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Originally published in the Historic Nantucket, Vol 44, no. 3 (Winter 1996), p. 105-107

The Whipping Post
By Nathaniel Philbrick


On a summer night at the end of the nineteenth century, Eliza Mitchell sat in the gloom of her empty house with a pen, a child's composition book, and a terrifying story to tell: how completely, how utterly Nantucket had changed. The whalemen were gone. The Quakers were gone. And, of course, the Indians were gone.

The Indians. It surprised her how she kept coming back to them in this book of reminiscences begun just prior to her eighty-eighth birthday, on February 22, 1895. On one page she pasted a daguerreotype of Dorcas Honorable, who along with Abram Quary had the distinction of being one of Nantucket's "last Indians," and wrote: "6 feet tall, a noble woman of her tribe, always kept aloof from bad company, lived to be over eighty."

She also wrote about Zaccheus Macy, one of the English people who offered assistance during the almost biblical plague of 1763-4 that, in Eliza's words, "swept away nearly all of them, and not a white person had the least touch of it." Then there was the story of the whipping post.

She first heard it when she was only eight years old. That was during the War of 1812, a difficult time on Nantucket since a British gunboat kept mainland supplies from reaching the island. She was playing at a friend's house when an old woman (almost the same age as Eliza was in 1895) stopped by for a visit with her friend's mother. Someone made mention of the Indians and "how few there were now living" on Nantucket — less than half a dozen. This prompted the old woman to recall how it used to be when she was a girl, long before the Revolution, when there were two tribes on the island: one to the west "toward Madaket," the other to the east "beyond Gibbs Pond."

Then the old woman recounted the incident from her childhood that Eliza would never forget: the last time the town's whipping post had been used.

She had been younger than Eliza at the time, five, maybe four years old. Given Eliza's estimate of the old woman's age, this would have put more than one-hundred and sixty years between Eliza at her writing desk and this four-year-old child preparing for bed on a cool autumn night in the 1730s.

As the girl and her older brothers and sisters changed into their night clothes and tightened their beds, there was a sound at the front door. It was their father. He was clearly agitated and yet was trying desperately to remain calm, announcing that mother "need not retire or undress the children." When asked why, he simply said that "there was trouble brewing with the Indians." But all of them, especially her brothers and sisters, demanded to know more. Reluctantly, her father explained: The day before, an Indian had come into town and "carefully, though very privately" told of a secret plot by the two tribes to attack the English settlement and take over the island. Even though the character of the Indian informant was somewhat suspect, the town officials were inclined to take the warning seriously. When you lived on an island that was a three-hour sail from the mainland (in ideal conditions), you were not about to dismiss even the wildest rumor.

Word went out to all the men that they would be divided into several companies: some would stay in town to protect the women and children in case the attack materialized; other groups would head out to the various Indian villages in an attempt to discover if, in fact, an uprising was in the works. In the meantime, it had been "thought best not to inform their families until the last minute."

But now the truth was out, and according to the old woman, there were "many fears and some tears." Borrowing a page from the frontier towns in the western half of the colonies, the Nantucketers decided to consolidate the women and children into a few, easily defended houses, and so "the families gathered their little ones close around them, club'd together, well as they could." The old woman remembered laying her head upon her mother's lap, and gradually falling to sleep, "as children will."

It was time for the men to search the darkness for Indian war parties. All night they patrolled the treeless moors in the swirling mist, their eyes and ears straining for some indication of the Indian bands their imaginations inevitably placed behind every rise of land and within every hollow. But by daybreak they had found nothing. Exhausted, they returned to town and made their report.

The next day, the town's sheriff and "fifty well-armed men" set out to determine, if possible, the "meaning of it all." Instead of finding the Indians in the midst of a war dance, "they found all quiet." It was harvest time, and the Indians were "merrily husking their corn." When they learned about the white people's fears, the natives were deeply disturbed and demanded to know who had told them this false story.

As it turned out, the informant had spent the last three days in a drunken stupor, having used the money the English had paid him to purchase rum. According to the old woman, the Indians were "so highly incensed [that] they came near tearing him apart." Eventually it was decided that he would receive no less than thirty lashes (the limit allowed by colonial law) at the town's whipping post.

When it came time to inflict the punishment, a large crowd had gathered in front of the town hall at the bend in the sandy highway that is now known as Main Street. Passions had cooled somewhat, so it was agreed to reduce the number of lashes.

Still, the old woman remembered, "it was all brutal enough," and afterwards the Indian informant was "proclaimed an outcast among his people." Whether or not a collective sense of shame had anything to do with it, the whipping post was "soon removed," making this the last public whipping on Nantucket.

Later, on other nights, Eliza wrote down a few more stories, but none had the urgency of the tale of the whipping post. She would live to see her eighty-ninth birthday, but just barely, dying the day after on February 23, 1896, "Deeply beloved and mourned," according to a postscript written on the last page of the notebook "by her sons."

Like any good story, the tale of the whipping post raises more questions than it answers. Its portrayal of a biracial microcosm on the brink seems to contradict the findings of several modern-day researchers, one of whom insists that Native white relations on Nantucket were "among the best in America."

Historians quite rightly distrust anecdotes such as Eliza's. The requirements of narrative and the fuzziness of memory often distort the facts to the point that the event described has little to do with the event as lived. Yet, when the facts are few and far between, tradition may be all we have to go on.

Although he was a generation younger than Eliza's source, Obed Macy, author of the island's first history, had heard the same story. In a paragraph in his History of Nantucket (1835) that has been almost completely ignored in the twentieth century, Macy describes a rumored Indian "conspiracy" that corresponds closely to Eliza's account. According to Macy there had been a long-standing claim on the part of the Indians that the English had "unfairly purchased their lands," and that at some point, well before the incident described by Eliza, the Indians "became so bold as to threaten the English with total extermination, if they refused any longer to listen to their complaints." Rather than an isolated incident, the possibility of an Indian uprising had been threatening for quite some time.

Macy provides only the briefest account of Eliza's story and makes no mention of the drunken Indian informant and the whipping post. He also offers no date for the incident. But in two different Boston newspapers from early October 1738 (which corresponds almost exactly with Eliza's time frame), are reports that on Nantucket Island an Indian friendly to the English had disclosed a plot to attack and burn the white settlement. Although there had been no bloodshed, the accounts make it clear that fears remained high— not only on the island but also among its whaling fleet since the typical crew of thirteen men contained between four and eight Indians.

Whether it's Eliza's traditional account, Obed Macy's quasi-historical reference, or the stories from the newspapers, one thing remains clear: white people on Nantucket in 1738 were not entirely comfortable with their Native American neighbors. Absent from these three accounts is the Indians' perspective of the incident, making it difficult to determine whether it was a case of unfounded hysteria on the part of the English or whether a native uprising was not entirely out of the question.

In the end it all comes down to a story. Even with confirmation from several other sources, we are ultimately left with an anecdote, like a flickering candle, passed from an old woman to a child who in turn grew old, wrote it down, and passed it on to us. Historians who dismiss such a story do so at their peril.

The old woman was not Eliza's only source of information. Elsewhere in her notebook she wrote of the man from whom she learned most of what she knew about Nantucket's past. His name was Benjamin Franklin Folger, and he lived alone in a Quary-like shack in the fishing village of Siasconset on the eastern end of the island.

Eliza began visiting Folger when she was twelve years old. Folger (who confirmed the old woman's tale of the whipping post) had an encyclopedic knowledge of the island. He knew the Indian traditions, the English traditions; he was also a genealogist who could recite a person's family tree from memory. Although he wrote a handful of articles for the local paper (including a story about Abram Quary soon after the Indian's death), Folger had an ingrained aversion to the written word. Eliza remembered, "[H]e never seemed willing to give me an opportunity to write any [of his stories] down. But simply said, 'Your memory is good enough, and you'll remember, because you cannot forget.' And so he would, when all was just right, tell me stories of the past."

Instead of the eccentricity of an old man, Folger's almost reverent insistence on the spoken word was part of a truly ancient tradition on Nantucket. Long before the arrival of the English settlers, the island's Native Americans had been relying on oral tradition to preserve their heritage and culture. Instead of a hodgepodge of scattered memories, these traditions were part of a rigorously recorded body of knowledge. In several seventeenth-century deeds on Nantucket, in which the English provided a translation of a Native American account, we find references to gatherings of "great men" during which much of the business of the island was transacted and subsequently remembered:

"old tahtahcummamuck he Saith thare was a great metting and . . . they ware in the house and they went out to Smock it and when those great men come in again they said that they did put into the hands of Cuscuttogens father (Pocomo and Shawkemo)...."

During treaty negotiations in Pennsylvania, Folger's namesake, Benjamin Franklin (whose grandfather, Peter Folger, happened to be Nantucket's first Indian interpreter) was witness to the kinds of gatherings described in the Nantucket deed. Although from a different area and time, the account provides a fascinating glimpse into the workings of Native American oral tradition:

The old men sit in the foremost ranks, the warriors in the next, and the women and the children in the hindmost. The business of the women is to take exact notice of what passes, imprint it in their memories, for they have no writing, and communicate it to their children. They are the records of the council, and they preserve tradition of the stipulations in treaties a hundred years back, which when we compare them with our writings, we always find exact.

The scene described here is not all that different from the one Eliza recounted in her notebook: of an old man telling a young girl stories and insisting that she "cannot forget."

Land and treaty negotiations were not the only subjects preserved by Native American oral tradition. In the case of Nantucket, a surprising number of myths and legends specific to the island have survived. A central figure in many of these tales is the mythic giant Maushop, who is credited with creating Nantucket. Maushop appears in many guises: as an avuncular builder and as a haunted destroyer. He also changes over time. Legends recorded in the eighteenth century differ radically from those told by Wampanoags from Mashpee and Gay Head in the twentieth century. Yet, when all these tales are taken together, a plot line begins to emerge, leaving us with, as in the case of Eliza and the whipping post, a terrifying story to tell....

 

About the Author: Island historian Nathaniel Philbrick is scholar-in-residence at the Coffin School and author of Away Off Shore, Nantucket Island and Its People 1602-1890. He has kindly given us permission to publish this excerpt from his book-in-progress Through Abram's Eyes: The Native American Legacy of Nantucket Island.