Полная версияПолная версия:
Historic Towns of New England
War had been the normal state of Europe; and from the hour when Bulkeley and Willard made here their honest bargain with the red landlords of these game preserves, cornfields, and fishing-places, down to the Franco-German campaigns of 1870, – 235 years, – there had been scarcely a period of twenty peaceful years in that hemisphere. With us it was different; but for the strife between France and England, in which the colonies were more or less entangled, Massachusetts had seen no warfare in her borders for nearly a century, when the insolence of the mother-country forced independence upon us against our will. Yet the fight at the North Bridge was no impromptu affair, as the utterances of our Concord yeomen show. They had declared they would fight for King George or against him, as His Majesty might elect; and when he had made his foolish choice they did not hesitate, – much as they had reason to dread the ordeal by combat. And here again came in the spirit of Calvinism, rallying to the Old Testament, rather than to the New with its gospel of peace and love, – its amnistie générale, as poor Trilby says. The grandfather of Emerson (who was also the great-great-great-grandson of Peter Bulkeley) was parish minister of Concord; he had been chaplain to the Provincial Congress, and he died in Vermont, as chaplain in the Revolutionary army of General Gates. Five weeks before the invasion of his parish by the redcoats, he had preached to the militia companies gathered in this town for review, a famous sermon from the text, “And behold, God Himself is with us for our Captain, and His priests with sounding trumpets to cry alarm against you.” He was as good as his word, for he was one of the first to take his musket and join the minute-men in the early morning of the 19th of April; and returning to the Old Manse (then the new manse, for it was built for him and his bride a few years earlier) to protect his family, he saw the brief fight at the bridge from his study window, and wrote of the day’s doings this brief chronicle of an eye-witness. His grandson found it in a page or two of his family almanac, where, at the end of April, he wrote, “This month remarkable for the greatest events of the present age.”
“This morning, between 1 and 2 o’clock, we were alarmed by the ringing of the bell, and upon examination found that the troops, to the number of 800, had stole their march from Boston, in boats and barges, from the bottom of the Common over to a point in Cambridge, near to Inman’s Farm, and were at Lexington Meeting-house, half an hour before sunrise, where they fired upon a body of our men, and (as we afterward heard) had killed several. This intelligence was brought us first by Dr. Samuel Prescott, who narrowly escaped the guard that were sent before on horses, purposely to prevent all posts and messengers from giving us timely information. He, by the help of a very fleet horse, crossing several walls and fences, arrived at Concord at the time above mentioned; when several posts were immediately despatched, that returning confirmed the account of the regulars’ arrival at Lexington, and that they were on their way to Concord. Upon this, a number of our minute-men belonging to this town, and Acton, and Lincoln, with several others that were in readiness, marched out to meet them; while the alarm company were preparing to receive them in the town. Capt. Minot, who commanded them, thought it proper to take possession of the hill above the Meeting-house, as the most advantageous situation. No sooner had our men gained it, than we were met by the companies that were sent out to meet the troops, who informed us that they were just upon us, and that we must retreat, as their number was more than treble ours. We then retreated from the hill near the Liberty Pole, and took a new post back of the town upon an eminence, where we formed into two battalions, and waited the arrival of the enemy.
“Scarcely had we formed, before we saw the British troops at the distance of a quarter of a mile, glittering in arms, advancing towards us with the greatest celerity. Some were for making a stand, notwithstanding the superiority of their number; but others, more prudent, thought best to retreat till our strength should be equal to the enemy’s, by recruits from the neighboring towns that were continually coming in to our assistance. Accordingly we retreated over the bridge; when the troops came into the town, set fire to several carriages for the artillery, destroyed 60 bbls. flour, rifled several houses, took possession of the Town-house, destroyed 500 lb. of balls, set a guard of 100 men at the North Bridge, and sent a party to the house of Col. Barrett, where they were in expectation of finding a quantity of warlike stores. But these were happily secured just before their arrival, by transportation into the woods and other by-places.
“In the meantime the guard set by the enemy to secure the pass at the North Bridge were alarmed by the approach of our people; who had retreated as before mentioned, and were now advancing, with special orders not to fire upon the troops unless fired upon. These orders were so punctually observed that we received the fire of the enemy in three several and separate discharges of their pieces, before it was returned by our commanding officer; the firing then became general for several minutes; in which skirmish two were killed on each side, and several of the enemy wounded. (It may here be observed by the way, that we were the more cautious to prevent beginning a rupture with the King’s troops, as we were then uncertain what had happened at Lexington, and knew not that they had begun the quarrel there by first firing upon our people, and killing eight men upon the spot.) The three companies of troops soon quitted their post at the bridge, and retreated in the greatest disorder and confusion to the main body, who were soon upon their march to meet them.
“For half an hour the enemy, by their marches and countermarches, discovered great fickleness and inconstancy of mind, – sometimes advancing, sometimes returning to their former posts; till at length they quitted the town and retreated by the way they came. In the meantime, a party of our men (150), took the back way through the Great Fields into the East Quarter, and had placed themselves to advantage, lying in ambush behind walls, fences and buildings, ready to fire upon the enemy on their retreat.”
This account differs slightly from others, and omits many particulars; it is the most valuable single version of the memorable skirmish at the Bridge, – in itself trifling, but momentous in its results. Parson Emerson was himself one of those who wished to meet the troops near his own meeting-house, but was wisely overruled. He says that two British soldiers were killed at the Bridge – Shattuck, the town historian, says three; the difference is accounted for by a dismal tale which Hawthorne was perhaps the first to print. He derived it, he says, from Lowell, the poet, who had picked it up, no doubt, in his short residence at Concord in the spring of 1838, when “rusticated” here from Harvard College. It may be read in the Mosses from an Old Manse, wherein is found one of the best pictures of our peaceful scenery, – so far removed from thought of bloodshed.
“A youth,” says Hawthorne, “in the service of the clergyman [Parson Emerson], happened to be chopping wood, that April morning, at the back door of the Manse; and when the noise of battle rang from side to side of the Bridge, he left his task and hurried to the battle-field, with the axe still in his hand. The British had by this time retreated, the Americans were in pursuit; and the late scene of strife was thus deserted by both parties. Two soldiers lay on the ground – one was a corpse – but, as the young New Englander drew nigh, the other Briton raised himself painfully upon his hands and knees, and gave a ghastly stare in his face. The boy – it must have been a nervous impulse, without purpose – uplifted his axe, and dealt the wounded soldier a fierce and fatal blow upon the head.”
To a certain extent, Bancroft, in his account of the fight, confirms this tale, saying:
“The Americans acted from impulse, and stood astonished at what they had done. They made no (immediate) pursuit, and did no further harm, – except that one wounded soldier, rising as if to escape, was struck on the head by a young man with a hatchet. The party at Col. Barrett’s might have been cut off, but was not molested.”
It is traditional that when this party, which had been sent to destroy the military stores at Colonel James Barrett’s, two miles to the westward, came back to the Bridge, alarmed by the firing, and saw their countrymen lying dead there, one of them with his head laid open, they were struck with fear and ran on to the main body in the village, telling of what they had seen. And it was this single incident, very likely, which led the English officers, and Lord Percy himself, to report “that the rebels scalped and cut off the ears of some of the wounded who fell into their hands.” Bancroft indignantly denies this, saying, “The falsehood brings dishonor on its voucher; the people whom Percy reviled were among the mildest and most compassionate of their race,” – which is true.
It is no wonder that the British troops on their flight back to Boston that day, pursued and ambuscaded by hundreds and thousands of the aroused militia of Middlesex and Essex counties, should themselves have committed some barbarities, – for their defeat and humiliation were great. They lost in course of the day 273 men and officers, – more than had fallen on that glorious day, sixteen years before, when Wolfe died in the arms of victory at Quebec. The loss of the yeomanry was only ninety-one – a third of the British loss, – while all the trophies and circumstances of victory were on the American side. From that day, the Revolution was begun, – to end only with the creation of a new republic. Concord, as President Dwight said, “prefaced the history of a nation, the beginning of an empire.” “Man,” he added, “from the events that have occurred here, will in some respects assume a new character; and experience a new destiny.” Hence the interest with which the world, from that day forward, began to look on this little town.
Yet the prominence of Concord in the revolutionary century that followed her skirmish at the Bridge and along the Lexington road was in part accidental; for Boston and Virginia were the two foci of the American revolt, and Concord became famous chiefly because it was near Boston. It was otherwise with the literary revolution that began sixty years later, with Emerson for its Washington, – and with results that seem as permanent, and in some sort as important, as those which Washington secured to his countrymen. In 1835, when Emerson’s literary career may be said to have fairly begun, America had maintained her political independence, but had lost much of her political principle: she was powerful without moral progress, and without either a profound philosophy or an original literature. The beginnings of poetry and art were visible, but they were more in promise than in performance. Our political writings, though disparaged by Jeremy Bentham, were coming to be recognized as among the foremost; but we had little else that Europe cared to read, – a few sketches by Irving, a dozen novels by Cooper, two or three sermons and as many essays by Channing.
Into the stagnation of this shallow pool of American letters, Emerson, in 1836, cast the smooth stone of his philosophical first book, —Nature. It made little immediate stir; the denizens of the pool paid small heed to it, and few of them guessed what it meant. It was written in Concord, and chiefly at the Old Manse, where Emerson dwelt with his mother and kindred before his second marriage in 1835, and where Hawthorne afterward made the house and himself widely known. The fixing of his own residence in this town by Emerson was due in part to ancestry, and still more to a perception of the fitness of the region for the abode of a poet and sage. The same perception, by Hawthorne, Alcott, Ellery Channing and others, – together with the important fact that it was Emerson’s chosen retreat, – brought those literary men here. Thoreau, the most original and peculiar genius of the whole group, was born here, and never had much inclination to leave Concord, although in youth he talked of adventuring to the wild West, – Kentucky and Illinois at that time, – whither his friend, Ellery Channing, afterward did in fact go. Around Emerson, this circle, with many who only lived here temporarily (like Margaret Fuller and George William Curtis), or not at all, gathered as friends and brothers, or else as disciples, – and thus the name of Concord became associated, and justly, with a special and remarkable school of thought and literature. Thousands now visit the graves of these worthies, to which, and to their haunts in life – their walks and seats and sylvan places of resort, – an increasing host of pilgrims come year by year.
The Arabs have a proverb, – “Though a hundred deserts separate the heart of the Faithful from the Kaaba of Mecca, yet there opens a window from its sanctuary into thy soul.” For those who have the true inward illumination, therefore, pilgrimage is not needful; yet to all it is agreeable, and it has been the practice of mankind for ages, and will be, so long as we remain ourselves but pilgrims and wayfarers on this earth. Nasar, the son of Khosrou, who wrote in the time of Haroun Al-Rashid, and called his book The Traveller’s Wallet, was not the first, nor Bunyan, with his Pilgrims Progress, the last, to look on life as a journey; but let us hear what that Persian says of it:
“Man, endowed with intellect, must search into the origin of his existence, – whence he came, and whither he shall go, – reflecting that in this world he is making a toilsome journey, without stop or stay, – not even for the twinkling of an eye, – until he has traversed the measure of that line which marks the time allotted for his existence. For that we are but pilgrims here on earth, God has mysteriously declared.”
The attraction of Emerson and the rest of the Concord authors, whose homes or tombs so many pilgrims visit, comes chiefly from the recognition by them of this search by mankind after the Infinite, – their insight into the nature and worth of this pilgrimage of life which all are making. Man loves and seeks amusement to beguile his toilsome or monotonous journey, – and hence the pleasure so many take in the lighter and more graceful or laughable forms of literature. But sooner or later, and in many persons at all times, what Tennyson calls “the riddle of the painful earth” is before us all for consideration, if not for solution. We see that the universe is moral, – even if we cannot read the moral aright, – and we seek those who can give us “the word of the enigma,” as the French say. Emerson gave it in his manner, Hawthorne in his, Thoreau in still another way; and these three Concord authors not only had much vogue in their lifetime, but are yet more widely read since their death. Others, like Ellery Channing, found little audience in youth, and time has not yet essentially enlarged the circle of their readers. With the same moral view of life which his more successful friends took, Channing, the poet (who must always be distinguished from Dr. Channing, the divine, his uncle), had in his style something of that distraction which Montaigne declares is needful to poets.
“The precepts of the masters,” says this eccentric Gascon, “and still more their example, tell us that we must have a little insanity, if we would avoid even more stupidity. A thousand poets drawl and languish in prose; but the best ancient prose (and ’tis the same with verse) glows throughout with the vigor and daring of poesy, and takes on an air of inspiration. The poet, says Plato” (and here Montaigne gives his own quaint form to the familiar passage in Plato’s Laws), “sitting on the Muses’ tripod, pours out like mad all that comes into his mouth, as if it were the spout of a fountain; without digesting or weighing it. So things escape him of various colors, of opposite natures, and with intermittent flow. Plato himself is wholly poetic; the old theology, say the scholars, is all poetry; and the First Philosophy is the original language of the gods.”
To this wild rule more than one of the Concord philosophers conforms; there is a perceptible lack of method, even when their meaning is fairly clear. Hawthorne incurs less of this censure than the rest; but he confessed that he did not always comprehend his own allegories, nor know exactly the moral he would insinuate. Emerson goes more directly to his mark; a Frenchman (Chantavoine) has said of him, “In his Essays he is first of all a philosophic moralist, never quite forgetting that he was once a preacher.” But, in contrasting him with French writers, Chantavoine admits that Emerson has something which the light and brilliant Parisian essayists lack:
“We are afraid, I suppose, of losing touch with things, if we rise much above them; we do not soar high, content to skim the surface; we distrust those generalities, however eloquent or edifying, which might lead us too far aside. Yet, should we borrow something of Emerson’s manner, French criticism, both historical and literary, would gain by it; there might possibly be less ease, less lightness of touch, less glancing wit in our essays; but in return there would be more earnestness and depth in our judgments on men and affairs.”
Emerson was a reader and admirer of French prose; he did not find much poetry in French verse. The glancing of his wit was as quick and searching as that of Paris; but he belongs more to the literature of the world than most of the French prose authors since Montaigne and Pascal. In American literature he is unique; so, in his very different way, is Thoreau; so is Hawthorne; and no American, not even one of these three, can be compared with any of them on terms of similarity. There is that in their best writing which puts us upon our best thinking, and leads us along the upper levels of life. Particularly is this true of Emerson; Virtue, radiant, serene and sovereign, sways the realm where Emerson abides, and to which he welcomes his readers, who become his friends. It was said of Socrates, in a dubious compliment, that he “brought philosophy down from heaven to earth”; it might as truly be said of Emerson that he raises earth to the level of divine philosophy. His method in this is purely poetic; therefore, while in verse he lacks what is usually called creative power, he brings with him the atmosphere of poesy more constantly than any modern poet; nor, since Milton, Spenser, and Shakespeare, has any English poet excelled him in this. To this quality, as well as to his courage of opinion and his penetrating insight, do we owe it that he first proclaimed our intellectual independence of the mother-country, as Franklin, Washington and Jefferson declared our political independence. There is, indeed, a certain resemblance between Washington and Emerson which might escape the notice of those who look chiefly at the totally different work each had to do, and the diversity of life and opinion which contrasted Virginia and New England so sharply.
It must be confessed that, in 1732, Concord was hardly so constituted as naturally to give birth to Washingtons; indeed, Virginia produced but this one, amid all her great men. The extreme narrowness of Puritan opinion, even when modified by Baptists and Quakers, was not favorable to the rise of men like the great Virginians of the eighteenth century. A milder intellectual climate, a temper less given to disputes about faith and works, election and reprobation, was needful to produce characters so broad, so moderate, and yet so firm, as Washington’s. New England did give birth to Franklin, in the very midst of Mathers and Sewalls; but he had to slip away to Philadelphia, in order to grow into his full stature as philanthropist and philosopher. The intolerance of New England deprived us, for more than a century, of the opportunity to produce genius and the gentler forms of heroism. We had the Adamses to set the Revolution on foot, the soldiers of New Hampshire and rural New England to fight its battles; but its noblest leader must come to us from the Potomac, and take us back there, when the long fight was won, to establish our government beside its waters, in sight of his own broad domain. It was not till this century, now declining, that Concord could show an intellectual Washington; and Emerson must be born in Boston, less provincial than our meadowy village, our “rural Venice,” as Thoreau called it in times of river-freshet.
Naturally, when men appear on earth of Washington’s or of Emerson’s stamp, there has been a long preparation for their advent. They are not found among Hottentots or corn-crackers, ‘longshoremen or cowboys; but in some long-tilled garden of the human species, where certain qualities have been inbred by descent and betterment for many generations. Poverty may be their birthright, as in the case of that greatest of Washington’s successors, Abraham Lincoln, but the experiences that are transmuted by descent into greatness are quite as often those of poverty as of wealth. Self-reliance, veracity, courage, and the gift of command are essentials in the founders and preservers of nations; these are fostered in all new colonies, and therefore were common qualities in New England, as in Kentucky and Virginia, in their early years. But among the planters of Virginia there grew up a form of society, now forever extinct there, in which these high qualities, together with courtesy and breadth of view, were cultivated and flourished to an extent which the Calvinistic rigors and enforced economies of New England never knew. That petty system of inquiring into creeds and points of doctrine which our ancestors brought with them from the Puritan parishes of England, and which was increased here by infusions from Scotland, and the tyranny of ecclesiastical control in Massachusetts and Connecticut, was not wholly unknown in Virginia; but its ill effects were dissipated by the customs of large landholding, outdoor sports, and certain traditions of honor and breeding which the best of the Virginians brought with them from England, and kept up by their habit of frequent intercourse with the mother-country.
It was no sin in Virginia to dance and play the fiddle; the Anglican Church, while prescribing a formal creed, did not concern itself to inquire every Sunday, or every Thursday, into all the dogmatic abstractions of the Westminster Assembly’s Catechism, longer or shorter; men’s minds were left to take the course most natural to them. But in New England, along with much acute speculation (the best type of which is Jonathan Edwards), there went a morbid conscientiousness, turning its eyes upon inward and even petty matters, and leading to numberless quarrels about Original Sin, Half-way Covenants, Justification by Faith, etc. Concord was less infested by this carping, persecuting, quarrelsome spirit than most of New England; yet the church records, and the collections of old Dr. Ripley, show there was much of it. Emerson declares, and justly, that good sense has marked our town annals: “I find no ridiculous laws, no eaves-dropping legislators, no hanging of witches, no ghosts, no whipping of Quakers, no unnatural crimes.” But the spirit which led to these mischiefs in other regions of Massachusetts and Connecticut was all about us; and it narrowed the minds and the opportunities of Concord before the Revolution. It was chiefly in New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont, where ecclesiastical domination was less rigid, that mental freedom manifested itself. In the other colonies of the North, wealth and culture were apt to be on the side of England, when our troubles began; in Virginia and the Carolinas, and to some extent in New Hampshire and Maine, wealth took the colonial side.
We may call the imaginative force and breadth of the Concord authors “Shakespearian” for lack of a better word; but there was a man of singular mental penetration sometimes visiting here, – Jones Very, of Salem, – who once made a wider generalization – whether wisely or not. When Very was asked to discriminate betwixt Wisdom and Genius, he said, “Wisdom is of God; Genius is the decay of Wisdom”; adding in explanation, “To the pre-existent Shakespeare, wisdom was offered; he did not accept it, and so he died away into genius.” We had a superior sage here (Bronson Alcott), who had little of the Shakespearian genius, but much of that mystic wisdom which Very thought older and nobler than genius. Religion was his native air, – the religion of identity, not of variety; he could not be polytheistic, as many Christians are, even while fancying themselves the most orthodox worshippers of the One God. He had that intense application of the soul to one side of this sphere of life, which led him to neglect the exercise of intellectual powers that were amply his. His gift it was, not to expand our life into multiplicity, – which was the tendency of Emerson, as of Goethe and Shakespeare, – but to concentrate multiplicity in unity, seeking ever the one source whence flow these myriad manifestations. His friends used to call him, in sport, the “Vortical philosopher,” because his speculations all moved vortically toward a centre, or were occupied with repeating one truth in many forms. He was a votary of the higher Reason; not without certain foibles of the saint; but belonging unmistakably to the saintly order. Of course he was the mock of the market-place, as all but the belligerent saints are; but he was a profound, vivifying influence in the lives of the few who recognized his inward light.
