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With Mr. Winsor's Compliments

THE

Mayflower Town

BY

JUSTIN WINSOR

THE MAYFLOWEE TOWK

AN ADDRESS

DELIVERED AT

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OF THE

INCORPORATION OP THE TOWN OF DUXBURY, MASS.,

June 17, 1887.

By JUSTIN WINSOR.

CAMBRIDGE:
JOHN WILSON AND SON.
Santijersitg J^tcss.
1887.

Tivo hundred copies privately printed.

ADDRESS.

T PRAY you let the dissolving view of another scene
^ than this come to your inner vision. Picture your
selves at the doorstone of Miles Standish in the declining
hours of a day in June, two centuries and a half ago.
Gaze attentively upon the knots of people looking out
upon the placid waters of yonder bay, and turning their
eyes upon a mellowing sky beyond the Kingston Hills.
You can hardly mistake the master of the house. His
three-and-fifty years have left some, if not heavy, marks
upon a frame that in his younger days had borne the
severities of campaigns in regular armies, and in his
sterner manhood had endured the rigors of the wilder
ness. But you can see that his face still has the volatile
lines which mark a nature quick in passion. His eye has
still the alertness and his motions the rapidity of those
earlier days when he fought in Flanders, and of the later
ones when he braved the braggart Pecksuot in the cabin
at Wessagusset, or quelled by his daring the revolt of
Corbitant. We know by the inventory of his books that
the " Commentaries of Csesar " was a household volume ;
and we may well conjecture how, with his children and
Hobamok looking on, he could trace upon the sand, and
place pebbles to mark, the marches and camps of the
Roman Legions in Gaul. He was now, as he continued

to be for a score of years yet left to him, trusted in the
counsels of the civil government of the colony, and it
may be upon his urgency in the Court of Assistants on
the morrow that Duxbury is to enter upon her corporate
existence. We may well imagine, in view of this con
templated action, how this littie gathering of neighbors
was formed as a last conference in the scant community,
which for five years had been taking up its house-lots
along the margin of the bay, and was now combining,
after the promptings of their English birthright, to secure
their own local government.
Of the Court which was to decide upon their petition in
the morning, there were others besides Standish who might
well have attended this supposable conference. There
was Edward Winslow, who had settled at Greenharbor, as
Marshfleld was then called, probably occupying a tem
porary summer shelter there at as early a period as when
on the hillocks along the Duxbury shore others of the
Plymouth people had begun to build their rude houses.
It was just about the time which we are now considering
that Winslow had built himself a more commodious
lodging, in which he might dare to brave the winter,
and had dignified his estate with a name associated with
his ancestral line; for he and Standish were the only
ones of the first comers whose family stock seems to have
been above the yeoman class. There was no definition
yet of the bounds of the proposed new town ; and it was
to surround if not to include Winslow's grant at Marsh-
field, and to stretch, as was determined some years later,
to the North River. Much the same reason had lured
Winslow to make a permanent abiding place at Green-

harbor as had brought Standish and the rest to settle
along the Duxbury fields, and as three years later Winslow
with his neighbors at Greenharbor were to seek incor
poration in the same way ; and as he was to make part
of the Court to determine upon the application of those
of Duxbury, we may well imagine him to have joined
this probable group. The name which had been selected
for the new town, and which for some years had been
commonly applied to the settlement on this side of the
bay, was a reminiscence of Standish's early days and of
his connection with an ancestral line which, centred its
history in family estates in Lancashire, known to this day
as Standish Hall and Duxbury Hall. The somewhat
lordly promises of Standish's will for the benefit of his
son Alexander and his descendants give a little pleasant
flavor of baronial state to the decidedly democratic feeling
of the early Plymouth records. It helps us to under
stand the two somewhat opposing phases of Standish's
character, — the sympathetic, companionable nature that
impelled him into the simple ways and homely fortunes
of the Pilgrims, and that reserve and perhaps hauteur of
individualism which never forgot his inherited rights.
Standish seems, if we may trust the records, to have
brought to the Pilgrim store small riches compared with
that somewhat profuse wealth which his will represents
him as having been surreptitiously deprived of ; or at least
he stands on the lists of rate-payers of the little colony far
below Winslow and Collier, the other members of the
Court of Assistants for this year, from this part of the bay
and beyond. Riches to these early settlers consisted not
so much in land as in the ability to work it, in the cattle

they could feed, and in the merchandise they could order
from England. Now that the settlements of Massachusetts
Bay were well established and prospering, the Plymouth
people, — who had largely increased their herds and flocks
from the small importation of three heifers and a bull,
which had been brought over in 1624, — found a quick
sale for any surplus in the necessities of the Massachusetts
people ; and Bradford offers serious complaint that the
accumulation of riches, and the methods to that end, were
making sad changes in the quiet, self-centred little com
munity which but a few years before had made the town
of Plymouth homogeneous and content. This increase of
their stock had induced them to move farther and farther
from the town to find pasturage ; and where a summer
sojourn had sufficed at first, a permanence of settlement,
provided with all the relief and aids by which the winter
could be combated, necessarily soon followed, breaking up
connections with the parent church at Plymouth, and at
one time causing almost the desertion of that town. It
was not without grievous presentiments of evils to come in
this train of events, that Bradford records these beginnings
of the towns of Duxbury and Marshfield. His fears that
the division of the church would lead to political indepen
dence in local affairs was only too evident some years be
fore it came ; and Bradford must confront the inevitable
issue at the sitting of the Court on the next day, for which
this little conference was preparing.
Plymouth had in fact by this time ceased to be the
chief home of the " Mayflower " Pilgrims. Bradford was
the only one of the first comers of much consideration
remaining in that town. It stirred him deeply to find

how the chief men had abandoned the places which had
been hallowed by their early sufferings. Brewster, Stand
ish, Winslow, Alden, Howland, and two of their compan
ions in that fateful voyage of whom we hear less, George
Soule and Henry Sampson, — ¦ every one was now living
on the Duxbury side and adjacent. Of those who had
come later, Collier and Prince and the sons of Brewster
were their neighbors here. What Plymouth thus early
lost she has never regained ; and the " Mayflower " blood
in the male lines, except as descendants of these Duxbury
settlers have returned to the old home, make no longer
an appreciable part of her population. I recall how forty
years ago, as a boy, smitten with the love of genealogy, I
traced down the widening lines of descent from the "May
flower," and found, as it seemed to me, half the people of
this town possessed of the strain of the Pilgrim blood.
¦ Of more marked bearing, perhaps, than either Standish
or Winslow, is he who is the eldest by much of all who
are gathered before us, and whose memory goes back for
nearly seventy years. How should we like to-day that
instrument, which the scientists say we may one day pos
sess, to take from the air still palpitating with the undu
lating' words of this reverend man his discourse, as he
stands there in reverie, turning aside it may be at times
to impart to Ralph Partridge, the new-come minister of the
town, the shifting visions of the past ! There was, indeed,
little in the scene before him, — the waters streaked with
the vagrant breezes, the rosy flush that lay over the dis
tant hills of Plymouth, the purple mass of Manomet, and
the woody headland of the Gurnet peering above the dusky
outhne of yonder island, — little in all this to bring back,

8
except by contrast, that village of Scrooby, in Nottingham
shire, where he passed his childhood. Think for a mo
ment of this aged Christian teacher, and of this doughty
soldier, passing among his guests and coming to the other's
side, and of the contrasts and startling visions which
might have come and gone, dissolving in their minds, —
Brewster, who might well have copied for Secretary
Davison, his master, the death-warrant of the Catholic
Mary Queen of Scots ; and Standish, with his recollec
tions of the campaigns in Flanders, where, scion of a
Catholic stock himself, we are told that his sword had
been wielded against the Spanish Romanists ! Think,
again, how the hoary associations of tbe storied halls along
the Cam might have poured upon the mind of Brewster,
as he recalled his life at the English university, when at
Peterhouse College nearly sixty years before he had laid the
foundations of a learning which for many years was the
most considerable possessed by any among the Pilgrims.
As we look upon him now he seems almost like a relic of a
by-gone generation. The courtiers he had met, the scholars
he had known, must have come and gone in his memory
like the stalking shapes of a dream. We can imagine how
in his moments of reminiscence, as his thoughts went back
to the friends of his early manhood, his heart if not his foot
trod the Bay Path to the Massachusetts settlements, over
which Partridge had so lately travelled. This new-comer
could tell him how the colleges of Cambridge and Oxford
had within these seven years sent their most heroi' souls
into this neighboring wilderness. But nearly all these
men were quite a generation the juniors of Brewster.
Partridge could tell him of a contemporary at,ithe Univer-

sity, — Nathaniel Ward, — and of the beginning of his
ministry at Agawam in the Massachusetts, where his active
intelhgence made him a few years later the draftsman of
the " Body of Liberties " of that sturdier colony. Par
tridge could tell him, too, of the men of his own college.
Trinity ; and every message from the Bay brought word of
what John Cotton had said in Boston, or Thomas Welde in
Roxbury, or Hugh Peters in Salem. Brewster could point
to a fellow collegian of Peterhouse — long after him to be
sure — in John Norton, to whom they had listened in
Plymouth for the winter, a year or two before.
Recall, if you will, some of the other names which
Massachusetts preserves, bearing thither from the Univer
sity of Cambridge the memories of her halls, and awak
ening in the breast of William Brewster the tender affilia
tions of fellowship in learning, as he heard of their coming
to carry a stout heart, and to press on with simple, earnest
endeavor in breaking out the primordial pathways of a
nation. The Pilgrims' shallop, as it explored the coast to
the northward, must have brought to him word, even be
fore the coming of Winthrop, of that mysterious recluse,
William Blaxton, who pre-empted in 1625 the site of the
future Boston. Other Cambridge men whose wandering
hither was not unknown to him were Francis Higginson,
of -Salem; Roger Williams, who but a year or two before
the time we are now considering had fled from Salem to
Plymouth, to be hardly more welcome there with the up
heave, ' of his instincts ; Thomas Hooker, who had but
a twelvemonth before led a migrating community from the
banks of the Charles to the valley of the Connecticut, —
A migratio . not without influence, as we shall see, upon

10
the vote to be passed to-morrow ; the godly Shepard, who
had taken the place which Hooker had left, little suspect
ing then that the unknown John Harvard, bringing with
him the Puritanism of Emmanuel, at this very moment,
when Brewster's reverie might have turned his spiritual eye
to the future of learning in New England, was crossing
the Atlantic with a dream of the great university shadowy
in his mind, and bearing among his books, as we know
from the hst preserved in the College records, the Essays
of John Robinson, the pastor of the Pilgrims.
To a man of Brewster's learning, as Bradford describes it
to us, the coming of Ralph Partridge to him as a neighbor
must have produced grateful recollections of the associations
of Cambridge in contrast to a time twenty years later than
his own, and when Puritanism had made Emmanuel its
stronghold. He could well remember how at Peterhouse
he had acquired in the first instance his Puritan tendency,
and how, as he left Cambridge for more stirring fields, it
was still under the Puritan diplomatist Davison that he
got his first glimpses of the Low Countries, so that when
some years later he went thither into exile it was not to a
land wholly unknown to him. It was this same Puritan
Davison who later interceded to get him the office of
postmaster in his native village, which his father had held
before him, and which, through the control that it gave
him of relays on the great post-route to the north, offered
him a position of not a little local importance. Here it
was in the habitable portion of an ancient manor-house of
the archbishops of York, the postmaster William Brew
ster passed nearly twelve years of his early maturity, —
years which proved to be the turning-point of his life.

11
The motive and effect of that change of life, which had
heretofore known its due share of the bustle of the world,
we can well understand when we read that tribute to his
character which has come down to us from the pen of
Bradford, and which enables us from what he was in this
cardinal period of his life to conjecture the man he was
to become in the ripening of time. His friend tells us of
Brevpster's grave and deliberate utterance ; of his humble,
modest, and inoffensive demeanor ; of his cheerful spirit,
not dismayed by trial, and always rising above the worst
that could beset him ; and of his tenderness, particularly for
those who had been driven to extremities for which their
life had not prepared them. If such was the native char
acter of the man, it is not surprising that when that flock of
English folk scattered about Scrooby in the three counties
of Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire, and Yorkshire had been
drawn together and needed a friend earnest to protect
them, they found one in William Brewster. The pity he
felt for an inoffensive, humble people harried by' the min
ions of the law, very easily became, as it happened, joined
to the admiration which he could feel for such a servitor
and minister as they had in John Robinson. This pastor
and his principal follower were sharers by nature in all
that was tender, tolerant, and hopeful in their religious
feelings. Of Robinson's scholarship, — for he too was of
Cambridge, though a dozen years later than Brewster, — his
companion was to know the deepest and to honor the broad
est part. It was through Brewster's welcome in his ancient
manor-housc-that Robinson and his flock now found a place
of meeting, when by stealth, or as best they could, they met
for mutual comfortings and for the service of prayer.

12
We may well suppose that Partridge listened to a story
like this with the interest natural to one whom fortune had
thrown among a people who had found a common in
heritance in all the tender recollections of such a life as
the older of the first comers had experienced. He could
but see in the veneration felt for their ancient elder that
the wisdom of Brewster, as it had been the guide of his
neighbors, must be his own in his ministration to this
people in the coming years. From Brewster he must
learn their individual traits ; he nuist know the joys and
miseries of each household, the aspirations of one person,
the estrangements of another ; and he must walk with him
among the graves at Harden Hill, and listen to the com
pletion of the family histories in the enumerations of those
that fire gone.
I cannot now detail the whole course of that story
which Brewster must have told to his new helper when
ever he easily reverted, as old men do, to the memories of
their younger days ; of the imprisonment which he suf
fered ; of the flight with the congregation of Scrooby to
Holland, — first to Amsterdam, where they found other
English who had preceded them, and in whose contro
versies over the questions of bodices and high heels they
were little inclined to join as a thing worth the enduring
of exile. Brewster must have told him how they parted
with their less spiritual countr3'men and passed on to
Leyden, destined to be so long their hofne. You know
the straits to which they submitted, — poverty, and hard
labor for a Hving; but never forgetting the land which
drove them forth. They who, as Bradford said, had been
used " to a plain country life and the innocent trade of hus-

13
bandry," were thus thrown into a strange city and forced
to learn a strange tongue. We can well imagine how
Partridge, who had been a Church of England clergyman,
would listen to this wonderful story, — of Robinson hold
ing all together by his tact and by his love ; of his gaining
the respect of the Leyden University, which is illustrious
with the names of Arminius, Scaliger, and Grotius ; of hig
publicly disputing with the professors, when he had been
honored with membership of their learned body ; and of
his contributing by his acquirements and sweetness to
that repute which they enjoyed with the Dutch, and which
the honesty and orderliness of the less learned among
these outcast English helped to intensify. Brewster might
well revert to his honorable calling then as a schoolmaster,
teaching English through the Latin to Dutch, Dane, or
German, as either required it. He might also recount how
when later in their sojourn a young English gentleman had
joined them, bringing doubtless some little capital to work
with, so that Brewster and Winslow (perchance this same
gentleman comes up now to the front to listen to the recital)
could set up a press and print for clandestine introduc
tion into England the doctrinal books and tracts that the
licensers of the English press had prohibited.
Standish himself might have joined in the talk too,
and told what we to-day would be glad to know, — just
how he chanced to join this exiled people. It has been
claimed of late years with some show of plausibility by Dr.
Shea, the most eminent of the native Catholic writers ou
American history, that the fact (un controverted I believe)
that Standish never became covenanted with the Pilgrim
Church, coupled to the other fact (equally unchallenged

14
I think) that he belonged to a Lancashire family, then as
now one of the well-known Catholic famihes of the realm,
afforded ground for holding the Duxbury captain to be
one of that faith. These facts do not certainly prove it,
nor yet is the allegation positively disproved by anything
we know. If Standish were a Catholic, it may or may not
have been known to his leading associates in the colony.
To suppose they knew it, and because of his helpfulness
to have ignored it, is but a step further than to have
trusted him as they did when he was without the pale of
their covenant. If Bradford had survived him to w^ite
his character as he wrote Brewster's, we might possibly
have been informed. As it is, we inherit a mystery.
But, see ! there is a new comer to our Leyden group.
Who is that fair and rosy woman, bewitching one may
well believe her to be, as she dismounts from the pillion
behind John Alden, greets Barbara Standish, — the Cap
tain's wife, — as she trips along in the early develop-
meut of her matronly comeliness, glancing at the Captain
himself, in remembrance of the incident which Longfellow
has immortalized, and draws near to pay her affectionate
homage to Elder Brewster, — who but that Priscilla who
so witchingly said, "Prithee, why don't you speak for
yourself, John ? " She makes in the group a new element,
for in her veins courses the blood of the Huguenots ; and
out of the Church of the Walloons in Leyden came the
names of Molines, changed to Mullins, and Delanoye,
which we now know as Delano.
And so in these years of their exile in Holland the Pil
grim Church grew to about three hundred souls ; but with
all their outward prosperity there was a spirit of unrest.

15
It grieved their English hearts to see- their young men
growing up with foreign ways, marrying Dutch maidens
and joining the Dutch marine. The truce of Holland
with Spain, soon to expire, might bring upon them the
clash of arms in a country not their own. They said to
one another, " Let us go hence to save this English blood
of ours." " Let us go and carry Christ to the New World,"
said Edward Winslow.
There is no time to-day to rehearse the story which the
narrative of Bradford has made clear to us, of the hard
bargain which some English merchants forced upon them
in their negotiations for the money necessary for their
transfer to America. Here in William Collier is one of
those same London merchants who could tell us the whole
story. He is one of the two or three of the seventy
merchants who had heart enough in the migration to
come over to share its burdens ; and he had already
settled, in company with Prince and Jonathan Brewster,
along the line of what we know as the shore road to
Kingston. Prince had married a daughter of Collier,
as had also Love Brewster, another son of the Elder.
William Brewster himself had participated in those coun
sels for the outfit, but we cannot follow them now.
Hard as the terms were, they were accepted ; and such
of them as were to part with the major portion of the
Church that remained behind with Robinson passed their
last night in Leyden with feasting and psalms. Who
would not wish that we had preserved to us in his very
words the farewell address which Robinson made to them ;
but it unfortunately has only come down to us as it floated
in the memory of Edward Winslow many years later, —

16
with its exalted tenderness, its far-seeing wisdom, and its
lofty, tolerant purpose.
We may suppose Brewster to have retired with the
falling dews to his home, and to have left Alden to rehearse
to Partridge the continuance of the story. There were
three of the " Mayflower " settlers now in Duxbury who
belonged to the class of which Alden was the most con
spicuous member, — unless, perhaps, John Howland be
excepted. These were men not of the Leyden stock, but
hired by the company, or apprenticed or bound to some
of. the leading men at their immigration. In this way,
though at coming a man of twenty-seven, John Howland
was a member of Governor Carver's family ; George Soule,
at this time soon to become a settler at Powder Point and
the ancestor of a numerous family of that name, was bound
to Edward Winslow ; and Henry Sampson, a lad of six
years at coming, was under the care of his cousins Edward
Tilley and wife, both of whom died in that first grievous
winter, while the youth Sampson had been at this tiirie
a year married, and was to become the ancestor of a
numerous family, — though not of all bearing the name.
The one person of this class whom Bradford singles out
for commendation is John Alden. He tells us that he
was hired for a cooper in Southampton, where the " May
flower" fitted, "and being a hopeful young man," he adds,
" was much desired, but left to his own liking to go or
stay when he came here [to Plymouth] ; but he stayed
and married here," and what that marriage with his fair
Priscilla produced, the genealogical tables of numerous
descendants abundantly make plain.

17
We can imagine Alden now explaining to. Partridge, the
new minister, how he was pursuing his trade in Southamp
ton when the " Mayflower " came round from London with
such of the Pilgrims as had gathered there to join in the
voyage ; and to these Londoners we can probably trace the
London designation of landmarks, which in my boyhood
were and perhaps still are familiar in this town, — Black-
friar's Brook, Billingsgate, Hound's Ditch, and the rest.
Alden could tell how the little " Speedwell " had followed
her into port for the rendezvous, freighted with the heavy
souls made indeed the lighter for the benedictions of
Robinson. He would tell of the conference there, when
he first came in contact with the noble spirits among
whom his life was to be cast ; of the trials which he saw
them endure as the merchants whom they had trusted
for succor turned their backs upon them ; of their departure
at last, and of their fears of the smaller ship ; their return
to Dartmouth for repairs, their venturing again, their seek
ing a harbor once more at Plymouth on the Devonshire
coast, their abandonment of the " Speedwell," their final
start with all that the " Mayflower " could hold crowded
in her narrow quarters, their voyage and its mishaps. He
could tell of the beam of the deck sprung out of place by
the storm that forced them to take in every sail, and how
they succeeded in raising it into place by an iron screw
which they had brought from Holland ; how John How
land by a lurch of the ship had been hurled into the sea,
and by good luck rescued to live many years, as Bradford
says in describing the incident, and to become " a profitable
member both in Church and Commonwealth."
You remember they were bound under the patent which

18
they had received from the old Virginia Company to find
land somewhere in the neighborhood of Hudson River, per
haps on the Connecticut, perhaps on the Jersey coast; and it
is almost equally certain that they had with them the map
of the New England coast which John Smith had made
when he examined its bays and headlands six years before,
and had later published with the native names displaced
by the English ones marked by Prince Charles on the
draught which the engraver followed. So when at last
they sighted land they knew it by the description to be
the sand-hills of that point which was called on Smith's
map Cape James, after the Prince's royal father, but
which the mariners who had been on the coast before, —
and they had such among the crew, — told them was
nevertheless known by those who frequented the region
for traffic with the Indians by the designation which
Captain Gosnold had given it eighteen years before, when
he was surprised at the numbers of fish which he found
thereabouts, and called it Cape Cod. As soon as it became
evident where they were, they turned to the south to seek
the place of their destination ; but before long getting
among the shoals off Nauset, and fearing that after all
their tribulations they were running too great hazards to
proceed, they turned once more northward, and rounding
the head of the Cape came at last to anchor in the shelter
of what we know now as Provincetown harbor.
I fear that the visitor, who stands on yonder hill and
reads inscribed on the base of that monument the names
of those who came in the "Mayflower," associates them
all with that Faith which is typified in the statue above
them ; but the scrutiny of the historian can lay his finger

19
upon more than one name in the list which stands for
little of that sublimating virtue, for such names belong to
men thrown fortuitously among them, — hired men, or
forced into the company by the cupidity of the merchants
who backed their undertaking on its mercantile side.
There were honorable exceptions among this class of the
" Mayflower" company; and we can see here in John Alden,
John Howland, and George Soule those whose hopefulness
of character made them soon take on the Pilgrims' spirit.
But with John Smith's map spread out before them on
the deck of the " Mayflower," and finding that stress of
weather and the lateness of the season had rendered it
necessary to cease the attempt to find a haven within the
privileges of their patent, and that they were brought
beyond the pale of the delegated authority which that
patent vested in their leaders, on territory not within the
bounds of such necessary control, — it was then that
mutterings from some at least of these same hired men
and apprentices, eager to make the most of their freedom
which chance had seemingly given them, made it necessary
to draft that immortal compact, wherein by the subscrip
tion of all this band of exiles, in the very spirit of their
religious independence, took on themselves the power of a
body politic, fit to govern themselves and compel the sub
jection of any that were evil disposed. Look around this
little group, and see who among them are left of those
that signed that fundamental example of constitutional
government, — William Brewster, Miles Standish, Edward
Winslow, John Alden, John Howland, George Soule, —
all here in Duxbury, and all except Soule men of the first
consideration in the colony, of whom Alden was destined

20
to be the latest survivor of all the signers, including
the four others then living in Plymouth, — Bradford and
Stephen Hopkins ; with two of less consideration, —
Francis Cooke and Edward Doten.
As a student of American history, I have often thought
that of all the documents connected with that theme there
were two I would give most to see. One is that early
draught of the New World, making part of a map of the four
quarters of the earth, drawn by Leonardo da Vinci, who of
all men seemed easiest to stretch his vision to the periphery
of all knowledge and of all mental capability, — drawn by
Da Vinci, and bearing upon it, so far as existing original
records can demonstrate, the written name of America,
for the first time in human history. That paper it was
my fortune, some years since, to gaze upon, in the cabinet
of the Queen at Windsor. The other document, transcend
ing for us even in interest this of Da Vinci, — not that I
would measure any name upon it with his in its superlative
glory, but that they are significant, for us at least, above all
others in the history of constitutional government, — is this
bit of paper which bears this business-like and comprehen
sive compact, this germ that has grown till the branches
of the tree have covered a vast continent, this experiment
vvrhich has riveted the attention of students of political sci
ence everywhere. But, alas ! no one of this generation, no
one of any generation within our record since the first comers
themselves, has looked upon it ; and even to this little group,
which we are, as it were, among to-day, and which may be
now recalling it, it doubtless never had any interest beyond
the few months when, as a temporary expedient, it served
them as the foundation and guaranty of their liberties.

21
Thus have we stood in our communion face to face for
a while with these builders of a people's fame ; and as the
sun goes down and they separate for their homes, — Wins
low, we may be sure, remaining for the night with Stan
dish, for he must accompany him to Plymouth in the
morning, — we can ponder on their fidelity to the charac
teristics of race which they had brought with them from
the Old World, giving never a thought to the ideas which
have so perplexed the modern students of institutional
history as to the origin of the methods of local government
with which they were to be so soon clothed, and falling
into the ways of that little democracy, the New England
town, as easily as traditions are exemplified in conduct,
and experience moulds what inheritance suggests.
And so the night fell upon the little community. The
reddened sky of the west had paled in the gloaming.
The full orb of our satellite had risen above the beach, and
the moon-glade trembled athwart the bay. Tread lightly
with me as we enter the habitation of their sainted Elder.
Pause with me as we see him at his solitary devotion. The
glimmer of the eastern herald quivers on the lifting waves
of his thin and silvered locks, as the gentle air from the
tide enters the window of his chamber. Governor Brad
ford, his most reverent disciple, has told us of the singular
felicity of invocation which belonged to this pious man ;
and I seem to catch the cadence, far off and musical, of
that tremulous voice, —
Father, near to all thy creatures,
Howe'er distant is their lot,
With thy vesture falling round us
And thy mercies failing not, —

22
In our exile have we planted
Precious seed upon this soil.
And are waiting for the harvests
To be garnered for our toil ;
In our living are our crosses
Kneaded by thee like to leaven.
For we know that we are pilgrims,
And our dearest country, heaven !
Give this people, as thy chosen,
What of chastisement they need.
That for them thy gentle finger
Stanch their bruises as they bleed ;
May their best endeavor prosper
As they buckle for the fight,
If they move along the pathway
On the stepping-stones of right.
Let not all the noonday visions
Which their proud ambitions form.
With the hopes of coming glories
Which on eager spirits swarm.
Make them heedless, as they wander.
Of thy never-erring grace.
Of thy hand that e'er sustaineth
In the lifting of a race, —
Make them heedless of the glory
Of the Lord and all his hosts,
Till they barter Zion's mountain
For the littleness of boasts.
Grant them solace in this midnight.
Groping for thy garment's hem,
Watching in Orion's glory
For Jehovah's diadem !

23
Brilliantly rose the sun on the next morning. Standish
and his guest were early astir, and as they stood on the
bank above the tide the two formed a picturesque group.
Winslow, despite the cloak and the peaked hat and the
matchlock upon which he leaned, had something of the
air of the courtly gentleman, as we see it in that portrait
which hangs to-day in Pilgrim Hall, — the only indisput
able likeness which has come down to us of a " Mayflower "
pilgrim. Standish wore his leathern doublet, his broad
band athwart his breast sustaining that sword of the
Oriental inscription along its blade which has puzzled
modern scholars, his hose above his buckled shoes dis
closing the ribbed muscle of his calf. He handled ner
vously the fowling-piece, which the inventory at his death
shows us was found among his effects, and which came
easily to his shoulder as he sighted a flock of dipping crows
among his young corn. The harried birds rose flapping,
and flecked the sky as they surged away to the tall clump
of whitewood trees which gave the name of Eagle's Nest
to the vicinity of Elder Brewster's homestead, and some
of whose gaunt and bleached trunks I remember to have
heard in my youth old people say that they recalled.
Coming along the lower slope of the hill three persons
approached. Two of them were Thomas Prince, who
lived within sight, and Timothy Hatherly, who had come
from Scituate, both knowing they could find passage in
the Captain's boat.
Here then these four with Collier, — who Kved also
within sight, but was debarred coming, — constituted the
larger part of the Court which was this day to decide
important questions for the httle colony in Plymouth,

24
where the Governor and John Jenney, the other assist
ant, were expecting their coming. Hobamok, the Indian
who for sixteen years had been an attendant upon Standish
and a companion in his wanderings, joined the group,
as he carried the head of a wolf which he had recently
killed, and which he was taking to Plymouth to claim
his reward of five bushels of corn. The magistrates en
tered the boat, Hobamok pushed at the prow, there was
a prolonged grating of the keel, and as the little craft slid
off into deeper water the sail was hoisted, and in the fresh
southerly breeze she bore away towards the channel over
against Clark's island. On its welcome shore two at least
of this little company had landed from the " Mayflower's "
shallop on that fearful night in December, 1620 ; when, en
tering by the Gurnet's nose in a driving snow-storm, they
barely succeeded in bringing their reeling boat under the
lea of this island, where they passed two days and held
their first religious service. Standish and Winslow might
well remember the explorations of the next day, when
they discovered that they were on an island. They could
tell the others how they had recourse to Smith's map to
see where they were. Before they left the " Mayflower,"
then lying in Cape Cod harbor, that map had told them
how over against them on the mainland was a harbor with
a considerable island in it, since Smith had so drawn it,
and Prince Charles had called the spot Plymouth. The
name could but ha\e reminded them of the Devonshire
Plymouth, the last English port they had left. But Smith,
as we now know, had not made the only map of the harbor
which had been engraved before this. There is no likeli
hood, however, that the Pilgrims ever knew any other.

25
Hobamok may well have remembered Smith's visit, and
that of Dermer, who only the year before the Pilgrims
came had been in the harbor to find that between Smith's
visit and his — an interval of five years — a plague
had swept off, hardly without an exception, the native
villages which were scattered round the bay. Dermer
had brought back to his native woods Hobamok's old
rival for the good-will of the English, Squanto, who had
been kidnapped by one of Smith's captains, and had had
a little experience of civilized life in Europe in the mean
time, and had acquired some knowledge of English, which
gave him at first a certain advantage over Hobamok.
The other map to which I refer was Champlain's, which
he made on a visit in 1605, quite within the memory of
Hobamok ; but the Pilgrims would probably have been
as much surprised as their Indian friend to learn that
while they were in Leyden a map of their harbor had been
issued in Paris, in 1613, — not very accurate to be sure,
but still as near the truth as the explorer's maps of that
time were likely to be.
We may imagine our Captain's boat long before noon
making her way where the deepest water lies, and bump
ing her stem against the very rock on which this same
exploring party, whom we have thought of on yonder island,
had landed, when on Monday after their Sabbath's rest
they touched for the first time the mainland of the harbor.
It is altogether improbable that Standish and his com
panions, landing there again as we may suppose on the
17th of June, 1637, had any suspicions that the name
less boulder on which they stepped would become historic,
— such at least is the inference which we may naturally

26
draw from the absence of any mention of it by any of the
Pilgrims themselves. As they passed from the landing
up the way which now bears the name of their Leyden
home, the memories of that first winter might throng upon
them. Here on the left what recollections clung to the
Common House, built in their first month ! How up this
incline they dragged the great guns from the " Mayflower "
to mount them on the hill ! Standish could tell how at
one time he and Brewster, and four or five others, were the
only ones left able to succor the many sick. Winslow
could tell how he went to yonder hill across the brook to
meet Massasoit, and to make through Squanto's help the
treaty that brought peace between the English and the
natives, and kept it for fifty years. Up the slope of
the hill Standish could see the spot where he had first
built his cabin ; and close at hand was Alden's early home,
before he had removed and built his house at the Bluefish,
in Duxbury. Beyond and above stood the level-roofed
fort with the cannon upon it, — not the same in appearance
as it had been, for it had just been strengthened and
enlarged, since there were rumors of war, as we shall
soon see.
The magistrates stopped at the door of the Governor's
house, where two halberdiers .stood without, making
a suitable state for the little colony on its court day.
Standish, we may be sure, got the salute which he claimed,
as with the others he entered the house. It was not
long before, in the Governor's study, — for Bradford's
inventory shows that his books were not few, and his
nephew tells us of the room which contained them, — the
dignified little Court proceeded to " handle business," as

27
the phrase with them went. It is one of the remarkable
phases of Plymouth Colony, that with very little of the
paraphernalia of a code of laws they set to work to de
velop a practical autonomy, which answered every pur
pose through the seventy years of the colony's independent
existence. Judge Story refers to the brevity and the
fewness of their laws ; and while allowing for the narrow
limits of the population and the scant business of the
colony as being in some measure the cause of it, he
contends that this simplicity was in a large degree owing
to their reliance upon the general principles of the
English Common Law.
What the magistrates did during the meeting to which
we have now brought them is a fair example of their
ways in legislation, as done in this all-sufficient court of
the Governor and five " justices of the peace of our
sovereign lord the King and assistants in the govern
ment," — as the record reads. To understand the sig
nificance of all that was done at this meeting, while they
make to this town the grant running after the fashion of
the time, " to be holden of our sovereign lord the King,
as of his manor and tenure of East Greenwich in the
County of Kent," with a due reservation of gold and
silver ore, — to understand this consummation, we must
take for a moment a view of the somewhat broader re
lations of the colony, and see how these contributed to
hasten, or at least to make compatible with existing
circumstances, the incorporation of Duxbury.
We remember that as the Pilgrims began in their excur
sions by land and water to know the country better, they
had gradually come to doubt whether on the whole they

28
had been wise in the selection of a spot for their settlement.
It was greatly in its favor, as they were aware, that the
immediate country was without Indian occupants, since the
plague had swept it so thoroughly ; and they could but re
joice in the friendly sentiments of the Wampanoags, their
nearest native neighbors, and of Massasoit their chief.
Still the soil they ploughed hardly gave the promise which
they saw in it on that bright day when, after landing on
the rock, their exploring party strayed back into the land
and found " divers cornfields and little running brooks,"
which seemed inviting even under a winter's aspect. In the
seventeen years during which their acquaintance with the
country, then as now called New England, had been widen
ing, there was no region into which they had pushed for
exploration and trade that on the whole pleased them so
much as the valley of the Connecticut. Not long after the
settlement of Boston, seven years before this, a sachem of
that country had come to the Massachusetts people and to
Plymouth, with an invitation to send colonists among his
people. It turned out, indeed, that the Pequods, who lived
not far off from this sachem, were making inroads upon the
tribes of the Connecticut, and that the latter were more in
want of allies than of neighbors, though they did not pro
fess it. The Massachusetts people declined the invitation ;
but Winslow, then governor of Plymouth, had heard from
some of his own adventurous people, who in their pinnace
had been up the river to trade, of the goodness of the soil
and of the otherwise pleasant look of the valley. The
Plymouth governor was enough satisfied with the pro
posal to visit the country himself, whence he brought
away favorable impressions. There were rumors at

29
the time that the Dutch from Manhattan were intend
ing by occupation to enforce their right to the territory ;
and to prevent this was held to be of so much conse
quence, that Winslow and Bradford had gone to Boston
to urge a joint occupation by Plymouth and the Bay.
Winthrop, however, pleaded various reasons in oppo
sition, among thera poverty, — which in the light of
the meagre treasury of the older colony was not very
convincing. So the Plymouth people were left to or
ganize the enterprise alone, and to send out a vessel
laden with the frame of a house, and to set it up on the
river as the beginning of a trading-post. The Dutch,
however, had anticipated them, and as the Plymouth
vessel approached the site of the modern Hartford, the
Hollanders turned the cannon of their fort upon it ;
but they hesitated to fire, as the little sloop pushed
boldly by. At a place above, where is now the town
of Windsor, the adventurers bought of the Indians a
tract of land, and erecting their house they began
trading for furs. There were later symptoms of ani
mosity on the part of the Dutch, but it did not go to
the length of violence ; and we know not how much
the old-time relations of the two peoples in Leyden
may have had to do with the forbearance.
Already the success of the Windsor settlement had
begun to turn the eyes of the Plymouth people to the
more inviting bottom lands of the Connecticut. We
have seen how, because of the increase of their cattle
and flocks, they had in search of pasturage made in the
first place summer sojourns along the Duxbury side
of the bay, which were naturally soon converted into

30
permanent abodes. By 1632 it had become desirable
for these distant worshippers to think of organizing a
church for themselves, which was permitted under
Brewster's paternal care; but the Court insisted that
settlers so far distant from the protection of the Ply
mouth fort should be, every man of them, armed ; and
in a short time their houses were palisaded, and a con
siderable defence of this nature was built across the
entrance to what we know as the Nook. We find, in
1632, Standish, Prince, Alden, and Jonathan Brewster
signing an agreement to return to Plymouth in the
winter. It was thus early with the formation of their
church that Duxbury became the first offshoot from
the Plymouth stock. The church at Scituate was the
second, in 1634, though from the greater remoteness of
that region it was given its civil independence a year
earlier than Duxbury.
I have referred to the apprehension which Bradford
felt, that this scattering of the people might hazard the
principles which had bound them together, and which
had so far governed them. That many shared Brad
ford's distrust was evident from the growing conviction
that the greater fertility of the Connecticut valley
might support their population more compactly. So
the Connecticut experiment was closely watched for the
chance it might offer of a general emigration from the
more sterile region about Plymouth Bay.
It soon became clear that there were causes which
were to prevent the fulfilment of any such scheme. It
became, in 1635, plain that the Massachusetts people
were conscious of having made a mistake in allowing

31
Plymouth to gain a footing in that attractive region.
Winthrop confesses it when he says that neither the
Dutch nor even other English must be allowed to estab
lish themselves there. In the struggle which the spirit
of this acknowledgment rendered inevitable, it was evi
dent that the greater population of the Bay was equal
to the same task which in our day the North under
took when thev measured their streno-th with the South
in the colonization of Kansas. When the Dorchester
migration, in 1635, set towards the Connecticut the
struggle was begun, and the migration under Hooker
soon followed. The attack was reinforced when the
new Connecticut' patentees sent vessels up the river
with other colonists. The Plymouth people could not
mistake the warning which their agent, Jonathan Brew
ster, a Duxbury man, sent to them, in July, 1635, that
the new-comers were occupying the land all about the
Plymouth trading-house, — land which Plymouth had
bought of the natives, and had taken possession of in
due form. Remonstrance w^as in vain, both there by
their agents and at Boston by their magistrates ; and
in March, 1636, the Massachusetts people delegated
powers for a year to magistrates appointed to govern
their new colony of Connecticut.
Now for a moment look at what was doing iu Plymouth
and Duxbury, in this month of March, 1636. There had
become so general an apprehension of the risk attending
the scattering of settlers round the bay, — and the remedy
would become more imperative in case the Connecticut
lands should allure large numbers, — that the matter was
referred to Standish and other leading men whether the

32
Plymouth and Duxbury people should not abandon their
present settlements and unite compactly at Jones River,
or at Morton's Hole, as the region lying neighboring to
the present roads from Duxbury to Kingston was called.
The majority voted for Jones River, where Kingston now
is, but we have no record that anything further was done.
The reason seems to have been that the Connecticut ques
tion was approaching an issue. Winslow had been sent
to Boston to adjust the dispute ; but delays ensued, till
finally Plymouth saw that the struggle was a hopeless one,
and in May, 1637, Thomas Prince was empowered to make
for a consideration a formal transfer of their Connecticut
lands — with the reservation only of a small portion lying
about their trading-post — to an agent of the Connecticut
people. " Thus," says Bradford, " the controversy was
ended ; but the unkindness was not so soon forgotten."
Thus, too, now that the settlements about the bay
were not to be depleted for the Connecticut migration,
it became a necessity to give those on the Duxbury
side the form of an incorporation.
Bradford's reference to the lingering feeling of dis
trust which Massachusetts had forced upon the weaker
colony^, had its manifestation very soon in the way in
which Plymouth met the appeal of Winthrop to afford
his people some help in the war which they quickly
found the ambitious Pequods were bound to wage. It
was not the first ground of affront which Plymouth had
against the Bay Colony, and they gave its magistrates
a pointed rejoinder. They reminded them of a few
years before, when the French had dispossessed the
Plymouth people of a trading-post on the Kennebec

33
how Massachusetts had refused to join out of common
interest in an attempt to recover it. They reminded
them how they had virtually dispossessed the Ply
mouth people of their lands on the Connecticut; and
as if remembering how Winthrop had covered his refu
sal to join them in the Connecticut occupation by
pleading poverty, the Plymouth magistrates now found
that the same excuse could stand them in as good
a stead. But the interests of the two peoples were too much
intertwined for any permanent estrangement to exist,
especially as renewed letters from Massachusetts had
shown that a common cause in defending the Narra-
gansetts against the Pequods was becoming more and
more a necessity
Thus it is that the first business done in this Court
of the Plymouth magistrates which we are now watch
ing, was action taken on a further urgent request of
Winthrop. Accordingly, the record tells us that a
force of thirty men, with as many others as may be
needed to manage the barque, shall be sent under
Lieutenant William Holmes — the same who sailed his
sloop past the cannon of the Dutch — to assist those of
Massachusetts and Connecticut in their wars against
the Pequods in " revenge for the innocent blood of the
English, which they have barbarously shed." They
also chose by lot Mr. Thomas Prince to accompany
the party as counsellor to the Lieutenant. There is
much else spread upon the record, of the necessary
provisions which the expedition required, including
a list of such as volunteered for the service. It was

34
significant of the years that had passed since the
" Mayflower " touched these shores, that among these
willing soldiers appear the names of the child Henry-
Sampson, now a man of twenty-three, and Peregrine
White, now a stripling of seventeen, who had
been born in Cape Cod harbor. It is enough to
add that a quick stroke mainly on the part of Con
necticut put an end to the war, the news whereof
arrived in time to prevent the starting of the Ply
mouth quota.
We may imagine for the next business the whole
story of these recent events to be gone over in the
discussion which followed the introduction, very likely
by Standish, of the order for the incorporation of the
new town. There may have been an enlargement
upon the justice and necessity of the case, upon the
passing of the opportunity which might have rendered
necessary the drawing of the scattered population closer
together, if the Connecticut migration had been con
summated ; but though Bradford as governor made
the necessary minutes of the meeting, he has not pre
served to us more than the vote, which we are this
day assembled to commemorate. " It is enacted by
the Court that Ducksborrow shall become a towneship,
and unite together for their better securitie, and to
have the pv'eledges of a towne ; onely their bounds
and limmits shalbe sett and appoynted by the next
Court." And so Duxbury became one of those little democra
cies which have made New England what she is ; for

35
her failings as well as virtues can be traced to them.
Such as it is, citizens of Duxbury, one of these little
democracies is your heritage. You have met to-day
to authenticate your title to it, and to pass it on to
coming generations.

YALE UNIVERSITY

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