From the year 1630—before that, but more perceptibly after—the advancing march of civilization carried all before it in New England. There were, indeed, occasional oscillations in its career of triumph; but always, when its genius seemed to balk, it ended by bearing off a trophy.
At Plymouth, all the social and religious forces had “settled down into fixed ways.” Justice was administered, order was preserved, education was provided for.[763] The old town began to prosper. The busy hum of men and the laughter of successful trade echoed through the streets; and Bradford wrote, “Though the partners have been plunged into great engagements and oppressed with unjust debts, yet the Lord has prospered our traffic so that our labor is not for naught. The people of this plantation begin to grow in their outward estates, by reason of the flowing of many into the province, especially into the settlements on Massachusetts Bay; by which means corn and cattle have risen to a great price, whereby some are much enriched, while commodities grow plentiful.”[764]
As property and a sense of security increased, the Plymouth Pilgrims began to show a disposition to disperse, for the convenience of better pasturage and ampler farm-room. So the three hundred inhabitants, esteeming themselves crowded, separated, and a new church and hamlet were planted on the north shore of the shallow harbor.[765] “The town in which all had lived very compactly till now,” observes the old Plymouth governor somewhat ruefully, “was left very thin by this move.” In Bradford’s eyes, it was the beginning of a movement pregnant with evil.[766] He thought, somewhat plausibly, that strength and safety lay in the close union of the scattered colonists. Yet that idea was fatal to colonization, and bolder theorists determined to educate communities by responsibility, the best of school-masters. They said,
For several years the church at Plymouth had enjoyed the ministrations of an ordained clergyman. That Separatist, Mr. Smith, who had crossed the water with Higginson and Skelton in 1629, perceiving that he was looked upon with some suspicion by his brother Pilgrims on account of his “come-outism,” an aroma which they were not then prepared to exhale, went immediately to Nantasket, sojourning there “with some stragglers” for several months.[767] One day a Plymouth boat happened to touch at that port, whereupon Mr. Smith “earnestly besought the crew to give him and his, with such things as could be readily carried, passage to Plymouth, as he had heard that there was likelihood that he might there find house-room until he could determine where to settle; for he said he was weary of the uncouth place in which he found himself, where his house was so poor that neither himself nor his goods could keep dry.”[768]
He was brought to Plymouth, where he “exercised his gifts”—which were rather “low”[769]—being “kindly entertained and sheltered,” and finally “chosen into the ministry;”[770] so that Brewster once again found respite. A little later, Smith’s labors and gifts were supplemented by Roger Williams—why and how long we shall in due time discover.
In 1632, an event of no little interest occurred. Governor Winthrop went to Plymouth to exchange fraternal greetings with Governor Bradford, and mutual inquiries of “What cheer?” were passed. Winthrop has related the incident. Let us open his record: “The governor of Massachusetts Bay, with Mr. Wilson, pastor of Boston, and some others, went aboard the ‘Lion’ on the 25th of October, and thence Captain Pierce carried then to Wessagusset, where is now a prosperous settlement of a graver sort than the old ones. The next morning the governor and his company went on foot to Plymouth, and came thither within the evening. The governor of Plymouth, Mr. William Bradford, a very discreet and grave man, with Elder Brewster and some others, came forth and met them without the town, and conducted them to the governor’s house, where they were very kindly entertained, and feasted every day at several houses.
“On the Lord’s Day there was a sacrament, of which they partook; and in the afternoon Mr. Roger Williams, according to the Plymouth custom, propounded a question, to which the pastor, Mr. Ralph Smith, spoke briefly; then Mr. Williams prophesied;[771] and after, the governor of Plymouth spoke to the question; after him, the elder; then some two or three more of the congregation. Then the elder desired the governor of Massachusetts Bay and Mr. Wilson to speak to it, which they did. When this was done, Mr. Fuller, their surgeon, put the congregation in mind of their duty of contribution; whereupon the governors and all the rest went down to the deacon’s seat, and put into the box, and then returned.
“On Wednesday, the 31st of October, at about five o’clock in the morning, the governor and his company came out of Plymouth; whose governor, pastor, elder, and others, accompanied them nearly half a mile in the dark. Lieutenant Holmes, one of their chiefest men, with two companions and Governor Bradford’s mare, came along with them to a great swamp, about ten miles. When they came to the great river,[772] they were carried over one by one by Luddam, their guide, as they had been when they came, the stream being very strong, and up to the crotch; so the governor called that passage ‘Luddam’s Ford.’ Thence they came to a place called ‘Hue’s Cross.’ The governor being displeased at the name, because such things might hereafter give the papists occasion to say that their religion was first planted in these parts, changed the name, and called it ‘Hue’s Folly.’ So they came that evening to Wessagussett, where they were bountifully entertained, as before; and the next day all came safe to Boston.”[773]
This was the first interchange of gubernatorial civilities ever known in America. It was certainly unique. One governor lent the other his mare to ride home upon, gave him a guide on whose shoulders he could be ferried across a rapid stream, and entertained his guest by beseeching him to “prophesy” on the Sabbath, and by gently reminding him that the contribution-box was empty.
Such was the homely, hearty, frank hospitality of the Pilgrim fathers over two hundred years ago. Such were the manners and customs of New England when Brewster “prophesied” and when Winthrop and Bradford governed. Looking back across two centuries, we smile; but perhaps, with all its super-refinement, modern hospitality is no whit in advance of that which contented Winthrop, and of which it may be said,
In this same year of Winthrop’s visit to Plymouth, the Pilgrims had their first boundary quarrel with the French. The extent of Acadia to the west was long a subject of dispute.[774] The lands which bordered on the rival boundaries became a “debatable” ground. Bradford and his coadjutors had erected a trading station on the Penobscot. This was now assaulted, and “despoiled of five hundred pounds worth of beaver-skins, besides a store of coats, rugs, blankets, biscuits;” and insult was added to injury; for the cavalier Frenchmen bade the tenants of the plundered post tell the English that “some gentlemen of the Isle of Rhé had been there to leave their compliments.”[775]
This taunt was not instantly responded to. Indeed, it was put out at interest, and remained unsettled until the next century, when these “religious English” gave the intruders indefinite leave of absence from Canada, and settled the boundary question by annexing the whole territory.
As an offset to their loss on the eastern rivers, the Plymouth Pilgrims began to push their enterprise towards the west. “Rumor, with its thousand tongues,” had frequently hymned the praises of the Eldorado of Connecticut. The phlegmatic Dutchman, so cold on other themes, kindled on this, and actually took his pipe out of his mouth, that he might speak more freely. The taciturn Indian melted into profuse and graphic eloquence when he painted the beauty and fertility of these western bottom-lands.[776]
These glowing reports at length won the Pilgrims, tied at first by the necessity of overcoming a contiguous wilderness, to scout in that region. Parties visited the banks of the “Fresh river,” as the Dutch styled it,[777] or the Connecticut, as it soon came to be called, “not without profit,” finding it “a fine place both for planting and for trade.”[778]
In 1633, Bradford and Winslow, who had himself bathed in the waters of the silvery river, went up to Boston to solicit from Winthrop a united effort to colonize the Connecticut valley. In the first spring after Winthrop’s landing, a Connecticut sachem, expelled from his hunting-grounds by the prowess of the Pequods, a fierce and numerous tribe, as powerful in New England as the “Six Nations” were in New York,[779] had come across the country to offer the pale-faces a settlement on the banks of the beautiful river, together with the alliance of his warriors and a yearly tribute of corn and beaver.[780] The Indian negotiator was well received, but Winthrop declined to accede to his request, since, “on account of their so recent arrival, they were not fit to undertake it.”[781] The Plymouth diplomats received the same answer; and returning home, they resolved to push into the Connecticut forests unassisted.[782]
Meantime the Dutch, hearing of this purpose and preparation, decided to preoccupy the land, and so, by antedating the Pilgrim settlement, claim the soil by priority.[783] They did indeed purchase, from a Pequod chief, a spot of land where Hartford now stands, and erecting a “slight fort” in June, 1633, planted cannon, and forbade any Englishman to pass.[784]
Undeterred by threats, the Pilgrims perfected their arrangements, and in October sailed by the “Good Hope” of the Dutch, after a parley and mutual threats[785]—in which they were struck only by a few Dutch oaths—and planted at Windsor the first English colony in Connecticut.[786] A twelvemonth later, a company of seventy Dutchmen quitted New Amsterdam with the avowed purpose of expelling the Pilgrim pioneers. But after observing the spirit and preparation of the little garrison, they concluded to end their war-trail in a reconciliation, and retired without violence.[787]
In the midst of their hardy enterprise, while the door of civilization was just ajar in Connecticut, an infectious fever came to scourge the Pilgrims. “It pleased the Lord to visit those at Plymouth,” says Bradford, “with a severe sickness this year, of which many fell sick, and upwards of twenty, men, women, and children, died; among the rest, several of those who had recently come over from Leyden; and at the last, Samuel Fuller, their surgeon and physician. Before his death, he had helped many and comforted all; as in his profession, so otherwise, being a deacon in the church and a godly man, forward to do good, he was much missed. All were much lamented, and the sadness caused the people to humble themselves and seek God; and towards winter it seemed good to him to stay the sickness.
“This disease swept away many of the Indians in that vicinage; and the spring before, especially all the month of May, there was such a quantity of strange flies, like wasps in size, or bumblebees, coming out of holes in the ground, spreading through the woods, and eating up every green thing, as caused the forest to ring with their hum ready to deafen the hearers.[788] They have not been heard or seen since; but the Indians then said their presence foretokened sickness, which indeed came in June, July, August, and the chief heat of summer.”[789]
At this period in colonial history, the tide of emigration seemed to flow at one time and to ebb at another. It was governed by the increase or the slack of persecution in England. In 1630, the date of the alienation of the provincial government, it was at the flood; in the succeeding year it actually receded. “Climate and the sufferings of the settlers were against free emigration; and besides, Morton, Radcliff, and Gardiner, were busy in the island against the colonists. In 1631, only ninety persons came over. But in 1632, the sluggish current quickened, and again set westward. Spite of threats, the Pilgrims had not been molested, and as Laud’s pesterings grew in virulence, many ships then prepared to start, and some of Britain’s noblest sons were about to desert her; among them Lord Say, Lord Rich, the ‘good Lord Brooke,’ Hazlerigge, Pym, Hampden, and Oliver Cromwell. But on the 31st of February, 1633, the king, in council, issued an order to stay the flotilla.”[790]
’Tis a high fact, and shows upon what slight hinges the weightiest events turn. The very foremost chiefs of the maturing revolution were at this time not only anxious to emigrate, but had actually embarked for America. Well would it have been for Charles, had he said to the disaffected Puritans,
Had some good genius nudged the elbow of the king, on that critical morning when his breathless messenger was hastening to stay the emigrant flotilla, urged him to say Yes, to its sailing, and foretold the future, how eagerly the fated monarch would have caught the cue, and torn that parchment, so pregnant with mischief, which forbade their departure; and offered the immortal junto jewels of gold and precious stones as an inducement to be gone, and cried, “Egypt is glad,” when they set out.
But God made the wrath of man praise him. He struck the besotted court with judicial blindness. Neither Charles, nor Strafford, nor Laud could read the hand-writing on the wall. They could not foresee events which were ere long to
These “fanatics” were not needed in New England. Their fellows had already commenced to build, at Plymouth and at Massachusetts Bay, for God and liberty. So they were detained to organize “resistance to tyrants” in the senate-house, and to give the arbitrary principle its death-blow at Naseby and Long Marston Moor.
But though the court, frightened at the prodigious extent of an emigration which threatened to depopulate the kingdom, had fulminated a decree against colonization, the departure of Pilgrims was only hindered, not stayed. They continued to cross the water until, in 1640, this pattering emigration had rained four thousand families and upwards of twenty thousand settlers into New England.[791] Then for a few glorious years the exodus ceased. The prospect of reform in England caused men to remain at home, “in the hope of seeing a new world” without passing the Atlantic.
In the summer of this same year which witnessed the detention of Cromwell, and Pym, and Hampden, and Hazlerigge, and Lord Brooke, a ship was freighted for America; and with two hundred other passengers, it bore to these shores three men who became as famous on this side the water as the revolutionists did on the other—John Haynes, John Cotton, and Thomas Hooker.[792] On board the “Griffin” at this same time was another eminent minister, Mr. Stone; “and this glorious triumvirate coming together,” remarks Cotton Mather, “made the poor people in the wilderness say that God had supplied them with what would in some sort answer their three great necessities; Cotton for their clothing, Hooker for their fishing, and Stone for their building.”[793]
Haynes, afterwards governor both of Massachusetts and Connecticut, was “a man of very large estate, and still larger affections; of a ‘heavenly’ mind and a spotless life; of rare sagacity and accurate but unassuming judgment; by nature tolerant; ever a friend to freedom, ever conciliating peace. He was an able legislator, and dear to the Pilgrims by his benevolence and his disinterested conduct.”[794]
Cotton and Hooker speedily became the most revered spiritual teachers of two commonwealths; Cotton shaped and toned Massachusetts ecclesiasticism; Hooker was the Moses of Connecticut. Both were well born; both had been clergymen of the English church; both had been silenced for non-conformity; both were consummate scholars—in Mather’s strong phrase, walking libraries; both had won wide fame at home, which, like Joseph’s bough, “ran over the wall” of the Atlantic ocean, and made their names familiar in every cabin on the eastern coast.
“Cotton was acute and subtile. The son of a Puritan lawyer, he had been eminent at Cambridge as a student. He was quick in the nice perception of distinctions, and pliant in dialectics; in manner persuasive rather than commanding; skilled in the fathers and the schoolmen, but finding all their wisdom compactly stored in Calvin; deeply devout by nature as well as habit from childhood; hating heresy and still precipitately eager to prevent evil actions by suppressing ill opinions, yet verging in opinion towards progress in civil and religious freedom. He was the avowed foe of democracy, which he feared as the blind despotism of animal instincts in the multitude. Yet he opposed hereditary power in all its forms; desiring a government of moral opinion, according to the laws of moral equity, and ‘claiming the ultimate resolution for the whole body of the people.’”[795]
Cotton was, if not the originator, then the main mover of the theocratical idea. “When he came,” says Mather, “there were divers churches in America, but the country was in a perplexed and divided state; points of church order he settled with exactness; and inasmuch as no little of an Athenian democracy was in the mould of the colonial government, by the royal charter which was then acted upon, he effectually recommended that none should be electors or elected except such as were visible subjects of Christ personally confederated in the church. In this way, and in others, he propounded an endeavor after a theocracy, as near as might be to that which was the glory of Israel.”[796]
Cotton was a man of much personal humility. “He learned the lesson of Gregory, ‘It is better, many times, to fly from an injury by silence, than to overcome it by replying;’ and he used that practice of Grynæus, ‘To revenge wrongs by Christian taciturnity.’ On one occasion he had modestly replied to one that would much talk and croak of his insight into the revelations: ‘Brother, I must confess myself to want light in these mysteries.’ The man went home and sent Cotton a pound of candles.”[797]
He was iron in his doctrines, but personally he had the nimia humilitas which Luther sometimes lamented in Staupitz; so much so, indeed, that Mather marvels that “the hardest flints should not have been broken on such a soft bag of cotton.”[798]
Cotton, on landing, in 1633, at once assumed that leading position to which his intellect entitled him, and his pulpit at Boston speedily became a leading power in Massachusetts.
Hooker was settled, during his sojourn in the Bay plantation, at Cambridge.[799] He was a man “of vast endowments, a strong will, and an energetic mind. Ingenuous in temper, he was open in his professions. He had been trained to benevolence by the discipline of affliction, and to tolerance by his refuge from home persecution in Holland. He was choleric in temper, yet gentle in his affections; firm in faith, yet readily yielding to the power of reason; the peer of the reformers, without their harshness; the devoted apostle to the humble and the poor, severe only to the proud, mild in his soothings of a wounded spirit, glowing with the raptures of devotion, and kindling with the messages of redeeming love. His eye, voice, gesture, and whole frame, were animated with the living vigor of heart-felt religion; he was public-spirited and lavishly charitable; and ‘though persecution and banishment had awaited him as one wave follows another,’ he was ever serenely blessed with ‘a glorious peace of soul’—fixed in his trust in Providence, and in his adhesion to the cause of advancing civilization, which he cherished always, even while it remained to him a mystery.
“This was he whom, for his abilities and services, his contemporaries placed ‘in the first rank’ of men; praising him as the one rich pearl with which ‘Europe more than repaid America for the treasures from her coast.’ The people to whom Hooker had ministered in England had preceded him in exile; as he landed, they crowded about him with their cheery welcome. ‘Now I live,’ exclaimed he, as with open arms he embraced his flock, ‘now I live if ye stand fast in the Lord.’”[800]
Hooker was an apostle of great boldness and of singular charity. He had fine tact and a habit of discrimination. He had a saying that “some were to be saved by compassion, others, by fear, being pulled out of the fire.” He knew how to reach the heart; once, when a settlement twenty leagues from his habitation was suffering from hunger, he sent a ship-load of corn to relieve the sufferers, thus demonstrating his Christianity by what Chrysostom calls “unanswerable syllogisms.”[801]
Whitfield once said of him: “Hooker is one in whom the utmost learning and wisdom are tempered by the finest zeal, holiness, and watchfulness; for, though naturally a man of choleric temper, and possessing a mighty vigor and fervor of spirit, which as occasion served was wondrous useful to him, yet he had as much government of his choler as a man has over a mastiff dog in a chain; he could let out his dog or pull him in, as he pleased.”[802]
Mather records that some one once, seeing Hooker’s heroism and persistent goodness, said: “He is a man who, while doing his Master’s work, would put a king in his pocket.”[803]
Of this there was an instance. It chanced once that on a fast-day kept throughout England, the judges on their circuit stopped over at Chelmsford, where Hooker was to preach. Here, before a vast audience, and in the presence of the judges, he freely inveighed against the sins of England, and foretold the plagues that would result. Charles had recently married a papist princess. The undaunted apostle in his prayer besought God to set in the heart of the king what His own mouth had spoken by his prophet Malachi, as he distinctly quoted it: “An abomination is committed; Judah hath married the daughter of a strange god; the Lord will cut off the man that doeth this.” Though the judges turned to and noted the passage thus cited, Hooker came to no trouble; but it was not long before England did.[804]
Hooker and Cotton have been well called the Luther and Melancthon of New England; each became the oracle of his plantation.
And now “the prophets in exile began to see the true forms of the house.” They already held the soil by a twofold title: the royal charter had granted it to the patentees called the “Massachusetts Company,” “to be held by them, their heirs and assigns, in free and common soccage; paying, in lieu of all services, one fifth of the gold and silver that should be found.”[805] And this vestment the conscientious Pilgrims had been careful to supplement by actual purchase from the aborigines.[806]
Every day the old trading corporation assumed new prerogatives, verging more and more towards a representative democracy. Winthrop was timid, and doubted the legality of this popular movement. Cotton was alarmed; and on one election day he essayed to check the democratic tendency by preaching to the assembled freemen against rotation in office, arguing that an honest magistrate held his position as a proprietor holds his freehold. But the voters were deaf to the fears of the government, and careless, for once, of the decision of the pulpit. Dudley succeeded Winthrop in the gubernatorial chair;[807] legislation was intrusted to representatives chosen by the several towns of Massachusetts Bay;[808] it was decreed that the freemen at large should be convened only for the election of magistrates.[809] Thus, in 1634, the electors exercised their “absolute power,” and “established a reformation of such things as they judged to be amiss in the model of government.”[810]
Now the colonial authority was divided between two branches. The representatives were the legislative, the magistrates were the executive arm. Both sat together in the outset, forming what was called “The General Court.” Finally, the magistrates grew discontented; as the towns increased, so did the representatives; and they found themselves outvoted; so they pressed for separate houses, each with a veto on the other. It was granted. The deputies and the council were inaugurated;[811] and these, under the Republic, have become the Representatives and the Senate.
Next, a law was framed which forbade arbitrary taxation; it was decreed that “the deputies alone were competent to grant land or raise money.”[812] Already “the state was filled with the bane of village politicians; ‘the freemen of every town in the Bay were busy in inquiring into their liberties.’ With the important exception of universal suffrage, in our age so happily in process of complete establishment, representative democracy was as perfect two centuries ago as it is to-day. Even the magistrates who acted as judges held their office by annual popular election. ‘Elections cannot be safe there long,’ sneered an English lawyer, Leckford, with a shrug. The same prediction has been made these two hundred years. The public mind, in perpetual agitation, is still easily shaken, even by slight and transient impulses; but after all its vibrations, it follows the laws of the moral world and safely recovers its balance.”[813]
The test of citizenship was indeed exclusive. But the conception which based the ballot on goodness of the highest type, goodness of such purity and force that nothing save faith in Christ could create it—which conferred political power on personal character, was noble, even while impracticable. But God commissioned an American reformer to plant the seed of a larger growth by a vehement and potent protest.