Ashfield Backstory

One of the things I’m found really interesting, writing about a character who lived from 1800 to 1850, was getting his world right. The Massachusetts in which Charles Knowlton grew up and where he made his home is a whole lot different from the place we know today. Even driving out to the sites and looking at the ground can be tricky, if you don’t try really hard to put yourself in the shoes of people of the time. For example, Knowlton walked from Gardner Massachusetts to Hanover New Hampshire at least once, to attend the “medical lectures.” I’ve been over most of that route in my car (and actually I used to live along that route), but it’s not the same.

So, as I worked to build these settings, I used sources like Mark Williams’s Yale-dissertation-turned-history, The Brittle Thread of Life. Here are some passages I found helpful:

After the May 1746 Indian attack at Colerain, “What little evidence there is suggests that only Richard Ellis, Thomas Phillips, and Heber Honestman and their families continued to reside in the hills west of Deerfield.” Heber was a formerly-enslaved African American. (243) “Stories come down to us of Huntstown people subsisting on maple sugar and the buds and leaves of basswood trees, and of Richard Ellis scrambling away from a band of Indians with a five-pail sap kettle strapped to his back.” (244)

Williams also dealt extensively with Ashfield’s first religious controversy, explaining that “until 1753 Massachusetts law exempted Baptists from supporting or attending the regular ministry. It is probably not a coincidence that in that year the legislature revoked that exemption because so many separates were saying they were Baptist.” (249) But the Ashfield Baptists had been there before the Congregationalists arrived. Their minister Chileab Smith went to Boston in 1769 to protest the “Ashfield Law” that the “River God” Israel Williams had pushed through, allowing the town to tax for support of the new Congregational Church. He carried a petition from the Baptists and “a companion petition from a group of Ashfield Congregationalists suggesting that ‘it is not all the other Society that would thus Oppress us.’ Signed by thirteen inhabitants, the second group of petitioners stated that it had ‘no objection a Gainst the anabaptest societys Being set free from paying to the maintenances of the other worship which they Do not Belong unto.’ This was a dangerous development for Israel Williams, for it set the non-resident proprietors apart from the majority of inhabitants in whose best interest they were supposedly acting.” (295) Additionally, it shows the beginning of a tendency for an elite group to use the Congregational Church as a weapon of social control in Ashfield.

Lt. Governor Hutchinson used the Ashfield issue to frustrate the House. His decision to forward it to the King for action was a not-too- subtle way to call the new “Sons of Liberty” hypocrites. (301) Israel Williams retaliated by jailing Chileab Smith on a trumped up charge of counterfeiting. (302) His son Ebenezer Smith (also a minister) complained, “they were calling themselves the sons of liberty and were erecting their liberty poles about the country, but they did not deserve the name, for it was evident that all they wanted was liberty from oppression that they might have liberty to oppress.” (303) This critique became popular enough that Isaac Backus reported on it in his 1871 book, A History of New England with Particular Reference to the Denomination of Christians Called Baptists.

Mark Williams argued that Ashfield residents adopted the parts of the Whig revolutionary argument that they already believed in, particularly “the insistence upon equality and collective autonomy.” (309) He said, “Probably the call for a boycott in 1767, and the subsequent efforts to keep the flames of resistance burning in spite of the repeal of most of the Townshend duties, seemed to be one more imposition by the Sons of Liberty upon the dreams of beleaguered and ‘oppressed’ people…as Chileab Smith put it, ‘the Sons of Violence’.” (312) He described a meeting in February 1783 where “the town resolved ‘that we will not pay the five & twenty shilling State Tax on the pole Nor no other State Nor County Tax or Taxes is or may be Assessed upon the Town of Ashfield until we are informed by Genl Cort or Some other Authority the perticular use the said Money is Designed for.’…and recommended that all the town’s militia officers ‘Resine their Commissions’ lest they be caught in the middle and ordered to use their authority to restore order.” (342)

In response to David P. Szatmary’s depiction of Shays’s Rebellion, Williams argued that “Ashfield’s steady stream of objections to the republicanism of the eastern elite contain a bold foray into a radical political culture that was neither traditional nor peasant-minded.” Although Shays’s rebels have often been depicted as simply debtors or down-on-their-luck Revolutionary War veterans, Williams said “There is one category that does cover all of the regulators of Ashfield: they were the town’s 1786 militiamen, and here is the point. They were, in short, a segment of a much larger entity that was itself as committed to the rebellion as any pardoned regulator in Hampshire County, and that entity was the town of Ashfield…[they] had already defied the state government’s tax laws. The militiamen were the executive arm of a whole town in rebellion” (349-50)

This was important because powerful men in the Eastern population center at Boston were determined to have as little democracy as possible. “When the 1780 constitutional drafting committee of [John] Adams, [Samuel] Adams and Bowdoin included a lecture on morality in their article on religious ‘freedom,’ and created a powerful executive, a state senate, and a judiciary that was completely independent of popular control,” Williams said, “these Sons of Liberty should have known to ‘Expect Trouble’ from the backcountry.” (352)

Although there were some notable holdouts in Ashfield like the Allen brothers, who refused to sign loyalty oaths and instead went to Vermont to join their famous cousins, “By 1793 only nine of the fifty-two Shaysites were not listed on the town’s tax rolls … forty-three rebels and their families…were among the more permanent half of Ashfield’s rapidly changing population.” Williams observed that “In 1785 less than half of the future rebels qualified to vote. In 1794 only four of the forty-three former rebels were not on the list of eligible voters … 72% of them had assessed estates above the median on the 1793 tax list.” (374) The former rebels were no longer poor, but many were still radicals. Williams concluded, “in 1795…Massachusetts citizens would decide if the constitution should be revised. In a relatively quiet meeting, Ashfield voted 56 to 12 against revision.” (371)