The widow's war (25 page)

In 1761 Massachusetts:

• James Otis, a lawyer from Barnstable, Massachusetts, had just resigned his lucrative position as advocate for the Crown rather than defend some trade acts that authorized, in his view, illegal search and seizure. Instead he accepted, without fee, the task of challenging the legality of the Writs, and in his challenge he shifted the argument from one concerning technical rules of trade to one concerning fundamental liberties and natural rights of man, principles on which future revolutionary activity was grounded. (As John Adams later claimed, “Then and there the child Independence was born.”)
  
• So many Cape Cod men died at sea that one heard reference to its “towns full of widows.”
  
• One in two hundred women and one in four children died during the birth process. The greatest cause of accidental death for a woman was fire.
  
• John Sequattom, the last full-blooded Sauquatuckett Indian “recognized as such,” had been dead eighteen years.
  
• A married woman could not own property or sign contracts. A widow was legally entitled to life use of one-third her husband’s real estate, actual title to the property customarily passing to the nearest living male heir.
  
• Punishable crimes included working on the Sabbath, nonattendance at church, profanity, and any white woman seducing an Indian.
  
• Slavery had been legal for a hundred and twenty years and would remain legal for twenty more, although the term “servant” was commonly used in place of “slave.”
  
• Only males who attended church and possessed an estate valued above twenty pounds could vote.
  
• The Cape Cod town known today as Brewster was the north parish of another Cape town, Harwich, and was commonly called Satucket Village, after the Satucket River (today Stony Brook), whose fertile banks and powerful stream first drew settlers, Indian and English, to the area. The river in its turn was named after the Sauquatuckett Indians who first peopled the area. Route 6A, which runs the length of Cape Cod, was called the King’s road and was laid out by the English over the original Indian trail. In Satucket it ran along
  much the same path as it does today, with the exception of the piece between the two ends of Stony Brook Road. That section didn’t exist, because the gristmill on Stony Brook Road was one of two main centers of town (the other being on Main Street around First Parish Church) and the King’s road took the more frequently traveled route past the mill. Modern-day visitors may still travel the King’s road past the site of the original church onto Stony Brook Road to a nineteenth-century working version of the old mill, which was built diagonally across the road from the site of the original. The mill wheel still grinds corn, the herring still run upstream each spring to spawn, and traces of the old Sauquatuckett Indian path can still be found along the millpond.
  

The following primary sources from the Massachusetts Historical Society were most useful in researching this book: John Adams’s diaries; Isaac Backus’s book of accounts; diary of Experience (Wight) Richardson; Josiah Thacher’s diary; and Peter Verstille’s account book. One additional source was so invaluable that it deserves separate mention. Benjamin Bangs, one of Brewster’s leading coastal traders, whalers, merchants, and farmers, kept a diary from 1742 through 1765, in which he logged everything from wind direction to religious musings to local scandal to the politics of the day, and Lyddie Berry’s Satucket would not have come to life without it.

The following books or periodicals were also most informative: Alice Brown’s
Mercy Warren;
Joy Day Buel and Richard Buel Jr.’s
The Way of Duty—A Woman and Her Family in Revolutionary America;
Delores Bird Carpenter’s
Early Encounters—Native Americans
and Europeans in New England—from the Papers of W. Sears Nickerson;
Culpepper’s
Complete Herbal;
Simeon Deyo’s
History of Barnstable County, Massachusetts;
Doris Doane’s
A Book of Cape Cod Houses;
Joan Druett’s
Hen Frigates—Passion and Peril, Nineteenth Century Women at Sea;
Alice Morse Earle’s
Home Life in Colonial Days;
Frederick Freeman’s
The Annals of Barnstable County and of Its Several Towns;
Alexander Keysarr’s
Widowhood in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts: A Problem in the History of the Family;
Henry Kitteredge’s
Cape Cod—Its People and Their History;
Haynes R. Mahoney’s
Yarmouth’s Proud Packets;
Daniel R. Mandell’s
Behind the Frontier—Indians in Eighteenth Century Eastern Massachusetts;
Mary Beth Norton’s
Liberty’s Daughters—The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800;
Jane C. Nylander’s
Our Own Snug Fireside—Images of the New England Home 1760–1860;
Josiah Paine’s
A History of Harwich;
Nancy Thacher Reid’s
Dennis, Cape Cod, from First Comers to Newcomers 1639–1993;
Charles Swift’s
Cape Cod, the Right Arm of Massachusetts: An Historical Narrative
and
History of Old Yarmouth;
William Tudor’s
The Life of James Otis of Massachusetts;
Laura Thatcher Ulrich’s
A Midwife’s Tale
and
The Age of Homespun;
John Waters Jr.’s
The Otis Family in Provincial and Revolutionary Massachusetts;
Rosemarie Zagarri’s
A Woman’s Dilemma: Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution;
and Michael Zuckerman’s
Peaceable Kingdoms—New England Towns in the Eighteenth Century.

Many thanks to the following people who either helped me ferret out key bits of historical information or pointed me in the right direction: Suzanne Foster and Teresa Lamperti at the Brewster Historical Society; Jim Brown at the Harwich Historical Society; Mary Sicchio at the Nickerson Room, Cape Cod Community College; Fred Dunford at the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History; Marjorie Jones at the Yarmouth Historical Society; Ernest Rohdenburg III and Joseph Nickerson at the Chatham Historical Society; and Nancy Thacher Reid.

Special thanks to my agent, Andrea Cirillo, for hanging in there through my various flights of fancy and for finding the widow such a good home; to my editor, Jennifer Brehl, for the enthusiasm and care she has devoted to the project; to Mimi and Warren McConchie, for the maps, the mill area information, and the millpond tour; to art
director Barbara Levine for all her hard work on the jacket; to Kathleen Remillard, Adult Services Librarian, Brewster Ladies Library, who first enthused with me about the project and then tracked down the resources that made it happen; to Ellen St. Sure, who came up with historical answers before I could get out the questions and proofed the manuscript as well; and to my cousin Bob Thomson, who provided much of the family genealogy that grounded me in time and place.

My heartfelt gratitude goes out once again to my family of readers who advised and encouraged along the way: Jan Carlson, Diane Carlson, Nancy Carlson, Doris Fisher, John Leaning, Carol Appleton, and Betty de Jongh. My thanks also to the members of the various writers’ gatherings at Brewster Ladies Library.

And for my husband, Tom, a swollen heart full of thanks, one for each time he read the manuscript, and one more for always supporting the limb as I crept along.

I take sole credit for all errors.