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

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  The Quaker Silvanus Macy (brother of Obed and grandfather of the future founder of Macy’s department store) soon distinguished himself as the most calculating and underhanded of the bank directors. Throughout this period he corresponded regularly with William Rotch in New Bedford, keeping him up to date on the latest in the scandal and often seeking his advice, particularly when it came to Coffin and Gardner. Although Nantucket’s original powerbase of Quaker whaling merchants was now scattered, it was still a force to be reckoned with.

  At one point Macy offered one Henry Purrington $3,000 if he would stick by an earlier claim that not only Coffin, Gardner, and Rice but also Samuel Barker and Jethro Hussey were involved in the robbery. Hearing of Macy’s dealings, Coffin accused him of being “a lying villain, a scandalous infamous felon,” after which the pious Quaker complained to Rotch, “I am sure I ought to be above his slandering me with impunity.”

  Even after Purrington reported the bribe attempt to the bank directors, Macy remained part of the investigation. In September, Coffin insisted that Macy come forward with whatever evidence he had. Macy replied that he needed a few more months to assemble his case; in December, Coffin appealed to what he recognized as the only real authority on the island—the Quaker meeting. In a carefully worded note, he explained that he was “ready to take any reasonable step although I . . . much fear his only aim is procrastination.” There is no evidence that the Quakers (or Silvanus Macy) made any attempt to respond.

  Certainly Coffin’s impulsive nature made him an easy target, especially in a community in which public expressions of emotion were taboo. And as the pressures on him began to mount, Coffin seems to have had an increasingly difficult time controlling himself, becoming a kind of raging bull in a China shop of stolid Quakers. In the fall of 1795, he had an unfortunate run-in with the elderly Nathaniel Coffin. According to a letter Nathaniel wrote to an off-island paper:I went into the U. S. Post Office here at Nantucket, and was quietly seated, waiting for my rotation to get a letter sent. The Barber, Deputy-Post-Master had been out. On his coming into the office, he took me by the collar and said, “Go out before I kick you.” I said to him. “Oh no you won’t.” He replied, “I will,” and added, “Don’t come in here again.” He did not let go his grab on me until he pulled me out. . . . By what the Barber said I was maltreated because I would not talk with him . . . about the Bank, hearing that he was suspected of being a pilferer, etc.

  Not long after this incident, Coffin became so frustrated by the bank directors’ unwillingness to investigate any off-island leads that he decided to take matters into his own hands. Following up on tips that a suspicious sloop known as the Dolphin had left Nantucket within hours of the robbery, he set off on a desperate attempt to clear his name. After traveling to New Haven, New York, and Philadelphia, Coffin obtained warrants for “James Weatherly, John Clark, and one Johnson,” and with the assistance of a constable from Philadelphia returned to New York where they searched the suspects’ homes. On January 7, 1796, he wrote to his wife, “I am now in the most perplexing business I was ever in during my life. I would have left the matter and returned home before now was it not for the persons who are suspected at Nantucket who I believe to be as innocent as angels of knowing anything about the robbery.”

  Due to Coffin’s efforts, Clark and Weatherly were finally brought back to Nantucket during the spring of 1796, with Clark admitting to the bank president Joseph Chase that he and two others had indeed robbed the bank. But Chase chose not to make the confession public, and the testimony was never used in court. Then in May, a guard at the Nantucket jail on High Street reported that Weatherly and Clark had admitted to robbing the bank. Rather than accepting the testimony, the bank directors fired the guard. Soon after that, Weatherly and Clark escaped under mysterious circumstances. Clearly, Chase, Macy, and the other like-minded bank directors were not out to discover the truth; they were out to destroy the reputations of Coffin and his fellow defendants.

  The scandal pitted not only Quaker against Congregationalist, Democrat against Federalist, it also put members of the same family at each other’s throats. At this time Phineas and Kezia Fanning were about as low as a couple could get; impoverished and with a growing family, not to mention maligned by most on the island, they were perfect candidates for Silvanus Macy’s manipulative malevolence. In June of 1796, Phineas, who also happened to be Randall Rice’s lawyer, was thrown in jail on trumped-up debt charges. It was made clear to him, however, that if he would testify that Rice had admitted to robbing the bank, he would become a free man. While in jail, Fanning had several detailed conversations with his fellow inmates, Clark and Weatherly, who may have told him where they buried the money. In any event, once he got out of jail in July, Fanning made a swift and mysterious trip to Long Island.

  Meanwhile, Silvanus Macy and his fellow bank directors went to work on his wife Kezia who had publicly expressed her belief that Rice had indeed robbed the bank. According to her own written testimony, Macy appeared at her house and explained that he was part of a “Secret Committee [with] such power vested in us that we can be at any expense in getting at evidence . . . and are not obliged to be accountable to the bank and how and in what way we spend the money.” After Kezia complained of being “destitute of money” and without a place to live, Macy offered to help, securing the Morris house on Main Street for the Fannings and Kezia’s mother who was now living with them after her dispiriting experience in a Nova Scotia debtor’s prison. As Macy told “brother Obed”: “For Fanning wants us and we want Fanning.”

  But when Fanning returned from Long Island (apparently unsuccessful in his attempts to find the money), he proved frustratingly uncooperative, even though Macy and his “Secret Committee” insisted on visiting him every night for almost an entire week. At one point, according to Kezia, Macy “started out of his chair” and shouted: “It’s enough to make a man eat red hot spikes! Why did thou come from Long Island to destroy our evidence?” Eventually Kezia would come to see the error of her ways, offering detailed testimony in Rice’s defense that also provided a devastating look into the secretive and illegal practices of the Quaker bank directors.

  It soon became apparent that the once idyllic community of Nantucket was in the midst of a cultural meltdown. In July of 1796 a handwritten notice appeared in town: The Starbucks and others that are rich their property shall be burnt the rich on this island ar a curse to the poor for they do no regard their own kindred and they shall be destroyed sooner or later REVENGE

  giving notice may seem strange but the motive is known to myself

  As the social fabric of their community threatened to unravel, some Nantucketers looked to Siasconset, the remote fishing village on the eastern end of the island, as a summertime refuge from the storm. Here, far away from the tumult to the west, Nantucketers were free to live as they had in the old days: a simple and self-consciously nostalgic way of life first popularized in “The Laws of Siasconset,” a ballad published at the height of the bank scandal in 1797. A typical stanza reads:Should party zeal the bosom rile,

  ’Tis here nor felt nor seen sir,

  For chowder well corrects the bile,

  And dissipates the spleen sir.

  Then when with B**k the wild ear swells,

  Some Genius bids renounce it,

  For no revenge nor malice dwells,

  With thee, O Siasconset.

  Meanwhile, back in the real world, Nantucket’s dark and seamy underbelly was put on display for all to see in an agonizing series of legal battles staged in Barnstable and Boston courts. Even though there was the same flimsy evidence against all those accused of the bank robbery, only Randall Rice was found guilty. By the time he emerged from a Boston jail—thanks to an executive pardon—he was a ruined man, and soon ended up in jail on Nantucket for debt. From the Quakers’ point of view, even if the off-islanders had indeed stolen the money, it was Coffin and the others who had masterminded the job.

  In 1805,
ten long years after the robbery, William Coffin attended a meeting of the House of Representatives in Boston to promote the appointment of a second notary public on the island. At this time, Nantucket was represented by the seventy-one-year-old Micajah (pronounced “My-KAY-jaw”) Coffin, a staunch Quaker. At one point in the proceedings Micajah—who had once used his political influence to change the venue of the bank robbery trials to the Democrats’ advantage—asked a fellow representative if he knew who had put forward the request for an additional notary public on Nantucket. The representative pointed to William Coffin sitting in the audience. “What!” Micajah exclaimed, “that convict?” When the representative asked what he was talking about, the Quaker mentioned “the business of the Nantucket Bank”; after the representative protested that Coffin had been “honorably acquitted,” Micajah insisted, “That did not make him the less guilty thee knows.”

  When Micajah and William Coffin ran into each other a few weeks later in the offices of the Nantucket Marine Insurance Company, William’s temper got the better of him. After tweaking the elderly Quaker’s nose—to the point that it bled—he called him “an old rascal.” Their next confrontation would be in court, with Micajah suing for assault and battery while William claimed defamation of character. After several appeals, William was found guilty in the assault case and assessed damages of $15.00. Micajah, however, ended up the ultimate loser, as the court ordered him to pay William $2,500 for slander. Had it not been for his sons’ financial assistance, Micajah would have lost his house on Pine Street.

  The turmoil had an inevitable effect on the quality of daily life on the island. In 1807 James Freeman observed, “It seems to be universally allowed that [the Nantucketers] no longer retain their former purity of morals; but that during the last twelve years in particular, a spirit of bitterness has been introduced among them; that the people no longer live together like a family of brothers; but that they hate, and revile, and persecute each other. The causes of this melancholy change ought not to be mentioned.” Many people simply left the island. Others began to reinvent themselves, breaking old alliances and forging new ones—particularly when it came to religion. Kezia Fanning, born and raised a Quaker and who later turned to Congregationalism when she married Phineas, became a Methodist as did a growing number of Nantucketers. William Coffin and a group of other Congregationalists, unhappy with their church’s increasingly restrictive orthodoxy, began the Second Congregational Church on Orange Street, now the Unitarian Church. Meanwhile, Quakerism continued to self-destruct. Throughout the early decades of the century, more and more members were disowned (many of whom joined the new Congregational church), and then in the 1830s, what had once been the rock-solid foundation of the community would fracture into a group of bitterly feuding sects as the doctrinal controversies that were dividing Quaker communities all across the country inevitably came to Nantucket.

  But the true deathblow to “Old Nantucket” would come from a different quarter. It was not just Quakerism and whaling that had defined colonial Nantucket. The common ownership of land also helped to create a sense of the community as one extended family. In 1781, a Quaker by the name of George Churchman visited the island and commented that this landmanagement system promoted a “social, friendly and commendable way of living.” Unfortunately, this form of ownership was not particularly “friendly” to the land. Each year, the island’s proprietors (of which there were approximately 300 by the turn of the century) would allot a different plot of land to its members for raising crops. In 1801 an observer claimed that “the tendency of this scheme to exhaust the land, is easily seen, as no possessor has an interest to give it any permanent improvements, but, on the contrary, to impoverish it as much as possible.”

  Most of the land was dedicated to grazing sheep, and here again, the system was not particularly fair or effective when it came to the resources involved. Even Obed Macy, who was one of the largest shareholders in the proprietorship, recognized its flaws, admitting that an inordinate number of sheep died in the winter due to a lack of care. According to Macy, the proprietors, “by long custom, have become so reconciled to the measure, that the thought of doing wrong has almost become extinct.” There were proprietors, however, who were having second thoughts.

  In 1810, a group composed chiefly of members of the Mitchell family but also including—you guessed it—William Coffin entered a petition claiming that they could not “possess, occupy, and improve” their portion of the land as long as it was in common ownership. As a consequence, they requested that portions equivalent to their shares in the proprietary be set aside and designated theirs.

  This was, of course, heresy of the highest order. In May, 1811, an anonymous Nantucketer published a pamphlet called “A Nest of Love Disturbed, or, The Farmer’s Dialogue” that defended the proprietary. Although the identity of the author has remained a mystery, it may have been Obed Macy. Indeed, the pamphlet reads like a warm-up for his History as it puts the current squabble in the larger context of the island’s past. According to the writer, the beauty of the proprietary system is that there is no need for individual owners to fence off their land—an exceedingly expensive undertaking that would not be financially feasible for most “small proprietors,” especially given the poor quality of the land. As it stood at that time, even those who were not members of the proprietary could pasture a cow for only three or four dollars per year. The Obed-like narrator goes on to claim that the common ownership of land is perfectly suited to a community whose “principal employment” is whaling and that the petitioners (being merchants rather than farmers) do not fully appreciate the ramifications of what they are proposing.

  By the time “A Nest of Love Disturbed” hit the presses, the case was already in court. For an island still suffering from the aftershocks of the bank scandal, it was a painfully familiar scenario. Representing the proprietors was Silvanus Macy (who would make a total of nine trips to Boston during the proceedings); for the petitioners it was William Coffin. And once again it was a bitter and dirty battle as the two sides went at each other tooth and nail. In the midst of the court battle, Obed Macy wrote in his journal, “Could we all view these things as they are, how soon would we settle all things in dispute and become a family of Love.” Contributing to the righteousness of Macy’s despair was the court’s decision in favor of Coffin and his fellow petitioners.

  As if the tensions associated with this court battle were not already enough, the outbreak of the War of 1812 created yet another sense of déjà vu on the island. Fearing a replay of the Revolution, large numbers of families fled to the mainland as land values plummeted to next to nothing. Whereas during the Revolution Nantucketers had looked to Quaker whaling merchants such as William Rotch and Timothy Folger when it came to negotiating with British and American forces, the island was no longer able to present a united front. As a British gunboat patrolled the waters from Great Point to Tuckernuck Island and townspeople begged for food in the streets, Democrats and Federalists bickered over what the island’s policy should be.

  As was true in the bank and commons fights, William Coffin was once again a prominent figure. During a town meeting in May of 1814, Coffin and his fellow Federalists, fearful that the selectmen were jeopardizing the safety of the island because of their pro-French, anti-British leanings, became so “tumultuous and riotous” that the sheriff literally read them the riot act. According to one account of the meeting, “William Coffin observed that as the sheriff had read the riot act and commanded the people to disperse, he was of the opinion it was best to go and went out of the meeting, and many others followed. . . .” With a flair for the dramatic and the pugnacity of a street fighter, Coffin made it perfectly plain that in the war for Nantucket’s future, the gloves were off.

  And, in a remarkable turn of events, Federalists ultimately gained a temporary majority on Nantucket. Although all negotiations were conducted by a bipartisan committee, the island’s inhabitants agreed to a private and highly con
troversial peace treaty with Britain: If the Nantucketers quit paying taxes to the U.S. government, the British would reestablish the flow of provisions to the island. As a consequence of this “separate peace,” two British admirals, one of whom was of Nantucket descent—Sir Isaac Coffin—traveled to England’s Dartmoor prison, where thousands of American seamen were being detained. Coffin made a point of assembling the Nantucket sailors together and assuring them that they would soon be released “on account of belonging to a neutral country.” What Coffin and the others did not know was that a peace treaty ending the war had been signed less than a month earlier on December 24, 1814.

  Whatever relief the Nantucketers felt concerning the end of the war (word finally reached the island on February 16th) was disrupted by the turmoil associated with what became known as the “Great Set-off,” as a huge tract of land on the eastern end of the island became the property of the petitioners. Making it all the worse was the proximity of this embattled piece of land (known as Plainfield) to the hallowed soil of Siasconset. Soon the proprietary was swamped with additional requests for set-offs as the commons underwent a gradual process of disintegration not unlike what was happening to the Quaker side of Nantucket’s identity.

  By the early 1820s, the town was no longer the self-contained, almost pastoral community it had once been. First the Newtown Gate at the end of Pleasant Street, where an “Uncle Cash” had collected tolls from those headed east out of town, was torn down. Then a year later the island’s two sheep shearings—at Gibbs and Maxcey’s Ponds—were consolidated into a single, much less intimate gathering at Miacomet Pond. Sheep and fences were still an omnipresent part of life on Nantucket, but the character of the place had been forever changed.