The Will of Captain Standish.—His Second Wife.—Captain’s Hill.—The Monument.—Letters from President Grant and General Hooker.—Oration by General Horace Binney Sargent.—Sketch of his Life.—Other Speakers.—Laying the Corner Stone.—Description of the Shaft.
None of the particulars of the last hours of Captain Standish have been transmitted to our day. So far as is known he enjoyed good health until his last sickness. His will was dated March 1st, 1655. In it he expressed the wish that, should he die at Duxbury, his body should be buried by the side of his two dear daughters, Lora Standish, and Mary Standish, his daughter-in law. One-third part of his estate he bequeathed to his dear and loving wife, Barbara Standish. The following extract from his will indicates the devout character of the man:
“I do, by this my will, make and appoint my loving friends, Mr. Timothy Hatherly and Captain James Cudworth, supervisors of this my last will; and that they will be pleased to do the office of Christian love, to be helpful to my poor wife and children, by their Christian counsel and advice; and if any difference should arise, which I hope will not, my will is that359 my said supervisors shall determine the same, and that they see that my poor wife shall have as comfortable maintainance as my poor state will bear, the whole time of her life, which if you my loving friends please to do, though neither they nor I shall be able to recompense, I do not doubt that the Lord will.”
There is a tradition that Captain Standish’s second wife, Barbara, was a sister of his first wife, Rose. When the Mayflower sailed, she was left an orphan in England. She afterwards reached the colony a full grown woman, and became the wife of the Captain.
STANDISH MONUMENT.
Captain Standish died the 3d of October, 1656. But his character and achievements were such that for two hundred years since his death, his name has been one of the most prominent in our retrospects of the Pilgrim days. His descendants are very numerous. For some time it has been, by these his descendants, in contemplation to rear a monument to his memory. On the 17th of August, 1871, there was a very large gathering of these descendants at Duxbury, to consecrate the spot on Captain’s Hill, where the monument was to be reared. Many others, of the most distinguished men of our land, were also present, who wished to unite in this tribute to the memory of one of the most illustrious names in American annals. President U. S. Grant wrote, regretting his inability to be present:
360 “I am heartily with your association in sympathy, with any movement to honor one who was as prominent in the early history of our country as Miles Standish; but my engagements are such that I regret I am unable to promise to be present in August.”
In the reply from General Hooker to an invitation to attend the celebration, he writes:
“I regret to state that my engagements for the month of August are such as to render it impossible for me to join you on that memorable occasion. It is unnecessary for me to say that I deeply sympathize with the object of your meeting. I have been an admirer of the character of Myles Standish from my boyhood up, and would like to be identified with any body of gentlemen engaged in commemorating his great virtues. To me, his civil and military character towers far above his contemporaries, and they, if I mistake not (when history shall be truthfully written), will be made to appear to be the most remarkable body of men that ever lived. Viewed from our present standpoint, in my opinion, they are now entitled to that judgment. It will be a graceful act on the part of our friends, to erect a monument to his memory; but it must not be expected to add to his fame or immortality. Industry, valor, and integrity were regarded as the cardinal virtues of our forefathers, and I hope they will never be held in less estimation361 by their descendants. One of our gifted poets has happily named ‘Plymouth Rock’ as the corner-stone of the nation. The superstructure promises to be worthy of the foundation. With great respect, I have the honor to be your friend and servant,
“J. Hooker, Major-General.”
Replies of a similar character were returned by Generals Sherman, Sheridan and Burnside, and by W. C. Bryant. General Horace Binney Sargent delivered the oration on this occasion. It was very eloquent in its truthful delineation of the character and career of the illustrious Puritan Captain. Every reader will peruse with interest the following graphic sketch from its pages:
“About the time that all Christendom was in mourning for the murdered Prince of Orange, and deploring in his death the overthrow of the bulwark of the Protestant faith, a little fair-haired child was playing among the hedge-rows of England, who was destined to learn the art of war in the armies of that king’s more warlike son, Prince Maurice, then a boy of seventeen, and to be a tower of defence to the unsoldierly Pilgrim colony of Protestant America.
“That child—whose bones, after nearly fourscore years of toil and war, were laid somewhere on this hill-side, perhaps under our unconscious feet—was Myles Standish, the great Puritan Captain! He was362 born about the year 1580, of English ancestry, dating back to rank and opulence as far as the thirteenth century. Of his childhood, little is known. To defeat the title of his line to lands in England, the rent-roll of which is half a million per annum, the hand of fraud is supposed to have defaced the page that contained the parish record of his birth.
“Unjustly deprived of these vast estates, as he avers in his will, in which he bequeaths his title to his eldest son, it seems probable that he went to Holland near the time of his majority. Queen Elizabeth signed his commission as lieutenant in the English forces, serving in the Netherlands against the cruel armies of the Inquisition. As she died in 1603, about two years after his majority, it is not improbable that we are indebted to that first disappointment, which may have driven him, in his early manhood and some despair, into the army.
“From 1600 to 1609, the year of the great truce between Prince Maurice and the King of Spain, the contest was peculiarly obstinate and bloody. In this fierce school the Puritan captain learned the temper and art of war.
“From 1609 to 1620, a period of truce but not of civil tranquility, the Low Countries were inflamed by those theological disputes of the Calvinists and Arminians which brought the excellent Barneveldt363 to the scaffold, and drove the great Grotius—a fugitive from prison—into exile. In this school, perhaps, Myles Standish learned some uncompromising religious opinions, which brought him into strange sympathy and connection with the Pilgrim church in Leyden. Both periods seemed to leave their impress on his character. The inventory, recorded with his will, mentions the Commentaries of C?sar, Bariffe’s Artillery, three old Bibles, and three muskets, with the harness of the time, complete. His Bibles were old. A well-worn Bible for every musket; and, thank God, a musket, not an old one, to defend each Bible!
“The schedule of his books, some forty in number, records nearly twenty which are devotional or religious. With the memory of one act of singularly resolute daring, when, in obedience to the colonial orders to crush a great Indian conspiracy, he took a squad of eight picked men into the forests, and deemed it prudent to kill the most turbulent warrior with his own hands, we may imagine how the Pilgrim soldier, friend and associate of Brewster, disciple of the saintly Robinson, rose from the perusal of one of the old Bibles, or of “Ball on Faith,” “Spasles against Heresie,” or “Dodd on the Lord’s Supper,” to stab Pecksuot to the heart with his own knife; a giant who had taunted him with his small stature, in almost the very words of Goliah in his insulting364 sneer at David, long before; and to cut off the head of Watawamat, which bloody trophy the elders had ordered him to bring home with him. We can imagine him on the evening of that cheaply victorious day, taking more than usual pleasure in the exultant psalms of the warrior David, and in a chapter of Burrough’s “Christian Contentement” and “Gospell Conversation,” especially as he had his three muskets with bandoleers, and Bariffe’s Artillery, close at his hand. One can feel the unction with which the valorous Pilgrim would religiously fulfil the colonial order to smite the heathen hip and thigh, and hew Agag in pieces before the Lord.
“Not originally, and perhaps never, a member of the Pilgrim church, and possessing many traits which might have belonged to the fierce trooper, in an army whose cavalry was the legitimate descendant of C?sar’s most formidable enemies,—the Batavi, celebrated for cavalry qualities, and long the body-guard of the Roman emperors,—the appearance of the somewhat violent soldier, in the saintly company of Parson Robinson’s church, is an anomaly.
“It has been proven many a time, from the days of Bannockburn, when the Scottish host sank on its knees to receive the benediction of the Black Abbot of Inchaffray, even to our own late day, when many of the best fighting regiments were blessed with the365 most earnest chaplains, that men never tender their lives more gallantly to God and mother-land than when they are fervently preached to and prayed for.
“Yet the all-daring contempt for peril, the roughness of temper, the masterly economy with which Standish saved human life by consumate indifference to personal homicide upon prudent occasion, his power of breathing his own fiery heart into a handful of followers, till he made them an army able to withstand a host in the narr............