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1 Dunstable
- Louisiana State University Press
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1 dunstable News of the fighting at Lexington and Concord reached Dunstable, twenty miles to the north, late in the evening of that fateful day. The townspeople were ready to act. Almost thirty of them, including nineteen-year-old Zebedee Kendall, had signed a pledge to “engage with each other in defence of our country, Priviledges and Libertys,” and the town had voted “to have menite men . . . in readiness to march at the first notice.” They had been drilling every week. Within a few hours militia captain Ebenezer Bancroft and fifty men were making their way southeast through Middlesex County to Cambridge.1 Two months later at Bunker Hill, Bancroft was severely wounded, and one of his soldiers lost an arm. During the siege of Boston the Dunstable militiamen took part in capturing Dorchester Heights, while back home their families were sheltering patriots fleeing from the city. The spirit of freedom was high; in June 1776 the town resolved that it would “risk life and fortune in ye cause” of independence. As the war spread outside of Massachusetts, the militia company, with Zebedee Kendall and a half dozen of his relatives in the ranks, fought at Ticonderoga, Philadelphia, and Saratoga.2 The unusual number of Kendalls in the militia company attests to their importance in the community. Dunstable was a Massachusetts town of six hundred people on the Merrimack River just south of the New Hampshire border. It had been founded in 1673, and for the next fifty years had served as a frontier garrison in the colonial wars. The coming of peace in the 1720s brought in permanent settlers of English stock, among them Zebedee’s grandfather and grandmother, two great-uncles, and his father, John, then a baby. 1. Elias Nason, A History of the Town of Dunstable, Massachusetts (Boston, 1877), 106–13, 116, quotations, 112; Frederick Lewis Weis, Early Generations of the Kendall Family of Massachusetts, Especially the Life of Lieutenant Samuel Kendall, Gentleman, 682–764, of Woburn, Lancaster, and Athol (Lancaster, Mass., 1839), 166. 2. Nason, Dunstable, 113–29, quotation, 119. 10 A Jackson Man: Amos Kendall and the Rise of American Democracy The Kendalls bought land and started farming, the great-uncles married, and the family multiplied. In 1747 John eloped with Hannah Whitman, already five months pregnant, and within eight years they had a family of five children, the youngest of whom was Zebedee. By the time of the Revolution almost fifty Kendall children had been born in the town.3 As one of the town’s core families the Kendalls performed vital civic duties and perpetuated community traditions. Only one or two families could rival them in number of members paying taxes. Everyone knew the Kendalls, for Zebedee’s great-uncle Ebenezer ran a tavern that was used for elections and town meetings. He and Zebedee’s father served on the committees that built a new meetinghouse. Zebedee’s grandfather and his great-uncle Abraham were both elected selectmen. During the Revolution Zebedee’s second cousin Asa chaired the committee of correspondence and held meetings of the minutemen at his home.4 The strong response of Dunstable and the Kendalls to the cause of freedom was typical of the reaction of dozens of Massachusetts country towns. The men who went off to fight were for the most part small farmers, whose primary concern was feeding their families, not making a profit. Typical farmers in Dunstable and throughout the state supported their families and a few animals—perhaps two or three cows, two pigs, a horse, and a pair of oxen—on twenty acres of improved land, half of it in hay and the rest in corn, rye, and pasture. Some of the farms were so small that the farmers had to exchange some surplus commodity, such as the labor of a son or daughter, for someone else’s surplus grain.5 This homogeneous, small-town, farming society was rooted in the traditions of righteousness, duty, and hard work taught by the established Congregational church. The society in turn fostered a form of classical republicanism that believed in independence, civic virtue, simplicity, local power, and equal 3. Nason, Dunstable, 8–55, 77, 282–83; Weis, Early Generations of the Kendall Family, 166–67; Oliver Kendall, Memorial of Josiah Kendall (n.p., 1884), 1, 9–13, 31; Vital Records of Dunstable, Massachusetts , to the End of the Year 849 (Salem, 1913), 49–53, 150. 4. They ranked second in number of taxpayers in 1744 and...