840 History of Hingham. 



Lieut., while William Fearing was chosen 4th Lieut. The two 

 latter officers resigned subsequently. 



July 4, 1855, the company had its first parade ; and from that 

 date to the day of its disbandment in 1862, this last of the many 

 military organizations which had faithfully served the country, 

 and kept bright the honor of the town, maintained the reputation 

 of its predecessors. At the opening of the Rebellion its com- 

 mander was Joseph T. Sprague; but its high standing was largely 

 due to its first captain, who had then recently become lieutenant- 

 colonel of the regiment. To the little armory where were kept 

 its arms, equipments, and colors, which had been the pleasant 

 gathering-place of its members and the scene of its drills and 

 instructions, came with sober faces, and probably heavy hearts, 

 the soldiers of the company on the afternoon of the 17th of April, 

 1861. The booming of the cannon across the bay of Charleston, 

 sounding the minute-guns of slavery's death-knell, left to the 

 townsmen of Benjamin Lincoln no alternative ; and in the great 

 march towards liberty which then commenced, the Hingham 

 which nestled in her bosom the sleeping remains of the heroes of 

 four wars knew no faltering. 



The voice of the great leader who had arisen was not strange 

 in her ears ; and as it reached the home of his ancestors and bade 

 the descendants of the Hobarts and Herseys and Cushings and 

 Lincolns take up the old battle for freedom and give their lives 

 that others might live, the response was as in the days of Church, 

 of Wolfe, and of Washington ; and the town whose forebears had 

 first settled down here at Bare Cove and given it the name of the 

 English home they had left, whose firstborn had helped subdue 

 Philip, whose sons " went out " against. the French, and strove 

 with the Redcoats at Bunker Hill, through all the weary and sad 

 and disheartening days of the long contest gave freely and gen- 

 erously of her means, and honored many a southern battle-field 

 with the graves of her children. The details of the story can be 

 scarcely more than touched upon here ; the briefly related facts 

 expand too greatly the limits of this chapter. In glancing back 

 at the history of this exciting period, we cannot repress a little 

 local pride in the recollection that the beloved President belonged, 

 at least in a sense, to the old town, being a descendant of the 

 Hingham Lincolns; that the Governor of the Commonwealth was 

 our own loved fellow-citizen ; that the company which upheld the 

 town's honor and continued her noble record of devotion to duty was 

 named after her great general, and its commander was descends] 

 from the old soldiers of the Revolution ; and that, moreover, 

 many of its members bore the honored names of ancestors who had 

 faced death at the cannon's mouth nearly a hundred years before, — 

 while the second officer of the regiment to which it was attached 

 was a grandson of the Hawkes Fearing who drew the Hingham 

 cannon to Hull in 1776, and a relation of Capt. Thomas Fearing of 

 the Revolutionary army. 



