University of California Berkeley 
 
X3 
 
 
 j* 
 
LATEST WORKS OF W. D. HOWELLS. 
 
 A WOMAN'S REASON. 12010. $1.50. 
 A MODERN INSTANCE. 121110. $1-50. 
 DR. BREEN'S PRACTICE. 121110. $1.50. 
 A FEARFUL RESPONSIBILITY. 12010. $1.50. 
 The four volumes in a neat box, $6.00. 
 
 " Blended delicacy, firmness, and definiteness of detail, and in 
 genuity and simplicity of narrative." Harper's Magazine. 
 
 " There has been no more rigidly artistic writing done in Amer 
 ica since Hawthorne's time.'' The Critic (New York}. 
 
 "Exquisite pieces of workmanship." New-Orleans Democrat. 
 
 A LITTLE GIRL AMONG THE OLD MASTERS. 
 
 Introduction and comment by W. D. HOWELLS. 56 
 illustrations. $2.00. Bound in parchment, $3.00. 
 Curious sketches, by a bright little maiden, sojourn 
 ing at Florence, Siena, and other ancient Italian cities. 
 " Its charm is irresistible. It ought to have a place by the jour 
 nal of 'Pet Marjorie,' as one of the rare and attractive exotics of 
 literature and art." Boston Traveller. 
 
 MR. HOWELLS'S PLAYS. 
 
 THE REGISTER. 3 2mo. 50 cents. 
 THE SLEEPING-CAR. 321110. 50 cents. 
 
 " Written with all the exquisite literary skill of which Mr. How- 
 ells is so thoroughly a master, and every page sparkles with bright 
 touches of dainty humor." Syracuse Journal. 
 
 For sale by Booksellers. Sent, post-paid, on receipt of 
 price by the Publishers, 
 
 JAMES R. OSCOOD & CO., Boston. 
 
THREE VILLAGES 
 
THREE VILLAGES 
 
 BY 
 
 W. D. HOWELLS 
 
 AUTHOR OK 
 A MODERN INSTANCE," " DK. BREEN's PRACTICE," ETC. 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 JAMES R. OS( ;<><>!) AM) COMPANY 
 1884 
 
Copyright, 1884, 
 BY W. D. H DWELLS. 
 
 All right-- reserved. 
 
 Jilnt'tictsitg Press : 
 
 JOHN WILSON AND SON, CA.MBRIDGI 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 LEXINGTON .............. ll 
 
 SHIRLEY 
 GNADENHUTTEN 
 
LEXINGTON. 
 

 LEXINGTON. 1 
 
 r I^HE Bostonian spring being more than usu- 
 .ally embittered against mankind the year 
 1882, we left our quarters in town very early, and 
 went to pass the month of May in the pretty and 
 historic village of Lexington. It lies ten or twelve 
 miles inland; it is not only a little beyond the 
 worst of the east wind, but is just a little too far 
 from Boston to be strictly suburban in aspect; 
 and~thanks chiefly to an absence of water-power 
 (a clear brown brook, that you may anywhere 
 jump across, idles through the pastures unmo 
 lested by a mill-wheel), Lexington has not yet 
 been overtaken by the unpicturesque prosperity 
 which has befallen so many New England villages. 
 
 1 Reprinted from "Longman's (London) Magazine." 
 
12 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 It has no manufactures of any sort, neither shoes 
 nor cotton, nor boxes, nor barrels, nor watches, 
 nor furniture ; it is still a farming-town, such as 
 you find in the Massachusetts or New Hamp 
 shire hills, and is not yet a market-gardening town 
 like those which lie nearer the city. The ances 
 tral meadows are still mown by the great-great 
 grandchildren of those who cleared them of the 
 primeval forest, and who, having begun to build 
 into fences and bury in the earth the granite bowl 
 ders plentifully bestrewing its surface, invented 
 rather than discovered their reluctant fertility. 
 In many parts of New England the Western jokes 
 about sharpening the sheep's noses for their 
 greater convenience in getting at the herbage 
 between the rocks, and about firing the seed-corn 
 into the ground with a shot-gun, do not seem 
 so grotesquely imaginative. More than once at 
 nightfall, as I drove along country roads, the flocks 
 and herds, lying under the orchard trees, have 
 turned on nearer inspection to companies of 
 bowlders; in the hill towns I have seen stone 
 
LEXINGTON. 13 
 
 walls six feet wide, titanic barriers thrown up in 
 the farmer's despair of otherwise getting rid of the 
 stones scattered over his fields ; and these gifts of 
 the glacial period are often interred by the cord 
 in pits dug for the purpose. It is said that the soil 
 thus twice conquered from the wilderness is very 
 rich and strong, and Lexington was by no means 
 so barren originally as some other towns ; but 
 its fertility must once have been greater than it 
 now is, or else people must once have been 
 satisfied with less fertility to the acre than con 
 tents them at present, for I could not see any agri 
 cultural reason why Lexington should first have 
 been known as Cambridge Farms. Doubtless the 
 name did not imply that it was the fittest part of 
 the township for farming ; Beverly Farms and 
 Salem Farms and Cambridge Farms must have 
 all been so called because they were hamlets 
 remote from the principal village. At any rate 
 Lexington once formed part of our university 
 town, but was set off long before the revolutionary 
 days in which it achieved a separate celebrity. 
 
14 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 In New England the " town " is the town 
 ship, and there are some " towns " in which there 
 is no village at all; but at Lexington there was 
 early a little grouping of houses ; and for two 
 hundred and fifty years the local feeling has been 
 growing more and more intense, until it can be 
 said at last to be now somewhat larger than the 
 place. This is not an uncommon result ; as Dr. 
 Holmes has remarked, American cities and vil 
 lages all like to think of themselves as the " good 
 old" this and that; but at Lexington more than 
 anywhere else out of Italy I felt that the village 
 was to its people t\\Q p atria. With us the great 
 Republic is repeated and multiplied in several 
 smaller and diminishing republican governments, 
 each subordinate to the larger, all over the land ; 
 and ever since its separation from Cambridge, 
 Lexington has, like other New England towns, 
 had its little autonomy. Twice a year the citizens 
 convene and legislate in town meetings ; and 
 three Selectmen annually chosen see that the 
 popular will is carried out and transact the whole 
 
LEXINGTON. 15 
 
 business of the town government. This micro 
 cosm of democracy is the more interesting in 
 Lexington because it is in many things an image 
 of what the New England town was a hundred 
 years ago, a sufficiently remote antiquity with 
 us. The Irish have their foothold there as every 
 where ; but they have not acquired much land \ 
 and though they remain faithful Catholics, they 
 have Americanized in such degree that it is hard 
 to know some of them from ourselves in their 
 slouching and nasal speech. As for the Cana 
 dian French, who abound in the valley of the 
 Connecticut, and in all the factory towns, I saw 
 none of them in Lexington, and there are no 
 Germans. 
 
 It is because of the typically New England 
 character of Lexington village, as well as its his 
 torical note, that I ask English readers to be 
 interested in it ; and as we Americans are some 
 times grieved by our cousins' imperfect recol 
 lection of family troubles, I make haste to re 
 mind them that at Lexington the first blood was 
 
1 6 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 shed in the war of American Independence. It 
 has a powerful hold upon the American imagina 
 tion for this reason ; it has therefore overloaded 
 the gazetteer with namesakes in every part of 
 the Union, and its celebrity is chief part of the 
 first historical knowledge imparted to American 
 school-boys. But the village has such a charm 
 for me from its actual loveliness and quaintness, 
 that I should be sorry to bring that bloody 
 spectre of the past into the foreground of any 
 picture, and I shall blink it as long as I can. 
 
 It was a shrewish afternoon late in April when 
 we arrived from Boston at the odd but very 
 pleasant hotel where we spent our month of May. 
 The season was very dry, and the bare landscape 
 showed scarce a sign of spring. At that time 
 there is usually a half-scared, experimental-look 
 ing verdure on our winter-beaten fields ; but 
 except where a forlorn hope of grass cowered in 
 some damp hollow, the meadows were now as 
 brown and haggard in aspect as they are when 
 the great snows leave them in mid-March, and 
 
LEXINGTON. 17 
 
 they lie gaunt and wasted under a high, vast blue 
 sky, full of an ironical glitter of sunshine. The 
 wind was sharp, and for many weary weeks yet 
 there would be no buds on the elms that creaked 
 overhead along the village street. 
 
 Further north, in Maine and Canada, the spring 
 comes with a bound after the thaw ; but the re 
 gion of Boston seems to me the battle-ground 
 of all the seasons when the spring is nominally 
 in possession. On the i8th of May this year we 
 had a soft, sunny morning, which clouded under 
 an east wind ; a cold rain set in before noon, 
 with hail ; it snowed the greater part of the after 
 noon, and we had an Italian sunset to the sing 
 ing of the robins. This was excessive ; but 
 usually after the first relenting days the winter 
 returns, and whips the fields with sleet and snow, 
 storm after storm ; and this martyrdom follows 
 upon a succession of frosts and thaws, which 
 began before Thanksgiving in November. Finally 
 the east wind comes in, fretting the nerves and 
 chilling the marrow, throughout April and May ; 
 
1 8 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 even when it does not blow it remains in the air, 
 a sentiment of icebergs and freezing sea. It is 
 worst, of course, on the shore, and delicate 
 people who cannot live in it there are sent to 
 Lexington, and thrive. The air is very dry and 
 pure, and that is perhaps the reason why even 
 the east wind is tolerable. Lexington Common, 
 they say, is as high as the top of Bunker Hill 
 Monument in Boston ; and the locomotive pants 
 with difficulty up the heavy grade of the road 
 near the village. Perhaps there is something in 
 the grouping of the low hills in the embrace 
 of which the village lies on an ample plain 
 that gives it peculiar shelter; it is certain that 
 beyond the eastern range there is practically 
 another climate. This is not saying that the 
 winter is not long and dreary there ; the snows 
 lie deep in the hollows of those hills for months, 
 and clog the long street on which the village 
 houses are chiefly set. 
 
 Streets branch off from this thoroughfare to 
 the right and left; but it is the newer houses 
 
LEXINGTON. 19 
 
 which are built on these, and the more char 
 acteristic dwellings, as well as the old-fashioned 
 shops, face the westward road along which Ma 
 jor Pitcairne's red-coats marched in the early 
 April morning a hundred years ago to destroy 
 the Provincial stores at Concord. Here and 
 there before you reach the village is a large old 
 mansion rambling with successive outhouses a 
 hundred feet back from the road or beside it, 
 all the buildings under one roof, and having a 
 comfortable unity and snugness ; but the dwell 
 ings in the village are small and very simple, 
 generally of but two stories, and placed each in 
 its separate little plot of ground. Where they 
 pretend to the dignity of mansions, they stand 
 
 " Somewhat back from the village street," 
 
 like the old-fashioned country-seat in Long 
 fellow's poem, and have stately elms and burly 
 maples about them ; but they are mostly set close 
 upon the road, as seems to have been everywhere 
 the early custom in New England. They are 
 
20 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 all of wood, there are but two brick buildings 
 in Lexington, and here and there one is still 
 painted saffron, with Paris-green shutters and 
 white window casings, the color of Long 
 fellow's house and the other colonial houses in 
 Cambridge. When the paint is not too freshly 
 renewed, they have a suggestion of antiquity 
 which is pleasing and satisfactory in so new a 
 world as ours. There is no attempt at ornamen 
 tation in these unassuming houses at Lexington ; 
 that is left to the later carpentry which has pro 
 duced on the intersecting streets various ex 
 amples, in one story and a half, of the mansard 
 architecture so popular in our wood-built sub 
 urbs. There is also at one point of the principal 
 street a wooden " block," in emulation of the 
 conventional American city block of brick or 
 stone ; but otherwise Lexington has escaped the 
 ravages alike of "tasliness" and of enterprise, 
 and is as plain and sober a little town as it was 
 fifty years ago. There are old-fashioned shops 
 in rows, quite different from the " block," with 
 
LEXINGTON. 21 
 
 wooden awnings to shelter their doorways, and 
 with well-gnawed rails and horse-posts before 
 them there is an old tavern dating from the 
 days when all the transportation was by stage 
 and wagon along the good hard roads ; there 
 are several churches of a decent and wholesome 
 ugliness ; and there are everywhere trees and 
 grass and vines and flowers. The village is con 
 scientiously clean ; but except in midsummer 
 the English reader must imagine a bareness im 
 possible in an English hamlet. We have no 
 evergreen vines ; the spruces and firs which we 
 plant about our houses only emphasize the naked 
 ness of all the other trees in winter ; in the clear, 
 cold air the landscape is as blank and open as 
 a good conscience. The village, when the leaves 
 fall, will be honestly of whatever color it is 
 painted, and its outlines will be as destitute of 
 "atmosphere" as if they were in the moon. 
 There is no soft discoloration of decay in roof 
 or wall ; at the best you will have a weather- 
 beaten gray. 
 
22 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 Lexington has a High-School house of wood 
 upon the model of a Grecian temple ; but the 
 principal public building is the Town Hall, a 
 shapely structure of brick, which has been put 
 up within the last five or six years, and which 
 unites under one roof a hall for town meetings, 
 elections, and all sorts of civic, social, and ar 
 tistic entertainments, the town offices, and the 
 free town library. The number of books is 
 uncommonly large and exceedingly well chosen, 
 and the collection is the gift of a lady of the 
 place. The library is named after her, but it is 
 piously dedicated in an inscription over the door 
 to the men of Lexington who fell in the first 
 battle with the British in 1775, and in the many 
 fields of our late civil war. Statues of John 
 Hancock and Sam Adams, the patriots who had 
 fled from arrest in Boston, and were in hiding 
 at Lexington the night before the affair of 1775, 
 occupy niches in the rotunda from which the 
 library opens, and confront figures of a pro 
 vincial Minute-Man and of a national volunteer 
 
LEXINGTON. 23 
 
 beside the door. Three days in the week the 
 library is open from one till nine o'clock, and 
 then there is a continual coining and going of 
 the villagers on foot, and the neighboring farmer- 
 folks in buggies and carryalls. I noticed that 
 these frequenters of the library, who thronged 
 the reading-room, and kept the young lady at 
 the desk incessantly busy recording the books 
 they borrowed and returned, were mostly young 
 people and mostly women. The women, in 
 fact, are the miscellaneous readers in our coun 
 try ; they make or leave unmade most literary 
 reputations ; and I believe that it is usually by 
 their advice when their work-worn fathers and 
 husbands turn from their newspapers to the 
 doubtful pleasure of a book. This is the case 
 alike in city and country as regards lighter lit 
 erature ; and in small towns these devourers of 
 novels and travels and magazines read so close 
 to the bone, that sometimes being brought per 
 sonally to book for my intentions in this or that 
 passage, I have preferred to adopt their own 
 
24 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 interpretations ; and when this copy of " Long 
 man's Magazine " is laid upon the table of the 
 town library at Lexington, I am aware that I 
 shall not be safe from my readers in any tortuous 
 subtlety of phrase, but that they will search me 
 out to the finest meaning of my commas, and 
 the last insinuation of my semicolons. But I 
 have a good conscience and I am not afraid. 
 
 Some friends, who compassionated the ex 
 tremity of an author with an unfinished novel 
 on his hands in the penetrating disquiet of a 
 country hotel, lent me the keys to the Town 
 Hall, and I had the library to myself on the days 
 when it was not open to the public, and wrote 
 there every morning amid the books, and the 
 memorials of Lexington's great day, and every 
 sort of colonial bric-a-brac. On one side of 
 the door was the gun carried by a Provincial 
 (whose name I read whenever I lifted my eyes 
 from my work, and now marvel that I should 
 have forgotten) during the fight, and which 
 being "brought back from Concord busted," 
 
LEXINGTON, 25 
 
 was thriftily sawed off just short of the fracture 
 and afterwards used by his descendants ; on the 
 other side was a musket taken from the body 
 of a British soldier who fell in the retreat ; the 
 sign of the old Monroe Tavern, where Earl 
 Percy made his headquarters when he came out 
 to support Major Pitcairne's men, swung from 
 the ceiling near these trophies ; in glass cases 
 on my right were collections of smaller relics, 
 including shot from Percy's cannon, the tongue 
 of the bell that called the villagers from their 
 slumbers the night before the attack ; the pistols, 
 richly chased and mounted, from which Pitcairne 
 fired the first bullet in the war that made us two 
 peoples ; the hanger worn by the sexton when 
 he went to light the signal lantern for Paul 
 Revere in the belfry of the Old North Church in 
 Boston, and sent him galloping out on his mid 
 night ride through the sleeping land with the 
 news that the King's troops had begun their 
 march on Concord ; the broadside issued in the 
 British interest, giving an account of the day's 
 
26 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 fight with divers shoe-buckles, rings, knives, 
 platters, and profiles cut out of black paper, 
 belonging to the colonial period. No motive of 
 patriotism shall induce me to represent these 
 collections as very rich, or in themselves very 
 interesting, and I am aware that I cannot give 
 them great adventitious importance by grouping 
 them with the rude writing-desk of one of the 
 old Puritan ministers of Lexington, or the foot- 
 stove which one of his congregation probably 
 carried to meeting and warmed his poor feet 
 with while he thawed his imagination at the 
 penal fires painted as the last end of sinners in 
 the sermon ; the sincere home-made lantern of 
 a later date, and the spinning-wheel of an uncer 
 tain epoch do not commend themselves to me 
 as much more hopeful material for an effective 
 picture. But all the more pathetic from their 
 paucity did I find these few and simple records 
 of the hard, laborious past of the little town, 
 which flowered after a century's toil and priva 
 tion into an hour of supreme heroism. For 
 
LEXINGTON. 27 
 
 whatever may be the several minds of my readers 
 and myself concerning their right, there can be 
 no question between us that it was sublime for 
 forty unwarlike farmers to stand up and take the 
 fire of six hundred disciplined troops in defence 
 of what they believed their right : it was English 
 to do that, it was American, and these plain 
 martyr-folk were both. I own that I sympa 
 thized with the piety that has treasured every 
 relic connected, however remotely, with that 
 time ; and that I took an increasing pleasure 
 in showing off the trophies to such comers as 
 tried the library door when nobody had any 
 right there but myself. I was quite master to 
 let them in or not, but I always opened, and 
 waited for them to overcome their polite re 
 luctance to disturb me at my writing. Their 
 questions succeeded upon a proper interval of 
 fidgeting and whispering, and then I 'confirmed 
 orally all the written statements of the placards 
 on the objects, and found my account in listen 
 ing to the laudable endeavors of my visitors to 
 
28 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 connect their family history somehow with them. 
 They were people of all ages and conditions ; 
 but they all had these facts by heart, and were 
 proud of them, though with a pride unqualified 
 by any foolish rancor. Most of all they were 
 interested in the portrait of a young and hand 
 some British officer in the uniform of the last 
 century, whose sensitive face looks down from 
 the library wall upon the records of the fight ; 
 and when I said that this was a portrait of Earl 
 Percy, who commanded the British artillery, and 
 explained (as I am afraid I have not the right 
 to explain fully here) how it came to be given 
 to a gentleman of Lexington by the present 
 Duke of Northumberland, I elicited nothing but 
 praises of the Earl's good looks or expressions 
 of satisfaction that his portrait should be there. 
 No one apparently regarded him as out of sym 
 pathy with themselves, and I believe indeed 
 that this generous foe acted only as a soldier on 
 that day, and thought the measures used against 
 the Provincials neither wise nor just. One small 
 
LEXINGTON. 29 
 
 boy dwelt upon the portrait with delays that 
 passed even the patriotic patience of the cicerone, 
 and left it at last with a sigh of gratified wonder. 
 " And he was a Britisher ! " I give his language 
 because, contrary to the experience of English 
 observers among us, I never heard any other 
 American say Britisher ; and this small boy was 
 unmistakably of Irish parentage. 
 
 The hotel in which we stayed had a character 
 istically American history, though it could not 
 relate itself in any way to the revolutionary fame 
 of Lexington, as I fancied most buildings in 
 Lexington would have liked to do. It was the 
 house put up by the Commonwealth of Massa 
 chusetts for the use of its officers and agents at 
 the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, in Philadel 
 phia. When the exhibition ended, the house 
 was sold to a citizen of Lexington, who took it 
 down piecemeal, and brought it round by ship 
 to Boston, whence it was forwarded by rail to 
 Lexington, and reconstructed there. This was 
 a simpler and easier process than first appears, 
 
30 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 for the edifice was what we call a shell ; it was 
 not plastered, and the several portions being 
 marked and numbered were easily put together 
 again. I believe that as a speculation the re 
 moval and rebuilding did not pay ; but when 
 the house was rendered winter-proof, and heated 
 with steam, it became at once the most pic 
 turesque and delightful country hotel. Out 
 wardly it abounded in porches, in broken roofs 
 and gables, and inwardly it was huge and ram 
 bling, with unexpected staircases and passages, 
 and chambers of all manner of shapes and sizes, 
 lit with transoms of colored glass ; but its most 
 charming feature was the vast hall, running the 
 whole length of the building and occupying the 
 greater part of the ground floor. You entered 
 this from the street, and wandered about in it at 
 will till some one in authority accidentally dis 
 covered you there, and having directed you to 
 the hotel register lying open on the piano, as 
 signed you a room ; so vague and slight in 
 everything was the conformity to ordinary hotel 
 
LEXINGTON. 31 
 
 usage in that pleasant house. It was like arriving 
 at some enchanted castle ; or, if it were not, so 
 much the worse for the enchanted castle. En 
 chanted castles, or even those of another sort, 
 had not a railroad, as our hotel had, at their 
 postern gate, a railroad that was on domestic 
 and almost affectionate terms with us all. When 
 the trains came scuffling and wheezing up the 
 incline from Boston, the sound was as if the 
 friendly locomotive were mounting the back stairs, 
 and might be expected to walk in without cere 
 mony, and sit down at the fire like any other 
 boarder. We could see the trains backing and 
 filling at the station as we sat at breakfast, and 
 such of us as were going to town could time 
 ourselves to the last half-minute, and count upon 
 some sympathetic delay when we were late. 
 Saturday evening, the trains all drew in with the 
 air of having done an honest week's work, and 
 the engines having run their empty cars up the 
 siding, found their way to the locomotive house 
 at their leisure, as if they were going to wash up 
 
32 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 there for Sunday, while a Sabbath peace settled 
 with the nightfall upon the village. 
 
 I dare say I shall not be able, in this much- 
 sewed England, to make it plain that our Lex 
 ington hotel was charming almost in proportion 
 to the wide freedom granted every comer of 
 taking care of himself; yet it was largely on 
 account of this rather slipshod ease that it was 
 so pleasant In the end one was very comforta 
 ble : the beds were good, the rooms were clean, 
 the table was plentiful ; you had what you wanted 
 if you would take the trouble to get it, and much 
 more than half the time it was got for you. 
 Moreover, you were brevetted partner in the 
 enterprise with a hearty good-will that could not 
 have been bought for money, and with so much 
 amiability, and so much real regard for your 
 welfare, that you must have been a very extra 
 ordinary American indeed if you did not will 
 ingly accept the situation as you found it. A 
 fire was burning all the month of May in the 
 prodigious fireplace midway of the hall at our 
 
LEXINGTON. 33 
 
 hotel ; and if neither host nor servitor came after 
 a reasonable time to receive the stranger, some 
 hospitable boarder rose from the circle about 
 the hearth, and welcomed him to one of the 
 great Shaker rocking-chairs before the fire, while 
 he went in search of the housekeeper or hostler. 
 The fireplace would take in a back-log big 
 enough to smoulder and inwardly burn for days, 
 and it had a stomach for the largest stumps 
 from the neighboring fields, which it devoured 
 together with all blocks and fragments too tough 
 for the axe and wedge. Sometimes, as the land 
 lord remarked, there was more wood than fire ; 
 but ordinarily a roaring blaze was not wanting, 
 and with this, and the elk's head and antlers 
 on the chimney-piece, the armor (brought home 
 by one of the boarders from some joust with a 
 bric-a-brac dealer abroad) on the opposite wall, 
 and all the rude gothic of the architecture, which 
 showed the beams and rafters as in a Venetian 
 palace, we had very little difficulty in feeling 
 baronial. It was probably a mistaken emotion ; 
 3 
 
34 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 and I am not prepared to defend its genuineness 
 against all comers. The ladies used to bring out 
 their sewing or knitting, and chat round the fire ; 
 the men had their newspapers and cigars ; as the 
 evening wore on there was whist or euchre at 
 the tables ; sometimes people from the outside 
 world dropped in ; and if you went down late 
 (as hours go with us in the country), you were 
 likely to find the landlord and his brother smok 
 ing before the fire and telling stories of Lexing 
 ton as they remembered it when boys. They 
 were born on that spot, their family had owned 
 the land for two hundred years, and they loved 
 their native place with a tenderness very uncom 
 mon among Americans. I remember from those 
 drowsy hours many stories, as of the frenzy of a 
 family cat amidst the pyrotechnic rejoicings of 
 a Fourth of July, and the unseemly behavior 
 of a Lexington man's horse, who brought his 
 owner to shame before a Boston audience by 
 backing down stairs into a huckster's cellar in 
 Dock Square ; but I am withheld from repeating 
 
LEXINGTON, 35 
 
 them here by that English scrupulosity regarding 
 the facts of private life which I am naturally 
 anxious to emulate in writing for an English 
 magazine. I do not know whether I am bound 
 by the same extreme of civilization not to speak 
 of the old lantern which the landlord sometimes 
 showed to guests of a very exacting patriotism 
 as the very lantern which Paul Revere carried 
 on his midnight ride from Boston to Concord. 
 They found nothing odd in the suggestion that 
 he should have carried a lantern, and no hesita 
 tion in receiving the relic as historical. 
 
 The hall was the boarders' drawing-room when 
 they were alone ; and it was only when a sleigh 
 ing party drove out from Boston in the winter, 
 or a bicycling party arrived in the spring, that 
 they reluctantly abandoned it to the dancing, 
 and to the anguish of the piano which must 
 ensue with or without the dancing. Here by 
 day as well as by night there was easy loitering 
 and talking amongst us, as if we were all guests 
 in the house, as in fact we practically were ; 
 
36 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 and here on one of those white, white Sunday 
 mornings, when the humid warmth bursts from 
 the suddenly open portals of the South, and 
 under a sky all sun, every bud breaks into blos 
 som with a bee in its heart, and the whole air 
 quavers and tinkles with the notes of bluebirds 
 and orioles, our languor was thrilled with the 
 horror of the murder of Lord Frederick Caven 
 dish and Mr. Burke in Dublin. The crime was 
 then but a few hours old, and it seemed to stain 
 that exquisite Sabbath purity with blood. I 
 think that throughout America we all felt it 
 personally as we did Garfield's death, and that 
 whether we hoped or whether we doubted for 
 Ireland, we were alike dismayed at the cruel 
 stupidity of the deed. The feeling of the hour 
 comes back to me again in vivid association with 
 the sensuous memory of that peculiarly American 
 weather, of which I should perhaps try in vain 
 to give a definite impression. It comes after 
 long days of chilly drought, when the dust flies 
 in the bitter east ; overnight the wind changes, 
 
LEXINGTON. 37 
 
 a warm rain falls, which dries in the first hours 
 of the sun climbing a lofty sky, absolutely with 
 out cloud, of more than Italian blueness, and of 
 such continental vastness as roofed the first home 
 of our race on Asiatic plains. In such a day 
 there is compensation for all that has gone 
 before ; the grass is thickly and brightly green ; 
 the cherry-trees and pear-trees whiten the world ; 
 the air is sweet with delicate scents, it palpitates 
 with -song. To-morrow may be like yesterday, 
 but to-day is heavenly perfect. 
 
 We were still the same company in our hotel, 
 when one day our evening paper brought us, 
 fully reprinted, Mr. Matthew Arnold's recent 
 " Word about America." It was a not wholly 
 flattering word, but I do not think it could have 
 been more amiably received if it had been so. 
 The good-will of the writer was so evident that 
 we all said it would not do to be vexed that he 
 seemed not very well informed; the Americans 
 are in fact so used to having their ribs walked 
 over by foreigners in the heaviest boots of travel, 
 
38 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 that this slippered and rhythmic pace was like 
 a sort of Hawaiian lomi-lomi to our toughened 
 sensibilities ; it tickled, it lulled us, it was almost 
 a caress. The editor of our paper had warned 
 us not to reject what truth there was in Mr. 
 Arnold's "Word," and we set ourselves duti 
 fully to seek it. We could not quite maintain 
 with our compatriot, whose declaration seemed 
 to have evoked the Word, that there was in every 
 little American town a circle of cultivated people ; 
 at the most we could assert that there was a 
 circle of people who wished they were cultivated, 
 and cordially and modestly and intelligently ap 
 preciated cultivation ; but at the bottom of our 
 hearts we were aware of not being Murdstones, 
 or even in an ill sense Methodists. This con 
 ception of us appeared to us lamentably mis 
 taken ; we could not so readily have proved that 
 we were not in a low condition from the national 
 tendency to irreverent humor ; we have cer 
 tainly a bad habit of laughing at serious things, 
 even our critics ; but at the same time we could 
 
LEXINGTON. 39 
 
 not see how we could be so generally wanting 
 in sweetness and light, and yet be so often Mr. 
 Arnold's readers and admirers. Given English 
 middle-class Puritanism, we ought logically to 
 have been what he imagines us ; the camel could 
 not complain that it had not been scientifically 
 evolved from the philosopher's consciousness ; 
 and yet it felt itself, in its dumb helplessness, 
 to be quite a different sort of beast. I suppose 
 this must be always somewhat the case ; and 
 heaven knows how the ancient Greeks and He 
 brews like Mr. Arnold's notions of them. I have 
 myself attempted to say things of the English 
 which have not been found just by the few Eng 
 lish people who read them, and in fact I suppose 
 it would be better to let the writers of each na 
 tion aggrieve their own. I shall not, therefore, 
 presume to say that Mr. Arnold is right about 
 the English middle class ; but if we are like 
 what he conceives of them, I should say yes, we 
 are perhaps the English middle class, but with 
 the lid off. This appears to me an advantage. 
 
40 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 At any rate this was the sum of the talk over 
 Mr. Arnold's paper among the boarders of the 
 Massachusetts House in Lexington. It was a 
 purely fortuitous assemblage of people, such as 
 one is apt to encounter at summer hotels in 
 New England. They were of various com 
 plexions as regarded creeds and callings; but 
 neither their creeds nor callings appeared to 
 characterize them ; they kept their individuali 
 ties free and apart from the accidents of busi 
 ness and belief, in a way that I own I should 
 be somewhat at a loss to explain. There were 
 Unitarians, Episcopalians, Swedenborgians, Or 
 thodox Congregationalists, and, for all I know, 
 Baptists among them, but I think no Methodists ; 
 and of that numerous and respectable sect there 
 happens to be no congregation in Lexington. 
 There is a Unitarian church, which was formerly 
 the prevailing faith ; the Orthodox church is 
 earnest and growing; there is a large Irish 
 Catholic church ; but the greatest advance has 
 been made by the Baptists, under the minis- 
 
LEXINGTON. 41 
 
 trations of a lay preacher, formerly a colonel in 
 the Union army, who has lately reconstituted 
 that body out of very perishing fragments, and 
 made it strong and flourishing. I heard it said 
 that he had done this by rendering the church 
 " attractive to young people." There is very 
 little religious excitement of any sort in New 
 England, now ; the church in small places be 
 comes more and more a social affair ; and per 
 haps it was chiefly in the social way that the 
 Baptist body was rehabilitated in Lexington. 
 
 It was our good fortune to be there on Deco 
 ration Day, the anniversary when all over the 
 country the Americans of both sections decorate 
 with flags and flowers the graves of those who 
 fell in the Civil War, and the soldiers who have 
 since died. In the cities the day is celebrated 
 with civic pomp, with parades of militia and 
 steam fire-engines ; but in the villages its ob 
 servance is an act of religion, of domestic piety ; 
 and it is touching, after the day is past, to see 
 the garlands withering in the lonely country 
 
42 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 graveyards, and the little flags feebly fluttering 
 about the graves till the weather quite wears 
 them away. Every year the graves increase in 
 number and the soldiers are fewer and fewer who 
 come to lay the flowers on them ; and it is in 
 the country that this waste of life is most sorrow 
 fully noticeable. At Lexington, two new graves 
 had been added to those of the year before, and 
 of the young men who went to the war from 
 the town only a score of middle-aging veterans 
 remained. These facts were touched upon in 
 the address with which the ceremonies of the 
 day were closed in the Town Hall at night, 
 and the sad and glorious associations of the 
 past were invoked by a speaker who had him 
 self been part of those great events. He was 
 now the Unitarian minister of the village, and he 
 had been preceded in prayer by the Orthodox 
 Congregational minister ; the gentleman, by the 
 way, through whom the Duke of Northumber 
 land presented Lord Percy's portrait to the town. 
 There was excellent singing by a choir of men's 
 
LEXINGTON. 43 
 
 voices ; and for the rest there was very earnest 
 attention on the part of the people who filled 
 the hall to overflowing. The audience was not 
 of unmixed Yankee race ; the Irish quarter of 
 Lexington was duly represented, but all were 
 one in a sense of the gravity of the occasion, and 
 the whole assembly was subdued, old and young 
 alike, to a Puritanic seriousness of demeanor. 
 It is sometimes a little amusing to find how 
 aptly the Irish settled in the rural communities 
 of New England take on the prevailing type of 
 manners ; they are perhaps, with the Celtic con 
 ception of democracy, that " one man is as good 
 as another and a dale better too," a little more 
 American in some things than the natives them 
 selves ; but it appears to be their ambition to 
 conform as closely as possible to our social ideal. 
 The imitation is by no means superficial ; they 
 are industrious and thrifty, and except that they 
 unfailingly vote for whatever is illiberal and 
 retrograde in politics, they are not bad citizens 
 in such communities, whatever they are in the 
 
44 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 larger towns. I was not near enough to the 
 veterans occupying the front benches to see 
 how many were of Irish birth ; but it is known 
 how well they served in the army ; and I dare 
 say no one present took greater satisfaction in 
 the expressions relating the second war for free 
 dom to the part Lexington had borne in the 
 struggle against England. The Revolution was 
 remembered in the special decoration of the 
 statues of Adams and Hancock and the Minute- 
 Man with wreaths of hemlock and pine, which, 
 in a season that denied the usual profusion of 
 flowers, did duty for them throughout the day. 
 
 One night we had a concert in the Town Hall, 
 which was so curiously American as regards the 
 artists that I wish I could give a thoroughly 
 intelligible idea of the affair. They were all of 
 one family, father, mother, and nine children 
 between nineteen and five years old, two chil 
 dren younger still being left at home out of 
 regard to their tender age. They were from 
 utmost Oregon, and they had gone about the 
 
LEXINGTON. 45 
 
 whole country, singing and playing, apparently 
 ever since any of the children could walk. They 
 had visited the White House in Washington, 
 and had been very acceptable everywhere to 
 Sunday schools and scrupulous pleasure-seekers 
 because of the edifying character of their enter 
 tainments, which were certainly exemplary from 
 the moral side. I cannot say much as to the 
 artistic quality of their programme ; it com 
 mended itself by dealing with those themes of 
 domestic and obituary interest in which our 
 balladry delights ; it was varied with a very lit 
 tle very modest dancing, and sketches of infan 
 tine drama ; but they were nevertheless gifted 
 people, and while they conformed to the popu 
 lar taste in their performances, they were all 
 working hard at the science of their profession 
 under a German master. They stopped at our 
 hotel, and we had the advantage of seeing them 
 in private as well as in public, and of witness 
 ing the triumph of the family among them 
 over the temptations of their difficult and haz- 
 
46 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 ardous experiment ; the young people were quiet 
 and well-mannered ; the little ones far less 
 spoiled than might have been expected of babes 
 encored several times every night ; and there 
 was a spirit of mutual affection and of discipline 
 manifest in them which I should like to claim 
 as characteristic of the American family under 
 less arduous conditions. ' The father talked freely 
 of his theories for maintaining a home-life in 
 his nomadic tribe ; and the author sojourning in 
 the hotel did not think the less of his methods 
 when he said he had read the author's books, 
 and introduced his children as versed in them. 
 This author had long had his ideas of what those 
 novels, those travels, those unsalable poems, 
 those intheatricable dramas, rightly understood, 
 might do for mankind, and here. . . . 
 
 I was very glad that the Lexington people gave 
 the singing and playing family a good house, and 
 I fancy that they do not refuse any fit occasions 
 for amusing themselves. The young men seem 
 not to go " away from home so generally as they 
 
LEXINGTON. 47 
 
 do from most country towns in New England ; 
 it is perhaps because their pleasant village is so 
 near the city ; at any rate they remain at home 
 even after being graduated at Harvard. They 
 have sleigh-rides, and dances at the Town Hall 
 during the winter ; I was told that the Lexing 
 ton "germans" are not despised by the under 
 graduates of Cambridge ; and " Oh, I tell you," 
 I heard it said by one of themselves, " the Lex 
 ington girls have a good time ! " In the sum 
 mer there are of course picnics, and of late 
 horseback-riding has come greatly into vogue 
 in the country all about Boston. The rigors 
 of our winters and summers are against that 
 pleasure, and hitherto it was almost unknown ; 
 but now, thanks largely to the importation of 
 Texan riding-horses, it is especially prevalent at 
 Lexington. These horses, which are small, are 
 very strong and tough, and they look like little 
 thoroughbreds. Like all Southern horses, they 
 are broken to walk very rapidly, and they have 
 in perfection that gait which in the Southwest is 
 
48 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 called a lope. When they are first brought 
 North they sell for prices ranging from $40 to 
 $100. Their popularity has revived the sport, 
 almost obsolete in the North, of horse-racing at 
 Lexington, where I once saw a race between 
 gentlemen riders, which had apparently called 
 out the greater part of the population. We 
 drove through miles of the small pine forest, 
 which, growing up all over New England on 
 the exhausted lands, gives such an impression 
 of wildness ; and came at last to a space in the 
 woods where a track had been newly laid out 
 in the white birch scrub, or newly recovered 
 from it, and where we found everything pre 
 pared for the sport in due form. The riders 
 gave us all the gayety of jockey dress, as well 
 as the race, for our money ; the ground was 
 thronged with carriages and buggies ; there was 
 a tally-ho coach which had been driven out 
 from Boston ; and I went about bewildered at 
 this transformation of my poor New England, 
 and fearfully hoping there was nothing wicked 
 
LEXINGTON. 49 
 
 in so much apparent enjoyment with no appar 
 ent useful purpose, till I heard myself indicated 
 in a whisper as " one of the horsemen." Then 
 I desperately abandoned myself to the common 
 dissipation, for it was idle to be better than 
 one seemed. 
 
 These Texan horses, which are not quite the 
 mustangs of the prairies, are ridden with high- 
 pommelled, wooden-stirruped Mexican saddles ; 
 and when a party of young people dashed by 
 the hotel in the twilight, it was with a pictur- 
 esqueness which the pig-skin of Anglo-Saxon 
 civilization fails to impart to a man. But let me 
 not give the impression of mere pleasure-taking 
 on the part of these cavaliers ; they were stu 
 dents at law or medicine, or they were young 
 men of business recreating themselves after the 
 close application of a day in town ; by and by, 
 when they were married, they would content 
 themselves with their cigars and their news 
 papers, and leave others to ride with pretty girls 
 in the dusk of the eyening, or chase the flying 
 4 
 
50 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 tennis-ball on the whitewashed lawn. Except 
 perhaps at Newport, or the New York clubs, one 
 sees few men of leisure with us, and the example 
 of these few is not one to make the Republic 
 pine for that leisure class which the Old World 
 finds indispensable to its government and refine 
 ment. Women of leisure we certainly have ; 
 they distinguish and adorn us everywhere, ad 
 vancing (as we understand) the standard of dress 
 abroad, and absorbing and diffusing ideas of 
 taste and culture at home. Wherever the piano 
 forte penetrates, lovely woman lifts her fingers 
 from the needle, the broom-handle, and the 
 washboard, and places them on its keys, never 
 again to be restored to those odious implements ; 
 she finds that she has a mind, and she makes 
 her husband or her father pay for it ; she begins 
 to have aims, to draw, to model, to decorate, 
 to lecture, and to render herself self-supporting 
 by every expensive device. This alone is enough 
 to keep the men of her family busy, and to pre 
 vent the commonwealth from lapsing into decay ; 
 
LEXINGTON. 51 
 
 the civic virtues fall naturally to the care of the 
 trained patriots who are " inside politics "... 
 
 I perceive too late that by an infrangible chain 
 of reasoning I have been proving that we too are 
 governed and refined by a leisure class, and that 
 there is only the trifling difference of sex between 
 the American and the European aristocracies. At 
 the same time I have got rather far away from 
 Lexington, where life seemed to be still very 
 unambitious and old-fashioned. I wish I could 
 say that it was cheap ; but this is not the case 
 in the suburbs of any of our Atlantic cities. 
 House rent is certainly less, but the railroad 
 fares and the expressman's charges go far to 
 equalize that with the city rate ; about Boston 
 the suburban taxes are sometimes greater than 
 the city taxes ; provisions and service are a little 
 costlier, and unless one conforms quite strictly 
 to the local standard of simplicity, one is apt to 
 live quite as expensively as in town. It would 
 cost as much to live with the same ease in Lex 
 ington as in Boston ; that is to say, a third more 
 
5* THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 than in London. But one is not obliged to live 
 with "ease" there, and he may live in comfort 
 for a reasonable sum. It struck me that the 
 place had studied convenience scientifically, and 
 that in a modest way it was entirely sufficient to 
 itself, with its good schools, its admirable library, 
 its well-kept streets and roads ; its sociable little 
 line of railroad connecting it with the city by ten 
 or twelve trains a day; its well-stocked pro 
 vision stores, and its variety of other shops. 
 There cannot be many more than a thousand 
 people in the village, including the Irish hamlet 
 by the railroad side ; but it is lighted with gas, 
 and they are talking of water-works. I dare say 
 they will soon have drainage and malaria. 
 
 The village of Lexington, however, is not one 
 of those examples of rapid growth with which 
 we like to astonish the world. I doubt if it can 
 be more than twice as populous as when a hun 
 dred years ago it became the scene of the brief 
 conflict which has made it memorable. Our 
 hotel fronted the road along which the King's 
 
LEXINGTON. 53 
 
 troops had marched in the twilight of the morn 
 ing of April 19, 1775, and on which they re 
 treated in the afternoon. The common where 
 the encounter with the Provincials took place 
 was but a minute's walk away, and with the relics 
 of the library close at hand, we dwelt, as it were, 
 in the midst of heroic memories. One pleasant 
 forenoon, when the May had remitted its worst 
 rigors, and nature was making the most, with 
 birds and sunshine, of a respite from the east 
 wind, we strolled up to the pretty green, and 
 leaning upon the rail that encloses it, listened 
 to the story of the fight from one who had all 
 but been present in his careful and enthusiastic 
 studies of its details. 
 
 The green is an irregular triangle fronted by 
 the village churches and dwellings, and the his 
 toric fact is commemorated by a rude monument 
 erected at the close of the last century, with an 
 inscription by the minister of the village : a good 
 man who seemed to have learned his rhetoric 
 from the French Republic, then distributing 
 
54 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 equality and fraternity to the reluctant peoples 
 of Europe at the point of the bayonet. The 
 stone is " sacred to liberty, independence, and 
 the rights of man ; " it rehearses in swelling terms 
 the wrongs endured from British tyranny by the 
 colonists, and their resort to arms. " The con 
 test was long, bloody, and affecting : righteous 
 Heaven approved the solemn appeal," and the 
 sovereignty of the States was the final conse 
 quence. The great-grandchildren of those who 
 fell there look from their windows upon the con 
 secrated spot ; not far up a street to the north 
 ward the house yet stands in which Adams and 
 Hancock were hiding, with a price set on their 
 heads by the British commandant in Boston, 
 while Major Pitcairne's troops were marching 
 up the Concord road ; and three of the houses 
 that witnessed the bloodshed on the green seem 
 to be still strong and sound, and good for 
 another hundred years. They are all interesting 
 as specimens of the early village architecture of 
 New England, and one is especially quaint and 
 
LEXINGTON. 55 
 
 picturesque, with a pretty, old-fashioned garden 
 beside it, where the flowers defied the May in 
 a sort of embattled bloom. This was the Buck- 
 ner Tavern at the time of the fight, and it was 
 even then an old house, of the seventeenth 
 century, as the beams in the parlor ceiling still 
 show. It afforded a rendezvous for the Provin 
 cials when the alarm of the British approach was 
 first sounded by Paul Revere, and there most 
 of the men lingered and waited subject to their 
 captain's orders, after he had begun to doubt the 
 truth of the rumor. The interval must have 
 been trying to those unwarlike men, but they all 
 answered the drum when a messenger galloped 
 up with the news that the King's troops were 
 right upon them. Some of them had gone to bed 
 again in their homes beside the green, and they 
 left their wives and children sleeping almost 
 within sound of a whisper from the spot where 
 they loosely formed on the grass before their 
 doors. They were very simple and quiet folks, 
 with no long perspective of national glory to 
 
56 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 embolden and sustain them in the resistance 
 they were about to offer their King : a name at 
 which we do not trouble ourselves to laugh now, 
 but which was then to be feared next to God's. 
 Independence was scarcely dreamt of; all that 
 the villagers were clear of was their right as 
 Englishmen, and they stood there upon that, 
 with everything else around them in a dark far 
 thicker than the morning gloom out of which 
 the red-coats flashed at the other corner of the 
 green. Major Pitcairne called a halt at some 
 thirty rods, and riding forward swore at the 
 damned rebels, and bade them disperse. They 
 stood firm, and he ordered his men to fire ; the 
 soldiers hesitated ; but when he drew his pistols 
 and emptied them at the Provincials, they dis 
 charged a volley, and eight of our people fell. 
 They were not a tithe of the enemy in number, 
 and it is doubtful if they returned the fire ; their 
 captain called a retreat, and those who were 
 unhurt made their escape, to join later in the 
 long running fight through which the Provincials 
 
LEXINGTON. 57 
 
 all day harassed the flight of the British from 
 Concord back to Boston. Major Pitcairne had 
 dispersed a riot, and had shed the first blood in 
 a seven years' war. The dead men lay on the 
 grass where their children had played a few hours 
 before ; one, shot through the breast, dragged 
 himself a little space to his own threshold and 
 died there in the arms of his wife. 
 
 Many stories are told of the peaceful inex 
 perience of these people who had defied a mighty 
 empire. A few of them had been in what we 
 call the Old French War, and had served under 
 Wolfe at the taking of Quebec ; but it was so 
 little understood generally that war meant fight 
 ing, that some boys came to the common that 
 morning as to a sort of muster, and only retired 
 when the bullets whistled over their heads. 
 After the encounter at Concord, where an hour 
 or two later 
 
 " The embattled farmers stood, 
 And fired the shot heard round the world/' 
 
 the popular education in the art of war pro- 
 
58 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 ceeded rapidly ; though even then one of our 
 men who was unsuspiciously firing from behind 
 a stone wall at the British column in the road, 
 had the surprise and mortification to be himself 
 shot in the back by a flanking party. Before 
 noon the retreat from Concord had become a 
 rout, that was not arrested till Earl Percy arrived 
 at Lexington with twelve hundred men and two 
 pieces of cannon. The whole country side was 
 up ; the Minute-Men from Acton, Concord, Me- 
 notomy, Lexington, and Cambridge were joined 
 by those of Woburn, Billerica, and even some 
 of the seaboard towns, in pursuing the King's 
 troops. The season was so unusually advanced 
 that the cherry-trees were in bloom ; the day was 
 one of that sudden and sickening heat that some 
 times occurs in our spring ; and when the troops 
 met Percy's supporting column at the Mon 
 roe Tavern, many of them fell down in the 
 dust, " with their tongues lolling out like dogs'. " 
 They had fought a running fight for ten miles, 
 and they had marched in all nearly thirty since 
 
LEXINGTON. 59 
 
 they left Boston the night before. Percy's can 
 non scared away the riflemen who hung upon 
 their rear, and his men, scattering over the 
 country, fired the farmhouses that might be 
 supposed to afford shelter to the Minute-Men. 
 Some of the houses were beyond gunshot, and 
 the sick and old who were here and there bayo 
 neted in them would perhaps now have been 
 spared. The word had gone about that the 
 Americans were scalping the English dead, and 
 something had to be done in retaliation. No 
 soldiers were found scalped, but a good many 
 farmhouses were burned ; for when Percy began 
 to retire, the shooting from the walls and the 
 woods along the road began again, and contin 
 ued throughout the retreat. At different points 
 on the route stones have been set up to com 
 memorate the acts of reprisal committed by the 
 soldiers : here stood a house burned by the 
 British ; in another house three Americans were 
 massacred ; in another twelve ; and so forth. 
 One of these monuments, in Arlington (then 
 
60 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 Menotomy), celebrates the valor and final per 
 severance of one of the patriots in terms that 
 used to amuse me in spite of the gravity of 
 the facts. "On this spot, Samuel Whittemore, 
 aged 81, killed three British soldiers. He was 
 shot, beaten, bayoneted, and left for dead, but 
 recovered, and lived to be 98 years old." My 
 readers may differ with me as to the political 
 principles of this hoary man, but there can be 
 but one opinion concerning his resolution and 
 physical toughness. 
 
 We have counted it all joy in our annals that 
 we were able to embitter defeat to the British 
 in the pursuit from Concord to Boston, and have 
 of course* made the most of their reprisals. But 
 perhaps these did not appear to them such 
 enormities. To be fired on from every covert 
 by the roadside, and helplessly slaughtered by 
 a people they despised, was a thing that must 
 have had its exasperations ; and they responded 
 in the way that might have been expected. 
 "War is cruel, madam," General Sherman ex- 
 
LEXINGTON. 61 
 
 plained to the lady who came out from Atlanta 
 to reproach him for bombarding a town where 
 so many non-combatants must suffer; and our 
 race, whether English or American, has never 
 " made war with water of roses." The British 
 had succeeded in the object of their expedition ; 
 they had destroyed the Provincial stores at Con 
 cord ; but they lost that day more men than 
 it cost them to capture Quebec. The day is 
 only a chapter of history now. We are tender 
 and proud of it, because it is our own, and 
 because it vindicated us, and proved us after the 
 fashion of war in the right. But if there have 
 been griefs between the two countries that no 
 dilution of "the language of Shakespeare and 
 Milton " can wash out the memory of, there is 
 scarcely a pang in them any more. Meanwhile 
 we are still very far apart, and after all that 
 cables and steamships can do, there are three 
 thousand miles of sea, and immeasurable gulfs 
 of democracy between us. With a few excep 
 tions on either side, we heartily dislike and 
 
62 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 distrust each other's civic and social ideas. 
 England Americanizes in some respects, in some 
 respects America Anglicizes ; but the most of 
 that amounts to very little, I suspect; and for 
 our part, whatever outcry we make over our 
 own follies and sins and errors, we do not believe 
 that it is less democracy, but more, that is to 
 help us. Mere contiguity might do something 
 to reconcile the ideals of the two countries, but 
 it could not do everything. The four millions 
 of Canada are not affected by the proximity of 
 our fifty millions ; they cling all the more closely 
 to the English ideal, or what they imagine it 
 to be, and shudder at the spectre of annexation, 
 which exists only in their own nervous abhor 
 rence. 
 
 At the same time, there is apt to be so much 
 kindness between us personally when we meet 
 on any common ground, that it is difficult to 
 realize the national alienation, and impossible to 
 account for it. We seem so very much alike, 
 I necessarily speak only for the American 
 
LEXINGTON. 63 
 
 half of the impression, that we feel like assert 
 ing an indisputable brotherhood. Upon reflec 
 tion we have our reserves, our doubts, our fears ; 
 but for the time the illusion is delightfully per 
 fect. It occurs with Americans, sometimes not 
 only upon acquaintance or speech with English 
 men, but at the mere sight of their faces, which 
 have a kindred look, whatever their calling or 
 degree ; and I think we are never less wrapped 
 in the national flag than when we encounter 
 English soldiers. The other day I was walking 
 through one of the Parks when I came upon 
 some sort of little barrack, where two or three 
 privates, being temporarily debarred from flirta 
 tion with the nursery maids by the duty they 
 were on, presented themselves purely and simply 
 as my traditional enemies. But so far from 
 wishing to offer them battle, I could only think 
 of that whimsical and remorseful passage of 
 Hawthorne's " Septimius Felton," in which he 
 describes Pitcairne's men as they marched into 
 Concord after the affair at Lexington, dusty, 
 
64 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 wearied, and footsore, but' "needing only a half- 
 hour's rest, a good breakfast, and a pot of beer 
 apiece, to make them ready to face the world. 
 Nor did their faces look in any way rancorous, 
 but at the most only heavy, cloddish, good- 
 natured, and humane. ' Oh, heavens, Mr. Fel- 
 ton ! ' whispered Rose ; l why should we shoot 
 these men, or they us? They look kind, if 
 homely.' ' It is the strangest thing in the world 
 that we should think of killing them/ said Sep- 
 timius." 
 
 Indeed it was monstrous. I realized then as 
 never before the tremendous moral disadvantage 
 a democracy is at in any war with a royal or 
 oligarchic power; for whereas a portion of the 
 Republican idea is slain in every American who 
 perishes on the field, the poor fellows who fall 
 on the other side personally express nothing, 
 while the real enemy remains safe at home. It 
 was no longer a question of shooting at the King 
 and his ministers from behind stone walls, as it 
 had been hitherto, but of picking off such amiable 
 
LEXINGTON. 65 
 
 and friendly-looking folk as those I saw. Some 
 thing in my heart no doubt the brother ple 
 beian stirred in their presence with a novel 
 pain ; and if I could have hoped to make these 
 honest men in anywise cognizant of April 19, 
 1775, 1 might have wished to excuse it to them. 
 
SHIRLEY. 
 
SHIRLEY. 
 
 TT was our fortune to spend six weeks of the 
 summer of 1875 m tne neighborhood of a 
 community of the people called Shakers, who 
 are chiefly known to the world- outside by their 
 apple-sauce, by their garden seeds so punctual 
 in coming up when planted, by their brooms so 
 well made that they sweep clean long after the 
 ordinary new broom of proverb has retired upon 
 its reputation, by the quaintness of their dress, 
 and by the fame of their religious dances. It is 
 well to have one's name such a synonyme for 
 honesty that anything called by it may be bought 
 and sold with perfect confidence, and it is 
 surely no harm to be noted for dressing out 
 
70 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 of the present fashion, or for dancing before the 
 Lord. But when our summer had come to an 
 end, and we had learned to know the Shakers for 
 so many other qualities, we grew almost to resent 
 their superficial renown among men. We saw 
 in them a sect simple, sincere, and fervently per 
 suaded of the truth of their doctrine, striving 
 for the realization of a heavenly ideal upon earth ; 
 and amidst the hard and often sordid common 
 place of our ordinary country life, their practice 
 of the austerities to which men and women have 
 devoted themselves in storied times and pictur 
 esque lands clothed these Yankee Shakers in 
 something of the pathetic interest which always 
 clings to our thoughts of monks and nuns. 
 
 Their doctrine has been so often explained 
 that I need not dwell upon it here, but the 
 more curious reader may turn to the volumes of 
 "The Atlantic Monthly" of 1867 for an authori 
 tative statement of all its points in the auto 
 biography of Elder Evans of Mt. Lebanon. 
 Mainly, their faith is their life ; a life of charity, 
 
SHIRLEY. 71 
 
 of labor, of celibacy, which they call the angelic 
 life. Theologically, it can be most succinctly 
 presented in their formula, Christ Jesus and 
 Christ Ann, their belief being that the order of 
 special prophecy was completed by the inspi 
 ration of Mother Ann Lee, the wife of the Eng 
 lish blacksmith, Stanley. She is their second 
 Christ ; their divine mother, whom some of 
 their hymns invoke ; and for whom they cher 
 ish a filial love. The families of Shirley and 
 Harvard, Massachusetts, were formed in her 
 time, near the close of the last century ; at the 
 latter place they show the room in which she 
 lived, and whence she was once dragged by 
 the foolish mob which helps to found every 
 new religion. 
 
 In regard to other points their minds vary. 
 Generally they do not believe in the miraculous 
 birth or divinity of Christ ; he was a divinely 
 good and perfect man, and any of us may be 
 come divine by being godlike. Generally, also, 
 I should say that they reject the Puritanic ideas 
 
72 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 of future rewards and punishments, and accept 
 something like the Swedenborgian notion of the 
 life hereafter. They are all spiritualists, recog 
 nizing a succession of inspirations from the ear 
 liest times down to our own, when they claim 
 to have been the first spiritual mediums. Five 
 or six years before the spirits who have since 
 animated so many table-legs, planchettes, phan 
 tom shapes, and what not began to knock at 
 Rochester, the Shaker families in New York, 
 Massachusetts, Ohio, and elsewhere were in full 
 communion with the other world, and they were 
 warned of the impending invasion of the world's 
 parlor and dining-room sets. They feel by no 
 means honored, however, by all the results. 
 But they believe that the intercourse between 
 the worlds can be rescued from the evil in 
 fluences which have perverted it, and they have 
 signs, they say, of an early renewal of the mani 
 festations among themselves. In some ways 
 these have in fact never ceased. Many of the 
 Shaker hymns, words and music, are directly 
 
SHIRLEY 73 
 
 inspirational, coming to this brother or that sister 
 without regard to his or her special genius ; they 
 are sung and written down, and are then brought 
 into general use. The poetry is like that which 
 the other world usually furnishes through its 
 agents in this, hardly up to our literary 
 standard ; but the music has always something 
 strangely wild, sweet, and naive in it. 
 
 The Shakers claim to be the purest and most 
 Christian church, proceeding in a straight suc 
 cession from the church which Christ's life of 
 charity and celibacy established on earth ; 
 whereas, all the other churches are sprung from 
 the first Gentile churches, to whose weakness 
 and wilfulness certain regrettable things, as slavery, 
 war, private property, and marriage, were per 
 mitted. Acknowledging a measure of inspiration 
 in all religions, they also recognize a kindred 
 attraction to the angelic life in the celibate 
 orders of every faith : the Roman vestals, the 
 Peruvian virgins of the sun, and the Buddhist 
 bonzes, as well as the monks and nuns of the 
 
74 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 Catholic Church. They complain that they 
 have not been understood by such alien writers 
 as have treated of them, and have represented 
 them as chiefly useful in furnishing homes for 
 helpless and destitute people of all ages and 
 sexes. In the words of Elder Fraser, of Shirley, 
 the Shakers claim that their system is " based on 
 the fact that each man has in himself a higher 
 and a lower life," and that Shakerism " is a mani 
 festation of the higher to the exclusion of the 
 lower life. Its object is to gather into one fold 
 all who have risen above their natural propensi 
 ties," and they think with Paul that though 
 those who marry do well, yet those who do not 
 marry do better. Their preaching and teach 
 ing is largely to this effect ; and yet I do not 
 find it quite strange that friends from the world- 
 outside regard rather the spectacle of the Shakers' 
 peaceful life, and think mostly of their quiet homes 
 as refuges for those disabled against fate, the 
 poor, the bruised, the hopeless ; after all, Christ 
 himself is but this. As I recall their plain, 
 
SHIRLEY. 75 
 
 quaint village at Shirley, a sense of its exceed 
 ing peace fills me ; I see its long, straight street, 
 with the severely simple edifices on either hand ; 
 the gardens up-hill on one side and down-hill 
 on the other ; its fragrant orchards and its levels 
 of clovery meadow-land stretching away to buck 
 wheat fields, at the borders of whose milky 
 bloom the bee paused, puzzled which sweet to 
 choose ; and it seems to me that one whom the 
 world could flatter no more, one broken in hope, 
 or health, or fortune, could not do better than 
 come hither and meekly ask to be taken into 
 that quiet fold, and kept forever from his sorrows 
 and himself. But such is the hardness of the 
 natural heart I cannot think of one's being a 
 Shaker on any other terms, except, of course, a 
 sincere conviction. 
 
 The first time that we saw the Shaker worship 
 was on the occasion of Sister Julia's funeral, to 
 which we were asked the day after her death. 
 It was a hot afternoon at the end of July, and 
 when we drove out of the woods, we were glad 
 
76 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 of the ash and maple trees that shade the vil 
 lage street in nearly its whole length. There 
 were once three families at Shirley, but the 
 South Family, so-called, has been absorbed by 
 the Church Family, and its dwellings, bams, 
 and shops are occupied by tenants and work 
 people of the community. The village is built 
 on each side of the road, under the flank of a 
 long ridge, and the land still falls, from the build 
 ings on the eastern side, into a broad, beautiful 
 valley (where between its sycamores the Nashua 
 run sunseen), with gardens, orchards, patches of 
 corn and potatoes, green meadows, and soft 
 clumps of pine woods ; beyond rise the fertile 
 hills in a fold of which the village of the Harvard 
 Shakers lies hid from their brethren at Shirley. 
 
 Between the South Family and the Church 
 Family were two wayside monuments that always 
 won my admiration and homage. One was a 
 vast apple-tree, whose trunk was some three feet 
 through, and whose towering top was heavy, 
 even in an off-year for apples, with a mass of 
 
SHIRLEY. 77 
 
 young fruit ; apparently this veteran, after sup 
 plying cider and " sass " for at least a century, 
 was resolute to continue its benefactions for 
 another hundred years to come. The other 
 reverend monument on this road was the horse- 
 trough : not one of the perishable horse-troughs 
 that our civilization, conscious of its own evanes 
 cence, scoops from a log, and leaves to soak and 
 .rot year by year, but a great, generous bowl, 
 four feet across, and nearly as many deep, which 
 some forgotten Shaker brother had patiently hol 
 lowed out of a mass of granite. A spring, led in 
 pipes from the hill-side, fills it to the brim, with 
 a continual soft bubble in the centre and silent 
 drip of the moisture over the edges to keep fresh 
 the cool, sober gre'en with which in many pass 
 ing years it has painted the gray stone. Our 
 horse was hired from the Shakers, and was, if 
 one may say it without disrespect, so bigoted a 
 brother himself that he could scarcely be got to 
 drink any water at our farm, but kept his thirst 
 for this fount, which, even when he was not 
 
7 8 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 thirsty, he would fondly stop to kiss and loll his 
 great head over. The brother to whom he be 
 longed by courtesy (for of course he was owned 
 in common, like everything else Shaker) had let 
 him form the habit of snatching birch leaves and 
 bushy tops of all sorts along the woodland roads, 
 and we learned to indulge and even cherish this 
 eccentricity. He was called Skip ; apparently 
 because he never skipped. 
 
 We stopped at the office of the Church Fam 
 ily, which is a large brick house, scrupulously 
 plain, like all the rest, and appointed for the 
 transaction of business and the entertainment of 
 visitors. Here three sisters and one brother are 
 in charge, and here are chambers for visitors 
 staying overnight. The Shakers do not keep a 
 public-house, and are far from inviting custom, 
 but their theory of Christianity forbids them to 
 turn any one unhoused or unfed from their 
 doors; the rich pay a moderate charge, and 
 the poor nothing as that large and flourishing 
 order of fellow-citizens, the tramps, very well 
 
SHIRLEY. 79 
 
 know. These overripe fruits of our labor system 
 lurk about in the woods and by-ways, and turn 
 up at the Shakers' doors after dark, where they 
 are secure of being fed and sheltered in the 
 little dormitory set apart for them. " And some 
 of them," said Elder Fraser, " really look as if 
 the Pit had vomited them up." 
 
 In the parlor of the office we found our friends 
 the office-sisters, and a number of Shakers and 
 Shakeresses from Harvard, including two of the 
 Harvard elders, who had come to the funeral, 
 and who presently repaired to the plain, white- 
 painted, hip-roofed church-building. Besides 
 ourselves there were but few of the world-out- 
 side there, and these few were nearly all tenants 
 from the South Family farm, so that the whole 
 ceremony was unrestricted by reference to spec 
 tators, though I am bound to add that no Shaker 
 ceremony that I have seen was embarrassed by 
 the world's observation, however great the at 
 tendance of lookers-on. We were separated, 
 the men from the women, as were the brethren 
 
o THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 and sisters, who sat facing each other on rows of 
 long settees opposite the spectators. The sisters 
 came in wearing their stiff gauze caps ; the 
 brothers with their broad straw-hats, which they 
 took off and hung up on the wooden pegs set 
 round the whole room. 
 
 There was silence for a little while, in which 
 the Shakers took from their pockets and laid 
 across their knees white handkerchiefs as great 
 and thick as napkins, and then placed their 
 hands palm down on the handkerchiefs, and 
 waited till some one began to sing, when they 
 all joined in the hymn. There was none of their 
 characteristic dancing or marching, rather 
 that day, but as they sang they all softly beat 
 time with their hands upon their knees, and 
 they sang with a fervent rapture that the self- 
 possessed worship of our world's congregations 
 no longer knows. Their hymns were now wild 
 and sad, and now jubilant, but the music was 
 always strong and sweet, as it came from lips 
 on which it had been breathed by angelic inspi- 
 
SHIRLEY. 8 1 
 
 ration. There seemed to be no leader, but after 
 each silence some brother or sister began to 
 sing, and the rest followed, except in one case, 
 when it was announced that the hymn was Sister 
 Julia's favorite and would be sung in compliance 
 with her request. There was no prayer, or any 
 set discourse, but the elders and eldresses and 
 many others spoke in commemoration of Sister 
 Julia's duteous and faithful life, and in expres 
 sion of their love for her. Their voices trem 
 bled, and the younger sisters, who had been 
 most about her at the last, freely gave way 
 to their tears. Each one who spoke had 
 some special tribute to pay to her faithfulness, 
 or some tender little testimony to bear to- her 
 goodness of heart ; several read verses which 
 they had written in memory of her, and amongst 
 these was the elder of the Church Family, who 
 conducted the ceremonies. What was most ob 
 servable in it all was the familiar character; it 
 was as if these were brothers and sisters by the 
 ties cf nature, who spoke of the dead. The 
 6 
 
82 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 faces of nearly all but our old friend Elder 
 Fraser were strange to us, but they were none 
 the less interesting, from the many-wrinkled 
 front of the nonagenarian who has spent half 
 his century in Shirley, to the dimpled visage of 
 the small boy or girl last adopted into the family. 
 They were peaceful faces, the older ones with 
 the stamp of a strong discipline which sustained 
 while it subdued. The women were in far the 
 greater number, as they are in the world's as 
 semblies in this quarter, and a good half were 
 children or young girls who had not come to 
 close question with themselves, and of whom it 
 could not yet be finally affirmed that they were 
 Shakeresses. The history which was not written 
 could not be read, but it was not easy to believe 
 of those who had passed their prime that they 
 had devoted themselves to their ideal without 
 regrets, or misgivings, nor was it true of any. 
 "We are women," one of them afterwards said, 
 " and we have had our thoughts of homes and 
 children of our own/' 
 
SHIRLEY. 83 
 
 During our six weeks' stay near them we saw 
 our Shaker friends nearly every day. Some of 
 their fruit was now coming into season, and we 
 were asked down to the village to see the first 
 harvest of their new Wachusett blackberry, a re 
 cent discovery by Brother Leander, who noticed 
 a vine one day by the wayside on which the 
 berries hung ripe, while those on neighboring 
 bushes were yet two weeks from their maturity. 
 He observed also that the cane was almost free 
 from thorns ; he marked the vine, and when the 
 leaves fell, transplanted it. In the garden we 
 found a dozen brothers and sisters busy on 
 either side of the rows of bushes which bowed 
 beneath their weight of ripe berries in those first 
 days of August. 
 
 In the afternoon we found the office-sisters 
 in the basement of their dwelling, putting up 
 the berries in boxes, which they did with Shaker 
 scrupulosity as to ripeness and justness of meas 
 ure. The Shakers are very diligent people, and 
 yet seem always to have any desired leisure, as 
 
84 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 one may notice in large, old-fashioned families 
 where people do their own work. The indus 
 tries at Shirley are broom-making (at which the 
 minister, Elder John Whiteley, 1 and several of 
 the brothers work), raising blackberries, drying 
 sweet corn, and making apple-sauce and jel 
 lies. In former times, before the wickedness of 
 fermented drinks was clearly established, one 
 brother made wine from the bacchanal grape as 
 well as the self-righteous elderberry, and some 
 bottles of his vintage yet linger in the office- 
 cellar. But no wine has been made for many 
 
 1 Elder Whiteley is an Englishman, who before coming to 
 this country had heard the Shakers mentioned by Robert Owen 
 as successful communists, and shortly after his arrival, in 1843, 
 heard the scrupulous honesty of the sect spoken of. He tried 
 to learn something about their belief at this time, but it was not 
 till five years later that he succeeded. Then a fellow-work 
 man (he was a wool-sorter by trade) lent him some of the 
 doctrinal books of the Shakers, which he read aloud with his 
 wife in the winter evenings. They both " gathered faith " in 
 the Shaker life, and shortly after they made the acquaintance of 
 some Shakers visiting friends in Andover, where Elder White- 
 ley lived, and by their invitation returned with them to Shirley. 
 Hither, two months later, they came again, bringing their 
 
SHIRLEY. 85 
 
 years, now; for the Shakers are very strictly 
 abstemious. Yet if a brother's natural man in 
 sist upon a draught now and then, they consider 
 all the circumstances, and do not forbid, while 
 they deplore. A similar tolerance they use to 
 ward tobacco, and I have seen a snuffing as well 
 as a chewing brother. They generally avoid 
 also tea and coffee, shortened biscuit, dough 
 nuts, and the whole unwholesome line of coun 
 try cookery, while they accept and practise the 
 new gospel of oatmeal porridge and brown- 
 bread gems in its fulness. Many of the younger 
 people are averse from meat, following the ex- 
 children, and lived together nearly four years in the South 
 Family. At the end of that time Elder Whiteley was asked to 
 take charge of the temporal affairs of the North Family, and 
 the test of their faith had come. The father and mother, who 
 had known each other from childhood, parted, and gave up 
 their children to the charge of the community. In a few years 
 he became elder of the North Family, and about five years ago 
 he was chosen to hi;: present place in the ministry. 
 
 Elder Whiteley relates that en his voyage to America he had 
 a dream or vision of his future home here, so vivid that he 
 wrote down its particulars. When he first came to Shirley he 
 recognized at once the scene prefigured in his dream. 
 
86 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 ample and precept of our good Elder Fraser, 
 who for the last thirty-five years has kept his 
 tough Scotch bloom fresh upon a diet that in 
 volves harm to no living creature, and at seventy 
 looks as ruddy as few Americans at any time of 
 life. 
 
 But after this testimony to their healthful regi 
 men, shall I confess that the Shakers did not 
 seem to me especially healthful- looking ? They 
 do not look so fresh nor so strong as the same 
 number of well-to-do city people ; and they are 
 not, as a community, exempt in notable degree 
 from the ills we are all heir to. Is it possibly 
 true that our climate is healthful only in propor 
 tion as it is shut out by brick walls and plate- 
 glass, and battened clown under cobble and flag 
 stones ; that the less fresh air we have the 
 better, and that Nature here is at best only a 
 step-mother to our race ? But perhaps it is too 
 much to expect a single generation, gathered 
 from the common stock of an unwisely-feeding 
 ancestry, to show the good effects of a more 
 
SHIRLEY. 87 
 
 reasonable regimen. The Shakers labor under 
 the disadvantage of not being able to transmit a 
 cumulative force of good example in their de 
 scendants ; they must always be dealing, even in 
 their own body, with the sons of pie and the 
 daughters of doughnut ; and Elder Fraser, who 
 one Sunday spoke outright against these abomi 
 nations, addressing the strangers present, will 
 have to preach long and often the better culi 
 nary faith, which the Shakers received from the 
 spirits (as they claim), before he can reach the 
 stomachs, at once poor and proud, of the dys 
 peptical world-outside. 
 
 We went regularly to the Shaker meeting, 
 which in summer is held every Sunday in the 
 church-building I have mentioned ; in winter the 
 meetings are privately held in the large room 
 kept for that purpose in every Shaker dwelling, 
 and used throughout the year for family gather 
 ings, social and devotional. The seats for spec 
 tators in the church were filled, and sometimes 
 to overflowing, by people from the country and 
 
88 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 the villages round about, as well as by sum 
 mer boarders from the neighboring town of 
 Lancaster, whose modish silks and millinery dis 
 tinguished them from the rural congregation ; 
 but all were respectful and attentive to the wor 
 ship which they had come to look at, and which, 
 in its most fantastic phase, I should think could 
 move only a silly person to laughter. The meet 
 ings opened with singing, and then Elder Weth- 
 erbee, of the Church Family* briefly addressed 
 the brethren and sisters in terms which were 
 commonly a grateful recognition of the beauty 
 of their " gospel relation " to each other, and of 
 their safety from sin in a world of evil. The 
 words were not always ready, but the sincere 
 affection and conviction which breathed from 
 them were characteristic of all the addresses which 
 followed. After the elder sat down, they sang 
 again, and then the minister, John Whiteley, 
 read a chapter of the Bible, and made a few 
 remarks ; then, with alternate singing and speak 
 ing (the speaking was mostly from the men, 
 
SHI RLE Y 89 
 
 though now and then a sister rose and bore her 
 testimony to her heartfelt happiness in Shaker- 
 ism, or declared her intention to take up a cross 
 against such or such a tendency of her nature), 
 the services proceeded till the time for the 
 marching came. Till this time the brothers and 
 sisters had sat confronting each other on settees, 
 which they now lifted and set out of the way 
 against the wall. A group formed in an ellipse 
 in the middle, with two lines of marchers out 
 side of them, headed by Elder Wetherbee. 
 Some one struck into one of their stirring march 
 tunes, and those in the ellipse began to rock 
 back and forth on their feet, and to sway their 
 bodies to the music, while the marchers with a 
 sort of rising motion began their round, all beat 
 ing time with a quick outward gesture of the arms 
 and an upward gesture of the open palms. It 
 was always a thrilling sight, fantastic, as I said, 
 but not ludicrous, and it never failed to tempt 
 the nerves to so much Shakerism at least as lay 
 in the march. To the worshippers this part of 
 
90 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 their rite was evidently that sort of joy which 
 if physical, is next to spiritual transport. Their 
 faces were enraptured, they rose and rose in 
 their march with a glad exultation ; suddenly 
 the singing ceased, the march instantly ended, 
 and the arms of each sank slowly down to the 
 side. Some brother now spoke again, and when 
 he closed, another song was raised, and the 
 march resumed, till in the course of the singing 
 and speaking those forming the central ellipse 
 had been relieved and enabled to join the 
 march. When it ended, the settees were drawn 
 up again, and the brethren and sisters sat down 
 as before. Generally, one or two of the younger 
 sisters would at this point read some article or 
 poem from " The Shaker and Shakeress," the 
 organ of the sect published at Mt. Lebanon, 
 New York, and made up of contributions by 
 members of the different families throughout the 
 country. If the extract was particularly to the 
 minds of the listeners, one of them pronounced 
 it " good," and there was a general testimony to 
 
SHIRLEY. 91 
 
 this effect. When these were finished, Elder 
 Fraser, of the North Family, came forward be 
 tween the rows of Shakers, and addressed the 
 world in the principal discourse of the day. I 
 always liked his speaking, for, if I did not 
 accept his Shakerism, I felt bound to accept 
 his good sense ; and besides, it is pleasant, after 
 the generalizing of the pulpits, to have the sins 
 of one's fellow-men frankly named and fully 
 rebuked ; in this sort of satisfaction I sometimes 
 almost felt myself without reproach. I suppose 
 that what Elder Fraser and Elder Wetherbee 
 and Elder John Whiteley preached is what is 
 called morality by those who make a distinction 
 between that and religion; but there was con 
 stant reference to Christ in their praise of the 
 virtues they wished us to practise. Elder Fra- 
 ser's discourses took a wide range at times, and 
 he enforced his faith in language which, while 
 it was always simple, was seldom wanting in 
 strength, clearness, and literary excellence. He 
 and Minister Whiteley are readers of most of 
 
92 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 the late books of religious and scientific contro 
 versy, from the most hopeless of which they 
 come back confirmed and refreshed in their 
 Shaker belief. 
 
 It was very pleasant to hear Elder Fraser, not 
 only in the church, but also among his rasp 
 berries and grape-vines, to the culture of which 
 he brought a spirit by no means bowed to the 
 clod. He was fond of drawing illustrations from 
 nature in his most daring theories of the uni 
 verse, and the sucker that his hoe lopped away, 
 or the vine bud that his thumb and forefinger 
 sacrificed to the prosperity of the clusters, fur 
 nished him argument as he worked and talked. 
 He is lately from Mt. Lebanon, where his years 
 and services had justly retired him from all 
 labors but those he chose to add to his literary 
 pursuits ; yet he came back to active life in 
 Shirley at the intimation that his presence there 
 would be to the advantage of the North Family, 
 and he bears his little cross (as the Shakers call 
 any trouble they would make light of) with the 
 
SHIRLEY. 93 
 
 cheerfulest content. 1 The boys, the sweet corn, 
 the tomatoes, the grapes, the pears, flourish 
 equally in his care at the North Family, and I 
 do not know where else one should find such 
 clumps of cockscomb and prince's feather and 
 beds of balsam as grow under his kindly smile 
 and diligent hand. 
 
 I am not sure whether the different faces in 
 the march had a greater or less fascination to 
 us after we came to know their different owners 
 personally. Each showed his or her transport 
 in a different way, and each had some peculiarity 
 of step or movement that took our idle minds 
 and made us curious about their history and char 
 acter. Among them, none was more striking 
 than the nonagenarian, whose bent frame kept 
 its place in the round, but whose nerveless hands 
 beat time after a very fugitive and erratic fashion. 
 
 1 Those who care to taste his theological quality, and get at 
 ths sams time a potent draught of Shakerism, can send to 
 Shirley for his characteristic little tract on " The Divine Afflatus 
 in History." 
 
94 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 Father Abraham is very deaf, and in the singing 
 some final bit of belated melody always stuck 
 in his throat, and came scratching and scrambling 
 up after the others had ceased in a manner that 
 was rather hard to bear. But it was wonderful 
 that he should know what tunes they sang when 
 they sang without book. He is the author of a 
 system of musical notation which the Shakers 
 used exclusively until very lately, and which many 
 of them still prefer. At his great age he still 
 works every day at basket-making, in which he 
 is very skilful and conscientious. But it is super 
 fluous to say this ; Shaker work is always the 
 best of its kind. He is rarely sick, and he takes 
 part in all the details of the worship, as he did 
 when he came, sixty years ago. He was then 
 a young man, and it is said that he visited the 
 community from idle curiosity, with his be 
 trothed. Its life and faith made an instant im 
 pression upon him, and he proposed to the 
 young girl that they should both become Shakers ; 
 but after due thought she refused. She said that 
 
SHIRLEY, 95 
 
 she would not be a hindrance to his wish in the 
 matter ; if he was called to this belief, she gave 
 him back his promise. To the Shakers it seems 
 right that he should have accepted her sacrifice ; 
 to some of the world-outside it will seem tragic. 
 Who knows ? He has never regretted his course ; 
 she took another mate, saw her children about 
 her knee, and died long ago, after a life that was 
 no doubt as happy as most. But perhaps in 
 an affair like that, a girl's heart had supreme 
 claims. Perhaps there are some things that one 
 ought not to do even with the hope of winning 
 heaven. 
 
 After this old man, some of the little ones, left 
 by death or their parents' poverty or worthless- 
 ness to the care of the Shakers, were the most 
 interesting figures in the march, through which 
 they moved with such a pretty pleasure. The 
 meeting must have been a delight to them, though 
 their faces kept a soberness which was an edify 
 ing proof of their discipline. This is the effect 
 of vigilance and moral suasion ; I believe the 
 
96 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 Shakers never strike their little wards, or employ 
 any harsh measures with them. 
 
 One has somehow the impression that the 
 young people of the Shakers are held in com 
 pulsory allegiance ; but of course this is not at 
 all the fact. As soon as they are old enough 
 to take care of themselves they are entirely free 
 to go or to stay. Undoubtedly they are con 
 stantly taught the advantages of the community 
 over the world, and the superior merit of the 
 virgin life over the married state, which they 
 may be inclined to think of as they grow to be 
 men and women. Marriage is not held to be 
 sinful or dishonorable. " Few things," said one 
 of the elders, " are more pleasing to us than the 
 sight of a happy young couple, living rightly in 
 their order," but marriage is earthly and human, 
 and celibacy is divine ; as the thoughts are turned 
 to higher things, they forsake husband or wife. 
 Nevertheless, if their young women will marry, 
 the Shakers claim the satisfaction of thinking 
 that they have received in the community the 
 
SHIRLEY. 97 
 
 best possible training for wives and mothers, 
 that they have been taught diligence, econo 
 my and all branches of domestic knowledge. 
 More than once there have been secessions of 
 young people, which are nearly always stealthy, 
 not because there could be any constraint, but 
 because they dreaded to face the disappointed 
 hopes of their elders. In after years, these de 
 linquents from the angelic condition sometimes 
 return to thank their benefactors, and to declare 
 that they owe most of their worldly prosperity 
 to their unworldly precepts. The proportion of 
 those reared in Shakerism whom the Shakers 
 expect to keep is small; they count quite as 
 much for their increase upon accessions of mature 
 men and women from outside, whom the Shaker 
 life and doctrine persuade. These they invite 
 now, as always, very cordially to join them, 
 and they look forward to a time when their 
 dwindling communities shall be restored to more 
 than their old numbers. 
 
 One bad effect of the present decrease, which 
 7 
 
98 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 all thoughtful Shakers deplore, is the employ 
 ment of hired labor. This, as communists, they 
 feel to be wrong; but they are loath either to 
 alienate their land or to let it lie idle. A strange 
 and sad state of things results : the most profit 
 able crop that they can now raise is timber, 
 which they harvest once in thirty years, and 
 which it costs nothing to cultivate, whereas it 
 costs more to plant and reap the ordinary farm- 
 crops, at the present rate of farm labor, than the 
 crops will sell for. This is the melancholy ex 
 perience of shrewd managers and economical 
 agriculturists. The farmer who can till his own 
 fields and take care of his own stock can live 
 by farming, but no other can. One might not 
 regret this, for it tends to encourage the sub 
 division of land, but the farm which one man's 
 labor can till is too small to support a family ; and 
 the farmer cannot count upon the help of his 
 children, for these, as soon as they grow up, 
 leave the homestead, the girls to be teachers, 
 factory operatives, table-girls, shop-girls ; the 
 boys for the cities and the West. 
 
SHIRLEY. 99 
 
 " 111 fares the land to hastening ills a prey, 
 Where wealth accumulates and men decay; " 
 
 and perhaps one ought to take heart from the 
 fact that these rural districts are as poor as ever, 
 though they have not half the population they 
 had fifty years ago. Yet it was not easy to be 
 cheerful when in our drives about the country 
 we came from time to time upon some grass- 
 grown cellar where a farm-house once stood, or 
 counted, within the circuit of a mile about the 
 corners where we sojourned, a score of these 
 monuments of adversity. It is not that the soil 
 is so poor, but that it lacks the tilth of an owner's 
 hands. How shall it be restored to prosperity? 
 It is within thirty-five miles of Boston, where we 
 all know to our sorrow that provisions are dearer 
 than anywhere in the country, not to specify 
 the whole planet, and where consequently the 
 best market is ; yet the land grows up to woods. 
 Who shall inherit this legacy of the Puritans, won 
 at such bitter cost from the wilderness? Other 
 races and another religion, it appears ; here and 
 
ioo THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 there the Irish have found foothold ; a good 
 part of the population is Canadian ; the farm 
 laborers are all either Irish or French. 
 
 The decay of numbers, then, which the Shak 
 ers confess with so great regret, is but their share 
 of the common blight, and how to arrest it is 
 their share of the common perplexity. We often 
 touched upon this subject, which they face 
 bravely and not unhopefully, and yet with a care 
 concerning it that was not less than touching. 
 What could it matter to those childless men 
 and women whether any like them should in 
 herit them in this world, to which, while living, 
 they had turned so cold a shoulder? Very little 
 indeed, one would have said, and yet they were 
 clearly anxious that Shakerism should flourish 
 after them. Their anxiety was not so unnatural ; 
 none of us can bear to think of leaving the fruits 
 of our long endeavor to chance and the stranger. 
 But I may attribute the largest share of the 
 Shaker reluctance to perish from the earth to 
 zeal for the perpetuation of the true faith, faith 
 
SHIRLEY. 1 01 
 
 which was founded, like all others, in persecu 
 tion, built up amidst ridicule and obloquy, and 
 now, when its practical expression is received 
 with respect by all the neighboring world, is in 
 some danger of ceasing among men, not through 
 the indifference of believers, but through their 
 inevitable mortal decay. There are several rea 
 sons for the present decrease, besides that de 
 crease of the whole rural population which I have 
 mentioned. The impulse of the age is towards 
 a scientific, a sensuous, an aesthetic life. Men 
 no longer remain on the lonely farms, or in the 
 little towns where they were born, brooding 
 upon the ways of God to man ; if they think of 
 God, it is too often to despair of knowing him ; 
 while the age calls upon them to learn this, that, 
 and the other, to get gain and live at ease, to 
 buy pianos and pictures, and take books out of 
 the circulating library. The new condition is 
 always vulgar, and amidst the modern ferment 
 we may look back upon the old stagnation and 
 call it repose. Whatever it was, it was a time 
 
102 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 when men's minds turned fervidly from the hard 
 work-days of this world to the Sabbaths of 
 another; from the winter, the wilderness, the 
 privation of New England, to the eternal sum 
 mer and glory and fruition of the New Jerusa 
 lem. How to get there was their care ; it was 
 for this that wives and husbands rent themselves . 
 asunder, and shared their children with stran 
 gers ; it was for this that the lover left his love, 
 and the young girl forbade her heart's yearning ; 
 we may be sure that it was zeal for heaven, for 
 the imagined service of God, that built up the 
 Shaker communities. 
 
 Their peculiar dress remembers the now 
 quaint days of their origin ; it is not a costume 
 invented or assumed by them ; it is the Ameri 
 can dress of a hundred years ago, as our rustic 
 great-grandparents wore it, with such changes as 
 convenience, not fashion, has suggested to the 
 Shakers since. With all its quaintness it has a 
 charm which equally appears whether it is worn 
 by old or by young. To the old, the modest 
 
SHIRLEY. 103 
 
 soberness of the colors, the white kerchief crossed 
 upon the breast, the clean stiff cap, were singu 
 larly becoming ; and the young had in their 
 simple white Sunday dresses a look of maidenly 
 purity which is after all the finest ornament. 
 The colors we noticed at meeting were for the 
 young mostly white, for the middle-aged and 
 elderly the subdued tints of drab, bronze, and 
 lead-color, which also prevailed with the men of 
 all ages. Both sexes wear collars that cover the 
 whole neck, and both eschew the vanity of neck 
 ties ; some of the brothers suffered themselves 
 the gayety of showing at the ends of their 
 trousers- legs the brighter selvage of the cloth; if 
 indeed this was a gayety, and not, as one clothed 
 in the world's taste might have accounted it, an 
 added mortification of the spirit. 
 
 The Shakers used to spin and weave all the 
 stuff they wore, but to do this now would be a 
 waste of time ; they buy the alpaca and linen 
 which both sexes wear in summer, and their 
 substantial woollens for the winter. Some relics 
 
104 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 of their former skill and taste remain in the 
 handsome counterpanes in their guest-chambers 
 at the office, which were dyed, spun, and woven 
 in the family, and the sisters are still skilled in 
 braiding palm-leaf hats and in the old-fashioned 
 art of hooking rugs. But I would not persuade 
 the reader that any Shaker family is otherwise a 
 school of art ; one painting I did indeed see, a 
 vigorous sketch in oil of a Durham bull, but this 
 was nailed to the side of a stall far up in the vast 
 gray barn. It was the work of a boy who was 
 in the family years ago ; but he never became a 
 Shaker. It would be interesting to know what 
 he did become. 
 
 In a community it must be that the individ 
 ual genius is largely sacrificed to the common 
 purpose and tendency, and yet I believe that 
 among the Shakers the sacrifice is compelled 
 only by the private conscience. So it is with 
 regard to everything. On joining the commu 
 nity the new member gives up nothing, and is 
 cautioned against a too early surrender of his 
 
SHIRLEY. 105 
 
 property. He wears, so long as he likes, the 
 fashions of the world, but these make him look 
 as odd in the family as the Shaker dress would 
 outside of it, and he is commonly anxious to 
 assume the garb of simplicity before his mun 
 dane clothing is worn out. After due time he 
 may give his property to the family ; if he ever 
 leaves it, he receives back the principal of his 
 contribution without interest ; for his labor he 
 has already received his support. There are no 
 formalities observed when a new brother or sister 
 comes among the Shakers. It is understood 
 that they are to go as freely as they have come ; 
 and this provision is recalled, as a rule that 
 works both ways, to the mind of any brother 
 whose room is finally found to be better than his 
 company. But this very rarely happens : in 
 twenty-five years Minister Whiteley had been 
 obliged to dismiss only one undesirable brother. 
 
 The whole polity of the family is very simple. 
 Its affairs are conducted by trustees, who hold 
 the property and handle the funds, and to whom 
 
io5 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 any member goes for money to purchase things 
 not provided for the common use. Reasonable 
 requests of this sort are readily allowed ; but it is 
 easy to understand how the indulgence of even 
 very simple private tastes adds to the cost of the 
 common living, already enhanced by the de 
 crease of members, and the necessity of keeping 
 in repair the buildings left only partially occu 
 pied. There are no longer carpenters, black 
 smiths, and shoemakers among the Shakers at 
 Shirley, because their work can be more cheaply 
 performed by the world-outside, and the shops 
 once devoted to these trades now stand empty. 
 The community still has the advantage of buy 
 ing all provisions and materials at wholesale 
 prices, but I doubt whether the cost of living 
 within it is much less than it is among its un- 
 communized neighbors. This, however, is an 
 impression for which I have not the figures. 
 
 At the head of each family there is an elder 
 and an eldress, to whom all complaints are first 
 addressed, and by whom difficulties are settled. 
 
SHIRLEY. 107 
 
 I believe there is also a species of confessional, 
 in which those who desire can confide their 
 repentance and good intentions to the elders. 
 Disputes in which the decision of the elders is 
 not satisfactory are appealed to the ministers, 
 whose mind is final in such matters. Of these 
 ministers there are three, two being sisters ; they 
 reside alternate months in Shirley and Harvard, 
 and have completely appointed dwelling-houses 
 in both communities. I could not see that they 
 took a more prominent part in public worship 
 than the elders, and I do not know in what their 
 religious eminence consists, but they are held in 
 peculiar regard by the community. 
 
 Of course, nothing like ceremony must be 
 inferred concerning the expression of this regard. 
 They, and all the other brothers and sisters, 
 are addressed by their first names, and it is 
 liked that strangers in addressing the Shakers 
 should be simple and direct, eschewing the 
 forms and titles which could not be accorded in 
 return. The speech of the Shakers is Yea, yea, 
 
io8 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 and Nay, nay (they pronounce the former words 
 yee, yee, for reasons of their own), but it does not 
 otherwise vary from the surrounding Yankee. 
 They are plain and homely in their phrase, but 
 they are very courteous, and it is impossible to 
 know them and not perceive how little polite 
 ness consists in the tedious palaver that com 
 monly passes by that name. Their sincerity 
 gives them dignity and repose ; it appears that 
 you have but to renounce the world, and you 
 cannot be afraid of it. 
 
 I should be sorry to give the notion of a 
 gloomy asceticism in the Shaker life. I saw 
 nothing of this, though I saw self-restraint, dis 
 cipline, quiet, and heard sober, considered, con 
 scientious speech. They had their jesting, also ; 
 and those brothers and sisters who were of a 
 humorous mind seemed all the better liked for 
 their gift of laughing and making laugh. The 
 sum of Shaker asceticism is this : they neither 
 marry nor give in marriage ; but this is a good 
 deal. Certain things they would think indecor- 
 
SHIRLEY. 109 
 
 ous rather than wicked, and I do not suppose 
 a Shaker would go twice to the opera bouffe ; 
 but such an entertainment as a lecture by our 
 right-hearted humorist, Mark Twain, had been 
 attended by one of the brethren not only with 
 out self-reproach, but with great enjoyment. 
 They had also some of them read Mr. Bret 
 Harte's books without apparent fear of con 
 sequences. They are rather strict in the ob 
 servance of the Sabbath, but not so much, I 
 thought, from conscience as from custom. 
 
 Our Shaker friends are sometimes embarrassed 
 by visitors who ask to be shown all over their 
 buildings, forgetting that their houses are private 
 houses ; and I cannot promise the curious reader 
 visiting Shirley a repetition of the favors done 
 us, whom the Shakers were good enough to 
 show all of their communal life that one could 
 see. In each village is an edifice known as 
 the Dwelling- House, which is separate from the 
 office and the other buildings. In this are the 
 rooms of the brothers and sisters, the kitchen 
 
no THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 and dining-room, and a large room for family 
 meetings. The first impression of all is cleanli 
 ness, with a suggestion of bareness which is not 
 inconsistent, however, with comfort, and which 
 comes chiefly from the aspect of the unpapered 
 walls, the scrubbed floors hidden only by rugs 
 and strips of carpeting, and the plain, flat finish 
 of the wood-work. Each chamber accommo 
 dates two brothers or two sisters, and is ap 
 pointed with two beds, two rocking-chairs, two 
 wash-stands, and a wood-stove, with abundance 
 of rugs. The rooms of the younger people are 
 above, so that (as was explained to us) if the 
 young sisters, especially, wish to talk after they 
 go to bed, they need not disturb their elders. 
 There were few tokens of personal taste in the 
 arrangement of the rooms ; the most decided 
 expression of character was that of the nonagen 
 arian, who required his bed to be made up with 
 a hollow in the middle from top to bottom, 
 which he called his trough, and which he strictly 
 forbade any one to meddle with ; that was all he 
 
SHIRLEY. in 
 
 asked of earth after ninety-six years, not to dis 
 turb his trough. It seemed right that the simple 
 demand should be indulged. 
 
 The dining-room was provided with two large 
 tables, at one of which the brothers sat, and 
 at the other the sisters. The monastic rule 
 of silence at meals is observed, because, as we 
 were told, the confusion would be too great if 
 all talked together. In the kitchen was an im 
 mense cook-stove, with every housekeeping con 
 venience ; and everywhere opened pantry and 
 store-room doors, with capacious cellars under 
 neath all scoured and scrubbed to the last 
 degree of neatness. 
 
 The family menage is completed by a wash- 
 house and a dairy-house ; there is an infirmary, 
 and a shop for women's work, and under the 
 same roof with the latter, at Shirley, a large 
 school-room, in which the children of the com 
 munity are taught the usual English branches by 
 Sister Rose. The Shaker village forms a school- 
 district, and their school is under the control of 
 the town committee. 
 
112 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 One day, toward the end of our sojourn, the 
 office-sisters asked us to spend an afternoon and 
 take tea with them. After tea we sat down in 
 the office- parlor, and the best singers of the 
 family came in with their music books, and sang 
 those tunes which we had severally liked most. 
 It was all done with the friendliest simplicity, 
 and we could not but be charmed Most of the 
 singers were young girls, who looked their best 
 in fresh white dresses and fresh gauze caps ; and 
 Elder William, Brother Lorenzo, and Brother 
 Thomas were there in Sabbath trim. One song 
 followed another till long after dark, and then 
 there was a little commotion : the married sister 
 of one of the young Shakeresses arrived with her 
 baby to spend the night. She was young and 
 pretty, and was duly tied back, overskirted, and 
 furbelowed, and her little one was arrayed in its 
 finest, when by and by she came into the room 
 where we sat. By some juggle the baby found 
 himself on the knees of one of the brothers, 
 and sat looking up into his weather-beaten face 
 
SHIRLEY. 113 
 
 with a kindly embarrassment which the good 
 brother plainly shared, while the white dresses 
 and white caps of the sisters flocked round 
 in worship of that deplorable heir of the Adamic 
 order of life ; his mother stood outside of the 
 group with complacently folded hands. Some 
 how the sight was pathetic. If she were right 
 and they wrong, how much of heaven they had 
 lost in renouncing the supreme good of earth ! 
 
GNADENHUTTEN. 
 
GNADENHUTTEN. 
 
 T HOPE that it is something better than an 
 idle love of picturesque and ancient days 
 that prompts me to cast a glimmer of their 
 light on this page, and trace the origin of a 
 poor little Indian village that flourished and 
 fell, beyond the Ohio, ninety years ago, to that 
 remote century, when the Paulician fathers, 
 Chyrillus and Methodius, went out of Constan 
 tinople and established Christianity among the 
 heathen of Moravia. The fate of Gnadenhiitten 
 is so dolorous in itself that I have no need to 
 borrow pathos of the past ; yet I own that its 
 obscure troubles have a peculiar interest to me 
 in their relation to those of a people whose seat 
 
Ii8 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 was in the world's most famous places, and 
 whose heroes' and martyrs' names are quick in 
 all men's minds. 
 
 The annals of the Moravian Church link in 
 the same chain of sorrows and calamities the 
 burning of Huss at Constance and the mur 
 der of the hapless Christian Indians on the 
 Muskingum; and if they cannot make them 
 equal sharers with him in the glory of martyr 
 dom, they declare their death equally magnani 
 mous and saintly, their faith as great, and their 
 spirit the same. It was this spirit, at once zeal 
 ous and patient, which made the Moravian 
 Church first among the missionary churches, and 
 which early in its history awakened persecution 
 against it. Indeed, the Moravians were scarcely 
 converted to Christianity in 860, when Rome 
 assailed them with all the reasons of popes and 
 kings, and the fagot and sword were constantly 
 employed against people whose bodies at least 
 would have remained much more comfortable if 
 they had continued heathen instead of becoming 
 
G NA DENHUTTEN. 1 1 9 
 
 heretics. Their chances of heaven may have 
 been impaired, in the opinion of their persecu 
 tors, if that were possible, when, after two hun 
 dred years of suffering, they united with the 
 Waldenses, in Bohemia; but the chances of 
 being burned alive were unquestionably dimin 
 ished by this union, and there was no more 
 persecution of either sect till Rome began to feel 
 the first movements of the Reformation within 
 herself. The Moravian Church then became es 
 pecially obnoxious to her, and she determined 
 to uproot that heresy. So it came to the mar 
 tyrdom of Huss and of Jerome, and of many 
 more unremembered, and at last to the armed 
 resistance of the Moravians under Zisca. When 
 Zisca died, the persecuted people quarrelled 
 among themselves, and divided into the Tabo- 
 rites, who held for a pure Scriptural church, and 
 the Calixtines, who were received into the Ro 
 man Church with the promise of certain privi 
 leges afterward only partially or never fulfilled ; 
 but a part of the Taborites and a body of the 
 
120 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 Calixtines came together again, and called their 
 new band Unitas Fratrum, and so eagerly de 
 voted themselves to the work of conversion, 
 that the Romish Calixtines stirred up a new 
 persecution. The temporal power refused the 
 
 4 
 
 United Brethren its protection ; their civil rights 
 were forfeited, the prisons were filled with them ; 
 they were driven from their homes in midwinter, 
 and reduced to scattered remnants that dwelt in 
 the forests and the uninhabited places, kindling 
 fires only by night, lest the element that saved 
 them from one death should betray them to 
 another yet more cruel. These fugitives finally 
 met together in the wilderness, to the number of 
 seventy, and reaffirmed their fealty to their an 
 cient church, and their preference for the episco 
 pal over the presbyterian constitution. Through 
 the Paulician fathers, first sent to them, and 
 again through their union with the Waldenses, 
 they traced an episcopal succession, hitherto un 
 broken, up to the apostles themselves ; and 
 now, casting lots for such of their number as 
 
GNADENHUTTEN. 121 
 
 should receive the succession, they sent these 
 secretly to the Waldensen bishop, Stephen in 
 Austria, who consecrated them. 
 
 After Stephen was burnt, many Waldenses 
 united with the Moravians, and, in the midst of 
 persecutions, they re-entered upon their career 
 as a missionary church. They published the 
 Bohemian Bible in 1470, and they multiplied 
 copies of the Scriptures at two printing-offices in 
 Bohemia and one in Moravia. 
 
 Luther, after a preliminary quarrel with them 
 about discipline, received a copy of their con 
 fession of faith, and acknowledged them worthy 
 of all Christian love, a little before Charles V., 
 declaring them worthy of all Christian hate, 
 because he believed they influenced the Bo 
 hemians in their refusal to fight against the 
 Protestant Elector of Saxony, confiscated their 
 property, outlawed their nobles, and racked their 
 bishops. Their sufferings continued throughout 
 the Thirty Years' War, and at its close the Prot 
 estant powers abandoned them to the fury of 
 
122 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 Austria, who disposed so effectively of their pes 
 tilent Bibles and other books, of their churches 
 and their schools, that she might well believe 
 herself to have extirpated them. Their Bishop 
 Comenius, however, escaped to England, where 
 he was received with all affection and respect 
 by the Anglican clergy, and whence he went 
 later to Holland, where he wrote the history of 
 his church. Before he died he caused the ordi 
 nation of two bishops, and thus transmitted the 
 apostolic succession to the church in our times, 
 through the few Brethren whom that devout 
 man, Count Zinzendorf, found at Fulneck in Bo 
 hemia, and invited to a safer and quieter abode 
 on his vast estates at Bertholsdorf. There, in 
 1722, they founded their famous hamlet of 
 Herrnhut, and established their church once 
 more in the ardor of its zeal and hope. 
 
 They were for the most part simple peas 
 ant folk and artisans, but they were afterward 
 joined by scholars and people of condition from 
 all parts of Germany. It appears they did not 
 
GA r A DENHUTTEN. 1 2 3 
 
 in all cases bear their peace and security with so 
 great dignity as they had borne their sorrows 
 and wrongs. They sometimes fell into silly ec 
 stasies of devotion, and permitted themselves a 
 latitude of metaphor and expression that scan 
 dalized the whole Protestant world, the excel 
 lent Protestant world, that had given them up to 
 their mortal enemies, and had endured their 
 calamities with such exemplary fortitude. Zin- 
 zendorf was himself an enthusiast, and unwit 
 tingly provoked the weaker Brethren to this 
 verbal and sentimental excess, though he was 
 afterwards first and severest in rebuking it, when 
 the clamor rose against it. The offending 
 zealots owned their indecorousness, and sent 
 their apology to the other Protestant churches. 
 Their folly had never passed beyond words ; 
 and in the mean time the works of the Mora 
 vian community were of a character to win it 
 our profoundest respect, if they did not attract 
 so much contemporary attention. 
 
 During the first ten years after their coloniza- 
 
124 
 
 ~on on Count Zmzendoif s estates, and while 
 n<r T yet numbered bat six hundred, the \Ion- 
 zaisskmanes to aH pests of die heathen 
 world, to Greenland, to the West Indies, to 
 Tartary. : o Lapland, to Guinea, to the Cape of 
 Good Hope, to Ceylon, and to North America. 
 T.-rir zii-iimnei f^: L^-ici -.:-;- : i: ::r.::- 
 nent at Savannah in 1735, anc * attempted the 
 coofexsionof the neighbofing Creeks, but with 
 drew to Pennsylvania a few years later, and 
 founded then- town of Bethlehem, and entered 
 
 " I ~ 1J1 r IT TlLlif 1 1- __ ~ . T_~ r _ r _L IT rf . - ~. :" . . I I 
 l_""zr~ ~ I.~ Li: "Jlr:r r~:l"rf! ="J.lIrfr '-.'.'. ~..L-i: ~.~. r : 
 
 bat the first Indian community seems to have 
 
 meko in New York and Fichgatgoch in Con- 
 -r:::r;:. i.-.rTt ^r er.ns ::" : r ^rt_.rrz :":r 
 die confersion and cffifizatiaii of the Tndiaias 
 
 -_-i. : ::>- : r ^vi^rs :- i 
 to such a degree that nothing bat 
 
 ii e: :-.r _-::ir fr:~ 
 i :r.t: :;r.t-:e ;: 
 
125 
 
 j:iv 
 
 -ey ^ere \r:rrri:: 1^1 r; 
 11-5 i'_ : :: Ci^iri^; _:, .z^: i: ^r.: 
 ::.ty -tre in'-iTi: ~:: *-r 'rrrriir ::" lie 
 _ : rrr. ; r. ~T. : :r:~_"_y _:eri.:r_ i2r~. it: 
 :>.ty ::_:i -re: :.; : r :: :e frrr friz: ~:Ier_i- 
 :'-rr= ir.t 7*1 Irr^ ^nriifi iht ri ijr- :: 
 ipt their lives. 2sd tbe 
 
 was averse to nscar 
 
 in the Province of Xew York tbe 
 
 ;i~ifT".;r. i_~.ii !~7' - trt jrrr.in 
 
 "...r.-l 15 _TTrl1 IT." ___ r .Ir U\r^7 rrT'llr- - 1" .r-ITV 
 
 _ ~-~~ r*I1__l -~" * " ""1 _ 1~ "* ~r fc H"ZL~ 
 
 about taking oaAs; and tbe Psrori 
 
 1-1:1 :in.^_z^ ir:z: N; V : :> il 
 --; refill ihe ;i" ::" iLrrnzrf. izi f:r;:i- 
 
 ~ "* "~ '- ^ ^ - - - - ^ - - ^ - - - ^, -^ ^ 
 
 . ^. 
 
 :_ r_-rii, :eiz :: - ? _~r 
 
126 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 that character of spiritual capital still belonging 
 to it among the Moravians. The whites near 
 Shekomeko at once seized upon the lands of 
 the Indian converts ; and it is consoling to 
 know that a pious struggle for their souls ensued 
 between the local Christians and the local sav 
 ages, the former striving to attach the converts to 
 their churches, and the latter to drag them back 
 into heathenism. 1 The savages, however, got 
 nothing at all; and the Christians, nothing but 
 the land ; for, after a great deal of suffering and 
 molestation, the converts thought best to follow 
 their teachers to Bethlehem. 
 
 The Moravians were now confined in their 
 enterprise to the Province of Pennsylvania, 
 where the precedent of the Friends had already 
 so far depraved public sentiment, that it was 
 possible for them not only to refuse oaths and 
 military service, but to pursue their benevolent 
 
 1 History of the Mission of the United Brethren among the 
 Indians in North America. In Three Parts. By George 
 Henry Loskiel. Translated from the German by Christian 
 Ignatius La Trobe. London, 1794. 
 
GNA DEN1IUTTEN. 1 2 7 
 
 efforts among the Indians without incurring so 
 much resentment as in Connecticut and New 
 York. 
 
 This, however, was but for a time. Many 
 Scriptural-minded colonists of that day held that 
 the Indians were Canaanities ; and many others, 
 who knew enough of God to swear by, inter 
 preted the Divine will to the extinction, not the 
 conversion, of the heathen. The French War 
 broke out, and it appeared certain to all these 
 that people who treated the Indians with love 
 and kindness, whereas God had imposed no 
 duty toward them but the simple and elemen 
 tary obligation of destruction, must in reason be 
 French spies ; while the heathen, on the other 
 hand, took it into their wrong, thick heads that 
 the Moravians must be the foes of their race, 
 and secretly leagued with the English, being of 
 such an inimical color as they were. The 
 savages, therefore, fell upon a Moravian station 
 on the river Mahony, and killed all the Breth 
 ren, with their wives and children, whom they 
 
128 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 found there. This unsettled the colonial mind 
 somewhat concerning their complicity with the 
 French, but did nothing to disabuse it of other 
 prejudices. Some murders committed on the 
 border exasperated the feeling against the con 
 verts to such degree that it was judged best by 
 their teachers to abandon their exposed and 
 isolated villages, and place themselves under the 
 protection of the troops at Philadelphia. But 
 when they repaired to the barracks, with the 
 governor's order for their admission, the soldiers 
 would not let them enter, and they remained a 
 whole night before the gate, exposed to the 
 insults and outrages of the mob that gathered 
 about them, and that threatened to revenge on 
 these helpless folk the crimes and injuries of 
 the savages. They were then sent to Province 
 Island, where they were lodged for some months 
 in comparative safety and comfort ; but about 
 the beginning of the year 1764 orders came 
 from the government for their removal to 
 New York, and, very scantily clad, and burdened 
 
GNADENHUTTEN. 1 2 9 
 
 with their old and sick, they set out on a 
 journey which was attended with exposure not 
 only to the seventy of the winter, but to the 
 contumely of the mobs that followed them in all 
 the stupid and wicked little towns, and assem 
 bled to revile them as they passed along their 
 route. 
 
 They had not reached the New York frontier, 
 however, when they were met by a messenger 
 from the governor of that Province, forbidding 
 them to cross it; and so they returned upon 
 their weary steps to Philadelphia, where the 
 authorities now succeeded in lodging them in 
 the barracks. For no other reason than that 
 they were Indians, and with scarcely the pre 
 tence of any other reason, a mob assembled to 
 destroy them, and nothing but the most prompt 
 and energetic measures on the part of the 
 military and the better citizens saved them. 
 The danger was so great, and the intended 
 outrage so abominable, that even some of the 
 younger Quakers took up arms in defence of a 
 9 
 
130 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 people whose use and creed would not permit 
 them to defend themselves ; and indeed the 
 Quakers, throughout the unmerited sufferings of 
 these harmless Indians, were their true and 
 steadfast friends, insomuch that one of them 
 said, Even the sight of a Quaker made him 
 happy. In this, as in other things, the Friends 
 bore witness to the superior civilization of their 
 sect, and to the faithful and generous spirit of 
 their relations with the Indians, at which it has 
 in these days grown easy and cheap to sneer. 
 Next to the drab-coats it was the red-coats that 
 treated the Christian Indians with the greatest 
 tenderness and respect, and in effect protected 
 them against the popular fury, until the end of 
 the war, which came in December, 1764, after 
 they had been under arrest a whole year. They 
 were then set at liberty, the danger from par 
 tisans of either side being past ; and with greatly 
 enfeebled numbers (fifty-six had died of small 
 pox during the summer) they repaired to a point 
 on the Susquehanna, in what is now Bradford 
 
GXADENHUTTEN. 131 
 
 County, and there founded their first considera 
 ble town. The Indian name of the place was 
 Wyalusing ; but the Moravians, out of their 
 thankful and hopeful hearts, called it Frieden- 
 shiitten, or Tents of Peace. It is needless to 
 relate at length how their hopes were turned to 
 despair, as the whites encroached upon them, 
 and the traders attempted to make their village 
 a rendezvous whence they might debauch and 
 plunder the neighboring savages. The great 
 blow to their tranquillity and confidence was the 
 sale of the whole region round about them, 
 which was ceded to the English by the Iro- 
 quois, in violation of the solemn promises of 
 that truculent and faithless tribe confirming the 
 Christians in the possession of the lands on 
 which they had settled. The Moravians had al 
 ready extended their operations westward as far 
 as the Ohio, and had a prosperous station on 
 Beaver Creek, and there now came to them, for 
 the third time, messages from the chiefs of the 
 Delawares, inviting them to establish a mission 
 
I3 2 T PI REE VILLAGES. 
 
 in their country. The Lennilenape, as they 
 called themselves, were then a numerous and 
 powerful people, in alliance with many impor 
 tant tribes, who, having abandoned Pennsyl 
 vania, where they were subject to the Iroquois, 
 now inhabited a vast and fertile country about 
 midway between the Ohio River and Lake Erie, 
 and had their principal towns on the Walhond- 
 ing and Tuscarawas, whose confluence forms the 
 Muskingum. It was from these capitals that 
 the invitation came to the Christians at Frie- 
 denshiitten, offering them lands and the protec 
 tion of the Delaware nation, with full and free 
 opportunity to the missionaries of preaching the 
 gospel and introducing the arts of peace. The 
 messages added that the land should never be 
 alienated from them, as it had been at Frieden- 
 shiitten by the Iroquois ; and both teachers and 
 people saw that in this invitation, from one of 
 the mildest and most intelligent of the Indian 
 nations, a great and smiling field of usefulness 
 opened to them, remote alike from the evil 
 
GNA DENHUTTEiV. 1 3 3 
 
 influences of the border and the bad faith and 
 secret enmity of the Iroquois. It was true, the 
 governor of Pennsylvania had assured them that 
 they should never be molested in the tenure of 
 their lands, and had forbidden the survey of any 
 territory within five miles of their villages on the 
 Susquehanna ; but their experience of the colo 
 nists had taught them to distrust, not the good 
 will, but the strength of their authorities. Still 
 less were the Moravians disposed to listen to the 
 remonstrances and repentant prayers of the Iro 
 quois, who now besought them not to abandon 
 their country. They heard the Delaware em 
 bassy with favor, and sent out to Ohio David 
 Zeisberger, their leading missionary, and five 
 Indian families to look at the land offered 
 them ; and these arriving on the Tuscarawas 
 made choice of a tract which, when they de 
 scribed it to the Delaware chiefs, proved to 
 be the very land destined to them by the 
 nation. 
 
 The pioneers found the soil of their allotted 
 
134 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 
 
 domain excellent, 1 and the game abundant in 
 the forest, and with well-contented hearts they 
 built themselves cabins, and laid out their peace 
 ful city on the site of an old Indian town, long 
 since deserted and falling to decay. Ramparts 
 and other traces of ancient fortification were still 
 visible beside the small lake where the gentle 
 Moravian and his followers planned their home, 
 and from the heart of the ruin burst forth 
 that beautiful spring for which he named their 
 city, Schonbrunn. All round them stood the 
 primeval, many-centuried woods ; the river, 
 never vexed by keel, flowed beside them from 
 solitude to solitude ; even the lodges of their 
 savage hosts and benefactors were a day's jour 
 ney out of sight. 
 
 1 The gallant Colonel Bouquet, who penetrated to the Mus- 
 kingum country, at the head of a small army, some eight years 
 before Zeisberger's arrival, and forced the Delawares to make 
 peace and deliver their prisoners to him, found the whole region 
 surpassingly fertile and attractive, watered by fine streams and 
 springs, and dotted with "savannahs or cleared spots, which 
 are by nature extremely beautiful." 
 
GNADENHVTTEN. 135 
 
 It was in April, 1772, and in the summer of 
 the same year the whole community of Friedens- 
 hiitten abandoned their houses and farms, and 
 departed on their long pilgrimage through the 
 wilderness, to seek the country given them beside 
 the Muskingum ; and though their historians set 
 
 down 
 
 " The short and simple annals of the poor " 
 
 in terms something of the driest, yet an irrepres 
 sible pathos communicates itself to the reader 
 as these writers tell how they all left their beloved 
 village on the Wyalusing to the malice of men 
 and elements, and trusted themselves to the 
 promise of the desert. At Friedenshiitten they 
 had dwelt seven happy, prosperous years, which 
 they had employed so well that their town wore 
 a substantial and smiling aspect, with its great 
 street eighty feet wide, and its lines of pretty 
 cottages, "built of squared pine logs," and 
 flanked by gardens, radiating from the spa 
 cious chapel in the midst ; while around it on 
 every hand rippled their yellow wheat, and the 
 
136 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 broad acres of bladed corn spread their serried 
 ranks. The green fruit mantled to ripeness in 
 their generous orchards, and all the flattery of 
 harvest was in the landscape from which this 
 poor little people turned their heavy eyes. 
 
 They must, of course, leave the greater part 
 of their substance, but such things as were most 
 necessary or most portable they carried with 
 them, and departed a heavily laden train, bear 
 ing each one his burden, and all driving their 
 well-freighted horses and their flocks and herds 
 before them. Hundreds of miles of unbroken 
 wilderness stretched between Friedenshiitten 
 and the land of promise ; and their path was 
 beset, not only by the sylvan beasts, but. by the 
 wild brethren of the new Christians. The con 
 verts had all the toils and fatigues of the pil 
 grimage to bear, and they must have often found 
 a potent fascination in the desert, where the 
 wildness without allured the wildness within 
 them, and pleaded eloquently for their return 
 to the allegiance of the woods. But they none 
 
GNADENHtfTTEN. 137 
 
 of them faltered in obedience to the pious and 
 humble teachers who led them, neither for love 
 of the desert if it beguiled, nor for fear of the 
 drunken savages, who sometimes molested their 
 march. 
 
 The pilgrims were far from suffering from 
 hunger, for they killed a hundred deer upon 
 their journey ; but their course was through 
 tangled depths of woodland and morass, across 
 floods, and over mountains, and their steps were 
 always in peril of rattlesnakes, which infested 
 the wilderness in great numbers. Those who 
 journeyed by land fared not more painfully and 
 slowly than others of the brethren who de 
 scended the rivers towards the Ohio in heavily 
 laden canoes, and over the long portages or 
 beside the shrinking streams carried craft and 
 freight alike upon their shoulders. 
 
 Heckewelder, 1 who tells us this much, tells 
 
 1 A narrative of the mission of the United Brethren among 
 the Delaware and Mohican Indians, from its Commencement 
 in the Year 1740 to the Close of the Year 1808. Comprising 
 
138 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 little of all that it would now be so interesting 
 to know of this strange pilgrimage, nor do other 
 Moravian writers, except in a dry and general 
 way, touch upon its events, at best vaguely 
 sketching a picture which the reader's fancy 
 must fill up. Their thoughts are doubtless upon 
 the things of which these wanderings were but 
 the shadow and symbol ; yet here and there a 
 touch illumines the whole with a vivid and 
 purely human interest. Such a one shows us 
 a certain poor mother, who took her crippled 
 son upon her shoulder, and so set out from 
 Friedenshiitten with the rest, and bore him 
 many and many days' journey through the 
 desert. Sickness appeared among the pilgrims, 
 and some of the little ones drooped and died ; 
 and that which shall one day ease us all of our 
 
 all the remarkable Incidents which took place at their Mission 
 ary Stations during that Period. Interspersed with Anecdotes, 
 Historical Facts, Speeches of Indians, and other Interesting 
 Matter, by John Heckewelder, who was many Years in the 
 Service of that Mission. Philadelphia : McCarty and Davis. 
 1820. 
 
GNADE NHUTTEN. 1 3 9 
 
 burdens, whether they console or whether they 
 oppress us, drew softly near the crippled boy. 
 Day after day the poor mother found the load 
 upon her shoulder grow lighter, and that within 
 her breast heavier and heavier, as if the burden 
 were shifted, till at last those walking at her 
 side saw by his white lips and shrinking visage 
 that the hand of death had touched the child. 
 The cripple, between signs and sounds, made 
 them understand that he desired baptism be 
 fore he died, and, tenderly lifting him from his 
 mother's shoulder, they consecrated him by the 
 ancient rites of that church of the poor and 
 martyrs. So he died ; and the mother mixed 
 again with the rest, and we know her thence 
 forth only as part of the sorrow of her people. 
 
 In fact, the history of Gnadenhiitten follows 
 with certainty few individual fortunes ; but its 
 chroniclers, who touch upon no others in that 
 march, tell us how every night, when the foot 
 sore and failing train halted after their long 
 day's journey, they built a great fire in the 
 
140 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 midst of their camp, and, as around an altar, 
 raised their voices in hymns of praise and 
 thanksgiving. It may be that, at these times, 
 when the echoes of the songs died away in dis 
 tant solitudes, the teacher who led them sought 
 to give his wild flock such ideas as they might 
 grasp of their church's past, and recounted her 
 history to those who were keeping unbroken 
 here, in another race and remote deserts, the 
 long succession of her martyrs. Fancy may 
 have her will as to what strange images of 
 imperial Levantine and lordly German cities, 
 of Byzantium, of Vienna, of Prague, and of 
 the embattled life of those far-off lands, arose 
 before the wondering eyes of these children of 
 the forest, as the story ran ; for not one of 
 their kindred survives in any generation to re 
 fute her, but all have entered upon their in 
 heritance. 
 
 On the 23d of August, 1772, the pilgrimage 
 came to an end, and beside the Muskingiim the 
 wanderers kindled their great camp-fire, and for 
 
GNADENHtJTTEN. 141 
 
 the last time gathered about it to utter the 
 common gratitude in songs and prayers. On 
 the morrow they arose and began their guiltless 
 warfare with the wilderness. 
 
 The good Moravians who had led them hither 
 had no grand or novel ideas of a state, and 
 perhaps their success in civilizing the Indians 
 was largely due to the fact that they formed 
 for them no high civic ideal, but seem to have 
 made them as like German peasant-folk as they 
 could where neither Kaisers devoured them in 
 wars nor lords in peace, and where the intermit 
 tent persecutions of their white and red brethren 
 could have but poorly represented the continual 
 oppressions of Fatherland. They taught their 
 communities to sow and reap, they instructed 
 them in humble and useful trades ; they incul 
 cated the simple policy of thrift, the humble 
 virtues of meekness and obedience. But if the 
 political ideal of the Moravians was lowly, their 
 religious ideal and their discipline was lofty and 
 severe, so severe, indeed, that it had in time 
 
142 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 of great peril and necessity barred their union 
 even with the early Lutherans. They had 
 sought these lately savage men, not with the 
 awful prophets of doom, and the sword of the 
 Lord sharpened against them, nor had they 
 come among them as the equally zealous and 
 devoted Jesuits did, to take their imaginations 
 with the picturesque splendors of ritual. The 
 ardent faith of the Hussites and the meek 
 goodness of Herrnhut were the arms with which 
 they surprised these wild, wily hearts, and con 
 quered them for heaven, making their converts 
 lay down the savage, not in creed only, but in 
 life also, and put on the Christian with all the 
 hard conditions of forgiveness to enemies, of 
 peace, and of continual labor. Never since 
 Eliot preached to the Indians in New England 
 had efforts so sincere and so fortunate been 
 made for their conversion, and never had civil 
 ization been so strictly united with conversion. 
 For once the unhappy race, whom romance has 
 caressed, and sentiment has weakly compas- 
 
GNADENHUTTEN. H3 
 
 sionated, but from whom our prudent justice 
 has always averted its face, was here taken by 
 the strong hand of love and lifted to the white 
 man's level, and saved for earth as well as for 
 heaven. It appears that the converts yielded 
 an implicit submission to the advice and laws 
 of the Moravians, who assumed no superiority 
 over them, who married among them, and who 
 shared equally with them in their toils and 
 privations. 
 
 Chief among these teachers was the brave, 
 steadfast, and pious David Zeisberger, a learned 
 and diligent man, and an apostle of zeal and 
 love not less than Eliot's. He was born in 
 Moravia, but his early life was passed at Herrn- 
 hut, whither his parents repaired at Zinzendorfs 
 invitation ; and he was eighty- seven years old 
 when he died, in 1808. Of these years he had 
 spent sixty-two in unceasing labors among the 
 Indians, without reward save such as came to 
 him through the sense of good work well done ; 
 for he always refused to " become a hireling," 
 
144 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 and never took pay for his missionary services. 
 He was the author of a German and of an 
 English grammar of the Onondaga language, 
 and a dictionary in that tongue containing near 
 two thousand pages, as well as a Delaware 
 grammar and spelling-book ; he was translator of 
 innumerable hymns and sermons for the use of 
 the Indian congregations ; and he was well 
 versed in different native dialects. He was a 
 man of simple and abstemious life, of a most 
 benevolent* heart, and a courageous and un 
 daunted temper. We need not refuse to know 
 that " he was of small stature, with a cheerful 
 countenance," that " his words were few, and 
 never known to be wasted at random or in an 
 unprofitable manner." 1 
 
 1 The life and labors of so good and useful a man as this 
 should not be suffered to fall into forgetfulness, and the reader 
 will be glad to know that the Rev. Edmund de Schweinitz, a 
 distinguished minister of the United Brethren at Bethlehem, 
 formerly editor of The Moravian newspaper, and now President 
 of the Moravian Theological Seminary, has written a very com 
 plete biography of Zeisbsrger. This work, which is the fruit of 
 
GNADENHUTTEN. 145 
 
 The Rev. John Heckewelder, who imparts 
 these facts, was himself only second to Zeis- 
 berger in the length and ardor of his labors 
 among the Indians. He was born of Moravian 
 parents in England, but came to this country 
 when a young man, and spent nearly his whole 
 life in the companionship of Zeisberger, and in 
 the work which engaged him. He left a daugh 
 ter, born in one of the Indian villages on the 
 Tuscarawas, who survived until last September 
 at Bethlehem ; and he bequeathed to our litera 
 ture a work on the history, character, and cus 
 toms of some tribes of the North American 
 Indians, which was received with great favor and 
 great disgust by differing North American Re 
 viewers of other days. I have here availed myself 
 freely of his Narrative, the statements of which 
 
 many years' diligence and thorough research among the records 
 of the missionaries and the other archives of the Church, is a 
 most important contribution to American history, in a depart 
 ment hitherto neglected by students, and almost an unknown 
 land to the mere general reader. Mr. De Schweinitz's vol 
 umes contain a full history of the events sketched here. 
 10 
 
146 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 there is no reason to doubt, whatever may be 
 thought of his philosophy of Indian life. He 
 and Zeisberger arrived among the first in the 
 Muskingum country in 1772, and continued 
 there throughout ten years of its occupation by 
 the Christians, being later joined by Brothers 
 Edwards, Sensemann, and Jungmann, and 
 others. 
 
 The Christian Indians who appeared on the 
 banks of the Tuscarawas in 1772, and who built 
 Schonbrunn, were two hundred and forty-one in 
 number ; a little later came a congregation of 
 Mohicans, and on the same river, some miles to 
 the southward, founded the village which gives 
 my history its great tragic interest, and which 
 they named Tents of Grace, or Gnadenhutten. 
 In 1776 Zeisberger and Heckewelder, at the 
 prayer of the Delaware chiefs, laid out a third 
 village, which they called Lichtenau, near the 
 heathen town of Goschocking, and stationed a 
 Missionary there, that the wives and children of 
 these chiefs might hear the preaching of the 
 
GNADENPlUTTEN. 1 4 7 
 
 Christian faith. All these communities now pros 
 pered and grew in the likeness of civilization ex 
 ceeding that of any of the border settlements. 
 It was yet ten years before the first white man 
 had fixed his place west of the Ohio ; a few hun 
 ters held Kentucky against the Indians north of 
 the river, and sustained with that region the 
 primitive relations of horse-stealing and scalping ; 
 in Virginia, the frail and lonely settlements 
 creeping westward made friends with the desert 
 and produced a population nearly as wild as its 
 elder children and quite as fierce and truculent. 
 In the mean time the old-world peasant-thrift and 
 industry, moving the quick and willing hands of 
 the new Christians, made those shores of the 
 Muskingum glad with fields and gardens. The 
 villages were all regularly laid out and solidly 
 built upon nearly the same plan. The chapel 
 stood in the midst, and the streets, branching 
 away from it to the four quarters, were wide and 
 kept scrupulously clean, and cattle were forbid 
 den to run at large in the public ways. The 
 
148 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 houses of the people were the log-cabins com 
 mon to all pioneers in the West ; but they were 
 built upon foundations of stone, and neatly con 
 structed within and without, and their grounds 
 were prettily fenced with palings. The chapels, 
 for their greater honor and distinction, were 
 built, not of the ordinary trunks of trees, but of 
 logs squared and smooth-hewn, and they had 
 shingle roofs, and were surmounted with belfries, 
 from which the voice of evening and of Sabbath 
 bells floated out over the happy homes, and 
 took the heathenish heart of the wilderness 
 beyond. 
 
 The people were for the most part farmers, 
 but some exercised mechanical trades. There 
 was neither poverty nor wealth in the state, but 
 all lived in abundance upon the crops that the 
 generous acres yielded them, and the increase of 
 their flocks and herds ; and at a time when none 
 but the rudest fare was known to their Virginian 
 neighbors, any of them could set before the 
 guest who asked their hospitality a meal's 
 
GNADENHtJTTEN. 1 4 9 
 
 victuals (as Heckewelder quaintly phrases it) of 
 good bread, meat, butter, cheese, milk, tea and 
 coffee, and chocolate, with such fruits and vege 
 tables as the season afforded. They dressed 
 decorously, and not after that heathen fashion 
 which took the fancy of the younger of the white 
 settlers ; the men wore their hair like Christians, 
 not shaving it as the savages did, nor decorating 
 their heads and faces with feathers and paint in 
 their vain manner ; and the women doubtless 
 wore the demure caps and linen fillets, which it 
 is said the good Count Zinzendorf once passed a 
 sleepless night in contriving for the Moravian 
 sisterhood. 
 
 The government of the villages was akin in 
 form and spirit to that of all other Moravian 
 communities. By an ancient usage of the 
 church in Bohemia and Moravia, each minister 
 received under his roof and into his family two 
 or three acolytes or assistants, whom he edu 
 cated in certain offices of piety and religion, 
 such as visiting the sick, catechizing the young, 
 
150 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 and caring generally for the moral welfare of 
 the people. When the church was revived at 
 Herrnhut, the minister ceased to receive the 
 acolytes into his family; but they still con 
 tinued a part of the social and religious gov 
 ernment, and in all the missions of the Brethren, 
 being chosen from among the converts, they 
 were particularly useful and active. They were 
 of either sex, the men being charged to oversee 
 the Brethren, and the women, who must always, 
 according to the Discipline, be " respectable, 
 prudent, and grave matrons," having particu 
 lar care for the helplessness of widows, and 
 the innocence of young maidens. They were 
 never ordained, but they gave their right hands 
 to the Elders as a pledge that they would be 
 faithful in duty. In the Muskingum towns, the 
 authority rested in a council composed of these 
 acolytes and of the missionaries, subject to the 
 mission-board at Bethlehem, 1 and this council 
 enacted the laws under which the people lived. 
 
 1 Letter of the Rev. Edmund de Schweinitz. 
 
GNADENHttTTEN. 151 
 
 Heckewelder gives the substance of their laws, 
 which were eminently practical in most things, 
 and were remarkable, as will be seen, for em 
 bodying some principles of legislation supposed 
 to be entirely the fruit of modern reform. 
 These enactments, which were accepted by the 
 whole congregation at Schonbrunn, and applied 
 afterwards to all the other towns, declared that 
 God only should be worshipped among them, 
 that the Sabbath should be hallowed, and that 
 parents should be honored, and supported in 
 helplessness and age. It was made unlawful 
 for any convert to be received without the 
 consent of the teachers ; and neither adulter 
 ers, drunkards, thieves, nor those that took part 
 in the feasts, dances, or sacrifices of the hea 
 then, were suffered to remain in the Christian 
 towns. The people renounced " all juggles, lies, 
 and deceits of Satan, 1 ' affirmed their will to obey 
 the teachers and acolytes, and to live peaceably 
 together, and not to be idle or untruthful in 
 anything. None should strike another; but if 
 
152 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 any were injured in person or property, the 
 wrong-doer should make just atonement. " A 
 man," the statutes continue, "shall have but 
 one wife, love her, and provide for her and the 
 children," and she shall be obedient to him, 
 take care of the children, "and be cleanly in 
 all things." The young were forbidden to marry 
 without their parents' permission; and no one 
 might go on a long hunt or journey without 
 first informing the teachers or assistants. All 
 persons were enjoined not to contract debts 
 with traders, and none could receive goods to 
 sell for them without leave of the council; all 
 should contribute cheerfully of labor and sub 
 stance to the public work of building school- 
 houses and churches, and other enterprises of 
 the community. There was a law, also, forbid 
 ding the converts to use witchcraft or sorcery 
 in hunting, as the heathen did, the Moravians 
 esteeming it perhaps wicked, or perhaps only 
 a foolish and unbecoming thing for Christians; 
 and among these Indians the first prohibitory 
 
GNA DENHtJTTEN. 1 5 3 
 
 liquor law was rigorously enforced. They al 
 lowed no intoxicating drink to be brought 
 within their borders ; and if strangers or trad 
 ers chanced to have such drink with them, the 
 acolytes took it in charge, and delivered it to 
 them only on their departure. Some time after 
 the adoption of these rules, when the Revo 
 lutionary War broke out, and a war-party .sprang 
 up among the Delawares, the native assistants, 
 of their own motion, enacted that " no one in 
 clining to go to war, which is the shedding of 
 blood," or that gave encouragement to theft and 
 murder by purchasing stolen goods of warriors, 
 could remain among them. 
 
 Offenders against any of the laws were first 
 admonished, and, upon repeated offence, sent 
 out of the towns. 
 
 The reader must have noted how little these 
 stern and simple enactments flattered any savage 
 instinct. Under them, a people fiercely free be 
 came meek and obedient, changed their wild 
 unchastity and loose marital relations for Chris- 
 
154 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 tian purity and wedlock; left their indolence 
 for continual toil ; learned to forego revenge, 
 and to withhold the angry word and hand ; 
 eschewed the delights and deliriums of drunk 
 enness ; and, above all, in a time and country 
 where all men, red and white alike, seemed 
 born to massacre and rapine, set their faces 
 steadfastly against war, and did no murder. 
 The success of the good men who effected this 
 change seems like a poet's dream, in view of 
 what we know of Indian life ; and it must 
 indeed have been a potent bond of love which 
 so united their converts to them that the order 
 of the villages was only once disturbed from 
 within, and was then restored by the penitent 
 return to the church of those who had been 
 seduced by the heathen. Doubtless the hold 
 of the Moravians upon the Indians was strength 
 ened by those ties of marriage and adoption 
 which they formed with them ; but, after all, 
 their marvellous triumph was due to the fact 
 that their efforts were addressed to the reason 
 
GNADENHtJTTEN. 1 5 5 
 
 of the savages, and to humanity's inherent sense 
 of goodness and justice. I confess that this 
 alone interests me in the history of Gnaden- 
 hiitten,, and lifts its event out of the order of 
 calamities into a tragedy of the saddest signifi 
 cance. Not as Indians, but as men responding 
 faithfully and sincerely to the appeals of civil 
 ization and Christianity, and reflecting in their 
 lives a far truer image of either than their 
 destroyers, its people have a claim to sympathy 
 and compassionate remembrance which none 
 can deny. 
 
 In spite of many vexatious disturbances from 
 the incessant border frays, the prosperity and 
 happiness of the Christian towns were so great 
 that their fame spread throughout the whole 
 Indian country, and the heathen came from far 
 and near to look with their own eyes upon 
 the marvel. They lost their savage calm when 
 they beheld these flourishing villages peopled 
 by men of their kindred and color, each dwell 
 ing in his own house with his wife and little 
 
156 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 ones in peace and security, and in such abun 
 dance as the wilderness never gave her children. 
 They saw with amazement the spreading fields, 
 and all the evidences of thrift and comfort af 
 forded by flocks and herds, and the free hos 
 pitality which welcomed them as guests, and 
 feasted them as long as they cared to linger ; 
 and though they doubtless regarded with grave 
 misgiving those points of the Moravian system 
 which required men who would naturally have 
 been naked and idle braves to clothe them 
 selves like white men, and go unpainted and 
 industriously about women's work of tilling the 
 earth, and which, teaching them how to use 
 the axe and saw and hammer, left them un 
 skilled in the nobler arts of tomahawking and 
 scalping, yet they could not deny that the whole 
 result was exceedingly comfortable and pleasant. 
 They shook their heads, and murmured gloomily 
 over the contrast their own state presented to 
 that of the Christians ; and they loudly blamed 
 their chiefs for not listening to the preachers. 
 
GNADENHUTTEN. 157 
 
 It was not strange that the Moravians should 
 conceive hopes of converting the whole Dela 
 ware nation, both from the effect of their peo 
 ple's visible prosperity upon the imagination 
 of the savages and from more substantial facts. 
 Converts were made in such numbers that it 
 became necessary to build new and larger 
 chapels at Schonbrunn and Gnadenhiitten ; 
 while, in a council of the whole Delaware 
 nation, it was determined that the Christian 
 Indians and their teachers should enjoy through 
 out their country equal rights and liberties with 
 other Indians, and that, while all should be free 
 to listen to the doctrine of the missionaries, no 
 heathen Indians should be permitted to settle 
 in the neighborhood of the Christian towns or 
 in any wise disturb them. The Moravians had 
 exacted a pledge of neutrality from the Del- 
 awares in the wars between the whites and 
 Indians; in 1776, when the war of our Revo 
 lution began, they stood firm upon the mainten 
 ance of this pledge ; and in the national council 
 
158 THREE ULLAGES. 
 
 it was determined to keep faith with them. 
 Schools for the children were maintained in the 
 villages, and instruction was given from ele 
 mentary books prepared by Zeisberger ; and the 
 religious activity of the ministers never ceased. 
 
 In the midst, however, of these happy and suc 
 cessful labors, the storm which was gathering to 
 the eastward burst upon the whole country, and 
 at last involved the Christian communities in ruin. 
 
 There had never been peace between the 
 white settlers and the other Indian tribes, and 
 now, at the outbreak of hostilities between the 
 Colonies and England, the Delaware borders 
 burned with warfare, the rumor of which beset 
 the timid Moravian flocks with terror. In spite 
 of the protection of the Delawares, they trembled 
 at the threats of the tribes that accused them of 
 secret alliance with the Americans ; and they 
 were especially afraid of the Monseys, once 
 a truculent and bloodthirsty people, but now 
 extinct as the Spartans, and, alarmed at the 
 advance of a Monsey war party upon Schon- 
 
GNA DENHtfTTEN. T 5 9 
 
 brunn, they abandoned that village and fled to 
 Gnadenhiitten, first taking care to destroy their 
 beloved chapel, lest it should be desecrated by 
 heathen powwows and dances. But the Mon- 
 seys passed harmless by Schonbrunn, and in 
 three days the Christians came back ; though 
 they finally abandoned the place, and drew 
 nearer the Delaware capital of Goschocking, in 
 Lichtenau. Here, with the fugitives from Gnad 
 enhiitten, which had been in like manner aban 
 doned, they enlarged the chapel, and pushed 
 forward their work of conversion and civilization. 
 In time they returned to the deserted villages, 
 and rebuilt Schonbrunn, which had been de 
 stroyed ; but as new dangers threatened, and the 
 Delawares seemed about to swerve from their 
 neutrality, even Lichtenau was vacated, and the 
 united congregations founded a new town, which 
 they called Salem. Schonbrunn and Gnadenhiit 
 ten were still inhabited ; and the converts contin 
 ued obedient to their teachers ; laboring as their 
 wont was, and enjoying seasons of prosperity and 
 
160 TPIREE VILLAGES. 
 
 happiness with longer and longer intervals of 
 disturbance. The war parties of the Wyan- 
 dots had free passage to and from Virginia 
 through the Delaware country, and the pioneers 
 made their avenging forays over the same 
 ground ; the Christian villages were thus overrun 
 by warlike guests, to whom they dared not deny 
 their hospitality, and they came to be regarded 
 with an evil eye by either side. The pioneers 
 especially complained that they fed and com 
 forted the murderous bands that preyed upon the 
 borders, and desolated them with warfare as 
 pitiless and indiscriminate as that waged by 
 themselves, and forgot that the Moravians, claim 
 ing from the Indians a right earned by their 
 hospitality, saved from blows and death the un 
 happy captives who were carried through their 
 country, and when it was possible ransomed 
 them, and sent them back to their friends. -In 
 deed, according to the American and Moravian 
 annalists alike, the Missionaries frequently fore 
 warned the settlements of Indian forays, not 
 
GNADENHU TTEN. 1 6 1 
 
 as spies in our interest, but as good men abhor 
 ring the cruelties of savage warfare, and anxious 
 to avert its atrocities from helpless women and 
 children. The authorities on either side recog 
 nized the vast advantage gained to the American 
 cause by the neutrality in which they held the 
 Delawares and the allies of that nation. At the 
 most disastrous period of our Revolution, this 
 neutrality was observed by a body of ten thou 
 sand warriors, whom the British vainly endeav 
 ored to incite against us, and it was not broken till 
 the great contest had been virtually decided in 
 our favor. President Reed of Philadelphia, in a 
 letter to Zeisberger, thanked " him in the name 
 of the whole country for his services among the 
 Indians, particularly for his Christian humanity 
 in turning back so many war parties on their 
 way to rapine and massacres ; " and there is no 
 doubt of the merciful and beneficent attitude 
 held toward us by a people afterwards requited 
 with such murderous wrong. l 
 
 1 Letter to the author from Rev. Edmund de Schweinitz. 
 II 
 
1 62 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 It had been the custom of some of the settlers 
 to steal the horses of the Brethren, and the en 
 tire population of the border seems to have 
 inherited that stupid hatred which everywhere 
 attended the enterprises of" the Moravians. 
 Sometimes large bodies of pioneers, bent upon 
 errands of theft and murder among the hostile 
 Indians, would pass through the Christian coun 
 try. Such a body once halted at Salem and 
 asked provision ; and then, while the greater 
 part remained with their commandant, who was 
 conversing with Heckewelder and assuring him 
 of his respect for the Brethren, and his confi 
 dence in their neutrality, certain of the men 
 stole away to destroy the other villages, and 
 could scarcely be restrained from that purpose 
 by their leader, to whom knowledge of it was 
 happily brought in time. 
 
 On the other hand, the war parties of the 
 Wyandots grew more and more insolent and ex 
 acting. They appeared in larger numbers and 
 with greater appetites, and the hospitality offered 
 
GNA DENflOTTEN, 1 6 3 
 
 them came to be a very oppressive tribute, 
 which they occasionally acknowledged by threat 
 ening the lives of the teachers, whom they had 
 often plotted to carry off to the English com 
 mandant at Detroit. 
 
 During the long summer months the Christian 
 territory was infested by these unwelcome guests. 
 It was a grateful relief, therefore, that the winter 
 brought the teachers and elders, when the last 
 party of warriors, in their paint and savage 
 panoply, marched down the peaceful streets, 
 chanting their melancholy farewell song, and 
 doubtless taking some hearts among their civil 
 ized kindred ; for here and there a young girl 
 must have melted to look on their splendor, here 
 and there a boy's heart leaped with delight in 
 those free wild men ; and even in some of the 
 Brethren tempting memories of other days, 
 when they, too, had trodden the war-path, may 
 have been stirred by these sylvan notes. But 
 the wives and mothers all rejoiced with the Mo 
 ravians, when the distance hid the nodding 
 
1 64 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 plumes, and the last echo let the farewell song 
 die. A profound peace fell upon the solitudes 
 with the falling snow ; for even if the woods had 
 not now become impassable to the warriors, the 
 drifts would have betrayed their steps beyond 
 hope of concealment, and pursuit and vengeance 
 would have too surely attended any raid upon 
 the white settlements. And now, life in the 
 Muskingum villages lapsed into a tranquillity 
 broken only by the advent from the forest of 
 some poor heathen, on whom the words of the 
 ministers had wrought, and who came at last, 
 with prayers and tears, entreating to be received 
 into the brotherhood of the Christians. It was 
 the season of social enjoyment, and the people, 
 released from the labor of their farms, paid 
 friendly visits between village and village, and 
 from house to house, or all met in their chapels 
 to celebrate those Love-Feasts, by which their 
 church remembered the earliest Christians, 
 eating and drinking together, and joining in wor 
 ship. It was also the time of in-doors industry ; 
 
GNADENHVTTEN. 1 6 5 
 
 the loom clattered at the window, and the wheel 
 murmured beside the hearth much the same 
 music that the children made over Father Zeis- 
 berger's spelling-books in the well-ordered schools. 
 No sound but that of the chapel bell broke upon 
 these homely harmonies, save when some peace 
 ful soul departed to its inheritance, and the peo 
 ple, according to the Moravian fashion, hailed 
 its release from earthly tribulations with the jubi 
 lant sound of horns and clarionets, continuing 
 their solemn exultation while the bearers of the 
 dead carried their burden through the street to 
 the house where it was prepared for burial. The 
 winter was the great harvest of the missionaries, 
 and they wrought zealously in their pious work, 
 animating those who had grown cold, and call 
 ing the unconverted to repentance. The churches 
 grew in numbers and activity ; and it must have 
 been with something like a pang that the 
 Moravians and their assistants saw the buds be 
 ginning to swell upon the naked boughs, and 
 found the first violet in the woods. 
 
1 66 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 All was changed with the return of spring, 
 and with the renewal of every year the dangers 
 of their people increased. 
 
 Most of the allies of the Delawares had at last 
 joined in the war against the Americans, and 
 there had grown up among the Delawares them 
 selves a hostile faction, which constantly in 
 creased. The leaders of this party perceived 
 that nothing but the presence of the Christian 
 Indians hindered them from dragging the whole 
 nation into the war, and all their efforts were 
 bent to their removal. The commandant of the 
 Americans at Pittsburg was also perfectly sensi 
 ble of this fact. He seems to have been one of 
 those humane, enlightened, and faithful soldiers 
 who have been only too rarely intrusted with the 
 control of our Indian relations, and the Dela 
 wares held him in the greatest love and honor. 
 When they applied to him for advice, he coun 
 selled them to treat the wards of their nation 
 with favor and kindness ; and we may well 
 believe, from the report of the missionaries, and 
 
G NA DENHtfTTEN. 1 6 7 
 
 from concurrent facts, that something better 
 than mere policy prompted this advice. But 
 his friendship in the end furnished the war Dela- 
 wares with an accusation against the Moravians, 
 and determined the English commandant before 
 whom it was made to remove the Christians 
 from the Muskingum. The letters from Pitts- 
 burg to the nation were craftily carried to the 
 missionaries to be read and answered. They 
 could not refuse this service, but they rendered 
 it sorely against their will, for they feared that it 
 would bring upon them the charge of alliance 
 with the Americans and unfaithfulness to their 
 neutrality, as indeed finally happened. When 
 the missionaries confronted their chief accuser 
 before the English commandant, the savage with 
 deep grief and shame owned his fraud and 
 declared them wholly innocent ; but in the 
 mean time the ruin of the villages had been 
 compassed. 
 
 All the events leading to the final disaster are 
 pathetic enough in themselves, and fantastic 
 
1 68 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 enough in their travesty of the fatalities by which 
 greater states have fallen. A little wicked diplo 
 macy, a great deal of ineffectual persuasion, ap 
 peals to the common sense of danger answered 
 by a few weak souls, and a coup de main at 
 last accomplished the purposes of the Indians 
 against the Brethren. The war faction amongst 
 the Delawares had already fruitlessly urged the 
 Moravians to remove to the Miami country, 
 when, on the loth of August, 1781, a chieftain 
 of the Hurons called the Half- King appeared 
 in Salem at the head of a hundred and forty 
 armed men, flying the Cross of St. George, and 
 accompanied by Captain Elliott and a trader 
 named McCormick. It does not appear certain 
 that these Englishmen were regularly in the 
 king's service, but on this occasion they gave 
 his authority to the whole transaction, and the 
 Half- King and his warriors acted under the 
 direction of Elliott, who was deputed to this 
 service by the governor of Detroit. They 
 marched down the startled village street, and, 
 
GNADENHUTTEN. 1 6 9 
 
 after a halt on the borders of the place, passed 
 on to Gnadenhiitten, where their number was 
 increased to three hundred by the arrival of 
 Monseys and war Delawares. A week of riot 
 and debauchery in the heathen camp celebrated 
 these preliminary steps, but no acts of violence 
 were committed against the Brethren ; and, as 
 soon as his followers had recovered from their 
 drunken stupor, the Half- King, in full council, 
 urged the converts to abandon a place where 
 they were in continual peril from the Virginians, 
 and to place themselves under the protection of 
 the British at Sandusky. Being answered by the 
 assistants that they were at peace with all men, 
 and had no fear of the Virginians, and that, 
 moreover, they were too heavy with substance 
 to think of leaving their present homes, and 
 must in any case delay giving a final answer till 
 spring, the Half- King and his men declared 
 themselves satisfied, and, as a clear expression 
 of their minds, fired upon the British colors. 
 Loskiel and Heckewelder dwell with sad unction 
 
170 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 upon the events which we need only allude to, 
 telling us with much circumstance how Elliott 
 now turned to evil account the departure of two 
 of the Brethren to Pittsburg, whither they went 
 to inform the commandant of their affairs, and 
 to beg that he would not interfere, lest he should 
 thereby confirm the Indians in their suspicions ; 
 how the warriors, incensed by Elliott's report 
 that the Virginians were marching to the rescue 
 of the Brethren, shot down their cattle and 
 threatened their teachers ; how the savage pol 
 iticians tampered with the weaker converts, 
 alluring them with pleasant pictures of the San- 
 dusky country, and terrifying them with the 
 fate that awaited them if they remained on the 
 Muskingum ; and how about one tenth of the 
 Christians were brought to favor removal, and 
 some were unhappy enough to give the hint 
 upon which the savages afterwards acted, saying, 
 " We look to our teachers ; what they do, we 
 likewise will do ! " 
 
 By this time all the villages were in the 
 
GNA DENIlOTTEN. I 7 1 
 
 utmost confusion ; and at Gnadenhlitten the 
 women and children were in terror of their 
 lives; many of the houses were sacked, and 
 the cattle which had been shot down in the 
 streets and fields sent up an intolerable stench. 
 Well might Zeisberger write to Heckewelder : 
 " It has the appearance as if Satan is again 
 about to make himself merry by troubling and 
 persecuting us. No wonder he grows angry 
 when he sees how many of his subjects he loses 
 by our preaching the gospel. His roaring, how 
 ever, must not frighten us ; we have a heavenly 
 Father, without whose will he dare not touch us. r 
 Let us rely on Him who so often has delivered 
 us from his machinations." In the midst of 
 these sorrows and troubles this good man 
 meekly gathered his flock about him at Gnad- 
 enhiitten, and preached to them for the last 
 time in the beloved chapel, while enemies com 
 passed them about ; giving " a most emphatic 
 discourse," says Heckewelder, " on the great 
 love of God to man," and charging them in no 
 
172 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 event to place themselves " on a level with the 
 heathen by making use of weapons "" for their 
 defence. 
 
 Soon after, the heathen, having received a repe 
 tition of the answer originally made them by the 
 Christians, when they urged the removal of the 
 latter, resolved to seize upon the missionaries, 
 and compel their followers to abandon the 
 Muskingum country. Their capture was easily 
 effected, for they made no effort to escape, and 
 the fears of the savages that the Brethren would 
 attempt their rescue were idle. They patiently 
 submitted to the outrage and insult offered them 
 by the Monseys into whose hands they fell, and 
 who, having stripped them of nearly all their 
 clothing, carried them prisoners before Captain 
 Elliott. The Englishman, who seems to have 
 undertaken the expedition chiefly through a de 
 sire to profit by the distress and necessities of 
 the Brethren, and who was particularly bent 
 upon buying their cattle for a trifling sum to sell 
 again at a great price in Detroit, had the grace 
 
GNADENHUTTEN. 1 7 3 
 
 to express some shame when these harmless 
 men were brought maltreated and almost naked 
 into his presence ; but he did nothing to relieve 
 them ; indeed, he speculated in the clothing of 
 which the savages had plundered their houses, 
 and they were kept from bodily suffering only 
 by the compassion of some of the heathen, who 
 gave back part of their stolen gear, and the 
 Brethren who brought them blankets. Their 
 calamity was not the less real because it took 
 at this and other times the face of comedy. 
 Heckewelder's coat, restored to him without the 
 skirts, and worn in that amusing state of mutila 
 tion, covered an aching heart, and the fortune 
 that similarly made a jest of his associates, not 
 the less afflicted them with anguish for the 
 wreck of their just and good hopes, for the un- 
 happiness of their people, and for the cruel state 
 of their families : for their wives and children 
 had likewise been seized by the heathen, and 
 Sister Sensemann was driven from one village to 
 another, with her babe four days old in her 
 
174 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 arms. As to their treatment by the warriors, in 
 whose camp they were confined, " What incom 
 moded us most," says Heckewelder, with a 
 quaint pathos, "was their custom of repeating 
 the scalp yell so often for each of their prisoners 
 during the night, as well as in the daytime ; but 
 this is a general custom with them, and is con 
 tinued until the prisoner is liberated or killed. 
 Another very incommoding custom they have is 
 that of performing their war dances and songs 
 during the night near their prisoners, all which 
 we had to endure, exclusive of being thereby 
 prevented from enjoying sleep. Otherwise the 
 addresses paid us by a jovial and probably harm 
 less Ottawa Indian, who, having obtained of the 
 Wyandot warriors sufficient of our clothes to 
 dress himself as a white man, and placing a 
 white nightcap on his head, being mounted on 
 a horse, would ride through the camps, nodding 
 to us each time he passed, caused much amuse 
 ment through the camp, and in some measure 
 to us also." The men to whom this moderate 
 
GNA DENllUTTEN. I 7 5 
 
 diversion was offered had already been enter 
 tained by threats against their lives, and were at 
 the moment of the Ottawa's pleasantries perhaps 
 sufficiently amused in guessing what fate was 
 reserved for them. They were very glad to be 
 released at last on their promise (exacted by 
 Elliott's command) that they would no longer 
 resist the will of their captors, but would prepare 
 at once to go with them to Sandusky. It was 
 hard to persuade the Brethren that they were 
 indeed to abandon their homes ; and the mis 
 sionaries had to call them, not only from the 
 labors of the field, but from their efforts to re 
 pair the damages done by the warriors to their 
 gardens and houses ; and of one it is related 
 that he was summoned to the general meeting at 
 Salem, away from the new cottage on which he 
 had just put the last touches of loving industry. 
 But they all obeyed the appeals of their teachers, 
 and on the gih of September assembled from 
 Gnadenhtitten and Schonbrunn at Salem, where 
 for the last time the three congregations met 
 
I 76 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 together in worship. "A most extraordinary 
 sensation of the presence of the Lord comforted 
 their hearts," says Heckewelder; the gospel 
 was preached, the holy sacrament was admin 
 istered to the communicants, and, even in this 
 hour of earthly extremity, a convert was bap 
 tized. 
 
 The Christians were in the mean time guarded 
 by a body of the hostile Delawares. Many of 
 these attended the service, which was in their 
 tongue, and all treated the congregations with 
 perfect decorum and respect ; but on the next 
 day the Half- King and his followers arrived, 
 and renewed at Salem the scenes of rapine and 
 devastation already enacted at Schonbrunn and 
 Gnadenhiitten. Then the teachers besought 
 their captors to delay no longer, and on the 
 third day, which was the nth of September, 
 the Brethren turned their faces from the valley 
 of the Muskingum. 
 
 " Never," says Hecke welder, " did the Chris 
 tian Indians leave a country with more re- 
 
GNADENHVTTEN. 1 7 7 
 
 gret ; " and he and his brother annalists, 
 Holmes and Loskiel, briefly relate the losses 
 the Brethren underwent, most of all lamenting 
 the destruction of the writings and records 
 of the little state, of the books of instruction 
 and worship prepared with so much pains 
 and labor for the converts and children, and 
 now heaped into the streets and burned by the 
 Wyandots, as a century before the Bibles of 
 the Moravians were burnt by the Austrians. 
 The total loss of the Christians is computed 
 at twelve thousand dollars, a great sum for 
 that rude time and country and that humble 
 people. The Wyandots had destroyed six hun 
 dred head of swine and cattle, and hundreds 
 of young cattle had wandered into the woods. 
 The crops of the last year were left in the 
 garners ; and three hundred acres of corn, ripe 
 for harvest, nodded in the September sunshine, 
 as the captives looked their last upon their 
 beloved villages. 
 
 At Sandusky the Brethren halted and pre- 
 
1 7 8 THREE 'VILLA GES. 
 
 pared to pass the winter; while their teachers 
 were carried on to Detroit, where they con 
 fronted their accusers before the English gov 
 ernor, and were honorably acquitted. The 
 season was very cold, and the miserable peo 
 ple, assembled on the bleak Sandusky shores 
 without proper food and shelter, suffered greatly, 
 and many little children died of cold and fam 
 ine ; but our story follows the fate only of those 
 who from time to time stole back to the Mus- 
 kingum, and gathered the corn yet standing 
 in the fields for the rescue of the starving 
 Brethren. 
 
 In March, 1782, a larger party than usual 
 arrived at the deserted villages and began their 
 belated harvest. Great number of these were 
 women and children, and the men bore only 
 such arms as served them in hunting. Even if 
 their bloodless creed had permitted them to 
 guard against the attacks of enemies, they would 
 not have prepared to defend themselves in a 
 region now abandoned by hostile Indians, and 
 
GXA DENHttTTEN. i 7 9 
 
 lying near the settlements of the whites whom 
 they had so often befriended ; for it was the 
 firm belief of these ill-starred people that they 
 had only to fear savages of their own race, and 
 that they were all the safer for their proximity 
 to the Americans. They worked eagerly and 
 diligently, gathering the corn, and securing it 
 in sacks for removal to Sandusky, and it would 
 scarcely have alarmed them to know that Vir 
 ginian spies had noted their presence and re 
 ported it in the settlements. 
 
 But on the border deadly influences were 
 operating against them. In February, a party 
 of Indians from Sandusky had fallen upon a 
 lonely cabin, and had murdered all its inmates, 
 with facts of peculiar atrocity. Earlier in the 
 winter, a number of the Christians had been 
 taken, while gathering corn on the Muskingum, 
 and sent to Fort Pitt, where they were promptly 
 liberated by the commandant. It was the pub 
 lic sentiment of the border, that these captives 
 ought to have been killed, religiously as Canaan- 
 
l8o THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 ites and politically as Indians ; and there was a 
 very bitter feeling against their liberator, ex 
 tending to Colonel Williamson, who had taken 
 the prisoners and might have butchered them 
 on the spot, instead of sending them to Fort 
 Pitt. Williamson had been the most popular 
 man in the backwoods, and he was deeply 
 hurt by the reproach his clemency had brought 
 upon him. He was, according to the testimony 
 of the annalist 1 who most severely condemns the 
 Gnadenhiitten massacre, " a brave man, but not 
 cruel. He would meet an enemy in battle, and 
 fight like a soldier, but not murder a prisoner." 
 Out of these evil elements bigotry, lust of 
 vengeance, and a generous but weak man's 
 shame was shaped the calamity of the Chris 
 tian Indians. As soon as it was noised through 
 
 1 Notes on the Settlement and Indian Wars of the Western 
 Parts of Virginia and Pennsylvania, from the Year 1763 to 1783 
 inclusive, together with a View of the State of Society and 
 Manners of the First Settlers of the Western Country. By the 
 Rev. Dr. Jos. Doddridge, Wellsburg, Va. Printed at the 
 office of the Gazette, for the Author. 1824. 
 
GNADENHUTTEN. 181 
 
 the settlements of Western Virginia and Penn 
 sylvania that a large body of the converts had 
 returned to the Muskingum, a band of a hun 
 dred and sixty pioneers hastily assembled, and, 
 under the lead of Colonel Williamson, who 
 burned to wipe out the stain of his former pity, 
 advanced upon the deserted villages with the 
 avowed purpose of putting the Indians to death. 
 We must record, upon the unquestionable au 
 thority given below, that these murderers were 
 not vagabonds or miscreants, but in many cases 
 people of the first social rank in the settlements ; 
 and perhaps we ought to respect them as vigor 
 ous and original thinkers, whose ideas of an 
 Indian policy still largely inspire us. 
 
 They hastily organized, and then pushed for 
 ward with an eagerness in their purpose which 
 defied all attempts at order and discipline, if any 
 were made. Their advance was not that of a 
 military expedition, but consciously and evi 
 dently that of a band of robbers and cut-throats, 
 descending upon victims from whom they ex- 
 
I2 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 pected no resistance. And throughout the 
 whole transaction, as if their deed were to have 
 the lustre of no virtue, they behaved with infa 
 mous cowardice as well as treachery. 
 
 It is pitiful to think of the blind trust and 
 security in which their victims awaited them. 
 The commandant at Fort Pitt, hearing of the 
 expedition and its object, sent a messenger to 
 warn the Christians of their peril, but he unhap 
 pily arrived too late. Yet they were not wholly 
 taken unawares. Information of the approach 
 of Williamson's men had reached them through 
 another channel; but they quietly continued 
 their labors, unable to believe that any harm 
 was meant them ; and the murderers found 
 them in the fields at work. 
 
 In fact, they had almost completed their har 
 vest, and they were preparing for an early de 
 parture when the whites appeared in their midst 
 at Gnadenhiitten. The first innocent life had 
 been taken, and the hands extended in friend 
 ship to the Brethren were already stained with 
 
GNA DENHUTTEN. 1 8 3 
 
 the blood of one of their number. About a mile 
 from the village the whites found a half-breed 
 boy, the son of the missionary Schebosch and 
 his Indian wife, and, giving him a peaceful 
 greeting, they approached and killed him with 
 their tomahawks, he crying out between their 
 blows that his father was a white man, and im 
 ploring them to spare him. To the main body 
 of the Christians whom they found in the corn 
 fields they now declared that they had come to 
 remove them to Fort Pitt, where they would be 
 safe from dangers that menaced them as the 
 friends of the Americans, at the same time tak 
 ing care to secure their rifles, lest in their ex 
 tremity these helpless people should be tempted 
 to make some effort at self-defence. The 
 Brethren thanked them for their kindness, and 
 mingled freely with their captors, who walked 
 about among them, " engaging them in friendly 
 conversation," asking them concerning their civil 
 and religious customs, and praising them for 
 their practical Christianity. They persuaded 
 
1 84 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 them to send messengers with a detachment 
 ordered to Salem, and urge the Brethren in the 
 fields there to repair to Gnadenhiitten. In the 
 mean time, the whites remaining suddenly fell 
 upon their bewildered prisoners and bound 
 them ; and the expedition, acting upon precon 
 certed measures, re-entered Gnadenhiitten with 
 the Salem converts disarmed and manacled. 
 
 Although the purpose of the campaign had 
 been perfectly understood from the beginning, 
 the officers were now loath to execute it upon 
 their own responsibility : and it is Doddridge's 
 belief, from his personal knowledge of William 
 son's character, that if he had been an officer 
 with due authority, and not merely the leader of 
 a band of marauders, he would not have suffered 
 any of his prisoners to be slain. But he was 
 powerless, and could only refer their fate to a 
 vote of his men. When, therefore, it was de 
 manded, Should the Christian Indians be put io 
 death, or should they be sent to Fort Pitt ? only 
 eighteen voted to spare their lives. It still re- 
 
G NA DENHU TTEN. 1 8 5 
 
 mained a question whether they should be 
 burned alive, or tomahawked and scalped ; and 
 the majority having voted for the latter form of 
 murder, one of the assassins was deputed to 
 inform the Indians, that, inasmuch as they were 
 Christians, they would be given one night to 
 prepare for death in a Christian manner. 
 
 It is related that the merciful eighteen reiter 
 ated their protests to the last against the atro 
 city, but neither their protests nor the appeals of 
 the Indians availed. One of the women who 
 had been educated at Bethlehem, and who 
 spoke good English, fell upon her knees at 
 Williamson's feet, and besought his protection ; 
 but the greater number of the victims seem to 
 have submitted silently, with something of the 
 old stoical fortitude of the savage, and some 
 thing of the martyr's serene resignation. They 
 embraced with tears and kisses, and asked for 
 giveness one of another, and thus meekly pre 
 pared themselves for their doom. They were 
 Christians whose lives had witnessed to the sin- 
 
1 86 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 cerity of their conversion; and, now brought 
 face to face with death, their faith remained 
 unshaken. Among them were five of the na 
 tional assistants, one of whom was well educated 
 in English, and all of whom were men of exem 
 plary thought and deed. These led the rest in 
 the fervent prayers and hymns with which they 
 wore away the night. 
 
 At dawn the assassins grew impatient of the 
 delay they had granted, and sent to the Breth 
 ren, demanding whether they were not yet ready 
 to die ; and, being answered that they had com 
 mended their souls to God and received the 
 assurance of His peace, the whites parted them, 
 the men from the women and children, and 
 placed them in two houses, to which, from some 
 impulse of grotesque and ferocious drollery, they 
 gave the name of the Slaughter-Houses. 
 
 Few even among those who had voted for the 
 murder of the Brethren took part in the actual 
 butchery. The great body of the whites turned 
 aside from the ineffable atrocity, while those 
 
GNA DENHtJTTEN. 1 8 7 
 
 who with their own hands did the murder now 
 entered the cabins. 
 
 The house in which the men were confined 
 had been that of a cooper, and his mallet, aban 
 doned in the removal of the preceding autumn, 
 lay upon the floor. One of the whites picked it 
 up, and saying " How exactly this will answer for 
 the business ! " made his way among the kneel 
 ing figures toward Brother Abraham, a convert, 
 who, from being somewhat lukewarm in the 
 faith, had in this extremity become the most 
 fervent in exhortation. Then, while the clear 
 and awful music of the victims' prayers and 
 songs arose, this nameless murderer lifted his 
 weapon and struck Abraham down with a single 
 blow. Thirteen others fell by his hand before 
 he passed the mallet to a fellow-assassin, with 
 the words " My arm fails me. Go on in the 
 same way. I think I have done pretty well." 
 In the house where the women and children 
 awaited their doom the massacre began with 
 Judith, a very old and pious widow ; and in a 
 
1 88 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 little space, the voices of singing and of suppli 
 cation failing one by one, the silence that fell 
 upon the place attested the accomplishment of 
 a crime which, for all its circumstances and con 
 ditions, must be deemed one of the blackest in 
 history. The murderers scalped their victims 
 as they fell, and, when the work was done, they 
 gathered their trophies together and rejoined 
 their comrades. But before nightfall they came 
 again to the Slaughter-Houses for some reason ; 
 and as they entered that of the men, one of the 
 Brethren who had been stunned and scalped, 
 but not killed, lifted himself upon his hands, 
 and turned his blood-stained visage towards 
 them with a ghastly stare. They fell upon the 
 horrible apparition, and it sank beneath their 
 tomahawks to rise no more ; and then, with that 
 wild craving for excitement which seems the first 
 effect of crime in the guilty, they set fire to the 
 cabins, and, withdrawing to a little distance, 
 spent the night in drunken revelry by the light 
 of the burning shambles. 
 
GNADENHtfTTEN. 1 3 9 
 
 The sole witnesses of their riot were two In 
 dian boys, who had almost miraculously escaped 
 the general butchery, and who afterwards met in 
 the woods outside of the village. One of them 
 had been knocked down and scalped with the 
 rest, and, reviving like the Brother who was 
 killed on the return of the murderers to the 
 Slaughter- Houses, had taken warning by his fate, 
 and, feigning death, had fled as soon as they 
 were gone. The other, having concealed him 
 self beneath the house of the women and chil 
 dren, remained there, the blood dripping down 
 upon him through the floor, until nightfall. A 
 companion who had taken refuge with him, and 
 attempted to escape with him through the cabin 
 window, stuck fast and was burned to death. 
 
 "Thus," says Bishop Loskiel, "thus ninety- 
 six persons magnified the name of the Lord by 
 patiently meeting a cruel death ; " and he adds 
 in another place, with a meek self-denial of one 
 who had fain claimed the greater glory for his 
 people, that inasmuch as, from the admissions of 
 
19 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 the murderers, the Moravians were destroyed 
 not as Christians, but as Indians, " I will not 
 therefore compare them with the martyrs of the 
 ancient Church, who were sometimes sacrificed in 
 great numbers to the rage of their persecutors, on 
 account of their faith in Christ. But this much I 
 can confidently assert, that these Christian In 
 dians approved themselves to the end as stead 
 fast confessors of the truth, . . . and delivered 
 themselves without resistance to the cruel hands 
 of their bloodthirsty murderers, and thus bore 
 witness to the truth and efficacy of the Gospel of 
 Jesus." Brother John Holmes, writing like 
 Bishop Loskiel at a distance, accepts this strict 
 construction of the position of the Indians in the 
 Church ; but Hecke welder, whose life for many 
 years had been passed in the closest and tender- 
 est association with these hapless victims, who 
 had doubtless been the means of conversion to 
 many, who had joined them in marriage, and 
 had baptized their little ones, who had shared 
 their lowly joys and sorrows, sat at their boards 
 
GNADENHtfTTEN. 1 9 I 
 
 and by the beds of their dying. has no heart 
 for these ecclesiastical niceties, but breaks into 
 lamentation none the less touching because the 
 words awkwardly express the anguish of his 
 spirit : " Here they were now murdered, together 
 with the little children ! the loving children 
 who so harmoniously raised their voices in the 
 chapel, at their singing-schools, and in their 
 parents' houses, in singing praises to the Lord ! 
 those whose tender years, innocent counte 
 nances, and tears made no impression on these 
 pretended white Christians, were all butchered 
 with the rest ! " 
 
 What recoil of their crime, if any, there was 
 upon the Gnadenhtitten murderers themselves, is 
 not certainly known. A dim tradition, one of 
 the few in the West which have not yet hardened 
 into print, relates that their leader in after years 
 lost the popular favor that he consented to buy 
 at so dear a cost. Old friends looked on him 
 coldly, and the humanity of a younger genera- 
 
192 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 tion regarded him with horror. He could never 
 be brought to speak of the atrocious deed, and 
 his men shunned all talk of it. But since, in the 
 year following the massacre, the same leader and 
 men organized a force to complete their work of 
 murder by taking off the remaining converts in 
 this refuge at Sandusky, it may be doubted 
 whether the defeat that attended this effort, and 
 the burning of such of their number as were cap 
 tured by the Indians, in avowed revenge for the 
 murder of the Christians, were not the only re 
 grettable circumstances connected in their minds 
 with the Gnadenhiitten massacre, until a better 
 and more civilized public sentiment illumined 
 them. Their act at the time did not lack de 
 fenders in Eastern gazettes, and many years 
 afterwards Heckewelder tells that he met and re 
 buked a ruffian who justified them, and regretted 
 that they had not killed all the Christian Indians. 
 It is true that the Gnadenhiitten murderers 
 but fulfilled a long-cherished purpose of the 
 backwoodsmen, which had been formed and 
 
GNADENHUTTEN. 193 
 
 attempted twenty years earlier in Pennsylvania ; 
 and it can be said, in their defence, that they 
 had provocation as well to cruelty as to mercy. 
 The race and color of their victims represented 
 to them the pitiless savages who had so often 
 desolated their homes, sparing neither age nor 
 sex, and holding them in continual wrath and 
 terror; and though many white prisoners owed 
 their welfare or their ransom to the humane 
 offices of the Moravians, the compulsory hospi 
 tality of the Muskingum villages to the war 
 parties of marauding Indians was, as has been 
 said, a constant offence to the pioneers. Yet 
 this offence, at the time of the massacre, had en 
 tirely ceased, through the removal of the Chris 
 tians to Sandusky, and the murder was utterly 
 wanton. Doubtless the slaughter of a few In 
 dians, more or less, was not quite a crime to 
 their tough consciences ; in the ethics of the bor 
 der, according to Heckewelder, it was no more 
 harm to kill an Indian than a buffalo, a senti 
 ment which with contemporary moralists of our 
 
194 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 Western plains finds expression in the maxim, 
 " Good Indians dead Indians." We can per 
 haps hardly arraign these murderers before any 
 tribunal of civilized thought ; but their deed was 
 nevertheless hideous, and it was most lamentable 
 in its consequences, for it weakened, if it did not 
 break, the hope of a whole race. It was so hor 
 rible, that in the face of it the Moravians never 
 regained full courage, nor the Indians full trust ; 
 and though the Moravian mission to the Del- 
 awares continued for some forty years thereafter, 
 the early vigor of the enterprise was never 
 restored. 
 
 The crime, indeed, had the far-reaching con 
 sequences of every evil action ; it embittered the 
 warfare between the whites and Indians in ten 
 fold degree, and filled their infrequent truces 
 with hazard and doubt. Nay, it seems to have 
 broken up all foundation of faith as well as 
 mercy between the two races ; many of the con 
 verts themselves relapsed into heathenism, and 
 were lost among the multitude of warriors ; and 
 
GNADENI-lUTTEN. 195 
 
 when the Moravians sent to seek these out and 
 reclaim them, they sometimes found their be 
 wildered minds filled with a dreadful and unim- 
 agined suspicion. " I cannot," said such a one 
 to the Indian brother who discovered him 
 among the warlike savages, painted and armed 
 like the rest, " I cannot but have bad thoughts 
 of our teachers. I think it was their fault that 
 so many of our countrymen were murdered at 
 Gnadenhiitten. They betrayed us and informed 
 the white people of our being there, by which 
 they were enabled to surprise us with ease. Tell 
 me now, is this the truth or not?" This poor 
 soul had lost all his children and most of his 
 kindred in the massacre, and even when brought 
 to see the injustice of his suspicions, he was im 
 potent to repair the wrong or to return to his 
 old life. " I have now a wicked and malicious 
 heart," he said, mournfully, " and therefore my 
 thoughts are evil. As I look outwardly," he con 
 tinued, pointing to his crimson paint and war 
 rior's plumes, " so is my heart within. What 
 
196 THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 would it avail if I were outwardly to appear as a 
 believer, and my heart were full of evil ? " l 
 
 There yet stands beside the Muskingum, near 
 the site of the hapless Indian village, a little 
 hamlet bearing the pious name of Gnadenhiitten, 
 and its chapel bells still call the Moravian 
 Brethren to the worship of their ancient church. 
 But no Christian of Indian blood shares in the 
 celebration of its rites ; the stone foundations of 
 the cabins, some aged apple-trees planted by 
 their hands, and a few pathetic traces of the fire 
 that consumed the victims of the massacre, alone 
 remain to attest the success and the disastrous 
 close of the Moravians' loving and devoted 
 labors at Gnadenhiitten. The survivors of the 
 great murder and of the cold and famine of that 
 winter at Sandusky attempted a settlement in 
 Canada under British protection, and later built 
 a village in Northern Ohio ; but they always 
 longed to return to the Muskingum, to their old 
 
 1 Loskiel. 
 
GNADENHtiTTEN. 197 
 
 fields, and to the scenes endeared to them by so 
 many years of happiness and consecrated by the 
 sufferings of so many of their kindred. Before 
 the close of the century this wish was gratified 
 through the Congressional grant to the Christian 
 Indians of all the lands assigned them by the 
 Delawares; and they came back and founded 
 near the ruins of Schonbrunn a new town called 
 Goshen. Their teachers came with them, and 
 Heckewelder, assisted by a Moravian Brother, 
 gathered together the charred bones of the 
 Indian martyrs, and gave them Christian burial. 1 
 But the life of the experiment was gone, as if 
 their hopes had been buried in that grave. 
 Defeat met the renewed efforts at conversion ; 
 the influences of the border infected the broken 
 and disheartened people ; Zeisberger died ; the 
 rigid laws of the community were trampled upon 
 by the borderers, among whom the war of 1812 
 revived all the old bitterness against the In- 
 
 1 Rev. Edmund de Schweinitz's letter from Gnadenhiitten, 
 in "The Moravian." 
 
IQS THREE VILLAGES. 
 
 dians ; drink was brought into the village ; and, 
 before the removal of the community to Canada 
 in 1823, the spectacle of drunken converts in 
 the streets bore witness, if not to the inherent 
 viciousness of the Indian, at least to the white 
 man's success in tempting and depraving him. 
 
 University Press : John Wilson & Son, Cambridge. 
 
LG 
 
 K