The Minutemen and Their World (American century series) - Softcover

CONCORD arrived at its strategic position in 1775 only after a good deal of foot-dragging. While Bostonians fulminated against British policies in the 1760s and early 1770s, the yeomen of Concord were squabbling among themselves in a series of increasingly bitter quarrels that threatened ultimately to divide the town into two warring parties. The local contentions had no relation to the colonial dispute with Britain; that subject came before the town only occasionally until 1774 and elicited only a mild response. Let others warm to arguments over the rights of the colonies and sound the alarm against a corrupt ministry in London and its lackeys at home. Concordians were more concerned over their roads and schools and meetinghouse.

When the eighteenth-century Yankee reflected on government, he thought first of his town. Through town meetings, he elected his officials, voted his taxes, and provided for the well-ordering of community affairs. The main business of the town concerned roads and bridges, schools, and the poor—the staples of local government even today. But the colonial New England town claimed authority over anything that happened within its borders. It hired a minister to preach in the town-built meetinghouse and compelled attendance at his sermons. It controlled public uses of private property, from the location of slaughterhouses and tanneries to the quality of bread sold at market. And it gave equal care to the moral conduct of its inhabitants, as Concord’s William Hunt regretfully learned in 1764 when the selectmen took notice of his public tippling and idle “Loytring about from House to House Wasteing his time in a Sinfull maner” and advised innkeepers to shut their doors to his trade. No issue was in theory exempt from a town’s action, even if in practice the provincial government occasionally intervened in local disputes and told the inhabitants how to run their lives.1

A remarkably broad segment of the population could join in this exercise of local power. To vote in Massachusetts town elections, one had to be a male, at least twenty-one years old, an inhabitant of a town for the past year, and owner of an estate that would rent for £3:6:8 a year in the local assessors’ view. In a country town like Concord, most men could meet the property-holding requirement, which was the equivalent of a month’s wages for a common laborer. In 1771 seven out of ten Concordians qualified. Those who could not were farmers’ sons, only recently come of age, and day laborers and servants, dependent on others for their bread. In eighteenth-century Massachusetts, a citizen mattered politically only when his judgment was subject to no one else’s whim and untempted by the financial inducements of designing men.2

With town government affecting so much of daily life, no New England community could escape political conflict. A road urgently needed by a man at the outskirts was often a wasteful expense to an inhabitant near the center, while one churchgoer’s learned preacher was another’s prideful sinner on the way to hell. Politics was, as ever, a contest over who got what of a community’s scarce resources and whose values would prevail in local life. But provincial Yankees labored under a set of beliefs that made political activity as we know it impossible.

Eighteenth-century New Englanders demanded a great deal of their leaders. A magistrate, they held, was not a hired agent but a “father” to his people. He was raised up to rule as another Moses, a model of wisdom and righteousness, a lover of justice and champion of the people’s rights. Like a good father, he was patient and gentle in guiding his subjects, but he could also be stern when necessary. He neither courted popular favor nor consulted private interest. He was ever-solicitous of the common good.3

The people of Concord sought such leaders among the well-born and the rich. Democracy and equality played no part in their view of the world. New Englanders believed that society was composed of “ranks and degrees,” that just as the earth “has Mountains and Plains, Hills and Vallies,” so “there are the Distinctions of Superiours and Inferiours, Rulers and Ruled, publick and private Orders of Men … .” The upper orders were to rule, the lower to follow. To place men of “low degree” in the council chamber would bring government into contempt. Magistrates must be distinguished men, known and respected by all. All authority—political, social, economic, and moral—was of a piece.4

By aristocratic English standards, Concord’s governing class cut a minor figure in the world. A few leaders were country squires like Colonel John Cuming, a Harvard- and Edinburgh-trained doctor who oversaw a 250-acre farm in Concord and speculated in frontier lands in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont. As a young man in his twenties, Cuming had fought in the old colonial wars against the French, in the course of which he received a musket ball in his hip—where it remained till his death—and was taken captive by Indians, beaten, and removed to Canada. He eventually won over his captors and gained release in a prisoner exchange. He returned home to build an extensive medical practice throughout Middlesex County and to become one of the town’s leading men—the moderator of no fewer than ninety town meetings, justice of the peace, president-judge of the county Court of General Sessions. Concord often called on him to serve as its ambassador to the world. Cuming practiced the philanthropy his worldly status prescribed. It is said that he never charged for treating patients on the Sabbath. When Harvard Hall burned, he donated “two handsome brass branches for the use of the College chapel”; in 1771, he was awarded an honorary M.A. At his death in 1788, he left the College £300 sterling to establish a professorship of medicine. Together with other money, the bequest was used to start the Harvard School of Medicine.5

But most of Concord’s leaders were substantial yeomen and tradesmen with seventy-five to one hundred acres of land—twice the holding of the ordinary farmer. And while they engaged in trade more often than most inhabitants, it was business on the scale of Honest John Beatton, parceling out pins for change, and that of farmer-shoemaker Jonas Heywood, who every winter went from house to house in the countryside “whipping the cat”—boarding with his customers while he made and repaired enough shoes to last each family for the season. Still, hard-working, substantial men like Beatton and Heywood did stand out in a largely rural society, and they could afford to spend the typical selectman’s four or five years in the public service. In the eyes of their neighbors, such men could rise to the standard of the public service.6

Ephraim Wood was another shoemaker-farmer who won the trust of the town. Born in 1733 and bred to his father’s trade, Wood was a natural candidate for town leadership: he was the son of a selectman—as were nearly half the men Concord chose for this post. But Wood also commanded respect in his own right. At 250 pounds, he was an imposing figure; the calf of his leg was said to measure twenty-four inches around. He had a reputation for “a calm, considerate mind and sound judgment,” and he so thrived in business that his name became synonymous with success. Once another shoemaker was complaining to a Scotsman about his bad luck and poor trade. “Oh,” the...