CHAPTER XXIII. 



THE CIVIL WAR. 



THERE is one point of connection with the Civil 

 War which belongs peculiarly to Cohasset. The 

 chief person in all that epoch, Abraham Lincoln, de- 

 scended from one of our earliest Cohasset homes. The 

 homesteads built by Mordecai Lincoln, the great-great- 

 great-grandfather of that infinitely greater son, are yet 

 standing near the mouth of Bound Brook, one in Scitu- 

 ate and the second in Cohasset. The ancestor* who first 

 went westward from New England to be a forbear of the 

 nation's hero learned his first lessons of toil in our old 

 Lincoln Mill at the south end of the town. 



The time came when our citizens, many of them rela- 

 tives of Abraham Lincoln, were called upon to vote for 

 him or to reject him. The summer and fall of i860 was 

 full of an unusual political excitement for this quiet ham- 

 letj not much given to politics. There were a few South- 

 ern sympathizers here who abominated the efforts of 

 abolitionists on behalf of the negro slaves. 



Slaves had been formerly toilers on some of our farms 

 and even worshipers in the church now standing upon 

 our Common. As early as the year 1683, as we read in 

 Chapter IX, there was an Indian slave farmed out to a 

 Cohasseter, Cornelius Canterbury. For about a century 

 slaves were owned, Indian and negro, by a few of the 

 wealthier of our citizens. One suggestive item in the 

 inventory! of John Jacob's estate, 1759, was a negro man 

 valued at fifty pounds and a negro woman valued at 

 nothing, coming immediately after the item of " live- 

 stock." But when our State Constitution was adopted, in 



* Mordecai the son of Mordecai. (See Hingham Genealogy.) 

 fTo be found in the Probate Office, Boston. 



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