St. Botolph's Town

an account of Old Boston
in Colonial Days

BY
MARY CAROLINE CRAWFORD

Author of "Among Old New England Inns,"
"The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees," etc.

Illustrated
[Cover by Blanche McManus]



BOSTON L. C. PAGE & COMPANY

MDCCCCVIII
Copyright, 1908
BY L. C. PAGE & COMPANY (INCORPORATED)

First Impression, September, 1908

Electrotyped and Printed at
THE COLONIAL PRESS:
C. H. Simonds & Co., Boston, U.S.A.

Dorothy Quincy, from a portrait by Copley

FOREWORD

IN my student days colonial history never interested me. I did not then understand why but I am now perfectly certain that it was be­cause persons and events were discussed, in most of the books set before me, only as their careers touched New England and hence in so fragmentary a way as to make them appear mere puppets with tiresome dates attached. The treatment usually accorded Sir Harry Vane offers an excellent example of what I mean. He flashed before us, in the history books, as a brilliant, handsome youth who espoused the cause of Mrs. Hutchinson, — and  then disappeared for ever from view. Because his wonderful career in England was deemed to have nothing to do with the subsequent his­tory of Massachusetts we were deprived of the great privilege it would have been to make his inspiring life-story a part of our mental equip­ment! If this volume errs in the other extreme by talking over-much of Vane and of La Tour after their connection with Boston has ceased the fault may be attributed to a reaction from my own defective education.

The truth is that it is biography rather than history which really allures me; history seems to me worse than useless unless it illus­trates the times of which it writes as those times affected the lives of its men and women. A book like this has no justification, to my mind, save as it makes us understand just a little better the part New England, in the per­son of its chief town, has played in the mighty drama of nations made up of thinking, feeling men and women.

Up to the time of the Revolution, of course, Boston was the biggest place in all the colonies as well as the chief settlement of Massachu­setts. This numerical preeminence needs to be borne in mind if we would understand many acts on both sides of the ocean. To understand the America of to-day, too, we must needs know the Boston of the fathers. So only can we be sure that the excrescences of modern govern­ment are no essential part of that Christian state of which Winthrop dreamed and for which Vane was glad to die.

The books consulted in the preparation of this work have been many and, for the most part, are named in the text. But sweeping credit is here due to the invaluable "Memorial History of Boston" and to the "Boston Antiquities" of Samuel Drake. I have to thank also Mr. Irwin C. Cromack of the engineering department, City of Boston, for kindly aid given and the editor of the Canadian Magazine for permission to incorporate in the chapter "How Winthrop Treated With the La Tours" my article on the "Fight Between La Tour and D'Aulnay" contributed to his magazine last year.