Affairs now went on peacefully enough in Massachusetts until 1664. In that year the king sent over four royal commissioners to look after the colonies, among them being Samuel Maverick, one of the Presbyterian petitioners who had made trouble for the New Englanders a few years before. These commissioners were required "to dispose the people to an entire submission and obedience to the king's government;" also to feel the public pulse in Massachusetts, in order to see whether the Crown might not judiciously assume to appoint a governor for that colony. They arrived at Boston in July with two ships-of-war and four hundred troops. Obtaining help from Connecticut, the expedition proceeded to New Amsterdam and easily conquered that port from the Dutch. During the months the commissioners were at Boston they were engaged in a prolonged quarrel with the Massachusetts men, who claimed that their charter allowed them to govern themselves after their own fashion, without interference from a royal commission. The court was persistently importuned to give a plain answer to the king's demands sent out in 1662; but nothing satisfactory could be obtained, and the commissioners were obliged to return without having accomplished their mission. The Dutch war against England was now going on, and political affairs at home were unquiet. A policy of delay had been profitable for Massachusetts.
In the other colonies of New England better treatment had been accorded the commissioners. Connecticut had sent over her governor, the younger Winthrop, to represent her at court. He was well received there, being a man of scholarly tastes and pleasing manner; the king was the more disposed to favor him because by helping Connecticut a rival to Massachusetts would be built up. A liberal charter was granted to his colony; and New Haven—disliked by Charles for having harbored the regicides—was now, despite her protest, annexed to her sister colony. |and of Rhode Island.| Rhode Island, too, was benefited by the royal favor, and received a charter making it a separate colony. Doubtless the fact that the people of Narragansett Bay had been shut out from the New England confederacy had inclined the king to look kindly upon them. For these reasons Connecticut and Rhode Island had received the commissioners with consideration, while weak Plymouth was also praised for her ready obedience.
The suppression of New Haven by the king, and the practical victory of the Quakers over the theocratic policy of Massachusetts, were staggering blows to the confederation. The federal commissioners held triennial meetings thereafter until 1684, when the Massachusetts charter was revoked; but its proceedings, except during King Philip's war, were of little importance.
The period of the decadence of the confederation, however, was in the main one of prosperity for New England. Emigration to America had almost wholly ceased after 1640, with the rise of the Puritans in England; but the restoration of the Stuarts and the passage of the Act of Uniformity, with its accompanying persecutions, caused a renewal of the departure of Dissenters, and the movement included many, both laymen and clericals, of eminent ability. New industries were introduced, commerce grew, the area of settlement extended, and wealth increased.
But the accretion of wealth and the passage of time brought changes in the attitude towards England that threatened in a measure to counteract the quiet struggle for independence which had been going on for nearly half a century. A second generation of Americans had come upon the stage, with but a traditional knowledge of the tyrannies practised upon their fathers in the old country. Larger wealth secured greater leisure, which resulted in a cultivation of the graceful arts, with a softening of the austere manners and thinking of the first emigrants. There was now manifest a desire on the part of many members of the upper class to bring about closer relations with the Old World, with its fine manners, its aristocracy, and its historic associations. Opposition to England began to give place to imitation of England; colonial life had entered the provincial stage. Two parties had by this time sprung up, although as yet without organization,—one desiring to conciliate England, the other standing for independence in everything except in name. Thus far none had ventured to think of the possibility of dissolving all political connection with the mother-land.
70. Indian Wars (1660-1678).
The Indian policy of the New Englanders was more humane than that adopted in any of the other colonies except Pennsylvania. Compensation had been granted to the savages for lands taken, firm friendships had been formed between some of the chiefs and the whites, and the missionary enterprises among the red-men were conducted on a large scale and with much zeal. Martha's Vineyard, Cape Cod, and the country round about Boston were the centres of proselytism; the "praying Indians" were gathered into village congregations with native teachers, most notable being those under the supervision of John Eliot, "the apostle." Of these converted Indians there were in 1674 about four thousand; several hundred of them were taught a written language invented by Eliot, who successfully undertook the monumental labor of translating the Bible into it for their benefit.
Massasoit, head-chief of the Pokanokets, had made a treaty of alliance with the Plymouth colonists soon after their arrival, and kept it strictly until his death (1660). His two sons were christened at Plymouth as Alexander and Philip. Alexander died (1662) at Plymouth, where he had gone to answer to a charge of plotting with the Narragansetts against the whites. Philip, now chief sachem, wrongfully thinking his brother to have been poisoned, was thereafter a bitter enemy of the dominant race. For twelve years there were numerous complaints against him, and he was frequently summoned to Plymouth to make answer. He was smooth-spoken and fair of promise, but came to be regarded as an unsatisfactory person with whom to deal. In 1674 it became evident that Philip was planning a general Indian uprising, to drive the English out of the land.
His territory was now chiefly confined to Mount Hope,—a peninsula running into Narragansett Bay; and here he "began to keep his men in arms about him, and to gather strangers unto him, and to march about in arms towards the upper end of the neck on which he lived, and near to the English houses." On the twentieth of June a party of his warriors attacked the little town of Swanzey, killing many settlers and perpetrating fiendish outrages. War-parties from Mount Hope now quickly spread over the country, joined by the Nipmucks and other tribes. Throughout the white settlements panic prevailed, and several towns in Massachusetts, as far west as the Connecticut valley, were scenes of heart-rending tragedies.
The Narragansetts had played fast and loose in this struggle, their disaffection growing with the success of the savage arms. It was evident that unless crushed, they would openly espouse Philip's cause in the coming spring, and the danger be doubled. A thousand volunteers, enlisted by the federal commissioners, on December 19 attacked their palisaded fortress in what is now South Kingston. Two thousand warriors, with many women and children, were gathered within the walls. About one thousand Indians were slain in the contest, which was one of the most desperate of its kind ever fought in America.
The following spring and summer Philip again made bloody forays on the settlements; but he was persistently attacked, his followers were scattered, and he was at last driven, with a handful of followers, into a swamp on Mount Hope. Here (Aug. 12, 1676) he was shot to death by a friendly Indian, and "fell upon his face in the mud and water, with his gun under him; ... upon which the whole army gave three loud huzzas." His hands and head were cut off and taken to Boston and Plymouth respectively, in token to the people at home that King Philip's war was at an end, and that thereafter white men were to be supreme in New England.
During the two years' deadly struggle the colonists had been surfeited with horrors, of which the statistics of loss can convey but slight idea. Of the eighty or ninety towns in Plymouth and Massachusetts, nearly two-thirds had been harried by the savages,—ten or twelve wholly, and the others partially destroyed; while nearly six hundred fighting men—about ten per cent of the whole—had either lost their lives or had been taken prisoners, never to return. It was many years before the heavy war-debts of the colonies could be paid; in Plymouth the debt exceeded in amount the value of all the personal property.
The year before Philip fell (1675), trouble broke out with the Indians to the north, on the Piscataqua. In the summer of 1678 the English of Maine felt themselves compelled to purchase peace, thus establishing a precedent which fortunately has not often been followed in America. The home government was much annoyed at the obstinacy of the colonists in not calling on it for aid in these two Indian wars. Jealous of English interference, they preferred to fight their battles for themselves, and thus to give no excuse to the king for maintaining royal troops in New England.
71. Territorial Disputes (1649-1685).
Massachusetts early gave evidence of a desire to extend her territory. Disputes in regard to lands frequently gave rise to quarrels with the Indians. In 1649 the strip of mainland along Long Island Sound, between the western boundary of Rhode Island and Mystic River, was granted to her by the federal commissioners. From 1652 to 1658 she absorbed the settlements in Maine, now neglected by the heirs of Gorges, just as in 1642-1643 she had annexed the New Hampshire towns. The council for foreign plantations had been dissolved in 1675, and the management of colonial affairs was resumed by a standing committee of the Privy Council styled "the Lords of the Committee of Trade and Plantations." At this time the Gorges and Mason heirs renewed their respective claims to Maine and New Hampshire, which they said had been wrongfully swallowed up by Massachusetts.
Other complaints against the Bay Colony, that had been allowed to slumber for some time, were now revived, and the Lords of Trade, as they were familiarly called, were soon sitting in council upon the deeds of the obstinate colony. The king's charges of early years were again advanced: that the Acts of Navigation and Trade (page 104) were not being observed; that ships from various European countries traded with Boston direct, without paying duty to England on their cargoes; that money was being coined at a colonial mint; and that Church of England members were denied the right of suffrage. Edward Randolph, a relative of the Masons, was sent over (1676) to be collector at the port of Boston, now a town of five thousand inhabitants, and to investigate the colonies. His manner was insulting, and he was rudely treated by the people, who were greatly embittered against England in consequence of his malicious reports to the home government.
In 1679 the king erected New Hampshire into a separate royal province. Edward Cranfield, a tyrannical man, became the governor (1682), but his conduct drove the people into insurrection. He was obliged to fly to the West Indies (1685), and in the same year New Hampshire was reunited to Massachusetts.
In 1665 the royal commissioners detached Maine from Massachusetts; but three years later (1668) that commonwealth calmly took it back again. Gorges was inclined to make trouble, and agents of Massachusetts quietly purchased his claim (1677) for £1,250. The skilful manœuvre excited the displeasure of the king, who had intended himself to buy out the claims of Gorges, in order to erect Maine into a proprietary province for his reputed son, the Duke of Monmouth. The company of Massachusetts Bay now governed Maine under the Gorges charter as lord proprietor, and did not make it a part of the Massachusetts colony.
72. Revocation of the Charters (1679-1687).
It was two years later (1679) before Charles was ready again to make a movement upon Massachusetts. He demanded that Maine should be delivered up to the Crown, on repayment of the purchase money, and also that all other complaints should at once be satisfied. The General Court gave an evasive answer, and adopted its usual method of sending over agents to ward off hostilities by a policy of delay. But in 1684 the blow came: a writ of quo warranto was issued against the simple trading charter under which Massachusetts had so long been permitted to grow and prosper; the charter was held to be annulled, and the colony now became a royal possession.
With the death of Charles II. (1685), James II. came to the English throne. As a Roman Catholic, and imbued with a taste of absolute power, the colonies had little favor to expect from him. In 1686, as a step towards abolishing the American charters, James sent over Sir Edmund Andros as governor of Massachusetts, Plymouth, New Hampshire, and Maine; he brought authority to ignore all local political machinery and to govern the country through a council, the president of which was Joseph Dudley, the unpopular Tory son of the stern old Puritan who had been Winthrop's lieutenant. The charters of Rhode Island and Connecticut were demanded for annulment (1686). The former colony was, as usual, obedient, and yielded up her charter; Connecticut failed to respond to the demand of Andros, and he went to Hartford (October, 1687) and ordered the charter to be produced. A familiar myth alleges that the document was concealed from him in the hollow trunk of a large tree, known ever after as the "charter oak;" nevertheless Andros arbitrarily declared the colony annexed to the other New England colonies which he governed.
The following year (1688) Andros was also made governor of New York and the Jerseys, his jurisdiction now extending from Delaware Bay to the confines of New France, with his seat of government at Boston. The government of Andros was despotic, and fell heavily on a people who had up to this time been accustomed to their own way. Episcopal services were held in the principal towns, and Congregational churches were frequently seized upon for the purpose; the writ of habeas corpus was suspended; a censorship of the press was restored, with Dudley as censor; excessive registry fees were charged; arbitrary taxes were levied; land grants made under former administrations were annulled; private property was unsafe from governmental interference; common lands were enclosed and divided among the friends of Andros; the General Court was abolished, and most popular rights were ignored. Dudley tersely described the situation (1687) on the trial of the Rev. John Wise, of Ipswich, for heading a movement in that town to resent taxation without representation: "Mr. Wise, you have no more privileges left you than not to be sold for slaves."
73. Restoration of the Charters (1689-1692).
In April, 1689, news came of the Revolution in England, the flight of the arrogant James, and the accession of the Prince of Orange. The example of revolt was already foreshadowed in Boston, where Andros and Dudley were deposed. Elsewhere in the Northern colonies the representatives of the tyrant extortioners were driven out. The Protestant sovereigns, William and Mary, were proclaimed amid great popular rejoicings.
The old charters were restored for the time. In September, 1691, Plymouth and the newly acquired territory of Acadia were united to Massachusetts under a new charter, which had been secured from the king chiefly through the agency of the Rev. Increase Mather, of Boston, now influential in colonial politics, as were also other members of the Mather family. In May following (1692) this new charter for Massachusetts was received at Boston. It was not as liberal as had been hoped. The people were allowed their representative assembly as before, but the governor was to be appointed by the Crown; the religious qualification for suffrage was abolished, a small property qualification (an estate of £40 value, or a freehold worth £2 a year) being substituted; laws passed by the General Court were subject to veto by the king,—a provision fraught with danger to the colonists. Thus Massachusetts became a Crown charter colony,—a position not uncomfortable so long as the executive and the legislature could agree. The first royal governor, Sir William Phipps (1692-1695), proved to be popular, generous, and well-meaning. He had a romantic history, but was of slender capacity, and owed his appointment to the favor of his pastor, Increase Mather.
Connecticut and Rhode Island received their charters back; New Hampshire was governed by its new proprietor, Samuel Allen, but without a charter; Maine continued under Massachusetts,—the Bay Colony now extending from Rhode Island to New Brunswick, except for the short intervening strip of New Hampshire coast.
It was fortunate for American liberty that the scheme of a consolidation of the New England colonies was put forward by the Stuarts too late for accomplishment. It was also fortunate that Massachusetts was flanked by and often competed with by her neighbors, Plymouth, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, who were protected against her by a jealous government in England, and that the Dutch cut off her ambitious territorial aspirations to the west. In the separate colonial life was sown the spirit of local patriotism which is now embodied in the American States. In New England, as in the South, there was a leading, but never a dominant, colony; the smaller colonies shared the experiences of the larger, but were freer from calamitous changes, and enjoyed in some respects governments which were more immediately under the control of the people.
The end of the century saw all the New England colonies established on what seemed a permanent basis of loyalty to the Crown and of local independence.
CHAPTER VIII.
SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CONDITIONS IN NEW ENGLAND IN 1700.
74. References.
Bibliographies.—Same as §§ 47 and 63, above; Channing and Hart, Guide, § 130.
Historical Maps.—Same as § 47, above.
General Accounts.—Osgood, Colonies; Doyle, Colonies, III. ch. ix.; Lodge, Colonies, ch. xxii.; W. Weeden, Economic and Social History; J. Bishop, History of American Manufactures; American Statistical Association Publications, No. 1.
Special Histories.—Manners and customs: Earle, Costumes of Colonial Times, Customs and Fashions in Old New England, Sabbath in Puritan New England, and Stage Coach and Tavern Days; W. Bliss, Colonial Times on Buzzard's Bay, and Old Colony Town; F. Child, Colonial Parsons of New England; J. Felt, Customs of New England; Fisher, Men, Women, and Manners, I. chs. ii.-v.; Howe, Puritan Republic, chs. v.-ix.; W. Love, Fast and Thanksgiving Days; M. Ward, Old Colony Days; Wharton, Colonial Days and Dames.—Education: C. Johnson, Old Time Schools and School Books; E. Brown, Making of our Middle Schools.—Theology: B. Adams, Emancipation of Massachusetts; F. Foster, New England Theology; M. Greene, Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut; C. F. Adams, Antinomianism.—Press: C. Duniway, Freedom of Press in Massachusetts; G. Littlefield, Early Massachusetts Press; R. Roden, Cambridge Press.—Slavery: G. Moore, Slavery in Massachusetts; G. Williams, Negro Race in America, 1619-1880; W. Dubois, Suppression of Slave Trade.—On the witchcraft delusion: C. Upham, Salem Witchcraft; S. Drake, Annals of Witchcraft; J. Taylor, Witchcraft Delusion in Connecticut.—Medical practice: O. Holmes, Medical Profession in Massachusetts. See also, biographies of prominent men.
Contemporary Accounts.—Same as § 63, above.
North of Cape Cod the shores of New England are rugged and forbidding, though the coast-line is indented by numerous inlets from the sea, affording safe anchorage. To the south of the cape there are also abundant harbors; but the mountains nowhere approach the shore, and the beach is wide, with a sand strip extending for some distance inland, while treacherous shoals are not uncommon. The rivers, except those in Maine and the Merrimac and the Connecticut, are small, and have their sources in innumerable small lakes; the upper streams fall in successions of picturesque cascades, the water-power of which is often profitably utilized in manufacturing; and the larger rivers are held back by great dams, about which have grown up the manufacturing towns of Manchester, Nashua, Lowell, Lawrence, Holyoke, and many others.
Two ranges of mountains traverse New England: the Green Mountains and their continuation, the Berkshire Hills, run nearly north and south from Canada to Connecticut; the White Mountains form a group, rather than a chain, nearer the coast. In the eastern half of Maine the low watershed comes down to within one hundred and forty miles of the sea-shore, and the Atlantic-coast region may be said practically to end there. The highest elevation in the Appalachian system north of North Carolina is Mount Washington (six thousand two hundred and ninety feet), in the White Mountain range. The soil of New England is for the most part thin, and interspersed with rocks and gravel. The banks of some of the principal rivers are enriched by alluvial deposits left by overflows; there are fair pasturage lands in Vermont and New Hampshire, while Maine, back from the shore, has much good soil. The New England hills are rich in quarries of fine building stone. Their mineral wealth is not great; iron and manganese have been found in considerable quantities, together with some anthracite coal, lead, and copper. Originally New England was one vast forest, and the trees had to be cleared away in order to prepare the soil for cultivation. The climate is subject to rapid variations, being generally accounted superb in the summer and autumn; but the winters are long and severe, and the springs late and brief.
The natural obstacles to human welfare in New England were great; but the English settlers were men of tough fibre and rare determination. They were not daunted by rugged hills, gloomy forest, harsh climate, and niggardly soil. With courageous toil they built up thrifty towns along the narrow slope, and erected enduring commonwealths, in which the English institutions to which they had been accustomed were reproduced, and often improved upon.
The population of New England in 1700, by which time a second generation of Englishmen had arisen in America, is roughly estimated at about a hundred and five thousand souls, of whom seventy thousand were in Massachusetts and Maine, five thousand in New Hampshire, six thousand in Rhode Island, and twenty-five thousand in Connecticut. The people were almost wholly of pure English stock. Up to 1640, when the first great Puritan exodus ceased, full twenty thousand English Dissenters, mainly from the eastern counties of England, came to New England; thenceforth the population, says Palfrey, "continued to multiply on its own soil for a century and a half, in remarkable seclusion from other communities." During this time there was a small infusion of Normans from the Channel Islands, Welsh, Scotch-Irish (chiefly in 1652 and 1719), and Huguenots (1685). It is computed that at the opening of the Revolutionary War ninety-eight per cent of New England people were English or unmixed descendants of Englishmen. Nowhere else in the American colonies was there so homogeneous a population, or one of such uniformly high quality. As said Stoughton, lieutenant-governor of Massachusetts (1692-1701): "God sifted a whole nation, that he might send choice grain over into this wilderness."
76. Social Classes and Professions.
Social distinctions were almost as sharply drawn in New England as in the South. There was a powerful and much-respected aristocratic class, beginning with the village "squire" and ending with the Crown officials in the capital towns. "The foundations of rank," says Lodge, "were birth, ancestral or individual service to the State, ability, education, and to some extent wealth." The recognized classes were, in order of precedence, gentlemen, yeomen, merchants, and mechanics; and at church the people were punctiliously seated according to station. Down to 1772 the students in Harvard College were carefully arranged in the catalogue in the order of their social rank, the Hutchinsons, Saltonstalls, Winthrops, and Quincys near the head. There was also a distinction between new-comers and old-comers, the "old family" class laying some pretensions to social superiority. The aristocrats were not men of leisure,—everybody in New England worked; but the public offices and the professions were reserved for gentlemen. Now and then some of them conducted large estates, although aristocracy was not, as in England, supported on landed possessions and primogeniture. The force of public opinion alone separated the classes; with the growth of the democratic idea, social barriers ultimately weakened, although they continued to appear in the politics of the commonwealth down to the middle of the present century.
Slaves were comparatively few in number, the greater part of them being house and body servants, and they were not harshly treated; travellers have left record of the fact that some of the humbler farmers ate at table with their human chattels. The race was, however, generally despised, and in one of the old churches in Boston is still to be seen the lofty "slaves' gallery." Judge Samuel Sewall issued the first public denunciation of slavery in Massachusetts, in a pamphlet issued in 1700, wherein he denounced "the wicked practice." For many years this distinguished jurist and diarist followed up his assaults, allowing no opportunity to escape wherein he might espouse the cause of the oppressed "blackamores" and mitigate the severity of the laws against them. But the colonists in general saw nothing in the system to shock their moral sense, and it was not until the Revolution that anti-slavery ideas began, in New England, to spread beyond a narrow circle of humanitarians.
There was a full system of courts, ranging from the colonial judges down to the justices of the peace and "commissioners of small causes," appointed by colonial authority in each town. The magistrates were uniformly men of good character, of the upper, well-educated class, and rendered substantial justice, although not specially trained in the law. The legal profession was practically neglected throughout the seventeenth century, doubtless owing in great part to lack of facilities for study and to the overtowering importance of the ministry; we do not read of a professional barrister in Massachusetts until 1688. There was, however, no lack of litigation; personal disputes were rife in Rhode Island, and in Connecticut there were frequent legal contests between towns regarding lands. Between the colonies, also, there were complicated and hotly-contested boundary disputes. The bar gained strength, but it was not till about the middle of the eighteenth century that it stood beside the ministry.
We have had frequent evidences, in preceding chapters, of the large influence of the clergy in the temporal affairs of New England. The ranks of the Puritan ministry contained men of the best ability and station; they were pre-eminently the strongest class, and as the popular leaders, deeply impressed their character upon the laws and institutions of the community. They were held in great affection and reverence; but in a body of sturdy, intelligent parishioners they could maintain their supremacy only by the exercise of superior mental gifts: their calling was one offering rich rewards for excellence, and attracted to it men of the finest calibre, like the Mathers and Hooker. The sloth or the dullard was soon taught by his people that he had mistaken his calling. Jonathan Edwards, although of a later period than that of which we are treating, was a fair type, and his early resolution "to live with all my might while I do live," was an expression of the spirit which dominated his order.
It was an age in which quackery flourished. The regular physicians, though excellent men and highly regarded by the people, depended upon nostrums, and had little medical knowledge; they were in the main "herb-doctors" and "blood-letters." Many of the practitioners were barbers, and others clergymen. "This relation between medicine and theology," writes Dr. Holmes, "has existed from a very early period; from the Egyptian priest to the Indian medicine-man, the alliance has been maintained in one form or another. The partnership was very common among our British ancestors." There were few facilities for the study of medicine in the colonies until after the Revolution. The first medical school in America was established in Philadelphia, about 1760.
77. Occupations.
Unlike the Southern colonists, New Englanders were dependent on England only for the most important manufactures. Mechanics were sufficiently numerous in every community. The lumber industry was important, and in Connecticut and Massachusetts there was profitable iron mining, which gave rise to several kindred pursuits. There being abundant water-power, small saw and grist mills were numerous; there were many tanneries and distilleries; the Scotch-Irish in Massachusetts and New Hampshire made linens and coarse woollens, and beaver hats and paper were manufactured on a small scale. The people were largely dressed in homespun cloth, and a spinning-wheel was to be found in every farm-house. It was not until after the Revolution, however, that New England manufacturing interests attained much magnitude; the home government, through the Acts of Navigation and Trade (page 104), had discouraged, as far as possible, American efforts in this direction.
The fisheries, particularly whale and cod, were an important source of income, those of Massachusetts being estimated, in 1750, at £250,000 per year. Fishers' hamlets, with their great net-reels and drying stages, were strung along the shores. The men engaged in the traffic were hardy and bold, no weather deterring them from long voyages to Newfoundland and Labrador, while whale-fishers ventured into the Arctic seas. From their ranks were largely recruited the superb sailors who made the American navy famous in the two wars with England.
A pinnace, called the "Virginia," was constructed by the Popham colonists in 1607,—the first ocean-going vessel built in New England. Shipbuilding was first undertaken at Plymouth in 1625, and in Massachusetts six years later (1631). By 1650 New England vessels were to be seen all along the coast, and carried the bulk of the export cargoes. Before 1724 English ship carpenters complained of American competition. In 1760 ships to the extent of twenty thousand tons a year were being turned out of American shipyards,—chiefly in New England; and most of them found a market in the mother-country.
Dried fish was the chief commodity carried out of New England, and was exported in American bottoms to Spain, Portugal, and the West Indies. Fish-oil and timber were also sent out of Maine and Massachusetts to foreign countries; hay, grain, and cattle were taken to New York, Philadelphia, and the West Indies. There was an active longshore coasting service by small craft, which ascended the rivers and gathered produce from the farmers; these they took to neighboring ports, and brought back other colonial products in exchange. Larger vessels went with miscellaneous cargoes to the West Indies, and returned with slaves and sugar. New Englanders manufactured rum from West India sugar and molasses, and exported the finished product. There are instances of New England ships taking rum to Africa, where it was exchanged for slaves; these slaves were then transported to the West Indies, to be bartered for sugar and molasses, which was carried home and converted into rum. It was a day when kegs of rum and wines were given to ministers at donation parties, and ministers themselves made brandy by the barrel for domestic use, and sold it to their parishioners. Wines were imported from Madeira and Malaga, and manufactured goods from England and the Continent. A very large and profitable business was done in the general carrying trade, which was developed by enterprising New England men in all the sister colonies. Boston alone employed, by the middle of the eighteenth century, about six hundred vessels in her foreign commerce, and a thousand in her fisheries and coast-trade.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century the population was in about equal degree engaged in trade and agriculture. Trade was the chief calling in Rhode Island, and agriculture in Connecticut and New Hampshire, while in Maine and Massachusetts both flourished. All of the colonies were also much interested in the fisheries.
78. Social Conditions.
Boston, Newport, and New Haven were the chief towns; the former was at this time the centre of political and mercantile life on the North American continent, and there were external evidences of considerable wealth and some luxury. New Haven was famed for its prosperous appearance, and the houses of its rich men were of a better style of architecture than commonly seen in the colonies. Small villages, neighborhood centres of the several townships, abounded everywhere. The houses of the minister and the school-teacher, with the little shops of tradesmen and artisans, formed the nucleus around which the farm-houses were grouped with more or less density. The village streets, overhung with arching elms, were kept in tolerable order by the "hog-reeves," "fence-viewers," and other town officials. The quaint, roomy, gambrel-roofed houses were scrupulously plain and clean, and were presided over by model housewives.
The people in these rural communities were in moderate financial circumstances, neat in habit, intelligent, and fairly educated; both sexes, young and old, worked hard, were frugal, thrifty, and as a rule rigid in morals. While coldly reserved towards strangers, they were kind and hospitable, and noted far and wide for their acute inquisitiveness. They wore sober-colored garments except on Sunday, the important day of the week, when there was a general display of quaint finery of a sombre character. The men wore long stockings and knee-breeches, with buckled shoes; workmen had breeches and jackets of leather, buckskin, or coarse canvas, while those of higher degree were generally dressed in coarse homespun,—only the richest could afford imported cloths. Their great open fireplaces were ill-adapted to withstand the winter's rigor. Their churches were wholly unprovided with heating accommodations. Their diet was spare. The well-to-do prided themselves on their old silver tableware, and New England kitchens were noted for their displays of brightly burnished pewter and brasses. Cider and New England rum were favorite beverages; but drunkenness was less prevalent than in the other colonies: the New England temperament was not inclined to excesses and roistering. The general tone of life was sedate, even gloomy; the Puritans had "a lurking inherited distrust for enjoyment," yet they cultivated a certain dry humor, and for the young people there was not lacking a round of simple amusements, such as house-raisings, dancing parties, and husking, spinning, quilting, and apple-paring bees, into which the neighborhoods entered with great zest. In the towns there was more pretension and ceremonial; but taking changed conditions into account, the life of the townspeople and their habits of thought differed but little from those of their rural cousins.
The highways were generally of fair character, but the larger streams were unbridged. Outside of the neighborhoods of the large towns wheeled vehicles, except for heavy loads, were not common until the time of the Revolution. Horseback was the ordinary mode of travel. A tavern kept by some leading citizen could be found in every town, with good lodgings at reasonable rates, although there was general complaint of the cookery. Nowhere else in the colonies was there so much intercommunication as in New England.
79. Moral and Religious Conditions.
A system of public education was among the first institutions established by the Puritans. Each town had its school; by 1649 there was no New England colony, except Rhode Island, in which some degree of education was not compulsory. Deep learning was rare, but the people were well drilled in the rudiments; except on the far-off borders of Maine there was no illiteracy in New England when the Revolution broke out. Latin schools and academies soon supplemented parental instruction and the common schools. We have seen that Boston was but six years old when Harvard College was established (1636); and Yale College was opened at New Haven in the year 1700.
Crime appears to have been less frequent in New England than in the Southern or the middle colonies; the highways were safe after the close of King Philip's war and the Tarratine trouble; doors and windows were seldom barred in the country, and young women could travel anywhere with perfect safety. The list of capital crimes was a long one in that day, as well in the mother-land as in the colonies, and hangings, particularly of the pirates who infested the coast, were spectacles frequently seen in New England. A more cruel form of punishment was reserved for the negro race. There were several cases of negroes being burned at the stake for murder or arson. Great publicity was given to all manner of punishments; gibbets, stocks, ducking-stools, pillories, and whipping-posts were familiar objects in nearly every town. Criminals might also be branded, mutilated, or compelled to wear, conspicuously sewed to their garments, colored letters indicative of the offences committed. Hawthorne's romance of the "Scarlet Letter" is based on this last-named custom.
Organized on the Independent, or Congregational, form, each religious congregation was a law unto itself, electing its own deacons and minister, and was but little influenced by the occasional synods, or councils of churches, which at last fell into disuse. At first the Church was bitterly intolerant; but this spirit gradually softened as it became more and more separated from the State. By the close of the seventeenth century John Eliot complained that religion had declined; in 1749 Douglass was able to write, "At present the Congregationalists of New England may be esteemed among the most moderate and charitable of Christian professions." The introduction of the Church of England under Andros aroused bitter opposition. Episcopalianism was vigorously preached against until the Revolution; but there was no great cause for complaint, as it was not sought to foist it upon the people, but to gain for it a hearing. The name "Bishop's palace," still applied to a house in Cambridge which was supposed when built to have been intended for an imported bishop, bears testimony to the popular feeling against the system. It had no success except among the Tory element in Boston and Portsmouth,—and later (1736-1750) in New Haven. In Rhode Island perfect tolerance made the colony a harboring place for all manner of despised sects and factious disturbers driven out of other communities, and the spirit of turbulence long reigned there.
A "great awakening" of religious fervor affected New England between 1713 and 1744. Originating in Northampton, Mass., in revivals under Solomon Stoddard, the popular excitement became almost frenzied under Jonathan Edwards, beginning in 1734. A visit from George Whitefield, the English revivalist, in 1740 caused a great fervor of religious interest, and it is estimated that twenty-five thousand converts were made by the great agitator throughout his New England pilgrimage. By 1744, when Whitefield again visited the scene of his triumphs, the excitement had greatly subsided.
80. The Witchcraft Delusion.
The witchcraft craze at Salem is commonly thought to have been a legitimate outgrowth of the gloomy religion of the Puritans. It was, however, but one of those panics of fear which during several centuries periodically swept over civilized lands. In the twelfth century thousands of persons in Europe were sacrificed because the people believed them to be witches, in league with the devil, and with the power to ride through the air and vex humanity in many occult ways. Pope Innocent VIII. commanded (1484) that witches be arrested, and hundreds of odd and repulsive old women were burned or hanged in consequence. From King John down to 1712, innocent lives were constantly sacrificed in England on this charge; in the year 1661 alone, one hundred and twenty were hanged there. It was therefore no new frenzy that broke out in Massachusetts. In 1648 Margaret Jones was hanged as a witch at Charlestown; in 1656 the sister of Deputy-Governor Bellingham, for being "too subtle in her perception of what was occurring around her," suffered the same fate; in 1688 an Irish washerwoman named Glover went to the gallows because a spiteful child said she had been bewitched by the poor creature.