CHAPTER XXVIII.
AN ARRIVAL, A UNIVERSITY, AND A STATE.

Spite of internecine struggle and transatlantic intrigue, New England walked steadily on in the path towards material prosperity. It was inevitable; for the parents of success were within her borders: essential godliness was in her right hand, and the habit of thrift was in her left. It is very probable that prosperity was helped instead of hindered by the agitation which was begotten of the official acts of the colonial government. The stir served to keep Christendom agog for the latest news from America. “What are these Pilgrims now at?” was the inquiry incessantly on every lip. Thus it was that the name and action of New England became as prominently familiar in the salons of the ultramontanists in Europe, and in the club-rooms of the riotous cavaliers, as in the humble dwellings of the godly Puritans.

Besides, agitation in its turn begot progress. Where there is silence there is death. If the Alps, piled in cold, still sublimity, are the emblem of fat and contented despotism, the ocean is the symbol of democracy; for it is pure and useful only because never motionless.

At all events, the progress of New England was unique and unprecedented. “Nec minor ab exordio,” says Cotton Mather, “nec major incrementis ulla.”[882] Never was any thing more lowly in inception or more mighty in increase. In 1635, twenty ships dropped anchor in Boston and Plymouth harbors;[883] and in that single year three thousand new settlers were added to the Pilgrim colonies.[884] Men came over fast and

And these, like their predecessors, were of “the best.”[885]

With them landed an illustrious trio—Hugh Peters, the younger Winthrop, and Sir Harry Vane.[886] The fiery Peters came from one exile to another; for he had been pastor of an English church at Rotterdam. He was an enlightened republican, public spirited, prodigiously energetic, and eloquent, already endowed with those high qualities which soon afterwards pushed him into prominence in the English civil war as the coadjutor of Cromwell, the jailor of Charles I., and an echoer of the regicidal verdict.[887]

During his seven years’ sojourn in New England, Hugh Peters was settled at Salem as the successor of Roger Williams.[888] At once his restless and various activity bubbled over into works of utility.[889] He was minister, he was politician, he was factotum. He saw the commercial capabilities of America, and set himself to develop them. He “went from place to place,” says Winthrop, “laboring both publicly and privately to raise men up to a public frame of spirit, and so prevailed, that he procured a good sum of money to set on foot a systematic fishing business.”[890]

The younger Winthrop was Hugh Peters’ compagnon de voyage. ’Tis related of a son of Scipio Africanus that, proving degenerate, the scoffing Romans forced him to pluck off a signet-ring which he wore, with his father’s face engraved upon it. There was no occasion for such public discipline in this case, for young Winthrop was, in Cotton Mather’s phrase, Bonus a bono, pius a pio, the son of a father like himself. After an exemplary and studious boyhood, he had followed the elder Winthrop to New England; where, dowered with the advantages of extensive travel and consummate education, he had been annually elected one of the gubernatorial assistants—an honor which was continued even when he returned to Europe for a space.[891]

He now came armed with the authority of Lord Say and the “good Lord Brooke,” the original patentees of Connecticut, to plant a new colony, of which he should be governor.[892] “But inasmuch as many good people from Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth had already taken possession of a part of his demesne, this courteous and godly gentleman would give them no molestation; but saying, ‘the land is broad,’ he accommodated the matter with them, and then sent a convenient number of men to erect a town and fort at the mouth of the Connecticut, which he called, after the patrons of the enterprise, Say-brook. By this happy action, the planters farther up the river had no small kindness done them; while the Indians, who might else have been even more troublesome than they soon proved, were kept in some awe.”[893]

Winthrop was one of the few early Pilgrims who had been graduated at a university, yet was not won to lay aside his layman garb for the clerical robe. “It is a singular fact,” observes Elliot, “that, possessed as he was of scholarly and scientific tastes, he took hold resolutely of the material life of his plantation at Saybrook, and worked to shape it well, as the base of the superior structure which he meant to rear upon it. He appreciated what scholars and idealists are prone to forget, the prime value of a good material foundation. For many years he was chosen governor of the colony, and in that position he gave universal satisfaction. For his vices and his enemies, if he had either, they are forgotten.

“He was too large a man to engage in the persecution of the Quakers, which he always opposed; and if he believed in witchcraft, a rank superstition at that time common, it was as a query, not as a fact. His leisure hours were devoted to science; and his contributions to the old ‘Royal Society of London,’ of which he was an early member, were highly valued. Indeed, Boyle and other scientific scholars at one period had a plan for joining their fellow-student in the New World, for the purpose of pushing their investigations of natural knowledge.”[894]

The last member of this famous group, Sir Harry Vane junior, was at this time but twenty-three,[895] and he came out much against the wishes of a father who stood as high in the confidence of the queen of England as Strafford did in the affections of the king.[896] “Let him go,” said Charles to the perturbed courtier, when he learned that Harry had turned Puritan and proposed to emigrate—“Let him go; my word for’t, he’ll soon sicken on’t and be back, if you give him consent to remain in those parts for three years.”[897]

So the devout boy embarked. On reaching Boston, he was saluted with enthusiasm. His high birth, his sacrifices, his Puritanism, his splendid talents, every thing about him, served to enlist the sober Pilgrims in his favor; and this effect was heightened by his personal beauty, singular learning, and ingratiating manners.[898] As the Bostonians knew him better they liked him better; soon he was the most popular man in the colony; and in 1636 he was elected to fill the gubernatorial chair—elected over the heads of Winthrop, and Dudley, and the elders of our Israel, which they might and did look upon as a freak of democratic strategy quite superfluous.[899]

The first public act of the three friends was, to placate a long smouldering feud between Winthrop and Dudley. Winthrop was accused of over-leniency in his politics; Dudley was charged with undue severity. A friendly convention was held; the questions at issue were kindly talked over. Vane and Peters counselled mutual forbearance; and the quarrel ended with a “loving reconciliation” never afterwards broken.[900]

Some little time after Winthrop and Dudley, under Vane’s auspices, had given each other the kiss of peace and gone home arm in arm, with the fire of their differences definitively quenched, measures were matured to plant a college in New England. Nothing more finely exhibits the wisdom of the Pilgrim Fathers than their watchful and ample provision for education, which Bacon has fitly termed the “sheet-anchor of peaceful commonwealths.” In their estimation, its importance was second to nothing but religion, whose handmaid it was.

They longed to rear a race of cultured men—to plant a school which should elbow out of America those wicked universities which were then the pests of Europe—vicious sinks which Beza called Flabella Satanæ, Satan’s fans; and which Luther styled Cathedras pestilentiæ et antichristi luminaria, seats of pestilence and beacons of antichrist; where, under the tuition of the Jesuits, immorality was made a fine art, and ferocity was taught as a cardinal virtue.

With this twofold object, a public school was called into life at Cambridge in 1636; and in that same year the General Court made a grant of four hundred pounds, which formed the legs on which the infant university first toddled.[901] Later, John Harvard bequeathed eight hundred pounds and his library to help forward the scholastic venture; whereupon the grateful authorities eternized the donor’s name by calling the school Harvard College.[902]

Henceforth New England had a “city of books.” Harvard college speedily became a nursery of piety, and was to America, as Livy said of Greece, sal gentium.[903] In narrating this achievement, the quaint divine who heaped together the mingled wheat and chaff of the Magnalia, cites triumphantly the language of the orator who chanted pæans to the English Cambridge: “We have now provided—and let envy be as far removed from this declaration as is falsehood—that in popular assemblies stone shall not talk to stone; that the church shall not lack priests, or the bar jurists, or the community physicians; for we have supplied the church, the government, the senate, and the army, with accomplished men.”[904]

Thus the new university was rightly esteemed an ornament and a civilizer; for learning, as the poet has hymned it,

The school is at once preserver and benefactor; it is urbis medicus, the physician of the state.

And now the settlements along the coast-line of Massachusetts were become “like hives overstocked with bees; and many of the new inhabitants began to entertain the thought of swarming into plantations farther in the interior.” The fifteen thousand settlers in Massachusetts felt crowded. They longed to imitate the Plymouth Pilgrims, who had sent out a forlorn hope to colonize Windsor, and the venture of the younger Winthrop at Saybrook. They too, longed

As early as 1634, Hooker’s parishioners, at Cambridge, had petitioned the General Court to permit them “to look out either for enlargement or removal.”[906] The authorities withheld their assent at the outset; but when, in 1636, the motion was renewed, they said Yes.[907]

Hooker—whom Morton calls “a son of thunder”[908]—and Haynes were the chief promoters of this project to remove.[909] The winter of 1635-6 was spent in active preparation. Scouting parties were thrown forward. In the opening of the year, Hartford was settled, government was organized, civil order was established.[910] At the same time pioneers went out from Dorchester, and pushing the earlier Plymouth settlers from the ground, usurped Windsor in the name of Massachusetts Bay.[911] Others quitted Watertown, and sat down at Wethersfield;[912] while some left Roxbury, and were enchurched at Springfield, which was afterwards found to lie within the boundary of the old Bay State.[913]

But this emigration was merely preliminary; it was the first patter of the coming shower; it was the scouts of the Pilgrims, making an initial survey of the new Hesperia of Puritanism. In June, 1636, the principal caravan, led by Thomas Hooker and John Haynes, began its march. “There were of the company about one hundred souls, many of them persons accustomed to the affluence and ease of European life. They drove before them numerous herds of cattle; and thus they traversed the pathless forests of Massachusetts, advancing hardly ten miles a day through the tangled woods, across the swamps and numerous streams, and over the highlands that separated the intervening valleys; subsisting, as they slowly wandered along, on the milk of the kine, who browsed on the fresh leaves and early shoots; having no guide through the nearly untrodden wilderness but the compass, and no pillow for their nightly rest but heaps of stones. How did the hills echo with the unwonted lowing of the herds! How were the forests enlivened by the fervent piety of Hooker! Never again was there such a pilgrimage from the seaside ‘to the delightful banks’ of the Connecticut.”[914]

The Pilgrims paused at Hartford, which the presence of Hooker and Haynes soon lifted into the foremost importance, and it became the Jerusalem of the west. The government was similar to that which Winthrop, and Endicott, and Cotton had shaped at Boston, except that now the church-membership test was omitted, church and state were half-divorced, and all freemen were citizens[915]—liberality which placed the new-born state close beside the Providence plantations in magnanimous catholicity. Indeed, Haynes, whose plastic hand moulded the primitive constitution of Connecticut, had gone through a bitter experience in the trial and banishment of Roger Williams; and his wiser statesmanship bade him beware lest, in steering clear of the Scylla of anarchy, he should ground his politics on the Charybdis of bigotry. His wise tact saved him from both perils, and enabled him, while never interrupting the entente cordiale with Massachusetts, to open a friendly intercourse with the Rhode Island “heretics.”[916]

A twelvemonth after the arrival of the Pilgrims at Hartford, the pioneers were flanked by an invasion of brother Puritans fresh from England. New Haven was planted; and in 1637, Guilford was colonized, and then Milford was settled.[917] These were independent of Connecticut, and for upwards of forty years formed a separate colony, called New Haven.[918] “The settlers,” says Cotton Mather, “were under the conduct of as holy, and as prudent, and as genteel persons, as ever visited these nooks of New England; and though they, in a manner, stole out of Britain, being forbidden to sail, yet they dropped here a plantation constellated with many stars of the first magnitude; for if Theophilus Eaton and John Davenport were not blazing lights, where shall we hunt for meteors?”[919]

The New-Haveners were traders; they believed more in commerce than in husbandry, and so they “went down to the sea in ships.” But in the wilderness traffic did not yield the dividends which it gave on ’change in London, or on the Rialtos of the world; so that in half a decade their stock was spent, and they so nearly touched bottom that they gladly turned for help to despised agriculture,[920] the surest base for new states to build on.

For some months New Haven lacked a charter, and so floated rudderless. But eventually the settlers formed themselves into a body politic by mutual consent, and signed a kind of constitution in a barn;[921] and this is the first political paper that was ever cradled in a manger. It was generally secundum usum Massachusettensem,[922] to follow Cotton Mather’s barbarous Latin; or, in plain English, after the model of the Bay State theocracy.

“Thus it was,” exclaims a jubilant old chronicler, “that Jesus Christ was worshipped in churches of an evangelical character in the outermost wilderness; and from thence, if the inquirer were inclined to make a sally across the channel to Long Island, he might have seen the congregations of our God taking root in those wild wastes.”[923]

The New Haven and Connecticut colonists were for many years on the verge of a quarrel with the Dutch at New Amsterdam, who felt that in this territorial race they had been outstripped and outwitted, and were consequently lifted out of their wonted phlegm by irritation. The “Yankee” and the Dutchman carried on a lusty war of words about their boundary lines, and for this good reason, there were none. Irving tells us that the Dutch disliked the smell of onions; and that the keen Yankee, knowing this, planted his rows each year a little farther west, and before this invasion of onions the sad Dutchman always retired with tearful eyes, leaving the polluted soil to the onion planters.

But bright as seemed the portents, the colonists soon found themselves environed by danger—girdled by a wall of fire. The hostile Dutchman scowled in the west. The untrodden wilderness stretched away on the north. Scores of weary, pathless miles separated them from their brothers on the Atlantic coast. The vengeful Pequods were panting for war in the southeast. They had found, not peace, but a sword; their painful enterprise seemed but “a lure to draw victims within the reach of the tomahawk.” Premonitory symptoms gave warning that danger lurked in the covert beside every log-house beyond the mountains. Soon the woods were ambuscaded, “and the darkness of midnight began to glitter with the blaze of the frontier cabins.” Then shrieked the ghastly Pequod, smeared in his horrid paint. “Fathers found the blood of their sons fattening the wasted cornfields; mothers were frozen by the war-whoop which disturbed the peaceful slumber of the cradle.”