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.
75. Land and People.
Sidenote: Geography.
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.
Sidenote: The population.
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.
Sidenote: Classes.
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.
Sidenote: Slavery.
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.
Sidenote: The legal profession.
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.
Sidenote: 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.
Sidenote: Medicine.
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.
Sidenote: Domestic manufactures.
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, § 44), had discouraged, as far as possible, American
efforts in this direction.
Sidenote: Fisheries.
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.
Sidenote: Shipbuilding.
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.
Sidenote: Commerce.
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.
Sidenote: Distribution of occupations.
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.
Sidenote: The towns.
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.
Sidenote: Life and manners.
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.
Sidenote: Roads and travel.
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.
Sidenote: Education.
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.
Sidenote: Crime.
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.
Sidenote: Religion.
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.
Sidenote: "The great awakening."
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.
Sidenote: The witchcraft craze.
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.
Sidenote: The trials.
There was general despondency in Massachusetts in 1692, the result of four
small-pox epidemics which had quickly followed each other, the loss of the
old charter, a temporary increase in crime, financial depression, and
general dread of another Indian outbreak. The time was ripe for an epidemic
of superstitious fear. All at once it broke out with great fury in the old
town of Salem. Despite the protest of Cotton Mather and other prominent
clergymen, who, though believers in witches, condemned unjust methods of
procedure, a special court of oyer and terminer was hastily organized
(1692) by the governor and council for the trial of the accused.
Lieutenant-Governor Stoughton, who presided over this extraordinary
tribunal, was in active sympathy with the fanatics who conducted the
prosecution. The witnesses were chiefly children, and the testimony the
flimsiest ever seriously received in an American court of justice. But the
judges, although sober and respectable citizens, were as deluded as the
people; while the frenzy lasted, nineteen persons were hanged for having
bewitched children in the neighborhood, and one was pressed to death
because he would not plead. Of the hundreds of others who were arrested,
two died while in prison.
Sidenote: Sewall's repentance.
By the following year the craze had exhausted itself, and there was a
general jail-delivery. Many of the children afterwards confessed to the
falsity of their testimony. Samuel Sewall was one of the trial judges. He
afterwards, while standing in his pew in the Old South Church at Boston,
had read at the desk at public declaration expressing his deep repentance
that he had been in such grievous error, and asking the congregation to
unite with him in praying for the forgiveness of God. Cotton Mather,
however, endeavored to vindicate himself by the statement, "I know not that
ever I have advanced any opinion in the matter of witchcraft but what all
the ministers of the Lord that I know of in the world, whether English or
Scotch, or French or Dutch, are of the same opinion with me."
Sidenote: The witchcraft delusion elsewhere in the colonies.
Belief in witchcraft was not confined to Massachusetts. Evidence of this
superstition--childish to us of to-day, but a stern reality in the
strongest minds of Cotton Mather's time--was noticeable throughout most of
the colonies until the middle of the eighteenth century. In 1705 a witch
was "ducked" in Virginia. There were trials for witchcraft in Maryland
during the last quarter of the seventeenth century, but there is no
evidence extant of an execution. In Pennsylvania in 1683 a woman was tried
as a witch, and bound to good behavior. In 1779, during a similar panic
among the French creoles at Cahokia, Ill., two negro slaves were condemned
to be hanged, and another to be burned alive while chained to a post, on
the charge of practising sorcery; there is, however, no evidence that the
sentence was carried out.
81. Political Conditions.
Sidenote: Administration.
The town was in New England the political unit. The town-meeting was a
primary assembly, at which were transacted all local affairs,--those which
came nearest to the individual. The colonial government dealt with general
interests; the colonial machinery of administration might break down, and
yet the immediate needs of the people would have been for a time subserved
by the town governments. This was the case at the beginning of the
Revolution. But the indispensable function of legislation upon property and
contracts, the definition of crimes, and all the judicial affairs of the
people, were from the first carried out by the colony. In the
town-meetings--and in church congregations, which were for a long period
scarcely distinguishable from them--the people were trained in
self-government; their intellects were sharpened, and there was bred a
stout spirit of political self-sufficiency. By the beginning of the
eighteenth century a freehold test for suffrage was common in New England,
as in most of the American colonies. Taxes raised on land, polls, and
personal property were not onerous, as public expenditures were carefully
watched and criticised by a frugal people. The introduction of royal
governors opened the door to bickerings between the executive and the
legislature,--so prominent a feature in eighteenth-century colonial history
prior to the Revolution. Up to 1700, with a few exceptions, the political
machinery had run quite smoothly, when not subjected to outside
interference. The several colonial governments in New England varied in
detail, but they were alike in being largely independent of England, in
being administered in a spirit of simplicity and economy, and in the extent
to which the body of the people were enabled to influence the conduct of
affairs.
Sidenote: Summary.
New England men were brave and liberty-loving, stoutly withstanding any
attempt on the part of the home government to curtail their rights as
Englishmen or hamper their progress. They were not always successful in
their resistance, but were vastly more independent than their French and
Spanish neighbors; and the principles of popular government were nowhere
else, even in the English colonies, so successfully put in practice. They
were hard-working, frugal, God-fearing, educated, and virtuous men. They
sprang from a high quality of pure English stock, and they had raised
indeed "choice grain." They founded an enduring empire amid obstacles that
two and a half centuries ago might well have seemed appalling. The creed of
the Puritans was harsh, their view of life gloomy, and their church
intolerant; but their mission, as they conceived it, was a serious one, and
the stormy experience of Rhode Island was not calculated elsewhere to
encourage looseness in religious thinking. They were enterprising and
thrifty to a high degree. In commerce, domestic trade, manufactures, and
political sagacity, for nearly two centuries New England easily led all the
American colonies. The nation owes much to the wisdom, the energy, and the
fortitude of New England colonial statesmen; and New England institutions
are to-day in large measure characteristics of the American commonwealth.