"The Birthplace of American Independence, 1687"
foreseen delays prevented the Mayflower from sailing around the stormy point called Cape Cod, until too late in the season to undertake the passage of another Cape, which was Cape Ann, and this delay compelled them to settle on the miserably poor, sandy soil around Plymouth, where the limited harvest of Indian corn almost drove them to seek another location, and where frequent starvation came very near exhausting their determination and perseverance.
Agawam possessed large areas of fertile, cleared acres of rich, black soil, adapted to corn growing, where the Indian tribes had once lived in plenty. It was the intention of the Mate of the Mayflower to land at Agawam, where he vouched for the beauty and fertility of the neighborhood. Had this landing been made, it is probable the whole history of New England would have been vastly different.
In 1687 Ipswich was the second town in wealth and population in the ancient "Province of the Massachusetts Bay in New England," as all of its legal papers then described the Province, and its residents religiously believed that their New England home was far dearer to them than the old English home which had so bitterly persecuted their fathers and mothers fifty years before.
The people who lived in Chebacco Parish in 1687 must have been a sturdy, patriotic, intellectual class. There are various evidences of this, one of which will here be called to your attention. Another is the fact that in this little community of perhaps five hundred people, almost entirely made up of old English Puritan families, were to be found the ancestors of Joshua R. Giddings, Nathan Dane, Seth Low, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Greene Coggswell, Edna Dean Proctor, Joseph H. Choate, and Rufus Choate. The latter was my mother's first cousin. Since commencing this paper I have discovered that all of the above mentioned persons find among their ancestors of over two hundred years ago some of the same ancestral lineages as are found in my father's and mother's families in that ancestral Parish.
The town seal of Ipswich bears this inscription: "The Birthplace of American Independence 1687." The important events I shall describe were a mere tradition in the town where I was born until recent publications and celebrations brought them to light. The traditions had faded almost entirely out of the minds of the descendants of the actors, and to me it was almost a revelation, when, in later years, I found unquestioned historical records deserving of national attention.
One of the actors was my Grandmother's Great-Grandfather,
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