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Gentlemen and Seamen
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Those of us who can claim any New England ancestors may congratulate ourselves that we are their descendants, and at the same time rejoice that we are not their contemporaries. Their sombre faces, with an inflexible contraction of the lips, as they have been stiffened and conventionalized in oils by forgotten artists, suggest natures difficult and unyielding, as the consequence of religious principle and of interminable struggle against the narrow resources of New England. The men of whom I am thinking are the patriarchs of the smaller towns, rather than the merchants of Boston, whom affluence often left more genial than the never prosperous countryfolk. But the representative New Englander is not exclusively a city man by descent, and has quite as much reason for taking pride in his rustic ancestors.
One notable characteristic of those hardy folk is the success with which they supported, in the conflict with misfortune, a gentlemanly dignity. Tradesmen and farmers, most of them, by descent, they were farmers in America; yet here they founded and maintained successfully a plebeian aristocracy, without the training of generations, and under adverse fates. Any task which necessity compelled them to undertake, in their hands became honorable; no privation and hardship lowered their pride or social position. So they were found as merchants and tradesmen, as farmers and printers, according to circumstance, without losing a jot of their dignity. There were many sacrifices. Straitened means confined noble ambitions, and their passion for education was not always gratified. In one of those white clapboard houses which look so tranquil in their decay lived a boy of good family, a hundred years ago, whom lack of means thwarted from his ambition the college education. So, at the age of fifteen, he killed himself.
But most of our New Englanders were stronger, and turned to what vocation they could find; the farm, the printing-press–a hundred years ago there were many local presses–or to the sea. The merchant marine was not the least important career in which New Englanders found distinction. They were the men who carried American commerce to the Levant, to India, to China; who from the Revolution till after 1812 made America an ocean power in war and in peace. They built the fine old ships which we know only from
Go to Salem and see a town that flourished a hundred years ago in the hightide of New England’s naval energy.
