Historic Nantucket, October 1982, Vol. 30 No. 2

Daniel Webster and Nantucket by Merle T. Orleans IN 1831 "A MEMOIR of the Life of Daniel Webster" was written by Samuel L. Knapp and published by Stimpson and Clapp in Boston. Mr. Webster, one of the greatest lawyers and politicians America has ever known, visited Nantucket in the summer of 1828. Coming to the island as a politician, he was one of the most important lecturers, along with the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass, to speak from the stage of the Great Hall of the Nantucket Atheneum prior to its destruction in the Great Fire of 1846.

Mr. Knapp's story of Mr. Webster's visit to Nantucket provides in­ teresting reading in the light of Nantucket's problems in 1982.

"A slight, accidental circumstance in the life of Mr. Webster, will show how necessary it is for a statesman to be thoroughly acquainted with the whole history of his country to the greatest minuteness. In the summer of 1828, Mr. Webster visited the island of Nantucket on pro­ fessional business, but was so much struck with the people and their place of residence, that he took pains to get all the information about the place and inhabitants he could readily find. He examined the island, apparently only a mound of sand, to the amount of twenty-three or four thousand acres, without forests, or even a grove to be seen; and only a few single trees which seemed to have been planted in doubt, and watched by care, without much faith in their growth. Yet, on this seem­ ingly barren island, he ascertained that there were fifteen thousand sheep, three or four hundred cows, and one hundred and fifty horses, that wandered where they pleased from one end to the other of this great pasture, summer and winter, spring and fall, and all thrived on the scanty grass which sprang up above the sand.

"The inhabitants of this island he found a shrewd, intelligent peo­ ple, amounting to nearly eight thousand souls, bearing all the strong marks of the primitive simplicity of their ancestors; and unlike, in many respects, any other maritime people that history has made us ac­ quainted with. The island was settled in 1659 by emigrations from the towns of Salisbury and Amesbury in the county of Essex, in Massachusetts. Many of those settlers who came to the island the se­ cond or third years after the proprietors (twenty-seven in number) had taken possession of the island; and had fled from those towns from fear of the emissaries of Charles the Second, who pursued the friends and adherents of Hugh Peters with unrelenting severity, many of whom had come to Salisbury for security, but thought it wiser to take a less noted place. The island had been the favorite abode of a very large tribe of Indians, which had been carried off by a sweeping sickness that preceded the coming of the Pilgrims. The English emigrants, unfor­ tunately, in their hatred to a wilderness, felled the forest trees in order to extend their crops of English grain and Indian corn; but this act of