CHAPTER III

THE ENGLISH MIGRATION IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

_They are too delicate and unfitte to beginne new Plantations and

Collonies, that cannot endure the biting of a muskeeto._

WILLIAM BRADFORD.

_To authorize an untruth, by toleration of State, is to build a

sconce against the Walls of Heaven, to batter God out of his

chair._

_The Cobler of Aggawam._

_I have often wondered in my younger dayes how the Pope came to

such a height of arogancie, but since I came to New England I have

perceived the height of that tripple crowne, and also the depth of

that sea._

SAMUEL GORTON.

I

Those who looked to America for great financial profit or immediate

political advantage were disappointed. The seventeenth century had run

half its course before the colonies became an important asset to the

English Government: no gold came from them to enrich its treasury, few

supplies to furnish its navy, while the revenue, derived from its slowly

growing trade was insignificant. Equally deceptive was the New World as

a field for corporate exploitation. The sagacity of Thomas Smythe and

the idealism of Edwin Sandys were alike unavailing. Before the Virginia

Company was dissolved in 1624 it had sunk nearly two hundred thousand

pounds in its venture "withoutt returne either of profitt or of any part

of the principall"; and in 1660 Lord Baltimore, whose colony was well

established, was himself living in straitened circumstances.

Yet within sixty years after the Susan Constant entered the James River,

seven colonies were firmly planted on the coast of North America:

Virginia and Maryland to the south; Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth,

Connecticut and Rhode Island, in New England; and between the two groups

of English settlements was the Dutch colony of New Netherland on the

Hudson. Within the limits of these colonies dwelt a population of more

than seventy thousand people, economically self-sufficing, possessed of

well-defined political institutions and clearly marked types of social

and intellectual life. The English migration and the founding of the

English colonies was in fact due mainly to the initiative of the

colonists themselves; and the institutions which they established in

America were different from those which statesmen and traders had

imagined. The character of colonial life and institutions was determined

by the motives which induced the settlers to leave the land of their

birth, by the inherited traditions which they carried with them into the

wilderness, and by the wilderness itself--the circumstances which, in

the new country, closed them round.

The motives which induced many Englishmen to come to America in the

seventeenth century must be sought in the profound social changes

occurring in the time of Elizabeth and the first Stuarts. The high hopes

with which the Virginia Company looked forward to successful

colonization were partly inspired by the prevailing belief that England

was overpopulated. There was much to justify the belief. The reign of

Elizabeth witnessed a striking increase in the number of unemployed, the

poverty-stricken, and the vagabond. The destruction of the monasteries

left the poor and defenseless without their accustomed sources of

relief; while steadily rising prices, due partly to the increased supply

of silver from the Spanish-American mines, were not infrequently

disastrous to those who were already living close to the margin of

subsistence. As never before country roads and the streets of towns were

encumbered with the vagrant poor, and the jails and almshouses were

filling up, as a result of Elizabethan legislation, with petty thieves,

"rogues and sturdy beggars."

That the surplus population would readily flow into the colonies, to the

advantage of all concerned, was the common belief. For successful

colonization, said the author of _Nova Britannia_ in 1609, but two

things are essential, people and money; and "for the first wee need not

doubt, our land abounding with swarms of idle persons, so that if wee

seeke not some waies for their foreine employment, wee must provide

shortly more prisons and corrections for their bad conditions." Yet for

more than a decade one of the chief difficulties of the Virginia Company

was to procure settlers. Reports from Virginia were discouraging. The

prosperous preferred to remain at home, and the company had "to take any

that could be got of any sort on any terms." Little wonder that the

colony for many years barely survived. It survived only by taking on

the character of a penal camp, in which the settlers worked for the

company that fed them, and ordered their daily routine by the

regulations of martial law.

The settlement was doubtless saved from destruction, but it did not

greatly prosper, under the military and joint-stock régime; for "when

our people were fed out of the common store, glad was he who could slip

from his labour or slumber over his task he cared not how." The first

step in the abolition of the joint stock was taken in 1616 when Sir

Thomas Dale "allotted to every man three acres of land in the nature of

farms." It was the beginning of better things, since not even the most

honest men, when working for the company, "would take so much pains in a

weeke as now for themselves they would do in a day." The first general

distribution was made in 1618, and within a few years the communistic

system was a thing of the past. Throughout the century the "head right"

was the nominal basis for the granting of land: fifty acres were

regarded as the equivalent of the cost of transporting one colonist. But

in fact the head right was customarily evaded. The payment of from one

to five shillings was usually sufficient to secure title to fifty acres,

and in 1705 the practice was legalized. Titles so secured were burdened

with the payment of a small quit-rent to the state; but the quit-rent

was difficult to collect, was often in arrears, and sometimes never

paid.

A greater incentive to settlement than free land was the discovery of a

crop that could be exported at a profit. Virginia had been founded to

raise silk and tropical products, and to supply England with naval

stores. But the difficulties were greater than had been anticipated, and

in 1616, when John Rolfe, having discovered a superior method of curing

the leaf, sold a cargo of native tobacco in London at a profit, the

future of Virginia was assured. Neither the plans of the company nor the

scruples of the king could prevail against the force of economic

self-interest. Twenty thousand pounds were exported in 1619, forty

thousand in 1622, sixty thousand in 1624. Tobacco became at once, and in

spite of long opposition on the part of the home Government remained,

the chief enterprise of the colony. Virginia was founded on tobacco, and

like the other Southern colonies, sacrificed everything to the raising

of her most important commodity; and for Virginia, as for the other

Southern colonies, the conditions necessary for the cultivation of her

great staple were of determining influence in the development of her

social institutions.

Those who were interested in the Virginia Company loudly proclaimed that

the recall of the charter would ruin the colony. But it was population,

rather than corporate or royal control, that Virginia needed, and the

profits from tobacco proved a more powerful incentive to large families

and immigration than all the efforts of king or company. Within a decade

after 1624 the number of settlers increased from 1232 to 5000. In 1649

the population had reached 15,000, and in 1670 it stood at 38,000. Land

was virtually free to those who could pay for the cost of clearing, and

the rich soil of the tide-water bottoms assured an easy living and the

prospect of accumulating a competence. As the conditions of life grew

easier, the Virginians, with the true instinct of frontiersmen,

described America as God's country, abounding in every good thing:

"Seldom any that hath continued in Virginia any time will or do desire

to live in England, but put back with what expedition they can." The

glowing accounts which reached England appealed to those of every class

whose straitened circumstances or unsatisfied ambitions disposed them to

a hazard of new fortunes. The yeoman farmer, whose income was small and

whose children would always remain yeomen; the lawyer and the physician,

the merchant and the clergyman, ambitious to become landowners and play

the gentleman; younger sons of the country gentry, for whom there were

no assured avenues of advancement: these felt the call of the New World.

Fretted by social restrictions, or pinched by rising standards of

living, they saw Virginia in the light of their ideals, and were willing

to exchange a safe but restricted position for the chance of economic

and social enfranchisement.

Since the main road to wealth and influence in Virginia was the raising

of tobacco, every emigrant with capital to invest at once became a

landowner; and the conditions of tobacco-planting disposed him to

enlarge his estate as rapidly as possible. It is true that one advantage

of tobacco over other products was its high acreage value. But the price

ordinarily was low, and many acres were necessary for large net

returns. Besides, the soil was soon exhausted, so that the successful

planter found it necessary to be always acquiring new land in order to

let the old lie fallow. It thus happened that, in spite of the cost of

clearing and the danger from the Indians, Virginia was not settled, as

its founders had intended, in compact towns modeled upon the English

borough, but in widely separated plantation groups, stretching far up on

both sides of the James River. The average size of patents granted

before 1649 was about four hundred and fifty acres; in the period

between 1666 and 1679 the average had risen to nearly nine hundred,

while there were ten patents ranging from ten to twenty thousand acres

each. By 1685 a total population not exceeding that of the London parish

of Stepney had acquired title to an area as large as all England.

For clearing and planting so large an area much unskilled labor was

essential. In Virginia, and in all the Southern colonies with the

exception of North Carolina, there accordingly existed, side by side

with the landowning planter class, and sharply distinct from it, a

servile laboring class which formed a large part of the total

population. In 1619, we are told, "came a Dutch man of war with 20

negars." The ship was probably English rather than Dutch. In either case

the circumstance marks the beginning of African slavery in the English

continental colonies; but the importation of slaves was slight until the

close of the century, and the laborers who cleared the forests and

worked the fields were largely supplied by contract, and were known as

"servants." The servant was a person bound over for a term of years to

the planter who paid his transportation or purchased the contract right

from its original owner. The term of service varied from two to seven

years, at the expiration of which the servant became a freeman.

Ex-servants sometimes migrated to other colonies, notably to North

Carolina after the foundation of that colony, or in the next century to

the up-country beyond the "fall line"; but many became renters or

tenants on the estates of the large planters, or in time became planters

themselves. The servant class included some condemned criminals and

political offenders, and some educated and cultured people who had

fallen on evil times; but they came mostly from the jails, the

almshouses, or the London streets. They were the unfortunate and the

dispossessed rather than the vicious--men who were vagabonds because

there was nothing for them to do, or petty thieves because they were

starving. They were, none the less, an inferior and a servile class. The

colonial law made no great distinction between the servant for life and

the servant for a term of years; during the term of his indenture, the

latter was subject to his master, driven and whipped like the negro

slave with whom he worked and ate and with whom he was classed.

Less clearly defined than the distinction between the free and the

unfree was the distinction, which began to develop toward the middle of

the century, and which was doubtless accentuated by the Cavalier

migration from England during the Commonwealth period, between the small

and the large landowner. The master of a great estate, enjoying a

certain leisure and exercising a political and social influence denied

to the average freeman, was set above the mass of the planters much as

in England the titled nobility was set above the gentry. Of this small

but important class, the first William Byrd was a notable example.

Uniting in his ancestry the Cavalier and the Roundhead traditions, he

inherited, before the age of twenty, 1800 acres of land and a recognized

social position in the colony. Before his death he had built up an

estate of 26,000 acres, which his son, in the next century, increased to

179,000 acres. He was at once planter, merchant, politician, and social

leader. His caravans of from fifty to one hundred pack-horses penetrated

regularly for many years to the Cherokee country beyond the Blue Ridge

Mountains. The furs which they brought back, together with the products

of his plantation, were exported to England and elsewhere in payment for

slaves, servants, or other commodities which were periodically landed at

his private wharf to be used on his own estate or retailed from his

general store to the small planters roundabout. Before he reached the

age of thirty, Byrd became, and remained throughout his life, a leader

in his own county and in the colony at large--a colonel of militia, a

burgess in the assembly, and member of the governor's council.

From the middle of the century Virginia society thus began to take on

the character which it retained throughout the colonial period. The

colony was primarily a rural and an agricultural community, combining in

curious fashion the democratic spirit of the frontier with the

aristocratic temper of an older civilization. The unit of social

organization was the plantation, which naturally tended to become, and

in the case of the larger plantations often became in fact, relatively

complete and self-sufficing--a little world in itself. The planter,

surrounded by his family and his servants and cut off from intimate or

frequent contact with his neighbors, producing, for the most part in

abundance, all the necessities and many of the luxuries of life, was

master of his _entourage_ and but little dependent upon the outside

world. Inevitably the conditions of plantation life developed the

aristocratic spirit, the sense of mastery and independence which comes

from directing inferiors in an isolated and self-sufficing enterprise.

Influences of environment were strengthened by the traditions which the

settlers had inherited. Neither planter nor servant came to America with

utopian ideals of society or government. It was discontent not dissent

that drove them out. Dissatisfied with their position in the English

social system, they were yet well content with the system itself; a

system which they were willing enough to establish in the New World in

the hope of obtaining in it a more desirable position for themselves.

And so it happened that the laborer and the farmer, the small landowner

and the master of a great estate, the clergyman and the high official,

were disposed to take as a matter of course the position which custom

assigned them, and in that position to exercise the authority and render

the obedience which was proper to it.

Tradition and environment thus conspired to establish a government in

which initiative and leadership fell to the great planters, while the

mass of the freemen exercised a restrained and limited supervision. It

was a happy accident, rather than any strong popular demand, that gave

to Virginia an elected chamber. Sir Edwin Sandys and the Earl of

Southampton, who gained control of the Virginia Company in 1618, hoped

to put the enterprise on a paying basis by lavish land grants and

liberal concessions in respect to religious and political liberty.

Governor Yeardley was accordingly sent out in 1619 with instructions to

call together "two Burgesses from each Plantation, freely to be elected

by the inhabitants thereof." In June of the same year twenty-two

burgesses, representing eleven districts, together with the governor and

council, assembled in the church at Jamestown and inaugurated

representative government in Virginia by passing a body of laws in which

the customs of England were adapted to the conditions of a frontier

community. After the dissolution of the company in 1624 the appointment

of the governor and council vested in the Crown, but the House of

Burgesses, elected at first by the freemen, but after the Restoration on

the basis of a freehold test, was continued. From the first the

assembly, filled by planters, exercised a beneficial influence in giving

a practical character to the laws of the province; while on certain

occasions, and notably during the period of the Commonwealth, it was the

dominant influence in the government of the colony.

But for the most part the assembly was the instrument rather than the

source of power. The directing influence was usually in the hands of the

great planter who combined the functions of merchant and country

gentleman, lawyer and politician and social leader. His knowledge of law

and his familiarity with affairs, his social connection and influence,

his greater leisure, the traditional authority which hung about his

position, all disposed the small planters to accept his initiative and

abide by his decisions. It was difficult to defeat his candidate for the

burgesses; difficult for the elected burgess not to defer to his

opinion. And if the great planters were influential among the burgesses,

they were predominant in the council. The home Government expected the

governor to manage the affairs of the colony by gathering to his support

the most wealthy and influential men in it. Accordingly, the great

planters were customarily appointed to the local offices and to the

council. Generally speaking, the governor and the great planters

established a community of interest on an exchange of favors. The small

group of men in the council, related by marriage, ambitious, shrewd, and

pushing, already wealthy or bound to become so, supported with

reasonable loyalty the royal interests, and found their reward in

exploiting, through the political machinery which they controlled, the

resources of the colony for their own profit. This compact was the basis

of the long régime of Berkeley. But the governor was made aware of the

source of his strength when he trespassed upon the preserves of the

oligarchy which supported him. His attempt to control the Indian trade

drove men like Colonel Byrd over to the side of Bacon, and the authority

of the governor collapsed like a pricked balloon.

Of this oligarchy of politician-planters, Colonel Byrd was indeed the

most notable. Already wealthy and influential, in 1687 he went to London

and secured, through the favor of William Blathwayt, the office of

receiver-general of the customs, to which was attached the office of

escheator; offices, among the most important in the colony, which he

held until his death. It was the duty of the receiver to receive the

quit-rents, and to receive them, at the option of the taxpayer, in

tobacco in exchange for certificates at the rate of about eight

shillings per hundredweight. Tobacco so received was stored in

warehouses, and sold at the close of the year by the receiver-general

for the benefit of the customs. The tobacco offered for the quit-rents

was naturally of inferior quality. Such as it was, the king favored

selling it at auction. But the Virginia assembly preferred to have the

receiver dispose of it by "private arrangement"; and in fact Colonel

Byrd found it convenient to make such "private arrangements" with

burgesses or members of the council, who sometimes paid as much as six

shillings for tobacco which would bring ten or twelve in the open

market.

Members of the legislature who profited by such practices were doubtless

willing to stretch a point in favor of the receiver of the customs. In

1679, before he had become receiver, Colonel Byrd was able to obtain

from the assembly, on condition of maintaining fifty armed men to repel

Indian attacks on the frontier, a grant of ten thousand acres at the

Falls extending on both sides of the James River. The grant was

disallowed in England, but other grants of great value were obtained

with little difficulty. Patents were easily obtained, but they did not

become effective until the land was "settled" by clearing and

cultivating a minimum tract. For a poor man this was the chief obstacle

to acquiring a great estate; but a rich man was often able to avoid it

altogether. In 1688, Byrd secured a patent for 3313 acres. He failed to

"settle" it and the title lapsed. But the land could not be granted

again until the lapse of title was officially declared in the office of

the escheator. Colonel Byrd was fortunately escheator as well as

receiver, and the lapse of his own title was not declared until 1701,

when the same tract was immediately repatented to Nathaniel Harrison,

who straightway transferred it to his neighbor and very good friend, the

original patentee. In like manner the colonel preëmpted 5644 acres of

land, which he held without improvement for ten years when it was

transferred to his son.

The aristocracy, of which Colonel Byrd was a shining light, nevertheless

held by a somewhat precarious tenure. The crude and primitive conditions

of the wilderness, restricting both the occupations and the diversions

of life within narrow limits, inevitably ran the thoughts of men in much

the same mould. The routine of work and pleasure was much the same on

the great plantation as on the small: clearing and planting, spinning

and weaving, dancing and horse-racing, neighborly hospitality which was

generous and sincere because the opportunity to exercise it was rare,

attendance at church or at the county court, at elections, at the annual

muster--it was a range of activities too limited to permit of any

deep-seated sense of difference between man and man.

And, indeed, the main basis of distinction in this new world was a

purely external one--the possession of wealth; and wealth was in no

unreal sense the bequest of nature to capacity. Initiative and industry,

rather than the dead hand of custom, marked a man for distinction and

preferment. It was the land of opportunity where the servant could

become the farmer, the farmer a planter, where the planter, acquiring by

skill or happy chance a great estate, thereby entered in with the

political and social grandees. There were classes but no castes; not

birth or title, but individual enterprise determined rank and influence.

And in an undeveloped country the possession of a great estate was not a

social grievance, but an evidence of success in the perennial contest

with nature, the measure of personal prowess and a test of civic virtue.

The enrichment of Colonel Byrd, even by ways that were devious, was

viewed with complacence by his neighbors so long as it harmed them not.

Yet the submission of the small to the great planter was a convenience

rather than a necessity. The wilderness, with the Indian as a part of

it, developed a crude and a ruthless spirit, but never a cringing or a

submissive one. The gentleman and the magistrate were deferred to, but

neither was regarded as sacrosanct; and when, in the régime of Berkeley,

special privilege in alliance with official corruption seemed to be

narrowing the chances of the common man, the insurgent spirit of

frontier democracy, denying the validity of distinctions and demanding

fair play, found militant expression in Bacon's Rebellion. The episode

was an early instance of that struggle between rich and poor, between

exploiter and exploited, of that stubborn insistence upon equal

opportunity which have so often characterized the more decisive periods

of American history.

II

The origin of New England is inseparably connected with the Protestant

Reformation, that many-sided movement of which no formula is adequate to

convey the full meaning. From one point of view it was the

nationalization of the Church, the subjection of the ecclesiastical to

the lay power. In the end the principle of territorial sovereignty

everywhere prevailed, in Catholic no less than in Protestant countries:

whether Lutheran or Gallican or Anglican, whether completely separated

from Rome or retaining a spiritual communion with it, the Church

submitted to the principle of _cujus regio ejus religio_, and became an

instrument in the hands of kings for erecting the lay and territorial

absolutism on the ruins of the universal church-state. James I spoke for

all his kind when he cried out, "No Bishop no King!" The lay prince

wished not to destroy the Church, but to use it; the sum of his purpose

was to transfer the ultimate authority in conduct and thought from the

divinely appointed priest to the divinely appointed king.

But the Reformation was far more than resistance to Rome. It did not

cease when the king triumphed over the Pope. The "dissidence of dissent

and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion" was as incompatible

with royal as with priestly authority. In this "reformation of the

Reformation" the strength of the movement was everywhere in the towns.

It was generally true, and nowhere more so than in England, that

Protestantism was the result of a middle-class revolt against the

existing régime, a denial of established standards in politics and

morality, the determined attempt to effect a transvaluation of all

customary values.

The quarrel of the middle-class man with the world as he found it was of

long standing. In the feudal-ecclesiastical structure, fairly complete

in the eleventh century and to outward seeming still intact in the

fifteenth, there was no prepared niche for the _bourgeois_. The peasant

to obey and serve; the noble to fight and rule; the priest to instruct

and pray:--these, all in their different ways respected and respectable

careers, completed the sum of God's purpose in arranging the occupations

of men. Yet into this trinity the _bourgeois_ had intruded his unwelcome

presence. The secret of his rise was the skill of his hand to fashion

material things, and his practical intelligence to care for them.

Neither personal service nor personal prowess was the source of his

power. Untouched by the principle of homage or of _noblesse oblige_, he

commanded, or was himself commanded, through the medium of material

values. He put money in his purse because it was the measure of his

independence, the symbol of his worth; and he kept it there, guarding it

as the priest guarded his faith or the noble his honor. Long occupation

with the concrete world of affairs had given his mind a peculiar

quality; his intelligence was direct and firm, his thinking clear and

dry, without atmosphere, unrelieved by poetic imagination or the play of

fancy.

Set apart by occupation and temperament, the middle-class man had little

in common with either the servile or the ruling class; little in common

with the noble who despised his birth, ridiculed his manners, envied his

wealth; little with the priest who found him too rigid, too intelligent,

too reserved with his money and his soul to be a good son of the Church;

little with the peasant who renounced him as a renegade or ignored him

as a _parvenu_. All these benefits the _bourgeois_ returned in full

measure, despising the peasant for his ignorance and servility resenting

the inquisitiveness of the clergy and the condescension of the nobility,

at the same time that he aspired to the power of the one and the

superior position of the other. And from the outside world the

_bourgeois_ had secured a measure of protection. With his money he had

purchased corporate independence and enfranchisement from feudal

obligation. The gild, at once an industrial enterprise, a religious

association, and a charitable foundation, bound him to his fellows and

rounded out his life.

At the close of the fifteenth century many circumstances had contributed

to identify the interests of the small country gentry with those of the

moderately well-to-do townsman, and to set them both in opposition to

the higher nobility and the wealthier merchants and promoters. The

control of trade was passing from the master merchant to the

capitalist, from the city to the state. Powerful financial monopolists

like the Fuggers and the Welsers, in alliance with the territorial

prince or the national government, were undermining the industrial

independence of town and gild. Exactions of State and Church were

increasing. The growing extravagance and immorality of the wealthy, both

burgher and noble, was matched by the worldliness of the upper clergy,

and accompanied by the decay of spiritual interests, the accentuation of

ritual and ceremony, and increased reliance upon external and formal

works as sufficient for salvation. From this world of the high-placed

favorites of fortune, where corruption flourished unashamed and power

was too often exercised without a redeeming sense of obligation, the

middle class was already withdrawing at the close of the fifteenth

century. The townsmen in Germany found satisfaction for their spiritual

and intellectual interests in reviving the religious activities of the

gilds, and in the formation of lay religious societies in which a

simplified form of worship was accompanied by study of the Bible and the

preaching of the unworldly virtues of upright living. It was this

separation of the _bourgeois_ from the world in which he lived that

constitutes the first protest, the beginning of the Protestant movement.

Ideal constructions are doubtless the psychic precipitates of social

experience, and the Protestant theory was but the reasoned expression of

the middle-class state of mind. Thwarted by the existing world of fact,

the leaders employed their practical and dexterous intelligence to

create a new world of semblance, a world of the spirit, in which the

way was illumined by the light of reason, and the individual rather than

the social conscience gave the sense of right direction. Material for

such a philosophy was ready to hand. The practice and the thinking of

the apostolic churches had been newly discovered by the study of the

secular and the sacred past; and the essence of all Protestant thinking

was implied in the phrase in which Luther embodied the teaching of St.

Paul: "Good works do not make the good man, but the good man does good

works." Not the conventional judgments of society, expressed through the

commands of Church or State, but the individual conscience, justified by

faith in God's purpose, determines a man's merit. St. Augustine's ideal

City of God was thus once more set over against the visible secular

world of man. Into this intangible community, a house not made with

hands, the elect and the select withdrew themselves, abiding there as in

a refuge, untouched by the corruptions of a spotted world, seeking with

humility the will of God and submitting with all the pride of conscious

merit to law.

As the middle-class experience implied the Protestant theory of

religion, it implied the Puritan conception of morals and conduct.

Puritanism originated in the towns for the same reason that it lingers

in the country; it was formerly the townsman rather than the countryman

whose ideas and manner of living stamped him as peculiar. The spiritual

and social isolation of the townsman is therefore the source of the

outward impassiveness of the Puritan, as well as of the intensity of

his inner experience: the continued impact of noble or priestly contempt

had crusted his nature with a manner that was rigid and resistant and

undemonstrative, beneath which smouldered the explosive forces of

thwarted ambition and the sense of unrecognized intellectual and moral

excellence. Conscious of a worth which society ignored, he transformed

his qualities into virtues, and erected his virtues into social

standards of value. Prudence and economy, restraint of manner, denial of

the sensuous and the sensual appeal, reserve of soul, the unmoved

endurance of the pricks of fortune--these became the virtues of the

Puritan because they were not the virtues of the world which despised

him: by these self-erected standards he justified himself and passed

judgment on the society in which he felt himself an alien and a

stranger.

Opposition was therefore but fuel to the Puritan flame. Every

persecution of society or obstacle of nature encountered in the endeavor

to withdraw from the world was a confirmation of its corruption, a

device of the devil to tempt him astray, or God's wise method of testing

his faith. To persevere was the very proof of his election, the sure

evidence of right thinking. The doctrine of eternal torment in hell,

said Jonathan Edwards, used to appear "like a horrible doctrine to me. I

remember very well when I seemed convinced, and fully satisfied, but

never could give an account how, or by what means I was thus convinced."

The very painfulness of the idea was doubtless what induced him to

accept it. It was not the truth of the doctrine convincing his

intellect, but the discipline of the will involved in vanquishing the

horror of it, that gave him peace; so that in the end it seemed to him,

not so much true, but "exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet." St.

Augustine furnished us one of the keys to Puritanism when he said: "No

man loves what he endures, but he may love to endure." The Puritan loved

to endure. To expect resistance and to meet it unmoved; to welcome

calumny and reviling with a steadfast mind; to transform a hostile

verdict of the majority into an unconscious award of merit:--such was

the Puritan temper in its most distinguished representatives.

III

In England the Puritan temper was given its effective edge during the

latter years of Elizabeth and the reigns of the first Stuarts. The

Armada was scarcely destroyed before the queen assumed a less

complaisant attitude toward dissent. James I warned the clergy at

Hampden Court that he would make them conform or harry them out of the

land. The third decade of the century witnessed the triumph of

Anti-Christ on every hand: in Germany the success of imperial arms was

crowned by the Edict of Restitution; with the capture of Rochelle, the

Huguenots in France lost their towns of refuge and found themselves at

the mercy of the state; and in England itself the first Charles, more

absolutist and more Catholic than his father, was thought to aim at

nothing less than the ruin of Parliament and the restoration of the

Roman religion. Under the stress of opposition there was accordingly a

marked accentuation of the Puritan and the Separatist spirit. To

Nonconformist and Independent alike the truth became more clear the more

it was traduced and maligned. Year by year there was a deepening sense

of being in the world but not of it; and to those who were already

spiritual exiles, the idea of removing to America came to seem but the

outward expression of an inner fact: "All the churches of Europe have

been brought under desolation; it maybe feared that the like judgements

are coming upon us; and who knows but God hath provided this place to be

a refuge for many, whom he meanes to save out of the generall

callamitie."

It was not the Puritan Nonconformists who first sought refuge on

American shores, but a less aggressive people, who were called Brownists

in derision, but who called themselves Separatists. Robert Browne first

formulated the doctrines of the sect; but its origin, and the reasons

for its persistence in the face of bitter persecution, are not

altogether clear. Poor in purse and feeble in numbers, Separatism found

adherents chiefly in London and Norfolk, and among the lower classes of

artisans and countrymen. It was in London and Norfolk that many thousand

Dutch refugees found homes during the reign of Elizabeth; and it was in

Norfolk that a kind of unofficial, lay religion had been for many

decades a marked feature of craft gild activities. Dutch influence and

the practice of the gilds may have furnished a fruitful soil for the

propagation of Separatism; but the leaders who formulated its doctrines

and ideals were mainly educated Englishmen, graduates of Cambridge many

of them, whose deliberate thinking carried them from Anglicanism to

Nonconformity, and from Nonconformity to Separatism. Such was Robert

Browne the founder, John Greenwood, Henry Barrowe, and John Penry; and

such were the later leaders, William Brewster and John Robinson. These

men, like the Puritans, were Calvinistic in doctrine; like the Puritans,

they held that true Christians formed an ideal commonwealth, whose ruler

Christ was, and whose law was the Bible; like the Puritans, they

believed that the test of the true Christian was an inner spiritual

condition bearing fruit in right living, rather than external conformity

to established custom. But the Separatist was at once less aggressive

and more radical than the Puritan Nonconformist. Desiring toleration for

himself, he accorded it to others; submitting to persecution, he refused

to practice it; and convinced that no purification of the Established

Church could make it the true house of God, his cardinal doctrine was

the separation of the spiritual and the temporal commonwealths. It was

the merit of the Separatist to have caught that inspiring vision which

was denied to most Protestant sects--the vision of the day when it

belongeth not to the magistrate "to compell religion, to plant churches

by power, and to force a submission to Ecclesiasticall Government by

lawes and penalties."

When the seventeenth century opened, exile for opinion's sake was no new

thing for this despised and persecuted sect; and the little Separatist

congregation of Scrooby which John Robinson led out of England in 1608

had doubtless read in Foxe's _Book of Martyrs_ of the many early

Protestants who had removed in the days of Mary to live unmolested at

Basel or Geneva. They themselves could endure persecution with a

steadfast heart. But they were unable to prevail against the "errors,

heresies, and wonderful dissentions" which the devil had begun to sow

even among the elect, and so crossed to Holland and settled in

Amsterdam. In Amsterdam they were, indeed, free from persecution; but

the conditions of life were unfamiliar there, and the dissensions more

bitter even than in England. Therefore they moved on to Leyden, where

they were joined by other English congregations, and where they

remained, "knit together as a body in the most strict and sacred bond

and covenant of the Lord." Yet even there the world compassed them about

and was not to be resisted. Of the grinding toil which made them old

before their time they could not complain; but their children,

associating with foreigners and disposed to marry with them, were losing

their language and departing from their early instruction; while the

renewal of the war with Spain threatened the liberty they enjoyed in

their new home. To preserve the true faith intact, it was necessary to

withdraw still more completely from the world; and they turned to

America where they would be as isolated in fact as they were in idea.

And so they "left that goodly and pleasant citie, which had been their

resting place near 12 years; but they knew they were pilgrimes, and

looked not much upon these things, but lift up their eyes to the

heavens, their dearest countrie, and quieted their spirits."

Of many attempts to withdraw from the corruptions of a complex world of

fact in order to dwell in spiritual peace according to the simple law of

God or nature, few are more interesting than that which issued in the

little colony of Plymouth. But in point of numbers, and in respect to

the storm and stress of conflicting ideals which produce great events,

Plymouth was soon eclipsed by Massachusetts Bay. The repressive measures

of Elizabeth and James I bore less heavily on the Nonconformist than on

the Separatist; but during the early years of Charles the activities of

the former became the special object of royal displeasure. And from the

point of view of the king the Nonconformist who wished to remain in the

Church was, indeed, more dangerous than the Separatist who wished to get

out of it. The great majority of the Puritans were still of the former

type. Men like Cotton and Winthrop, less spiritual and more practical,

less unworldly and more resistant, than men like Robinson and Bradford,

were not prepared to renounce the land of their birth without a

struggle. They wished rather to get control of the Government in order

that their own ideas might prevail, and were more disposed to purify a

corrupt society by act of Parliament than by passive renunciation and

unobtrusive example.

And in the third decade of the century the Puritans were well on the way

to the control of Church and Parliament. All over England they were

sending to Westminster men of their own stubborn temper for whom

political and religious liberty were but two sides of the same shield.

They were buying up impropriated tithes and gaining control of

appointments to livings. In hundreds of parishes the congregations

remained outside while the official reader intoned the service from the

Prayer Book, and then entered to hear their chosen minister preach

doctrines that boded ill to the cause of royal authority. To the

over-sanguine it might have seemed that episcopacy was beginning to

break down into congregationalism, and congregationalism laying the

foundation for control of Parliament, when Charles I, in March, 1629,

pronounced the famous dissolution that marked the beginning of his

personal rule. It was then that many Nonconformists, despairing of

success at home, began to look to America as God's appointed refuge

"from the generall callamitie"; and the ten years from 1630 to 1640,

during which the king endeavored with the aid of Wentworth to dispense

with Parliament, and with the aid of Laud to crush out Nonconformity, is

precisely the period of the great Puritan migration to New England.

In the summer of that very year 1629 a group of Nonconformists, under

the lead of John Winthrop, a gentleman of Suffolk whose estate was

becoming inadequate to his customary manner of living, convinced

themselves that they could best serve God by renouncing the struggle

against king and bishop in order to set up in America a "due form of

Government both civil and ecclesiastical." And for such an enterprise it

seemed that the way had been miraculously prepared. In March, 1628, John

Endicott and five associates had obtained from the New England Council a

grant of land extending from a point three miles north of the Merrimac

River to three miles south of the Charles, and westward from the

Atlantic as far as the South Sea. The enterprise had in the mean time

been joined by many Nonconformists, and in 1629 the associates obtained

from the king a charter which confirmed their rights to the land, and in

addition authorized them, under the title of "The Governor and Company

of Massachusetts Bay," to establish and govern colonies within the

limits of their jurisdiction. All the powers of the company were

intrusted to a governor, deputy-governor, and board of eighteen

assistants, with the final authority in the freemen assembled in general

court. The officers were elected by the freemen of the company, and

freemen were admitted to the company by the officers. The charter

originally provided for the "election of the Governor and officers here

in England"; but before it passed the seals the phrase was omitted:

"With much difficulty," says Winthrop, "we got it rescinded." The change

was of vital importance for those who were preparing to set up, as free

as possible from all outside authority, a "due form of Government both

civil and ecclesiastical." Since the charter did not require the

company's elections to be held in England, the freemen and officers had

but to remove to America to transform a commercial corporation into a

self-governing colony.

With this end in view, the offices of the company were transferred to

those who signified their intention of removing. In March, 1630, all

arrangements were completed, and over a thousand people, including the

governor and officers of the company, left England. When they landed at

Salem in June the prospect was so disheartening that some two hundred

returned in the ships that brought them out; and of those who went on to

Boston Harbor two hundred died before December. The unfavorable reports

of those who returned discouraged migration for many months; but for ten

years after 1632 the repressive measures of Laud and Wentworth produced

a veritable exodus, so that in 1643 the population of Massachusetts Bay

is estimated to have been not less than sixteen thousand.

The leaders of the migration were substantial and hard-headed laymen

like Winthrop and Dudley, and able and conscientious clergymen such as

Cotton, Norton and Wilson, Davenport, Thomas Hooker, and Richard Mather.

During the eclipse of Parliament and the Country party in England, the

former found many avenues of advancement closed, while their estates,

even when carefully husbanded, would no longer permit them, as Winthrop

said, to "keep sail with their equals." The latter, excluded by their

Puritan and evangelical convictions from the profession for which they

were trained, turned to America as the most inviting field for service

among the elect of God. They were men of ability and conviction--"a

chosen company of men, picked out ... by no human contrivance, but by a

strange contrivance of God," to be the leaders of a chosen people.

Yet the Puritan colony was not made up of leaders. In firm intelligence,

in clearly realized conceptions of Church and State, in moral fervor and

spiritual exaltation, men like Winthrop and Davenport were far removed

from the rank and file. The great majority of those who first came to

Massachusetts were small "merchants, husbandmen, and artificers"; men

with little property or none at all; uneducated and home-keeping men

whose outlook was bounded by the parish; Puritans by temperament and

habit rather than by reasoned conviction: followers in a very real and

literal sense. Few of them would have come as individuals; but they came

as families and groups of families from the same community, yielding to

the call of a favorite minister or trusted neighbor. And few would have

come for religion's sake alone. Persecution was the efficient cause, but

straitened circumstances frequently gave point to the pricks of

conscience. Even Winthrop himself, a man of substantial possessions,

tells us that a consideration for his undertaking the New World venture

was that "his meanes heer are soe shortened as he shall not be able to

continue in that place and employment where he now is." How far more

persuasive an appeal was this to common folk! "This lande grows weary of

her inhabitants, soe as man is heer of less price amongst us than a

horse or sheep. All towns complain of the burthen of their poore though

we have taken up many unnecessary, yea unlawfull trades to maintaine

them. Children, servants, and neighbors (especially if they be poore)

are considered the greatest burthen. We stand heer striving for places

of habitation (many men spending as much labour and cost to recover or

keep sometimes an acre or two of land as would procure them many hundred

as good or better in another country) and in ye mean tyme suffer a

whole continent as fruitful and convenient for the use of man to lie

waste without any improvement."

Both in a spiritual and a material sense, it was to preserve and not to

dissolve the ties of community life that the Puritans, leaders and

followers alike, came to Massachusetts. Coming as townsmen seeking land,

they settled in towns, to which they often gave the names of the places

from which they came--for example, Boston, Plymouth, Dorchester. The

town was not originally an industrial center, but a group of

agricultural proprietors who procured from the company title to the land

which they held individually or in common according to custom, and which

they cultivated after the manner with which they were familiar. Free and

equal access to the soil was the principle upon which the original

grants were made: there were no quit-rents or charges; the allotments

were small, and so far as possible equal in value. And happily the

ideals of the settlers were suited to the environment in which they

found themselves. The soil was adapted to the raising of a variety of

farm products; corn and fodder and vegetables, swine and cattle and

horses; products requiring neither great estates nor servile labor for

profitable cultivation. Thus in New England the unit of settlement was a

group of small, free proprietors living together in villages and

managing their affairs by concerted action. The town and the town

meeting were as natural to New England as the plantation and the county

were to Virginia and the other Southern colonies.

But the community in New England was a spiritual as well as an

industrial enterprise, and the counterpart of the town was the church.

By the leaders especially, settlement was regarded more as a planting of

churches than as the founding of towns. In their view the church

covenant was the expression of the fundamental social pact, the public

confession of membership in the spiritual City of God, the very basis of

"that Church-State," that "due form of Government both civil and

ecclesiastical," which they had come to the New World to establish.

"We covenant with our Lord and with one another"--so runs the Salem

covenant, which may be taken as typical--"we avouch the Lord to be

our God, and ourselves to be his people, in the truth and

simplicity of our spirits. We promise to walk with our brethren,

with all watchfulness and tenderness, avoiding jealousy and

suspicion, back-bitings, censurings, provokings, secret risings of

spirit against them; but in all offenses to follow the rule of our

Lord Jesus, and to bear and forbear, give and forgive, as he hath

taught us. We do hereby promise to carry ourselves in all lawful

obedience to those that are over us, in church and commonwealth. We

resolve to approve ourselves to the Lord in our particular

callings; shunning idleness as the bane of any state; nor will we

deal hardly or oppressingly with any, wherein we are the Lord's

stewards."

Town and church were thus the basis of settlement; but whatever measure

of self-direction either might enjoy, neither was regarded as

independent. All legal authority was vested in the company and

exercised by the officers and freemen assembled in general court. Yet of

the two thousand settlers who came over in 1630, less than a score were

members of the company. Authority so narrowly confined could not long

remain unquestioned in a primitive community. In October, 1630, one

hundred and nine persons petitioned to be admitted to the freedom of the

corporation. It was a critical moment in the history of this "due form

of Government." Without numbers, the colony could not thrive; without

restriction of authority, it would be in danger of falling away from the

ideals of its founders. The circumstance was one of many to reveal the

essential difference, in respect to primary motive, between leaders and

followers. The mass of the settlers had migrated primarily to secure

economic enfranchisement: too great restraint would drive them to the

north, where colonists were desired by Mason and Gorges, or to Plymouth,

where the tolerant Pilgrims would welcome them perhaps on easier terms.

But Winthrop and his associates had migrated primarily to establish a

community that should live by God's law; and to admit all freeholders to

share in its direction would end in the defeat of that high purpose.

Weight of numbers prevailed at last; and the history of Massachusetts

Bay in the seventeenth century is the story of the vain and pathetic

effort of single-minded men to identify the temporal and the spiritual

commonwealths. The compromise presently made was the first step in the

final surrender. The one hundred and nine petitioners were admitted; but

it was shortly voted, in plain violation of the charter, that the

rights of the freemen should be confined to the election of the

assistants; and, "to the end that the body of the commons may be

preserved of honest and good men, it was likewise ordered that for time

to come no man shall be admitted to the freedom of this body polliticke

but such as are members of some of the churches within the lymitts of

the same." In order to preserve the purity of the state still more

effectively, it was voted, in 1636, that even church members should be

excluded unless the churches to which they belonged had secured the

approbation both of the magistrates and of a majority of the churches

already established.

The suffrage remained thus restricted until 1684, although a nominal

modification was made in 1664. But the freemen were not long content to

see their privileges confined to the election of assistants and

magistrates. The first protest was characteristically English. In 1632

the minister of Watertown Church, George Phillips, more independent in

his manner of thinking than the majority of the clergy, induced his

congregation to pass the first resolution in America against taxation

without representation: "It was not safe," they contended, "to pay money

after that sort for fear of bringing their posterity into bondage." A

magisterial reprimand from Governor Winthrop reduced the protestants to

the level of an apology; but in 1634 the freemen demanded to see the

charter, and when it became generally known that supreme authority was

vested in the freemen assembled in general court, rather than in the

board of assistants, the latter was forced to concede to the former a

share in the business of lawmaking. Since it was inconvenient for all

the freemen to attend the sessions of the general court in person, they

adopted the custom of sending two deputies from each town to represent

them. The assistants, thus overbalanced by the deputies, demanded the

privilege of the negative voice, a contention which the deputies were

inclined to deny, but which resulted, in 1644, in the separation of the

general court into two houses, the board of assistants constituting the

upper chamber and the deputies the lower. During the same period the

discretionary powers of the magistrates in administering the laws gave

the deputies much concern; and their constant protests were not without

effect, although the victory was mainly to the magistrates. The results

of the first decade of conflict between leaders and followers over the

distribution of political power are registered in the famous Body of

Liberties which was promulgated in 1641.

In spite of concessions to the freemen, political privilege remained

narrowly limited. Between 1631 and 1674 the total number of freemen

admitted was 2527, about one fifth of the adult male residents. The

suffrage was thus far more exclusive than a freehold test would have

made it. In town meeting, voting was not always restricted to freemen;

but in deciding important matters non-freemen were usually excluded. And

yet the formal restriction of political privilege, narrow as it was,

gives no true measure of the real concentration of political power.

Deference to the magistrate, no less than the habit of protest against

illegal action, was an English tradition. The circumstances of the

migration had tremendously accentuated the force of the religious

appeal, and the freemen, being church members, were of all the settlers

precisely that part most disposed to defer to the wishes of the clergy,

and to select for magistrates those whom they approved.

"They daily direct their choice to make use of such men as mainly

endeavor to keepe the truths of Christ unspotted, neither will any

christian of sound judgment vote for any but such as earnestly

contend for the faith, although the increase of trade and traffique

may be a great inducement to some."

The freemen sometimes demonstrated their power, but the same men were

customarily returned to office year after year. The magistrates and the

clergy, a handful of men with practically permanent tenure, men of

strong character and of great ability for the most part, virtually

governed Massachusetts Bay for two generations.

They governed the colony, these "unmitred popes of a pope-hating

commonwealth," yet not without storm and stress; and of all their

difficulties, the quarrel with the freemen over the distribution of

political power was far from being the most perplexing. In 1681, Roger

Williams, a young minister of engaging personality, with "many precious

parts, but very unsettled in judgemente," came to Boston. He scrupled to

"officiate to an unseparated people," and soon went down to Plymouth,

where he "begane to fall into strange oppinions, and from opinion to

practise; which caused some controversie, by occasion whereof he left

them something abruptly." Returning to Massachusetts, he became minister

of Salem Church, which was itself thought to be tinged with radicalism.

But the radicalism of Williams went beyond all reason. He maintained

that the land of New England belonged to the Indians, and that the

settlers were therefore living "under a sin of usurpation of others

possessions." And he denied that the state had any rightful authority in

matters of conscience, holding with Robert Browne that "concerning the

outward provision and outward justice [the magistrates] are to look to

it; but to compell religion, to plant churches by power, and to force a

submission to Ecclesiasticall Government by lawes and penalties,

belongeth not to them." By farmer and magistrate alike the man was

regarded as a nuisance, and after three troubled years was banished from

the colony.

The ideas of Williams were too relevant not to arouse controversy, but

too remote from the spirit of the age to win many adherents. Of another

sort was Mistress Anne Hutchinson, a woman of "nimble wit and active

spirit," one of those popular village characters who go about among the

poor and sick, bringing wholesome draughts of cordial, gossip, and

consolation. As a taster of dry sermons there was none better; so that

many women of Boston, and not a few men, fell into the habit of

assembling at her house, where she discoursed on the latest sermon or

Thursday lecture, and by exegesis and comment and criticism made all

clear. And her doctrine went straight to the heart and intelligence of

the average man in the seventeenth century, as it does to-day and has in

all ages. "Come along with me says one of them. I'le bring you to a

woman that preaches better Gospell than any of your black-coats that

have been at the University, a woman of another kind of spirit, who

hath had many revelations of things to come; and for my part, saith he,

I had rather hear such a one that speaks from the mere motion of the

spirit, without any study at all, than any of your learned Scollers,

although they may be fuller of Scripture." This, indeed, was the secret

of Mistress Anne's power, that she spoke the language of the untutored,

and infused into the scholastic categories of theology the elemental and

familiar emotions of daily life.

The issue raised by Anne Hutchinson soon passed into politics, and the

little colony was divided into irreconcilable factions. The good woman

had a great following in Boston, including not a few in high places.

Wheelwright was her avowed defender; John Cotton was half convinced. The

credit of the party was raised by the accession of the brilliant Sir

Harry Vane, lately come from England, and destined to return hither to

vex a greater than Winthrop. Vane was as radical in politics as Mistress

Anne was in religion; and the two made common cause against the

magistrates and clergy. Had the issue been confined to Boston the result

could not have been doubtful, for the Boston Church was predominantly

Hutchinsonian; but the ministers as a body supported Winthrop and

Wilson, and the old magistrates were returned in the election of 1637.

The victory was a crucial one. The erratic Vane went off to England;

Cotton returned to his first allegiance; and when the cause of all the

trouble was cited to appear before the court in the fall of the same

year, the decree of banishment was a foregone conclusion. Like Luther

before the diet, Anne Hutchinson pressed for reasons--"I desire to know

wherefore I am banished." It was in the spirit of the Roman Church that

Governor Winthrop replied--"say no more; the Court knows wherefore, and

is satisfied."

The direct result of the expulsion of Williams and Anne Hutchinson was

the founding of Rhode Island, famous as an early experiment in the

separation of Church and State. Williams, with his few followers, denied

admittance to Plymouth, went on to the south and founded the town of

Providence. Into this region there shortly came the much larger group,

including William Coddington, who followed Anne Hutchinson into exile.

The settlements of Portsmouth and New Port, which they established

there, were united with Providence, under a patent procured by Williams

in 1643, to form the colony of Rhode Island, where flourished, to the

scandal of its neighbors, that "soul liberty" of which Williams was the

apostle. Yet not without difficulty. Peopled by those who were too

eccentric not to prove troublesome, the history of the little colony was

a stormy one--its peace "like the peace of a man who has the tertian

ague"; but its fame is secure, and, its founder, condemned by the common

sense of his age, will ever be celebrated as the prophet of those

primary American doctrines, democracy and religious toleration.

Rhode Island was founded by those who were not allowed to remain in

Massachusetts; Connecticut by those who, finding its conditions too

restricted, did not wish to remain there. Few facts have been more

potent in determining the history of America than the steady migration

in search of better opportunities. A decade had not passed before the

westward movement began. As early as 1633 many people at the Bay, fired

by favorable reports which John Oldham brought back from the Connecticut

Valley, began to have "a hankering after it." In 1634 the people of

Newtown, under the leadership of Thomas Hooker, asked permission of the

general court to remove there, advancing, in support of their petition,

"their want of accommodation for their cattle, the fruitfulness and

commodiousness of Connecticut, and the strong bent of their spirits to

remove thither." The petition was at first denied, but in 1636,

permission having at last been obtained, a considerable number from the

towns of Newtown, Dorchester, Watertown, and Roxbury migrated to the

west and south and settled the towns--Hartford, Wethersfield, and

Windsor--which became the nucleus of the colony of Connecticut.

While the fertility of the Connecticut Valley was doubtless attractive,

some of the motives which actuated Hooker and his followers lie

concealed in the naïve phrase, "the strong bent of their spirits."

Thomas Hooker, and to a less extent John Haynes and Roger Ludlow, were

men of outstanding ability. But as their towns were second to Boston,

they themselves were overtopped in influence by Winthrop and Cotton,

Dudley and Wilson. In the compact community of Massachusetts Bay, ideas

as well as cattle found accommodation difficult. In religion and

politics Hooker was more radical than Winthrop: he was not wholly out of

sympathy with Anne Hutchinson; and he defended the proposition that "the

foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people,"

whereas Winthrop maintained that the best part of the people "is always

the least, and of that best part the wiser part is always the lesser."

And so, when the petitioners were permitted to leave, the strong bent of

their spirits directed them, not only to the Connecticut, but southward

without the limits of the Massachusetts jurisdiction.

While Hooker and his associates, with room for their cattle and their

ideas, clear of Boston's shadow and the din of disputes over the

negative voice and the covenant of works, were establishing a more

liberal Bible Commonwealth on the Connecticut, Theophilus Eaton, a

merchant of "fair estate and great esteem for religion," and John

Davenport, a dispossessed London minister, were establishing at New

Haven a Bible Commonwealth stricter even than that of Massachusetts.

They had arrived, with their congregation of well-to-do middle-class

Londoners, at Boston in 1637, where they remained during the winter.

Winthrop would have retained them permanently; but Davenport found the

colony distracted by the Hutchinson episode, and was as much distressed

by the concessions which had been made to the "mere democracy" as Hooker

had been by the restraints in favor of a "mixed aristocracy." They

therefore moved on, accompanied and followed by some inhabitants of

Massachusetts, to establish at New Haven a community in which the

Scriptures should be the "only rule attended to in ordering the affairs

of government." But these "Brahmins of New England Puritanism" did not

find the peace which they pursued. The distractions which they left

Boston to avoid attended them in the wilderness; and in the end the

colony was united with the settlements to the north, where the liberal

ideas of Hooker had proved compatible, not only with strict morality and

frugal prosperity, but with religious and spiritual concord as well. The

charter of 1662 which founded the larger Connecticut embodied the ideas

of Hooker rather than those of Davenport, and was so wisely contrived

that it stood the shock of the Revolution and survived to the nineteenth

century as the fundamental law of Connecticut.

Internal difficulties growing out of conflicting ideals of Church and

State had scarcely achieved the dispersion of the New England

settlements before external dangers began to draw them together. As

early as 1637, and again in 1639, the Connecticut settlements,

threatened by the Dutch and the Indians, applied to Massachusetts Bay

for support against the common danger. The Dutch and the Indians were

less dangerous to Massachusetts than to Connecticut, but the possibility

of royal interference touched her more nearly. In 1634 Laud had obtained

the appointment of a commission to inquire into her affairs, and in 1642

the "ill news we have had out of England concerning the breach between

King and Parliament" gave further apprehension with respect to the

colony's chartered liberties. Accordingly, the third proposal of

Connecticut in 1642 met with a favorable response, and in the following

year the New England Confederation was founded. Rhode Island was without

the pale, but Massachusetts, Connecticut, Plymouth, and New Haven

entered into a "firm and perpetual league of friendship and amity for

offense and defense, mutual advice and succor, both for preserving and

propagating the truth and liberties of the Gospel, and for their own

mutual safety and welfare." The affairs of the league were to be

administered by a board of two commissioners from each colony.

Massachusetts, with a greater population than the other three combined,

agreed to bear her proper burden in men and money, and presumed at times

to exercise a corresponding influence. The smaller colonies were

naturally more willing to accept her money than disposed to submit to

her dictation; but in spite of disputes, the Confederation was

maintained for forty years, an effective influence in its day, and the

first of many compromises which led in the end to that more perfect

union which still endures.

IV

Neither revolution in England nor the stress of conflicting ideals in

the colony turned the first generation of Massachusetts Bay leaders from

the straight course which they had laid. Magistrates and clergy went

steadily forward, emerging from Nonconformity into practical Separatism,

as resistant to Parliamentary as to royal control, as cool toward

Cromwell as toward Charles. During the quarter-century of their

domination, Massachusetts maintained a virtual independence of the

mother country and the effective leadership of Now England. Towards the

middle of the century the theocratic principle might have seemed more

firmly established than ever before. The relative tranquillity which

followed the banishment of Anne Hutchinson appeared to be a clear

justification of the action of the general court on that occasion. It

was therefore without hesitation that the authorities acted when Anne

Austin and Mary Fisher, two Quaker missionaries from Barbados, arrived

at Boston in 1656. The women were reshipped to Barbados; and a law was

straightway enacted which decreed the flogging and imprisonment of any

of the "cursed sect of haeritics commonly called Quakers" who might come

within the colony's jurisdiction.

In the seventeenth century, it was agreed that, next to the Münster

Anabaptists, the Quakers were of all dissenting sects the most pestilent

and blasphemous. They used no force in propagating their beliefs or in

defending their lives. They were believers in equality, and refused to

doff their hats to any man, respecting neither magistrate nor priest.

They were believers in liberty; no man to be restrained in matters of

opinion; but every man to go or come, to speak or remain silent, as

God's commands, by direct inner revelation, might be laid upon him. And

it appeared that God had laid his command upon many to go among the

unregenerate bearing testimony, and with sharp-tongued reproach and

reviling to prick as with thorns the seared conscience of a perverse and

stiff-necked generation. Persecution they welcomed as the martyr's

portion, the sure evidence of well-doing. "Where they are most of all

suffered to declare themselves, there they least of all desire to come."

And so, impelled by the force of the divine spirit, they came among the

reserved and seemly Puritans of Boston, with scandalous impropriety of

action bringing the staid Sunday sermon or Thursday lecture to

irremediable confusion, with voluble harangue and wealth of stinging

epithet pouring scorn upon the self-selected leaders of the chosen

people.

The harassed magistrates wished only to be rid of them. But unlike

Williams and Anne Hutchinson, the Quakers came back as often as they

were banished; and as often as they returned, their conduct became more

outrageous, and, the penalties inflicted more severe. Yet oppression

bore its proper fruit. Persecution engendered sympathy; sympathy ripened

into conviction; and the more heretics were confined in the prisons, the

more heresy flourished in the streets. The popularity of Anne

Hutchinson's teachings had demonstrated how eagerly the average man

turned from the literalism of the Puritan clergy in response to the

appeal of one who spoke "from the mere motion of the spirit." Quakerism

was above all a spiritual gospel addressed to the emotions. Its humane

and liberal teachings, obscured but not concealed by the extravagance of

speech and conduct in its first apostles, stood out in striking contrast

to the repressive policy of the Puritan government as well as to the

cold, gray intellectualism of the Puritan religion. The Quakers were a

political danger as well as a public nuisance; for whether few or many

were likely to profess the Quaker faith, among covenanted and

uncovenanted alike their teachings fell on the fruitful soil of

discontent. The magistrates were well aware at last that a crisis was

impending; and they went steadily forward, with circumspection and not

without apprehension, indeed, but without flinching, to meet the final

test. In 1659 and 1660, according to law established and known, five

Quakers were condemned to death, and four were hanged on Boston Common.

The event was a significant one in early Massachusetts history, for it

revealed, in respect to theory and practice alike, the insecure

foundation upon which the Church-State rested. In respect to theory, the

Quakers were a perplexing problem precisely because they remorselessly

pressed the basic principles of Protestantism to their logical

conclusion. The doctrine of the inner light, like Anne Hutchinson's

notion of personal illumination, was implicit in the premises of Luther,

who had grounded the great protest on the conception of a covenant of

grace, and had laid it down, as the primary thesis, that "good works do

not make the good man, but the good man does good works." Luther's

revolt had, indeed, raised a vital social question: Are belief and

conduct in matters religious to be determined by the social will

registered in decrees of Church or State, or by the individual will

following the promptings of reason and conscience? For most dissenters

in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was a logical

difficulty in assenting to the first proposition and a practical

objection to assenting to the second: it was logically difficult to deny

the authority of Rome, which the practice and traditions of centuries

had recognized as voicing the will of Christendom, without denying the

validity of any external authority whatever; but it was practically

impossible to appeal unreservedly to the authority of the individual

reason and conscience without running into free thought and allowing

religion to dissolve in an infinite variety of opinion. Generally

speaking, most Protestant sects appealed from the outer to the inner

authority in order to establish their beliefs, and then from the inner

to the outer authority in order to maintain them. Luther himself, having

denied the right of the Church to compel his conscience, straightway

maintained that it was not for _Herr Omnes_ to determine matters of

religion, and fell back on the State as the defender of his faith

against the dangers of dissent. But it is indeed true that "the business

of dissenters is to dissent"; and the Massachusetts magistrates found

that the very arguments they had used to deny the authority of Laud were

now employed to deny their own. This was the logical opening in the

Puritan armor, that the Protestant Church-State or State-Church was but

a masked and attenuated Catholicism destined to be destroyed by the very

principles upon which it had been originally established.

If in respect to theory the hanging of the Quakers was a confession, in

the realm of practical politics it was but a Pyrrhic victory. The

authority of magistrate and clergy, strained to the breaking point,

never quite recovered its old security. The capital law was itself

passed by a bare majority, and the successive executions carried popular

opposition to the verge of insurrection. Nor did the executions achieve

the desired end. The last sentence was never carried into effect, and

for years the Quakers continued to molest the colony, pushing their

extravagances sometimes to the farthest limit. To fall to mere flogging

after having inflicted the death penalty was a fatal anti-climax which

marks a turning-point in Massachusetts history--the beginning of the end

of Winthrop's Bible Commonwealth.

The end was doubtless hastened by the Stuart Restoration and the recall

of the charter; but the theocratic ideal, carrying the germ of its own

decay, was predestined to failure. For the founders of the Bible

Commonwealth it was an axiom that Church and State were but two sides of

the same shield; a matter of course that the "body of the commons" must

be "preserved of honest and good men"; a reasonable hope that all good

men would be found within the churches. And the circumstances of the

migration seemed, indeed, a miraculous preparation for this easy

solution of human government; for persecution was taken to be but "a

strange contrivance of God" to gather "a chosen company of men"--the

sifted wheat for planting an ideal commonwealth. Yet of the first

settlers more than half refused to take the covenant, thus renouncing

the privileges of the ideal commonwealth without obtaining relief from

its burdens. A most disconcerting circumstance this at the beginning,

and of ill omen for the future! Doubtless some strange perversity of the

natural man, some inscrutable judgment of God for the discipline of his

people, must have kept so many outside the fold.

But in truth not all who came to Plymouth or Massachusetts were of the

sifted wheat. Under the stress of persecution and the stimulus of

migration, the mass of the first settlers doubtless caught something of

the spiritual exaltation which inspired the leaders. But it was not for

the many to live on that high level of purposeful resolution and

enduring courage. It is a significant fact that of those who came over

with Winthrop and Dudley two hundred returned in the ships that brought

them out; and of those who remained who shall say how many met the stern

realities of the New World with a sinking sense of disillusionment,

finding the material conditions of life harder and the spiritual peace

less satisfying than they had imagined? And many there were who had

never been touched by the Puritan ideal. "Men being to come over into a

wilderness," says the kindly Bradford, "in which much labour and servise

was to be done about building and planting, such as wanted help in that

respecte, when they could not have such as they would, were glad to take

such as they could, and so, many untoward servants, sundry of them

proved, were thus brought over, both men and women kind; who, when their

terms were expired, became families of themselves, which gave increase

hereunto. Another and maine reason hereof was, that men, finding so many

godly disposed persons willing to come into these parts, some began to

make a trade of it, to transport passengers and their goods, and hired

ships for that end; and then, to make up their freight and advance their

profite, cared not who the persons were, so they had money to pay them.

And also ther were sente by their freinds some under hope that they

would be made better; others that they might be eased of such burthens,

and they kept from shame at home that would necessarily follow their

dissolute courses. And by this means the country became pestered with

many unworthy persons, who, being come over, crept into one place or

other."

Such unworthy persons doubtless swelled the mass of uncovenanted. Yet

the historian is apt to think that for many, honest and good men enough,

the cold inner temple of the ideal commonwealth must have proved more

forbidding than its wind-swept outer courts. To enter its portals was an

ordeal which the average man will not readily undergo, involving, as an

initial procedure, a confession of faults and a profession of faith, a

public revelation of inner spiritual condition, an exposure of soul to

the searching and curious inspection of the sanctified. And the covenant

itself was found to be no warmed and cloistered retreat, secure from the

rude impact and impertinent gaze of the world. Quite the contrary! To

enter the covenant was to renounce all private spiritual possessions, to

give one's intimate convictions into the keeping of others, to subscribe

to a very communism of the emotional life. This un-Roman Church was after

all but a public confessional, in which every brother was a confessor,

and life itself a penance for constructive sin. The soul that is

constantly exposed grows callous or diseased; and the New England

covenant provided a regimen well suited to repel the normal mind or

induce in its patients a fatal spiritual anæmia.

And with every decade the house of the covenant became at once more

difficult to enter and less comfortable to abide in. The Puritan was not

necessarily a sad or solemn person. Yet the light heart and the merry

mind were not the salient characteristics even of the cheerful Winthrop

or the genial Cotton; while the conditions of life in the

wilderness--the unrelieved round of exacting labor, the ever present

danger from the lurking Indians, the long cold winters with their

certain harvest of death from diseases which could be ascribed only to

the will of God and met with resignation instead of skill, the

succession of funerals as depressing as they were public and

pervading--were well calculated to deepen the somber cast of the Puritan

temper and accentuate the critical and introspective tendency of his

mind. Inspection of one's own and one's neighbor's conduct was, indeed,

always a Puritan duty; shut within the restricted horizon of a New

England village, it became a necessity and almost a pleasure. When few

stirring events diverted thought from the petty and the personal, when

pent-up emotion found little outlet in the graces or amusements of

social intercourse, observation and introspection fastened upon the

minutiæ of life and every eccentricity of speech and conduct was weighed

and assessed. Close espionage on conduct was matched by the careful

scrutiny accorded every novel opinion. When the weekly sermon was the

universal topic of conversation, the refinements of belief were more

discussed than essentials; often discussed, they were often

questioned--by strict Separatists like Roger Williams; by cavilers at

infant baptism like that "anciently religious woman," the Lady Deborah

Moodie; by fervid emotionalists, such as Anne Hutchinson or the Quaker

missionaries: and every discussion of the creed left it more precisely

defined, more narrow, and more official. Under the stress of conflicting

opinion and the attrition of acrid debate, the covenant of grace

steadily hardened into a covenant of barren works, in which an air of

sanctimony became an easy substitute for the sense of sanctification,

and the tithe of mint and cummin was allowed to overbalance the

weightier matters of the law.

While the covenant became more inelastic, and its rule of life more

strictly defined, the call of the world became more insidious and

alluring. As the colony became established beyond the fear of failure,

and life fell from an artificial and self-conscious venture to be but a

natural experience, as wealth increased and opportunities for relaxation

and idle amusement multiplied, the elemental instincts of human nature,

stronger than decrees of state, would not be denied. During the third

decade after the founding, the Christmas festival found its way into the

colony, and "dancing in ordinarys upon the marriage of some person" gave

occasion for scandal. Extravagance in "apparill both of men and women"

became the subject of repeated legislation: "we cannot but to our grief

take notice," so runs the law of 1651, "that intolerable excesse and

bravery have crept in uppon us, and especially amongst people of mean

condition, to the dishonor of God, the scandall of our profession, the

coruption of estates, and altogether unsuitable to our povertie."

Non-attendance at church did not become a problem for the magistrates

until 1646, but the fine then imposed proved ineffective; and year by

year the desecration of the Sabbath became more marked and more

difficult of correction. Many and sundry abuses were committed "by

several persons on the Lord's day, not only by children playing in the

streets and other places, but by youthes, maydes, and other persons,

both strangers and others, uncivilly walkinge in the streets and fields,

travelling from towne to towne, going on shipboard, frequentinge common

howses and other places to drinke, sport, and otherwise to misspend that

precious time."

"Maydes and youthes!" The words are significant, for by 1653 the first

generation of native-born New Englanders had indeed come upon the scene

to vex the Puritan fathers. How different from that of the first

settlers must have been the outlook of those who had never been in

England. They had never been oppressed by bishop or king; had never felt

the insidious temptation of a cathedral church, or witnessed the mockery

of the mass, or been repelled by a surpliced priesthood desecrating

God's house with incense and music; had never seen a maypole with its

accompaniment of licentious revelry, or witnessed the debauching effects

of a holiday festival. They had solemnly sat in unwarmed churches; they

had been present at elections; had seen men standing in the pillory or

women whipped through the streets; they had diverted themselves at

weddings or the husking-bee, or by walking in the woods, or by drinking

in a tavern. But no frivolous and superstitious world of Anti-Christ

compassed them about to point the moral of the harsh Puritan tale. Their

Puritanism was induced by precept and example rather than by the

compelling impact of a corrupt society.

Yet no conventionalized Puritanism, no mere living on the dead level of

habitual virtues could satisfy the leaders of the great migration. The

founding of Massachusetts was preëminently a self-conscious movement,

the work of able and resolute men who brought an unquenchable moral

enthusiasm to the support of a clearly defined purpose. They had counted

the cost and made their choice; and every instinct of proud and

self-contained men disposed them to minimize the difficulties which they

encountered in the New World and to exaggerate those which they had

overcome in the Old. Having staked their judgment on the wisdom of the

venture, they were bound to be justified in the event. To admit that

life on the physical and moral frontier was less than they had imagined

would be a humiliating confession of failure; and worse than a

confession of failure; for God had appointed this refuge for them, and

not to abide in it in all contentment would be to cavil at his purpose,

to question his decree. With the instinct of true pioneers they

therefore idealized the barren wilderness, pronouncing its air most

healing, its soil most fertile; and with unfailing optimism proving, by

the very sufferings they endured, how practicable, how spacious and

attractive was the habitation which they had set themselves to fashion.

Thus it was that the very influences which relaxed the hold of the

Puritan ideal upon the mass of the people served only to strengthen its

hold upon their leaders. With resolution stiffened by every obstacle,

magistrates and clergy pressed on to the appointed task, never doubting

that they were called upon to justify the ways of God to man. Drawing

their inspiration from Geneva and the ancient Hebrew code, they assumed,

with a courage as sublime as it proved futile, to foster moral and

spiritual excellence by decrees of state. Indifference or opposition

only called them to a stricter rule; for every physical disaster, every

denial of the creed or departure from the straight line of life, was

thought to be God's judgment upon them for some want of faith or failure

in the law. And in later years the chastisements of the Lord were

many:--the desolating King Philip's War; persistent interference with

their chartered Liberties; dissensions in the Boston Church and quarrels

of magistrates and clergy; the rise of "an anti-ministerial spirit" and

the growth of worldliness and lax living among the people. "What are the

reasons that have provoked the Lord to bring his judgments upon New

England?" Such was the primary question which the Synod of 1679 was

called upon to answer. "Declension from the primitive foundation work,

innovation in doctrine and worship"--this, according to a committee of

the deputies, was the true cause. "A spirit of division, persecuting

and oppressing of God's ministers and precious saints," said Mr. Flint

of Dorchester, "is the sin that is unseen." And not a few maintained

that all their troubles were but well-merited punishments for having

dealt too leniently with the Quakers.

And yet, in the year 1679, such explanations as these were falling to

the level of the conventional for many of the magistrates and even for

some of the clergy. After forty years few of the original leaders were

still alive. Winthrop died in 1649, Cotton in 1652, Thomas Dudley in

1653, John Wilson in 1667, Richard Mather in 1669. The days of

persecution and exile influenced the thinking of the second generation,

indeed, not so much as an experience, but rather as a tradition or a

tale that is told. Liberal influences, which were to oust the Mathers

from control of Harvard College, were already gaining ground in

Cambridge, while Boston had become the center of powerful material

interests which were to prove incompatible with the rigid ideals of the

founders. "The merchants seem to be rich men," writes Mr. Harris in

1675, "and their houses as handsomely furnished as most in London." In

1680 more than one hundred ships traded at the Bay, carrying fish,

provisions, and lumber to southern Europe, to the Madeiras, and to the

English sugar colonies in the West Indies. Many men who rose to

prominence in the third quarter of the century were more concerned for

the temporal than for the spiritual commonwealth; and when material

interests thus came into competition with the interests of religion, not

a few were prepared to compromise with the world, and so a secular and

moderate spirit crept in to corrupt the counsels of government.

The rise of the moderate party and the divergence between clergy and

magistrate is therefore a notable feature of the last years of

Massachusetts history under the charter. In 1679, after the death of

Leverett, Bradstreet was elected governor. He was the leader of the

party of conciliation, one of many who, renouncing the rigid and

uncompromising policy of the clergy, were ready to coöperate with

Randolph in the hope of securing the essential interests of the colony

by a timely submission to the English Government. And it is significant

of the growing influence of the property interests that the moderates

were stronger in the upper than in the lower chamber. In 1682 the

governor and a majority of the assistants, "upon a serious consideration

of his Majesty's intimation that his purpose is only to regulate our

charter, in such a manner as shall be for his service and the good of

this his colony," announced themselves willing to surrender the bulwark

of the Puritan liberties. But the House of Deputies voted to "adhere to

their former bills," preferring with the clergy rather to "die by the

hand of others, than by their own."

The event reveals the opposition of the material and the ideal interests

which was a prime cause in the defeat of the great Puritan experiment.

The assistants were "men of the best estates," says Randolph, while the

deputies were "mostly an inferior sort of planters." Randolph was a

prejudiced observer; but it is undoubtedly true that the upper chamber

spoke for the shipbuilders and traders of Boston. Forty years earlier,

when Laud was preparing to annul the charter, both magistrates and

clergy made ready for forcible resistance. It was no longer possible.

Massachusetts had ceased to be a wilderness community cut off from

contact with the outside world. Her rapidly growing trade depended upon

English markets. The base of the fisheries was shifting northward, and a

French company at Nova Scotia was already seizing New England ships.

Without English protection trade would be ruined and the colony itself

fall a prey to France. Forcible resistance was therefore not to be

thought of. The material interests of Massachusetts bound her to the

home Government, and practical men were apt to think that even the

spiritual City of God would suffer less under Anglican than under

Catholic control.

The recall of the charter but opened free passage to the latent forces

that were already beginning to transform the life and thought of New

England. The theocratic ideal had so far lost its hold that the event to

which the clergy and a remnant of the magistrates looked forward as to a

cosmic catastrophe was accepted with resignation or indifference by the

mass of the people. Neither disaster nor serious disturbance accompanied

the inauguration of the new régime. The extension of the suffrage to the

freeholders removed more discontent than it created. A government

controlled by property interests approved itself as well as one directed

by religious ideas. The colony was no more distracted by the

introduction of the Anglican service than by the erection of the second

Boston Church; and even the passing of Harvard College, that citadel

and fortress of the old theocracy, into the hands of Boston and

Cambridge liberals, was far less a tragedy to Massachusetts than it was

to the Mathers.

The life of Cotton Mather was, indeed, a kind of tragedy, for he was the

most distinguished of those who grew to manhood under the old order only

to witness its fall and live in degenerate days. Not less able than his

father, but how much less influential! In early years his voice was a

commanding one, but he was destined to see his popularity wane and to

live most of his long life in comparative isolation and neglect in the

very community where Increase Mather had been a high priest indeed. In

such men as Cotton Mather the old spirit lived on, sharply accentuated

by defeat; and transformed, in such men as Jonathan Edwards, by dint of

morbid introspection and brooding on the sins of a perverse generation,

into a kind of disease, or spiritual neurasthenia. Such men could but

look back with poignant regret to the golden age that was past. Of that

golden age, Cotton Mather himself, "smitten with a just fear of

encroaching and ill-bodied degeneracies," sat down to write the history,

recording in the _Magnalia_ "the great things done for us by our God,"

in the hope that he might thereby do something "to prevent the loss of

the primitive principles and the primitive practices."

But he had imagined a vain thing. For even as the century drew to its

close, the old Bay colony was already drifting from its back-water

moorings, out into the main current of the world's thought. None could

know to what uncharted seas of political and religious radicalism they

were bearing on. None could foresee the time when Calvin's Institutes

would give way to the Suffolk Resolutions, when Adams would speak in

place of Endicott, or the later day when Emerson would preach a new

antinomianism more desolating than any known to Winthrop or Bradford.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

This period is fully treated in Channing's _History of the United

States_, I, chaps, VIII-XIV; and in Tyler's _England in America_, chaps.

V-VII, IX-XIX. See also Fiske's _Old Virginia and Her Neighbours_, I,

chaps. VII-XI, XIV; and Eggleston's _Beginners of a Nation_ and _The

Transit of Civilization from England to America_. The constitutional

aspects of the colonial settlements are exhaustively treated in Osgood's

_The American Colonies in the 17th Century_. For the economic and social

history of the colonies, see Bruce's _Social Life in Virginia_ and _The

Economic History of Virginia in the 17th Century_, and Weeden's

_Economic History of New England_. Contemporary pamphlets relating to

the colonies are to be found in Force's _Tracts and Other Papers_, 4

vols. Washington, 1838. To understand the motives and ideals of the

Separatists and Puritans one must read their own accounts. Of these, the

most charming is Bradford's _History of Plymouth Plantation_. This, as

well as Governor Winthrop's _Journal_, is printed in Jameson's _Original

Narratives of Early American History_. Johnson's _Wonder Working

Providence_, in the same collection, is a history from the point of view

of a loyal Puritan of average education and intelligence. Morton's _New

English Canaan_ (1632) and _The Simple Cobler of Aggawam_ (1647) are

printed in Force's _Tracts and Other Papers_, vols. II, III. A hostile

account of the Puritan experiment is in Samuel Gorton's _Letter to

Nathaniel Morton_, in Force's _Tracts_, etc., vol. IV. About three

quarters of a century after the founding of Massachusetts, Cotton Mather

wrote his _Magnalia Christi Americana, or the Ecclesiastical History of

New England_, 2 vols. Hartford, 1855. In Bk. I he gives an account of

the founding from the point of view of one who felt that New England was

then departing from the "primitive principles."