I Travel the Open Road - Classic Writings of Journeys Taken around the World. Various
Court of Assistants; but, as Hutchinson tells us, the people assumed that the right to such representation was implied in that clause of the charter which reserved to them the natural rights of Englishmen. Thus the building of a wooden palisade from Ash Street to Jarvis Field furnished the occasion for the first distinct assertion in the New World of the principles that were to bear fruit in the independence of the United States.
But the most interesting event in the history of the New Town before it became Cambridge was the brief sojourn of the Rev. Thomas Hooker and his company, from Braintree in England. In popular generalizations it is customary to allude to our Puritan forefathers as if they were all alike in their ways of thinking, whereas in reality it would be difficult to point out any group of men and women among whom individualism has more strongly flourished. Among the numberless differences of opinion and policy, it was only a few—and mostly such as were related to vital political questions—that blazed up in acts of persecution. For the disorganization wrought by Mrs. Hutchinson swift banishment seemed the only available remedy; but slighter differences could be healed by a peaceful secession, which some people deprecated as the "removal of a candlestick." Such a secession was that of Hooker and his friends. The difference between Hooker's ideal of government and Winthrop's has come to be recognized as in some measure foreshadowing the different conceptions of Jefferson and Hamilton in later days. But of controversy between the two eminent Puritans only slight traces are left. One act of omission on the part of the friendly seceders is more forcible than reams of argument: the founders of Connecticut did not see fit to limit the suffrage by the qualification of church membership.
The removal of so many people to the banks of the Connecticut left in the New Town only eleven families of those who had settled here before 1635. But depopulation was prevented by the arrival of a new congregation from England. There stands on our common a monument in commemoration of John Bridge, who was for many years a selectman of Cambridge, and dwelt beyond the western limits of the town, on or near the site since famous as the headquarters of Washington and the home of Longfellow. This John Bridge, deacon of the First Church, was one of the earliest settlers of the New Town, and one of the eleven householders that stayed behind, a connecting link between the old congregation of Thomas Hooker and the new congregation of Thomas Shepard. The coming of this eminent divine was undoubtedly an event of cardinal importance in the history of our community, for in the Hutchinson controversy, which shook the little colony to its foundations, his zeal and vigilance in exposing heresy were conspicuously shown; and, if we may believe Cotton Mather, it was this circumstance that led to the selection of the New Town as the site for the projected college. It was well for students of divinity to sit under the preaching of such a man, and of such as he might train up to succeed him. How vain were all such hopes of keeping this New English Canaan free from heresy was shown when Henry Dunster, first president of the college, was censured by the magistrates and dismissed from office for disapproving of infant baptism!
In the great English universities at that time Royalism and Episcopacy prevailed at Oxford, while Puritanism more or less allied with Republicanism was rife at Cambridge. Ever since the fourteenth century a superior flexibility in opinion had been observable in the eastern counties, whence came so many of the people that founded New England. Not only Hooker and Shepard, but most of our clergy, among whom individualism was so rife, were graduates of Cambridge. When it was decided that the New Town was to be the home of our college, it was natural for people to fall into the habit of calling it Cambridge; and this name, so long enshrined already in their affections, already made illustrious by Erasmus and Fisher, by Latimer and Cranmer, by Burghley and Walsingham and the two Bacons, by Edmund Spenser and Ben Jonson,—this name of such fame and dignity was adopted in 1638 by an order of the General Court. The map of the United States abounds in town names taken at random from the Old World, often inappropriate and sometimes ludicrous from the incongruity of associations. The name of our city is connected by a legitimate bond of inheritance with that of the beautiful city on the Cam. It was given in the thought that the work for scholarship, for godliness, and for freedom, which had so long been carried on in the older city, was to be continued in the younger. The name thus given was a pledge to posterity, and it has been worthily fulfilled.
Into the history of the town of Cambridge during the two centuries after it received its name I do not propose to enter. But a glimpse of its general appearance during the greater part of that period is needful, in order to give precision and the right sort of emphasis to the contrast which we see before us to-day. The Cambridge of those days was simply the seat of the college, not yet developed into a university. Within the memory of persons now living, Old Cambridge was commonly alluded to as "the village." In the original laying out of the township we seem to see a reminiscence of the ancient threefold partition into town mark, arable mark, and common. The "east gate," near the corner of Harvard and Linden streets, and the "west gate," at the corner of Ash and Brattle, marked the limits of the town in those directions. The town was at first comprised between Harvard Street and the marshes which cut off approach to the river bank. Afterward, the "West End," from Harvard Square to Sparks Street, was gradually covered with homesteads. The common began, as now, hard by God's Acre, the venerable burying ground, and afforded pasturage for the village cattle as far as Linnæan Street. The regions now occupied by Cambridgeport and East Cambridge contained the arable district with many farms, small and large, but everywhere salt marshes bordered the river, and much of the country was a wild woodland. The tale of wolves killed in Cambridge for the year 1696 was seventy-six, and a bear was seen roaming as late as 1754. It was a rough country which the British first encountered when they landed at Lechmere Point in 1775, on their night march to Lexington. Cambridge then turned its back toward Boston, to which the only approach was by a causeway and bridge at what we now call Boylston Street, and by this route the distance was eight miles, as we still read upon the ancient milestone in God's Acre. To complete our outline of the village, we must recall the principal public buildings. The meetinghouse, a little south of the site of Dane Hall, was used both as church and as townhouse until 1708, when a building was erected in the middle of Harvard Square to serve for town meetings and courts. A little eastward, near the "east gate," stood the parsonage. The schoolhouse was behind the site of Holyoke House. The jail stood on then west side of Winthrop Square, which was then an open market. Between this market and Harvard Square, in the sanded parlour of the Blue Anchor Tavern, then selectmen held their meetings; and on the corner of the street which still bears the name of Harvard's first president was something rarely to be seen in so small a village, the printing press now known as the University Press, established in 1639,—the only one in English America until Boston followed the example in 1676.
Until the beginning of the present century these outlines of Cambridge remained with but little change, save for the building of noble houses on spacious estates toward Mount Auburn in one direction, and upon Dana Hill in the other. The occupants of many of these estates were members of the Church of England, and the building of Christ Church in 1759 was one marked symptom of the change that was creeping over the little Puritan community. It was a change toward somewhat wider views of life, and toward the softening of old animosities. In contrast with the age in which we live the whole eighteenth century in New England seems a slow and quiet time, when the public pulse beat more languidly, or at any rate less feverishly, than now. The people of New England led a comparatively isolated life.
Thought in our college town did not keep pace with European centres of thought, as it does in our day. There was less hospitality toward foreign ideas. Few people visited Europe. Life in New England was thrown upon its own resources, and this was in great measure true of Cambridge in the days when it was eight miles from Boston, and indefinitely remote from the mother country. One of the surest results of social isolation is the acquirement of peculiarities of speech, often shown in the retaining of archaisms which fashionable language had dropped. That quaint Yankee dialect, of which Hosea Biglow says that,
"For puttin' in a downright lick
'Twixt Humbug's eyes, ther's few can metch it,
An' then it helves my thoughts ez slick
Ez stret-grained hickory doos a hetchet,"—
that dialect so sweet to the ears of every true child of New England may still be heard, if we go to seek it; but in Lowell's boyhood it must have been a familiar sound in the neighbourhood of Elmwood.
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