Volume Ii Part 4 (1/2)

Meanwhile, in spite of the oath, the secret had escaped. It is said that a country member, more pious than discreet, prayed so loud and fervently, at his lodgings, for light to guide him on the momentous question, that his words were overheard, and the mystery of the closed doors was revealed. The news flew through the town, and soon spread through all the province.

After his defeat in the a.s.sembly, s.h.i.+rley returned, vexed and disappointed, to his house in Roxbury. A few days later, James Gibson, a Boston merchant, says that he saw him ”walking slowly down King Street, with his head bowed down, as if in a deep study.” ”He entered my counting-room,” pursues the merchant, ”and abruptly said, 'Gibson, do you feel like giving up the expedition to Louisbourg?'” Gibson replied that he wished the House would reconsider their vote. ”You are the very man I want!” exclaimed the Governor. [Footnote: Gibson, _Journal of the Siege of Louisbourg_.]

They then drew up a pet.i.tion for reconsideration, which Gibson signed, promising to get also the signatures of merchants, not only of Boston, but of Salem, Marblehead, and other towns along the coast. In this he was completely successful, as all New England merchants looked on Louisbourg as an arch-enemy.

The pet.i.tion was presented, and the question came again before the a.s.sembly. There had been much intercourse between Boston and Louisbourg, which had largely depended on New England for provisions. [Footnote: _Lettre d'un Habitant de Louisbourg_.] The captured militia-men of Canseau, who, after some delay, had been sent to Boston, according to the terms of surrender, had used their opportunities to the utmost, and could give s.h.i.+rley much information concerning the fortress. It was reported that the garrison was mutinous, and that provisions were fallen short, so that the place could not hold out without supplies from France. These, however, could be cut off only by blockading the harbor with a stronger naval force than all the colonies together could supply. The a.s.sembly had before reached the reasonable conclusion that the capture of Louisbourg was beyond the strength of Ma.s.sachusetts, and that the only course was to ask the help of the mother-country. [Footnote: _Report of Council, 12 Jan. 1745_.]

The reports of mutiny, it was urged, could not be depended on; raw militia in the open field were no match for disciplined troops behind ramparts; the expense would be enormous, and the credit of the province, already sunk low, would collapse under it; we should fail, and instead of sympathy, get nothing but ridicule. Such were the arguments of the opposition, to which there was little to answer, except that if Ma.s.sachusetts waited for help from England, Louisbourg would be reinforced and the golden opportunity lost. The impetuous and irrepressible Vaughan put forth all his energy; the plan was carried by a single vote. And even this result was said to be due to the accident of a member in opposition falling and breaking a leg as he was hastening to the House.

The die was cast, and now doubt and hesitation vanished. All alike set themselves to push on the work. s.h.i.+rley wrote to all the colonies, as far south as Pennsylvania, to ask for co-operation. All excused themselves except Connecticut, New Hamps.h.i.+re, and Rhode Island, and the whole burden fell on the four New England colonies. These, and Ma.s.sachusetts above all, blazed with pious zeal; for as the enterprise was directed against Roman Catholics, it was supposed in a peculiar manner to commend itself to Heaven. There were prayers without ceasing in churches and families, and all was ardor, energy, and confidence; while the other colonies looked on with distrust, dashed with derision. When Benjamin Franklin, in Philadelphia, heard what was afoot, he wrote to his brother in Boston, ”Fortified towns are hard nuts to crack, and your teeth are not accustomed to it; but some seem to think that forts are as easy taken as snuff.”

[Footnote: Sparks, _Works of Franklin_, VII. 16.] It has been said of Franklin that while he represented some of the New England qualities, he had no part in that enthusiasm of which our own time saw a crowning example when the cannon opened at Fort Sumter, and which pushes to its end without reckoning chances, counting costs, or heeding the scoffs of ill-wishers.

The prevailing hope and faith were, it is true, born largely of ignorance, aided by the contagious zeal of those who first broached the project; for as usual in such cases, a few individuals supplied the initiate force of the enterprise. Vaughan the indefatigable rode express to Portsmouth with a letter from s.h.i.+rley to Benning Wentworth, governor of New Hamps.h.i.+re. That pompous and self-important personage admired the Ma.s.sachusetts Governor, who far surpa.s.sed him in talents and acquirements, and who at the same time knew how to soothe his vanity. Wentworth was ready to do his part, but his province had no money, and the King had ordered him to permit the issue of no more paper currency. The same prohibition had been laid upon s.h.i.+rley; but he, with sagacious forecast, had persuaded his masters to relent so far as to permit the issue of 50,000 in what were called bills of credit to meet any pressing exigency of war. He told this to Wentworth, and succeeded in convincing him that his province might stretch her credit like Ma.s.sachusetts, in case of similar military need. New Hamps.h.i.+re was thus enabled to raise a regiment of five hundred men out of her scanty population, with the condition that a hundred and fifty of them should be paid and fed by Ma.s.sachusetts. [Footnote: Correspondence of s.h.i.+rley and Wentworth, in _Belknap Papers, Provincial Papers of New Hamps.h.i.+re_, V.]

s.h.i.+rley was less fortunate in Rhode Island. The Governor of that little colony called Ma.s.sachusetts ”our avowed enemy, always trying to defame us.”

[Footnote: _Governor Wanton to the Agent of Rhode Island, 20 Dec.

1745,_ in _Colony Records of Rhode Island_, V.] There was a grudge between the neighbors, due partly to notorious ill-treatment by the Ma.s.sachusetts Puritans of Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island, and partly to one of those boundary disputes which often produced ill-blood among the colonies. The Representatives of Rhode Island, forgetting past differences, voted to raise a hundred and fifty men for the expedition, till, learning that the project was neither ordered nor approved by the Home Government, they prudently reconsidered their action. They voted, however, that the colony sloop ”Tartar,” carrying fourteen cannon and twelve swivels, should be equipped and manned for the service, and that the Governor should be instructed to find and commission a captain and a lieutenant to command her. [Footnote: _Colony Records of Rhode Island_, V. (_Feb._ 1745).]

Connecticut promised five hundred and sixteen men and officers, on condition that Roger Wolcott, their commander, should have the second rank in the expedition. s.h.i.+rley accordingly commissioned him as major-general.

As Ma.s.sachusetts was to supply above three thousand men, or more than three quarters of the whole force, she had a natural right to name a Commander-in-chief.

It was not easy to choose one. The colony had been at peace for twenty years, and except some grizzled Indian fighters of the last war, and some survivors of the Carthagena expedition, n.o.body had seen service. Few knew well what a fortress was, and n.o.body knew how to attack one. Courage, energy, good sense, and popularity were the best qualities to be hoped for in the leader. Popularity was indispensable, for the soldiers were all to be volunteers, and they would not enlist under a commander whom they did not like. s.h.i.+rley's choice was William Pepperrell, a merchant of Kittery.

Knowing that Benning Wentworth thought himself the man for the place, he made an effort to placate him, and wrote that he would gladly have given him the chief command, but for his gouty legs. Wentworth took fire at the suggestion, forgot his gout, and declared himself ready to serve his country and a.s.sume the burden of command. The position was awkward, and s.h.i.+rley was forced to reply, ”On communicating your offer to two or three gentlemen in whose judgment I most confide, I found them clearly of opinion that any alteration of the present command would be attended with great risk, both with respect to our a.s.sembly and the soldiers being entirely disgusted.” [Footnote: _s.h.i.+rley to Wentworth, 16 Feb._ 1745.]

The painter Smibert has left us a portrait of Pepperrell,--a good bourgeois face, not without dignity, though with no suggestion of the soldier. His s.p.a.cious house at Kittery Point still stands, sound and firm, though curtailed in some of its proportions. Not far distant is another noted relic of colonial times, the not less s.p.a.cious mansion built by the disappointed Wentworth at Little Harbor. I write these lines at a window of this curious old house, and before me spreads the scene familiar to Pepperrell from childhood. Here the river Piscataqua widens to join the sea, holding in its gaping mouth the large island of Newcastle, with attendant groups of islets and island rocks, battered with the rack of ages, studded with dwarf savins, or half clad with patches of whortleberry bushes, sumac, and the s.h.i.+ning wax-myrtle, green in summer, red with the touch of October. The flood tide pours strong and full around them, only to ebb away and lay bare a desolation of rocks and stones buried in a shock of brown drenched seaweed, broad tracts of glistening mud, sandbanks black with mussel-beds, and half-submerged meadows of eel-gra.s.s, with myriads of minute sh.e.l.lfish clinging to its long lank tresses. Beyond all these lies the main, or northern channel, more than deep enough, even when the tide is out, to float a line-of-battle-s.h.i.+p. On its farther bank stands the old house of the Pepperrells, wearing even now an air of dingy respectability.

Looking through its small, quaint window-panes, one could see across the water the rude dwellings of fishermen along the sh.o.r.e of Newcastle, and the neglected earthwork called Fort William and Mary, that feebly guarded the river's mouth. In front, the Piscataqua, curving southward, widened to meet the Atlantic between rocky headlands and foaming reefs, and in dim distance the Isles of Shoals seemed floating on the pale gray sea.

Behind the Pepperrell house was a garden, probably more useful than ornamental, and at the foot of it were the owner's wharves, with storehouses for salt-fish, naval stores, and imported goods for the country trade.

Pepperrell was the son of a Welshman [Footnote: ”A native of Ravistock Parish, in Wales” Parsons, _Life of Pepperrell_. Mrs. Adelaide Cilley Waldron, a descendant of Pepperrell, a.s.sures me, however, that his father, the emigrant, came, not from Wales, but from Devons.h.i.+re.] who migrated in early life to the Isles of Shoals, and thence to Kittery, where by trade, s.h.i.+p-building, and the fisheries, he made a fortune, most of which he left to his son William. The young Pepperrell learned what little was taught at the village school, supplemented by a private tutor, whose instructions, however, did not perfect him in English grammar. In the eyes of his self-made father, education was valuable only so far as it could make a successful trader; and on this point he had reason to be satisfied, as his son pa.s.sed for many years as the chief merchant in New England. He dealt in s.h.i.+ps, timber, naval stores, fish, and miscellaneous goods brought from England; and he also greatly prospered by successful land purchases, becoming owner of the greater part of the growing towns of Saco and Scarborough. When scarcely twenty-one, he was made justice of the peace, on which he ordered from London what his biographer calls a law library, consisting of a law dictionary, Danvers' ”Abridgment of the Common Law,”

the ”Complete Solicitor,” and several other books. In law as in war, his best qualities were good sense and good will. About the time when he was made a justice, he was commissioned captain of militia, then major, then lieutenant-colonel, and at last colonel, commanding all the militia of Maine. The town of Kittery chose him to represent her in the General Court, Maine being then a part of Ma.s.sachusetts. Finally, he was made a member of the Governor's Council,--a post which he held for thirty-two years, during eighteen of which he was president of the board.

These civil dignities served him as educators better than tutor or village school; for they brought him into close contact with the chief men of the province; and in the Ma.s.sachusetts of that time, so different from our own, the best education and breeding were found in the official cla.s.s. At once a provincial magnate and the great man of a small rustic village, his manners are said to have answered to both positions,--certainly they were such as to make him popular. But whatever he became as a man, he learned nothing to fit him to command an army and lay siege to Louisbourg. Perhaps he felt this, and thought, with the Governor of Rhode Island, that ”the attempt to reduce that prodigiously strong town was too much for New England, which had not one officer of experience, nor even an engineer.” [Footnote: _Governor Wanton to the Agent of Rhode Island in London, 20 Dec.

1745._] Moreover, he was unwilling to leave his wife, children, and business. He was of a religious turn of mind, and partial to the clergy, who, on their part, held him in high favor. One of them, the famous preacher, George Whitefield, was a guest at his house when he heard that s.h.i.+rley had appointed him to command the expedition against Louisbourg.

Whitefield had been the leading spirit in the recent religious fermentation called the Great Awakening, which, though it produced bitter quarrels among the ministers, besides other undesirable results, was imagined by many to make for righteousness. So thought the Reverend Thomas Prince, who mourned over the subsiding delirium of his flock as a sign of back-sliding. ”The heavenly shower was over,” he sadly exclaims; ”from fighting the devil they must turn to fighting the French.” Pepperrell, always inclined to the clergy, and now in great perplexity and doubt, asked his guest Whitefield whether or not he had better accept the command. Whitefield gave him cold comfort, told him that the enterprise was not very promising, and that if he undertook it, he must do so ”with a single eye,” prepared for obloquy if he failed, and envy if he succeeded. [Footnote: Parsons, _Life of Pepperrell,_ 51.]

Henry Sherburn, commissary of the New Hamps.h.i.+re regiment, begged Whitefield to furnish a motto for the flag. The preacher, who, zealot as he was, seemed unwilling to mix himself with so madcap a business, hesitated at first, but at length consented, and suggested the words, _Nil desperandum Christo duce_, which, being adopted, gave the enterprise the air of a crusade. It had, in fact, something of the character of one. The cause was imagined to be the cause of Heaven, crowned with celestial benediction. It had the fervent support of the ministers, not only by prayers and sermons, but, in one case, by counsels wholly temporal. A certain pastor, much esteemed for benevolence, proposed to Pepperrell, who had at last accepted the command, a plan, unknown to Vauban, for confounding the devices of the enemy. He advised that two trustworthy persons should cautiously walk together along the front of the French ramparts under cover of night, one of them carrying a mallet, with which he was to hammer the ground at short intervals. The French sentinels, it seems to have been supposed, on hearing this mysterious thumping, would be so bewildered as to give no alarm. While one of the two partners was thus employed, the other was to lay his ear to the ground, which, as the adviser thought, would return a hollow sound if the artful foe had dug a mine under it; and whenever such secret danger was detected, a mark was to be set on the spot, to warn off the soldiers.

[Footnote: Belknap, _Hist. New Hamps.h.i.+re_, II. 208.]

Equally zealous, after another fas.h.i.+on, was the Reverend Samuel Moody, popularly known as Father Moody, or Parson Moody, minister of York and senior chaplain of the expedition. Though about seventy years old, he was amazingly tough and st.u.r.dy. He still lives in the traditions of York as the spiritual despot of the settlement and the uncompromising guardian of its manners and doctrine, predominating over it like a rough little village pope. The comparison would have kindled his burning wrath, for he abhorred the Holy Father as an embodied Antichrist. Many are the stories told of him by the descendants of those who lived under his rod, and sometimes felt its weight; for he was known to have corrected offending paris.h.i.+oners with his cane. [Footnote: Tradition told me at York by Mr. N. Marshall.] When some one of his flock, nettled by his strictures from the pulpit, walked in dudgeon towards the church door, Moody would shout after him, ”Come back, you graceless sinner, come back!” or if any ventured to the alehouse of a Sat.u.r.day night, the strenuous pastor would go in after them, collar them, drag them out, and send them home with rousing admonition. [Footnote: Lecture of Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted by Cabot, Memoir of Emerson, I. 10.

] Few dared gainsay him, by reason both of his irritable temper and of the thick-skinned insensibility that encased him like armor of proof. And while his pachydermatous nature made him invulnerable as a rhinoceros, he had at the same time a rough and ready humor that supplied keen weapons for the warfare of words and made him a formidable antagonist. This commended him to the rude borderers, who also relished the sulphurous theology of their spiritual dictator, just as they liked the raw and fiery liquors that would have scorched more susceptible stomachs. What they did not like was the pitiless length of his prayers, which sometimes kept them afoot above two hours s.h.i.+vering in the polar cold of the unheated meeting-house, and which were followed by sermons of equal endurance; for the old man's lungs were of bra.s.s, and his nerves of hammered iron. Some of the sufferers ventured to remonstrate; but this only exasperated him, till one paris.h.i.+oner, more worldly wise than the rest, accompanied his modest pet.i.tion for mercy with the gift of a barrel of cider, after which the Parson's ministrations were perceptibly less exhausting than before. He had an irrepressible conscience and a highly aggressive sense of duty, which made him an intolerable meddler in the affairs of other people, and which, joined to an underlying kindness of heart, made him so indiscreet in his charities that his wife and children were often driven to vain protest against the excesses of his almsgiving. The old Puritan fanaticism was rampant in him; and when he sailed for Louisbourg, he took with him an axe, intended, as he said, to hew down the altars of Antichrist and demolish his idols. [Footnote: Moody found sympathizers in his iconoclastic zeal. Deacon John Gray of Biddeford wrote to Pepperrell: ”Oh that I could be with you and dear Parson Moody in that church [at Louisbourg] to destroy the images there set up, and hear the true Gospel of our Lord and Saviour there preached!”]

s.h.i.+rley's choice of a commander was perhaps the best that could have been made; for Pepperrell joined to an unusual popularity as little military incompetency as anybody else who could be had. Popularity, we have seen, was indispensable, and even company officers were appointed with an eye to it. Many of these were well-known men in rustic neighborhoods, who had raised companies in the hope of being commissioned to command them. Others were militia officers recruiting under orders of the Governor. Thus, John Storer, major in the Maine militia, raised in a single day, it is said, a company of sixty-one, the eldest being sixty years old, and the youngest sixteen. [Footnote: Bourne, _Hist, of Wells and Kennebunk_, 371.] They formed about a quarter of the fencible population of the town of Wells, one of the most exposed places on the border. Volunteers offered themselves readily everywhere; though the pay was meagre, especially in Maine and Ma.s.sachusetts, where in the new provincial currency it was twenty-five s.h.i.+llings a month,--then equal to fourteen s.h.i.+llings sterling, or less than sixpence a day, [Footnote: Gibson, _Journal; Records of Rhode Island_, V. Governor Wanton, of that province, says, with complacency, that the pay of Rhode Island was twice that of Ma.s.sachusetts.] the soldier furnis.h.i.+ng his own clothing and bringing his own gun. A full third of the Ma.s.sachusetts contingent, or more than a thousand men, are reported to have come from the hardy population of Maine, whose entire fighting force, as shown by the muster-rolls, was then but 2,855. [Footnote: Parsons, _Life of Pepperrell_, 54.] Perhaps there was not one officer among them whose experience of war extended beyond a drill on muster day and the sham fight that closed the performance, when it generally happened that the rustic warriors were treated with rum at the charge of their captain, to put them in good humor, and so induce them to obey the word of command.

As the three provinces contributing soldiers recognized no common authority nearer than the King, Pepperrell received three several commissions as lieutenant-general,--one from the Governor of Ma.s.sachusetts, and the others from the Governors of Connecticut and New Hamps.h.i.+re; while Wolcott, commander of the Connecticut forces, was commissioned as major-general by both the Governor of his own province and that of Ma.s.sachusetts. When the levies were complete, it was found that Ma.s.sachusetts had contributed about 3,300 men, Connecticut 516, and New Hamps.h.i.+re 304 in her own pay, besides 150 paid by her wealthier neighbor. [Footnote: Of the Ma.s.sachusetts contingent, three hundred men were raised and maintained at the charge of the merchant James Gibson.] Rhode Island had lost faith and disbanded her 150 men; but afterwards raised them again, though too late to take part in the siege.

Each of the four New England colonies had a little navy of its own, consisting of from one to three or four small armed vessels; and as privateering--which was sometimes a euphemism for piracy where Frenchmen and Spaniards were concerned--a favorite occupation, it was possible to extemporize an additional force in case of need. For a naval commander, s.h.i.+rley chose Captain Edward Tyng, who had signalized himself in the past summer by capturing a French privateer of greater strength than his own.