Historic Towns of New England

CONCORD

FIRST IN MANY FIELDS

By FRANK B. SANBORN

OLD this New World is, – geologically more ancient, perhaps, than that hemisphere from whose western edge Columbus set sail, four centuries ago, and found our continent lying across his way, as he plodded to Cathay. Yet, uncounted as our barbarous centuries and antediluvian æons are, real history begins only with the opening of the seventeenth century, when the English Puritan and the French Jesuit transferred to these shores the unfolding civilization and the rival religions of Western Europe. When we see at Plymouth the wooded glacial hillsides, under which the Pilgrims landed and established democracy in their wilderness, we may remember that their venture, though bolder, because earlier, than that of Bulkeley and Willard, who planted the Concord colony, was yet but fifteen years in advance, and was made beside a friendly ocean, bearing succor and trade, and feeding them from its abundance. But the Concord colonists sat down in the gloomy shadow of the forest, amid trails of the savage and the wolf. Still more heroic was the crusade of the Jesuit in New France; but while romance and martyrdom were his lot, our Puritans planted here the germs of a grand republic.

The first event in the history of Massachusetts was this planting of a territorial democracy. The colony of Concord was granted by Winthrop and his legislature in September, 1635, to Peter Bulkeley, a Puritan minister, from the little parish of Odell or Woodhill (colloquially called “Wuddle”) in English Bedfordshire, and to Simon Willard, a merchant, from Hawkshurst in Kent. Twelve other families were joined with them in the grant, and another minister, Rev. John Jones, brought other families from England, aiming towards Concord, in October, 1635. The situation was doubtless chosen by Major Willard, an Indian trader and in after years a fighter of the Indians; who also selected and partly colonized two other towns, farther in the wilderness, – Groton and Lancaster. But the true father of this Concord, and probably the giver of its name (altering it from the Indian Musketaquit), was Rev. Peter Bulkeley, ancestor of its most celebrated citizen, Waldo Emerson. Of this worthy, whose grave, like that of Moses, is unknown to this day, something should be said, before we come to later heroes. Peter Bulkeley was the son of Rev. Edward Bulkeley, a doctor of divinity in English Cambridge, – a scholar and man of wealth, who was rector of the Bedfordshire parish just named, where his son was born in 1583. He succeeded his father there in 1620.

It is in the country of John Bunyan and Cowper the poet, this little parish of Odell. Like Concord River, the Ouse, on which it stands, is unmatched for winding, even in England. Below the old castle of Odell, and the church, still standing, where the Bulkeleys preached, runs this crooked stream, murmuring as it meanders through its fringe of meadowland, green as the richest strip of English pasture can be, which lies between such a river and the low hills that come down towards its edge. This Ouse (there is another in Yorkshire) flows from Bucks, the county of John Hampden, through Bedford, the county of the Russells, and Huntingdon, where Cromwell lived, and finally into the North Sea at Lynn. On the north bank lies the hill upon which Odell stands, – the highway from Sharnbrook to Harrold and Olney (long the home of Cowper) running from east to west along the breast of the hill. The old church standing amid trees – conspicuous is a chestnut of surpassing size and beauty – is directly opposite the ancient castle, now a comfortable and handsome mansion, built some two hundred years ago, – or about the time the oldest houses in Concord were built.

It was no love of adventure, we may be sure, that brought Peter Bulkeley, at the age of fifty-two, from this lovely country into a land of forests and of poverty; but a desire to escape the ecclesiastical tyranny of Laud and his bishops, and to establish a true church in the wilderness. Some difficulties attended even this, for when, in July, 1636, Mr. Bulkeley was about to organize his church at Cambridge, in order to have Sir Henry Vane and John Winthrop (Governor and Deputy Governor that year) present at the ceremony, lo and behold! these great men “took it in ill part, and thought not fit to go, because they had not come to them before, as they ought to have done, and as others had done before them, to acquaint them with their purpose.” Again, in April, 1637, when Mr. Bulkeley was to be ordained (also in Cambridge), Winthrop says that Vane and John Cotton and John Wheelwright, and the two ruling elders of Boston “and the rest of that church which were of any note, did none of them come to this meeting.” “The reason was conceived to be,” adds Winthrop, “because they counted the Concord ministers as legal preachers,” – that is, believers in a covenant of works (of the Law) instead of a covenant of grace. This was the issue upon which Wheelwright and Mrs. Hutchinson were banished, soon after.

Indeed, the ordination of Mr. Bulkeley took place in the very height of that fierce controversy between John Cotton and his former supporters, Wheelwright and Vane, which came near breaking up the little colony; and the Concord minister was one of the synod which, the next August, or perhaps later, specified some eighty doctrinal opinions as erroneous or heretical, – about one error for every two white persons in Concord. The covenant of the village church, however, breathes a more liberal spirit; for in it we find these words, evidently from the hand of Bulkeley:

“Whereas the Lord hath of His great goodness brought us from under the yoke and burdening of men’s traditions, to the precious liberty of His ordinances, which we now do enjoy, – we will, according to our places and callings, stand for the maintenance of this liberty, to our utmost endeavor, and not return to any human ordinances from which we have escaped.”

And the spirit of his oft-quoted sermon is also a witness to his true piety, whatever his doctrinal narrowness:

“There is no people but will strive to excel in something; what can we (in Concord) excel in, if not in holiness? If we look to number, we are the fewest; if to strength, we are the weakest; if to wealth and riches, we are the poorest of all the people of God through the whole world. We cannot excel nor so much as equal other people in these things; and if we come short in grace and holiness too, we are the most despicable people under Heaven.”

Let us hope that the wish of the good pastor was granted, and that he lived to see the fruit of his labors. Yet there is a letter of his, written in 1650 to John Cotton, in which Bulkeley seems to regret the democratic liberty which Emerson, his descendant, never ceased to approve. The Concord minister writes:

“The Lord hath a number of holy and humble ones here amongst us, for whose sakes He doth spare, and will spare long; but, were it not for such a remnant, we should see the Lord would make quick work amongst us. Shall I tell you what I think to be the ground of all this insolency which discovers itself in the speech of men? Truly, I cannot ascribe it so much to any outward thing, as to the putting of too much liberty and power into the hands of the multitude, which they are too weak to manage; many growing conceited, proud, arrogant, self-sufficient… Remember the former days which you had in old Boston; yet the number of professors is far more here than there. But tell me, which place was better governed? When matters were swayed there by your wisdom and counsel, they went on with strength and power for good. But here, where the heady or headless multitude have gotten the power into their hands, there is insolency and confusion; and I know not how it can be avoided, unless we should make the doors of the church narrower.”

This was the caution and reversion of age, – for the doubting Peter was then sixty-seven. But Emerson, at the age of sixty, could say, with unabated faith in Freedom:

The experience of the ages has shown that the Puritans were right in making the doors of the church wider, not narrower; though we still hear the complaint of aged men, or young men born with a call to be old, that the former times were better than ours, and the “headless multitude” must be deprived of a voice in their own destiny.

When Emerson in 1835, at the two hundredth anniversary of Concord, proposed to requite England’s gift of her printed Doomsday Book by presenting her and the other European nations with our yet unpublished town records, he said: “Tell them the Union has 24 States, and Massachusetts is one; that in Massachusetts are 300 towns, and Concord is one; that in Concord are 500 rateable polls, and every one has an equal vote.” To-day there are 45 States; Massachusetts has 322 towns, besides nearly 30 cities; and instead of 500 ratable polls, Concord has now 1200; but each one still has an equal vote.

Men are carried along, in spite of themselves, by the doctrine or system which they embrace; their life principle, once adopted, has more force than their temporary wish or will. So Calvinism, of which Peter Bulkeley was a fervent disciple, with its constant stress laid on the worth of the individual man, led inevitably to democracy, no matter how much the innate aristocratic feeling of the English gentleman – the class to which Bulkeley belonged – might revolt thereat. It was the same in both countries, the mother and the daughter; Old England and New England found John Calvin leading them along towards the Commonwealth of equal rights and abolished privileges, – towards Sidney and Locke, Franklin and Jefferson, Lincoln and Gladstone.

This, then, is the first historic lesson of Concord, as of all New England, – Democracy through Calvinism, in spite of recalcitrant gentry and reactionary ministers. Philanthropy, too, that modern invention, which may almost be said to have come in with the eighteenth century, and to have had Franklin for its first missionary, began to show itself in our meadowy town, whose very name prefigured it. The epitaph of Rev. John Whiting, parish minister here for twenty-six years (dying in 1752), records that he was “a gentleman of singular hospitality and generosity, who never detracted from the character of any man, and was a universal lover of mankind.” This would have been no compliment in Bulkeley’s time, when the saints were entitled to be loved, and sinners were excluded; but the eighteenth century set up a higher standard, which has been maintained till now, when the votaries of evolution and the survival of the fittest are teaching a return to the old doctrine, – only reversing it; for now it is the sinners whom we are expected to admire, and to hate the saints.

The second historic lesson of Concord is like unto the first, – but more startling and brilliant. It was the lesson of Revolution, which has been thoroughly learned since 1775. The embattled farmers who, at yonder bridge, were conservative revolutionists, and as far from anarchy as from atheism. In the instructions given by this town to its representative in 1774, – or rather, in a report made in town-meeting, January 20th of that year, in view of

the Boston Tea-Party, – it was declared as the voice of the town:

“That we will, in conjunction with our brethren in America, risk our fortunes, and even our lives, in defence of his Majesty King George the Third, his person, crown, and dignity; and will also, with the same resolution, as his freeborn subjects in this country, to the utmost of our power and ability, defend all our charter-rights, that they may be transmitted inviolate to the latest posterity.”

Three months after this, when the Boston Port Bill was in agitation, and two months later, when it had passed Parliament, the farmers of Concord took a bolder tone, – “conscious,” as they said in town-meeting, “of no alternative between the horrors of slavery, and the carnage and desolation of a civil war,” except non-importation of British goods, to which the good citizens bound themselves. Still later, in a county convention which met in Concord, August 31, 1774, it was resolved:

“That we by no means intend to withdraw our allegiance from our gracious Sovereign; that when our ancestors emigrated from Great Britain, charters and solemn stipulations expressed the conditions, and what particular rights they yielded; what each party had to do and perform, and what each of the contracting parties were equally bound by. Therefore a debtor may as justly refuse to pay his debts, because it is inexpedient for him, as the Parliament deprive us of our charter privileges, because it is inexpedient to a corrupt administration for us to enjoy them… And a sense of our duty as men, as freemen, as Christian freemen, united in the firmest bonds, obliges us to resolve that every civil officer in this Province, now in commission, and acting in conformity to the late act of Parliament, is not an officer agreeable to our charter —therefore unconstitutional, and ought to be opposed… As we are resolved never to submit one iota to the Act, we will not submit to courts thus constituted, and acting in conformity to said Act… In consequence of this resolve, all business at the Inferior Court of Common Pleas, and Court of General Sessions of the Peace, next to be holden in Concord, must cease.”

This was peaceful revolution, proceeding, not upon any vague notion of a general “Social Contract,” but on formal violations of a written contract, the Colony Charter, as explicitly stated. I ask attention to this, because it has been a favorite fancy of some modern writers, who praise the Puritans and disparage Jefferson and Franklin, that our Revolutionary fathers had gained through those two latitudinarians a glimpse of the levelling French doctrines, and gave themselves up to be guided by Rousseau and Voltaire, in dereliction of their Puritan ancestry. Precisely the opposite is true; the French author whom Jefferson may have had in mind, when he was not thinking of Pym and Hampden, Sergeant Maynard, Locke, and Algernon Sidney, – I mean Montesquieu, – having derived his theories more from the English constitutionalists than they from him. Probably not one of the men of Middlesex, who thus led the way to revolution in this law-abiding town of Concord (the seat of county justice), ever heard of Rousseau; but they were lawyers, deacons, country justices and farmers, accustomed to sit on juries; and they understood the law of contract and the obligations of fair trade as well as any English lord could tell them.

They voted further, on this eventful summer day, that “a Provincial Congress is absolutely necessary, in our present unhappy situation,” – and they named October, and Concord, as a suitable time and place for its assembling. This first Provincial Congress did meet, October 7th, at Salem, but adjourned to Concord that day; it first met here, October 11, 1774, and, finding the county court-house too small for its three hundred members and clerks, and the people who gathered to support them, it moved over to the parish meeting-house (built in 1712), and remained in session there five days, when it removed to Cambridge, for the sake of being nearer Boston, then held as a garrison by British troops. The second Provincial Congress, of 1775, also met in Concord for four weeks of March and April; and it had only been adjourned four days when the British grenadiers made their midnight march from Boston to Lexington, hoping to catch there the arch-rebels Hancock and Sam Adams, who had gone to Lexington as members of the Committee of Public Safety (of which Dr. Warren was chairman), then the executive of Massachusetts under the new revolutionary government. The Provincial Congress, the legislature of the Province, met again for the last time in Concord, April 22, 1775, to consider the results of the eventful 19th. It finally dissolved May 31st, after hearing a sermon from Dr. Langdon, the President of Harvard College; and Concord ceased forever to be the legislative capital of Massachusetts. It became temporarily, however, the seat of Dr. Langdon’s College, which in October, 1775, began its recitations in the court-house and meeting-house, and so continued till June, 1776.

Even Harvard College was at that time revolutionary; it gave up its few buildings in Cambridge to the army of Washington, and its president, a cousin of the wealthy New Hampshire patriot, John Langdon, made the prayer for Bunker Hill battle, as the troops marched out of Cambridge to give a feeble support to Prescott and his Middlesex farmers, entrenched on the hill. Washington had not yet reached Cambridge, to take command; had his strategic eye taken in the situation that morning, the result at Bunker Hill would have been different.

Lexington, the town which gave its name to the battle of April, 1775, more decidedly than Concord, – though both names occur from the first, – was an offshoot from the older towns of Cambridge, Watertown and Woburn, rather than an original church seat, and was not established as a town until 1712. A range of hills separates it from the valley of the Musketaquit, and Paul Revere, in his night ride of April 18th, celebrated by Longfellow, could not cross those hills, but left his message of war to be borne on to Concord village by young Prescott, distantly related to Prescott of Bunker Hill. But Lexington, though little more than half so populous as Concord at that time, had a warlike people, many of them descended from the fighting Monros of Scotland, captured by Cromwell, and exiled for their loyalty to the Stuarts. In Lexington they again turned out against the house of Hanover, and they were commanded that April morning by the grandfather of Lexington’s most famous son, Theodore Parker. Captain John Parker, though ill on the 19th of April, did his soldier’s duty from two in the morning till midnight; and some of his men returned the British fire in early morning, against hopeless odds. Their turn came in the afternoon, when the retreating British were only saved from total defeat by the cannon of Lord Percy. Those first heroes of the Revolution, John Hancock and Samuel Adams, who had been at the Provincial Congress in Concord, at Lexington were in the early morning in the parsonage of Rev. Mr. Clark, a kinsman of Hancock, and narrowly escaped capture by the British soldiers, who had special orders to seize them.

John Pierpont, a poet whose Pegasus balked now and then, in his verses at Acton, April 19, 1851, anticipated Longfellow by this Wordsworthian version of Revere’s ride to Lexington:

As compared with Concord, though both were rural towns, Lexington was then, and long remained, more rustic than its westward neighbor; with less trade, less culture and fewer of the tendencies toward literature which early showed themselves in the parish of the Bulkeleys and Emersons. When Theodore Parker, in his career of scholarship and reform, began to look outward from his father’s Lexington farm, it was towards Concord, as well as towards Boston, that he turned his eyes; he taught a district school in Concord, and preached in its pulpit as a candidate to stand beside Dr. Ripley, the pastor of the Old Manse. In after years he thus described the event which gave Lexington its chief title to fame, before Parker’s own birth there:

“The war of Revolution began at Lexington, to end at Yorktown. Its first battle was on the Nineteenth of April. Hancock and Adams lodged at Lexington with the minister. In the raw morning, a little after daybreak, a tall man, with a large forehead under a three-cornered hat, drew up his company of 70 men on the Green, – farmers and mechanics like himself; only one is left now (1851), the boy who played the men to the spot. (It was Jonathan Harrington the fifer.) They wheeled into line to wait for the Regulars. The captain ordered every man to load his piece with powder and ball. ‘Don’t fire,’ were his words, ‘unless fired upon; but if they want a war, let it begin here.’ The Regulars came on. Some Americans offered to run away from their post. Captain Parker said, ‘I will order the first man shot dead that leaves his place.’ The English commander cried out, ‘Disperse, you rebels! lay down your arms and disperse!’ Not a man stirred. ‘Disperse, you damned rebels!’ shouted he again. Not a man stirred. He ordered the vanguard to fire; they did so, but over the heads of our fathers. Then the whole main body levelled their pieces, and there was need of ten new graves in Lexington. A few Americans returned the shot. British blood stained the early grass which waved in the wind. ‘Disperse and take care of yourselves!’ was the captain’s last command. There lay the dead, and there stood the soldiers; there was a battle-field between England and America – never to be forgot, never to be covered over. The ‘Mother-country’ of the morning was the ‘enemy’ at sunrise. ‘Oh, what a glorious morning is this!’ said Samuel Adams.”

Seven men had been killed on the spot, nine wounded, – a quarter-part of all who had stood in arms on the Green, under the eyes of Hancock and Adams.

One of the Lexington Munroes, Ensign Robert, was the first man killed by Pitcairn’s volley; he was sixty-four years old, and had been color-bearer in the capture of Louisburg by assault in 1745. Two of his sons and two sons-in-law were in his company on Lexington Green, and eleven of the Munroe clan were in arms that day. Captain Parker did not long survive the battle, dying the next September; but when the Civil War came on, his grandson Theodore had bequeathed to Massachusetts, and Governor Andrew had placed in her Senate Chamber, beside the trophies sent by Stark from Bennington, “two fire-arms, formerly the property of my honored grandfather, – to wit, the large musket or King’s arm, which was by him captured from the British in the battle of Lexington, and which is the first fire-arm taken from the enemy in the war for Independence; and also the smaller musket used by him in that battle.”

Theodore Parker had died in May, 1860.

Pitcairn and his redcoats, delayed only half an hour by this bloody overture to Washington’s grand career, marched on towards Concord, little knowing what would meet them there. As they climbed the hills in Lexington and Lincoln, they could surmise, however, that the country was rising, for the church-bells were ringing an alarm of fire. Pierpont, at Acton, overlooking the neighboring towns named by him, gave the geography of this rising in spirited couplets:

These are the small towns lying along the Concord and Merrimac rivers, and their tributaries, which sent forth the minute-men to fight at Concord Bridge.

Prescott had done his warning work well; and as Emerson said in 1835:

“In these peaceful fields, for the first time since a hundred years (King Philip’s War), the drum and alarm-gun were heard, and the farmers snatched down their rusty firelocks from the kitchen walls, to make good the resolute words of their town debates. These poor farmers acted from the simplest instincts; they did not know it was a deed of fame they were doing.”

It was Emerson’s grandfather, the town minister, who met them on Concord Green, before his church, and who entered that night in his almanac the events he had witnessed, as soon to be quoted.

By the 17th of June, Massachusetts had an army; but when the Concord farmers made their appeal to arms, two months earlier, it was the spontaneous uprising of an armed people to maintain their own votes and defend their threatened homes. This it is, and not their military achievement, striking as that was, which gives their town a place in martial history. The unregenerate imagination of mankind still delights, after so many centuries of barbarous warfare, in the recital of deeds of battle and the conquering march of great soldiers; Alexander and Cæsar – even Hannibal and Bonaparte – continue to receive admiration for their victories; but the purer fame of Washington rests on the accomplishment of that for which the men of Middlesex rushed to arms on the 19th of April, 1775. As Emerson, our Washington in the field of literature, said, “If ever men in arms had a spotless cause, they had.”