Away Off Shore: Nantucket Island and Its People, 1602-1890

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  After the Revolution, this group of Quaker Nantucketers, becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the ubiquity of slavery in the South, began to emigrate once again, this time to the west into Indiana and Ohio. Even though they were now becoming second- and even third-generation mainlanders, they did not forget their origins, looking back with pride to the island that they still considered to be the “Nation of Nantucket.” Economy, Indiana, was first called Nantucket by its original settlers from North Carolina and features a “Tucket Burying Ground” full of Barnards, Coffins, Macys, Swains, and Starbucks. In 1819 a Friends Meeting in Salem, Indiana, was organized in which its members vowed “to cherish the memory and emulate the example of the pioneers of Nantucket who established and maintained a commonwealth when there was no other in New England.”

  Crèvecoeur recognized that this concept of the island as a “commonwealth” was as much a state of mind as it was a function of the physical place on which the Nantucketers lived. Before the conclusion of the Revolution, he correctly predicted that if they were one day “driven from this spot, . . . they might perhaps be allowed to transport themselves in their own vessels to some other spot or island, which they would soon fertilize by the same means with which they have fertilized this.”

  Soon after the end of hostilities, with the once great Nantucket whaling fleet in ruins, this prophecy became a reality when a band of eighteen Nantucket families relocated to Hudson, New York, more than 100 miles up the Hudson River. Here, on a bay safely removed from the threat of privateers, they reassembled houses that had been taken apart and shipped in pieces from the island. By 1786 there were four wharves, several warehouses, a ropewalk, sail loft, candle factory, and 150 dwellings (many of them lean-tos with roof walks)—all based on the Nantucket model. In the first twenty years of its existence, this offshoot community grew to the point that it temporarily outranked Nantucket as a whaling port. It is reported that in 1802, fifteen vessels a day cleared from Hudson, with the port becoming so crowded that it was possible to walk across the bay on the decks of waiting vessels. According to one Hudson resident writing in 1928, whose great-grandmother had been born on the island, “The news at Nantucket . . . was always a subject of keen interest” among Hudson residents.

  As we have seen, many of Nantucket’s most ambitious whaling merchants were avowed Tories. The continued strength of their old loyalties combined with the loss of London as a market (not surprisingly, Britain imposed a hefty duty on American whale oil) led several influential members of the community to propose in 1785 that the island remain an independent or “neutral” state. Needless to say, Massachusetts authorities took a rather dim view of this rather extraordinary proposal. So in 1786 Timothy Folger and Samuel Starbuck led a group of Nantucket loyalists to Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. By that summer, a total of forty families had removed to Dartmouth, initiating a whale fishery that would ultimately employ 150 seamen and a total of twenty-two vessels. How big this fishery might have become will never be known. As early as April of 1786, the British government, which had hopes of capitalizing on Nantucket’s misfortunes by establishing a whaling monopoly, decided that the last thing it needed was another colonial whaling port to compete against. Rather than setting up a rival Nantucket outpost, the British wanted to divide and conquer the Nation of Nantucket by luring its whalemen directly to English-owned whalers. So, only a few months into its settlement, the Dartmouth enclave (which would continue on for a number of years despite the lack of support) had the plug pulled out by the British government.

  Another leading Nantucketer, William Rotch, attempted to convince the British government that it should help finance his relocation to England, where he, too, proposed to create a transplanted microcosm of Nantucket. However, the London whaling merchants once again applied pressure on their political leaders, insisting that Britain had no need of Rotch. So the savvy Quaker merchant took his Nantucket “genius” to—of all places—Dunkirk, France. Here was the ultimate test case: a foreign culture on the other side of the Atlantic. If the Nantucketers could make it work here, they could make it work anywhere.

  With the help of bounties on oil and some other inducements, Rotch was able to get a sizeable fleet of twenty vessels up and running by 1789, although only nine Nantucket families actually relocated to Dunkirk. The settlement was less of a community than a marketing ploy, a way for Rotch to funnel Nantucket oil into the European market. As far as he was concerned, what was then known as the “Southern Whale Fishery” was an international business that no single nation (unless, of course, you were talking about the Nation of Nantucket) could call its own. In a letter to Samuel Rodman he rather smugly confided, “I wish our great [states] men may consider they have not sufficient power to overturn us in this branch. . . .” Although Rotch’s overseas ventures seem to have been initially motivated by a genuine desire to help his native island, his conduct of the Dunkirk fishery made it increasingly clear where his true loyalties lay. According to the Rhode Island whaling merchant Moses Brown, Rotch had allowed “the profits of so gilded and flattering prospects . . . overbalance the ties of country, friends, etc.”

  Galled by Rotch’s success in France, the English government finally relented when they were presented with yet another plan to initiate a new Nantucket whaling colony on British soil. In 1790, Lord Charles Greville, nephew of Sir William Hamilton, was empowered by Parliament to begin developing a Welsh harbor known as Milford Haven into a whaling port. To drum up interest, Greville immediately sent an emissary to both Nantucket and Dartmouth. Unlike the London whale fishery, where seamen received wages, the Milford Haven fishery would be based on the American lay system. At one point, Greville explicitly stated his three aims in establishing a whaling port in Milford Haven: “1. To cut up both French and Colonial competition in the Whale Fishery. 2nd. To separate the detached Nantucketers from the Nantucketers remaining in America. The 3rd object is personal to me, vizt.—To give permanency to my establishment by a further addition of original whalers, either by general invitation or by a partial one.”

  Whether they were in Nova Scotia, Dunkirk, or still based on their native island, the Nantucket whalemen were what Greville was after, but he was only partially successful in achieving his aims. In Dartmouth both Starbuck and Folger agreed to make the switch, but the two merchants seem to have alienated many of their fellow Nova Scotian Nantucketers by negotiating private pensions for themselves (of 150 pounds per year) when they were supposedly negotiating for the colony as a whole. Feeling against Starbuck ran so high that the Nantucket Monthly Meeting (which maintained jurisdiction in Dartmouth) refused to grant him a removal certificate. Writing from Milford Haven in 1794, he complained of his “grievous hurt” in respect to the accusations. Folger’s family does not seem to have been thrilled by the move either. Timothy’s wife would record in her diary, “I step’d my feet on Welsh land and a grievous day it was to me.”

  Despite the controversy, Folger and Starbuck were soon sending out whalers from a port that was being designed and built to their specifications. Meanwhile, back in Dunkirk, William Rotch was in the midst of the French Revolution—certainly an ironic fate for the Quaker pacifist who had voyaged across the Atlantic in search of an alternative to his own revolution-ravaged island. In a letter he admitted that “I never expected to be in this midst of a second Revolution,” and in 1794 he would finally return to Nantucket when war erupted between France and England. His son Benjamin went to Milford Haven, where he soon became the port’s leading whaling merchant.

  Although Milford Haven enjoyed its share of prosperity, the War of 1812 had a devastating effect on the whale fishery. Benjamin Rotch would go bankrupt; back in America, even the once booming port of Hudson, New York, would fall into a disastrous decline. On Nantucket, the war provoked yet another wave of migration as islanders left for the Kennebec River area in Maine (a favorite destination for Nantucketers even before the Revolution) and the west, with a raft of Quaker removal certificates being
issued to the “Miami Monthly Meeting, State of Ohio.” In 1811, Micajah Coffin wrote Walter Folger, Jr. (then in Boston), concerning “our Friends” who had recently left for Ohio. After quoting extensively from an enthusiastic letter written by Phebe Myrick, “who left this place almost broken hearted and her eyes full of tears,” Coffin reported: “Such an account from the woman that left this place with so great reluctance appears to begin to work on many minds. . . . I begin to be apprehensive of being deserted by the major part of the middling class of townsmen with a great many of the more wealthy.”

  Coffin’s fears were well-founded. The lure of the American West was so strong that even transplanted Nantucketers from as far away as Milford Haven were tempted by the promise of yet another new beginning. On September 25, 1818, a son of the bankrupt Benjamin Rotch wrote to his friend Gayer Starbuck, urging him to leave Wales and join him in Princeton, Indiana, where he was then living in his Nantucket uncle’s cabin on the edge of a vast, lush prairie: “I wish a few of my industrious neighbors could find themselves suddenly translated from Milford to the prairie or, in other words, from a scanty and hardly earned pittance to a comfortable independent trade—for in this country obsequiousness makes no part of a man’s stock in trade. . . . Every day I have reason to wish you were here.” He may have taken a round-about route, but this removal was now back amid his Nantucket brethren, pushing west across the American heartland.

  Although by this time Hudson, Dartmouth, Dunkirk, and Milford Haven had all fallen by the wayside, there was one Nantucket microcosm yet to be reckoned with. A year after returning to his native island, William Rotch, finding that his decade spent abroad had not exactly endeared him to the local populace, decided to relocate once again. This time he did not have to travel far—to what was then known as Bedford, Massachusetts, where in 1763 his father Joseph Rotch had started a small settlement on the mouth of the Acushnet River.

  The “palmy days” to come would launch both New Bedford and what Melville called the “great original,” Nantucket, on yet another roller coaster ride of prosperity. But as we shall see, the Nantucket of the nineteenth century would have less and less in common with the “great original” she had once been.

  CHAPTER 14

  A “Nest of Love” No Longer: William Coffin and the Bank, Commons, and School Wars

  ON AN ISLAND OF Quaker whalemen, William Coffin marched to the beat of a different drummer. A self-described wig-maker and hair-draper, not to mention a Congregationalist, he was also Nantucket’s first U.S. Postmaster. But more than anything else, it was Coffin’s political affiliation that set him apart from the Quaker-whaling mainstream. Because on Nantucket, as was true throughout America in the years after the Revolution, party politics had begun to divide the people into two bitterly feuding camps.

  On one side were the Federalists: generally well-to-do merchants and landowners who revered John Adams and whose international sympathies were with Britain. Most of Nantucket’s modest Federalist population were either Congregationalists or, in Coffin’s words, “Nothingarians.” On the other side were the Democrats, otherwise known as Jeffersonians, Republicans, or, to their enemies, Jacobins. The Democrats were also the Quaker party on Nantucket, and in keeping with their high regard for Thomas Jefferson, their international loyalties lay with France, strengthened in many instances through service on Rotch whalers out of Dunkirk.

  As an outspoken Federalist, William Coffin seems to have enjoyed (in the beginning at least) his role as an outsider. In a letter written in 1793 to a friend in Virginia, the thirty-seven-year-old Coffin mocked the calculated simplicity of the island’s Quaker merchants as well as their fondness for French revolutionary rhetoric: “[M]any of the owners themselves work in making casks in the absence of their ships, and on their return put on their frock and trousers, cart and cooper their own oil. If a Sans Culotte Frenchman was here, he would exclaim ‘Ça Ira, Ça Ira—Liberté and Egalité en Perfection.’ ”

  Whether or not he was whistling in the dark, William Coffin does not seem to have realized the seriousness of the growing rift between Federalists and Democrats on Nantucket, a “contention” that would ultimately “rage with pestilential fury” throughout the community, threatening to ruin the lives of not only Coffin but many of his friends. As with most deep-seated differences, it involved something more than mere matters of political opinion. Hidden beneath the Federalist-Democrat overlay was a battle over the very heart and soul of the island: Whether or not Quakerism would remain the dominant religious and social force on Nantucket in the century to come.

  Prior to the Revolution, the Society of Friends had undergone a tightening of its Discipline, a process that turned into an outright purge during the war, when dozens of young men were disowned for sailing on privateers. Even after the war, the winnowing process continued as disownments were handed out to those who dared to inoculate themselves against small pox, join the Masons, wear fashionable clothes, update their hairstyles, attend dances or Congregational weddings, apprentice their children to non-Quakers, and, of course, marry outside the Friends.

  By 1793, the religion that had once functioned as a much needed cohesive force was in danger of becoming spiritually and socially irrelevant. Although it still controlled most of the wealth and power on the island (accounting for approximately two-thirds of the population), the Quaker establishment found itself increasingly challenged by a new generation of Nantucketers who had little regard for the old way of doing things. Instead of relying upon the island’s longstanding tradition of mediation, many of these men, with names like Coffin and Gardner (as opposed to Macy and Starbuck), often utilized an array of Kezia-like legal tactics to achieve their ends. They also had an inordinate amount of political clout (given their minority status on the island) since the Federalists were the ruling party throughout the rest of Massachusetts.

  Among this group it is hard to conceive of a man whom the Quakers would have viewed with more suspicion than William Coffin—a Congregationalist, Federalist, and Mason who attended to people’s vanity on a daily basis in his barbershop on Main Street. Even more alarming was his interest in progressive social reforms; indeed, Coffin was known to sermonize on the need for a free public school system on Nantucket—a horrifying prospect to a tight-fisted Quaker community that had chosen to ignore Massachusetts educational laws for more than a century.

  As a portrait painted when he was an old man makes clear, William Coffin was no pushover. With a craggy brow, Karl Malden nose, and protruding jaw, he was as tough and hardbitten as any Quaker sea captain. But Coffin was no captain and he certainly was no Quaker. Here was just the man to drag Nantucket, kicking and screaming, into the nineteenth century.

  On a foggy Saturday night in June, 1795, three men, using keys they had manufactured out of pewter spoons, broke into the newly opened Nantucket Bank on Main Street. It was exhausting, back-breaking work, but in a few hours they had cleaned out the vault of more than $20,000 in gold coins, lugging the clinking sacks through the black, unlit streets of town to a sloop tied up at the waterfront. By the time the break-in was discovered on Monday, the thieves were long gone.

  A community that prided itself on the fact that most homes had no door locks was ill-equipped to deal with a robbery of this magnitude. (When told about the bank robbery, a Nantucketer in Hudson joked that “they must have left their latch string outside.”) Although the robbery had occurred during the sheep shearing festival—an annual event that flooded the island with “strangers”—most Nantucketers were either unwilling or unable to believe that someone from the world beyond their own island could have stolen the money. And with no real evidence, each individual’s opinion on the bank robbery became a litmus test for his or her political, religious, and personal loyalties as townspeople continued to “throng the streets” for days, speculating about who had stolen the money.

  On July 9th, Joseph Chase, the bank’s president, met with William Coffin, a fellow board member of the bank, at the lo
wer section of town square. They had much to discuss as they strolled toward Old North Wharf. The first suspect to emerge from Chase’s investigation into the robbery was the bank’s cashier, Randall Rice, a Rhode Islander who had married a local girl and, besides working for the bank, owned and operated a slaughterhouse while also doing some legal work on the side. Rice had initially come under suspicion when Walter Folger, Sr. (a leading candle manufacturer, amateur phrenologist, and Democrat), claimed that Rice, a Federalist, “looked guilty.” Now, as the two bank directors walked along the waterfront, Coffin was hopeful that Chase and his investigators had come up with something more substantial. He was to be rudely disappointed.

  Not far from Rice’s slaughterhouse at the foot of Old North Wharf, Chase turned to Coffin and said, “You are pointed out by Stafford, the conjuror, and by God I think you guilty.” Dumbfounded, Coffin was initially at a loss to respond to the charge. But as he began to deny all connection with the robbery, it soon became clear that Chase had already made up his mind. By August the president had consulted a Providence astrologer who described one of the four people who robbed the bank as “a quarrelsome fellow, a big bony man with rough face and sandy hair.” This, Chase and the Democrat bank directors agreed, was William Coffin.

  Although it was not much consolation, William Coffin was not alone. His best friend, Albert Gardner, a merchant and coasting captain (not to mention a Federalist), was also accused of taking part in the robbery. Rumor had it that Coffin and Gardner had planned to use the money to corner the whale oil market on Nantucket. The testimonies of astrologers and phrenologists were bolstered by a prostitute and a village idiot who claimed to have seen Rice, Coffin, Gardner, and assorted others at the scene of the crime. That the witnesses later recanted their testimonies did little to alter the perception that Coffin and company were guilty.