the remark of a member of the assembly. It was voted that the execution
should cease; more than two-score men had already been strangled for
defending their homes and resisting oppression. Even Charles in London
was annoyed when he heard of the wasteful malignity of "the old fool,"
and sent word of his disapproval and displeasure. A successor was sent
over to supersede him; but he at first refused to go at the king's
command, though he had ever used the king's name as the warrant for his
crimes. He had sold powder and shot to the Indians to kill his own
people with; he had appropriated the substance of widows and orphans
whom he had made such; he had punished by public whipping all who were
reported to have spoken against him; he forbade the printing-press; but
all had been done "for the King". And now he resisted the authority of
the king himself. But Charles, for once, was determined, and Berkeley,
under the disgrace of severe reprimand, was forced to go. The joy bells
clashed out the people's delight as the ship which carried him dropped
down the harbor, and the firing of guns was like an anticipation of our
celebration of Independence Day. He stood on the poop, in the beauty of
the morning, shaking out curses from his trembling hands, in helpless
hatred of the fair land and gallant people that he had done his utmost
to make miserable. In England, the king would have none of him, and he
met with nothing but rebuffs and condemnation on all sides. The power
which he had misused was forever gone; he was old, and shattered in
constitution; he was disgraced, flouted, friendless and alone. He died
soon after his arrival, of mortification; he had lived only to do evil,
and to withhold him from it was to take his life away.
It is not the function of the historian to condemn. Berkeley was by
birth and training an aristocrat and a cavalier, and he was a creature
of his age and station. He had been taught to believe that the
patrician is of another flesh and blood than the plebeian; that
authority can be enforced only by tyranny; that the only right is that
of birth, and of the strongest. He was early placed in a position where
every personal indulgence was made easy to him, where there was none to
call in question his authority, and where there was temptation to
assert authority by oppression, and by arrogating absolute license to
act as the whim prompted, and to lay hands on whatever he coveted. Add
to these conditions a nature congenitally without generous instincts, a
narrow brain, and a sensual temperament, and we have gone far to
account for the phenomenon which Berkeley finally, in his approaching
senility, presented. He was the type of the worst traits that caused
England ultimately to forfeit America; the concentration of whatever is
opposite to popular liberties. His deeds must be execrated; but we
cannot put him beyond the pale of human nature, or deny that under
different circumstances he would have been a better man. We may admit,
too, that, in the wisdom of Providence, he was placed where, by doing
so much mischief, he was involuntarily the cause of more good than he
could ever willingly have accomplished. He taught the people how to
hate despotism, and how to struggle against it. He wrought a mutual
understanding and sympathy between the upper and lower orders; he led
them to define to their own minds what things are indispensable to the
existence of true democracy. These are some of the uses which he, and
such as he, in their own despite subserved. He and the young Bacon were
mortal foes; but he, by opposing Bacon, and murdering his friends,
aided the cause for which they laid down their lives.
After his departure there ensued a period of ten years or more, during
which the pressure upon Virginia seemed rather to grow heavier than to
lighten. The acts of Bacon's assembly were repealed; all the former
abuses were restored; the public purse was shamelessly robbed; the
suffrage was restricted; the church was restored to power. In 1677 the
Dominion became the property of one Culpepper, who had the title of
governor for life; and the restraints, such as they were, of its
existence as a royal colony were removed. But Culpepper's course was so
corrupt as to necessitate his removal, and in 1684 the king resumed his
sway. James II. reached the English throne the following year, and his
persecutions of his enemies in England gave good citizens to America.
But the Virginians, who could be wronged and oppressed, but never
crushed, protested against the arbitrary use of the king's prerogative;
they were punished for their temerity, but rose more determined from
the struggle. No man could be sent to Virginia who was strong enough to
destroy its resolve for liberty.
And now the English Revolution was at hand; and we are to inquire what
influence the new dispensation was to have on the awakening national
spirit of the American colonies.
CHAPTER SEVENTH
QUAKER, YANKEE, AND KING
The American principle, simple in that its perfection is human liberty,
is of complex make. It is the sum of the ways in which a man may
legitimately be free. But neither Pilgrims, Puritans, New Amsterdamers,
Virginians, Carolinians nor Marylanders were free in all ways. Even the
Providence people had their limitations. It is not meant, merely, that
the old world still kept a grip on them: their several systems were
intrinsically incomplete. Some of them put religious liberty in the
first place; others, political; but each had its inconsistency, or its
shortcoming. None had gone quite to the root of the matter. What was
that root?--or, let us say, the mother lode, of which these were
efferent veins?
The Pilgrims and Puritans, heretics in Episcopalian England, had
escaped from their persecution, but had banished heretics in their
turn. Tranquil Lord Baltimore having laid the burden of his doubts at
the foot of God's vicegerent on earth, had sought no further, and was
indifferent as to what other poor mortals might choose to think they
thought about the unknown things. Roger Williams' charity, based on the
dogma of free conscience, drew the line only at atheists. The other
colonists, since their salient contention was on the lower ground of
civil emancipation and self-direction, are not presently considered.
But, to the assembly of religious radicals, there enters a plain Man in
Leather Breeches, and sees fetters on the limbs of all of them. "Does
thee call it freedom, Friend Winthrop," says he, "to fear contact with
such as believe otherwise than thee does? Can truth fear aught? And
fear, is it not bondage? As for thee, George Calvert, thee has
delivered up thine immortal soul into the keeping of a man no different
from what thee thyself is, so to escape the anxious seat; but the dead
also are free of anxiety, and thy bondage is most like unto death. Thee
calls thy colony folk free, because thee lets them believe what they
list; but they do but follow what their fathers taught them, who got it
from theirs; which is to be in bondage to the past. And here is friend
Roger, who makes private conscience free; but what is private
conscience but the private reasonings whereby a man convinceth himself?
and how shall he call his conviction the truth, since all truth is one,
but the testimony of no man's private conscience is the same as
another's? Nay, how does thee know that the atheist, whom thee
excludes, is further from the truth than thee thyself is? Truly, I hear
the clanking of the chains on ye all; but if ye will accept the Inner
Light, then indeed shall ye know what freedom is!"
This Man in Leather Breeches, who also wears his hat in the king's
presence, is otherwise known as George Fox, the Leicestershire weaver's
son, the Quaker. In his youth he was much troubled in spirit concerning
mankind, their nature and destiny, and the purpose of God concerning
them. He wandered in lonely places, and fasted, and was afflicted; he
sought help and light from all, but there was none could enlighten him.
But at last light came to him, even out of the bosom of his own
darkness; and he saw that human learning is but vanity, since within a
man's self, will he but look for it, abides a great Inner Light, which
changeth not, and is the same in all; being, indeed, the presence of
the Spirit of God in His creature, a constant guide and revelation,
withheld from none, uniting and equalizing all; for what, in comparison
with God, are the distinctions of rank and wealth, or of
learning?--Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and
these things shall be added unto you. In the lowest of men, not less
than in such as are called greatest, burns this lamp of Divine Truth,
and it shall shine for the hind as brightly as for the prince. In its
rays, the trappings of royalty are rags, jewels are dust and ashes, the
lore of science, folly; the disputes of philosophers, the crackling of
thorns under the pot. By the Inner Light alone can men be free and
equal, true sons of God, heirs of a liberty which can never be taken
away, since bars confine not the spirit, nor do tortures or death of
the body afflict it. So said George Fox and his followers; and their
lives bore witness to their words.
The Society of Friends took its rise not from a discovery--for Fox
himself held the Demon of Socrates, and similar traditional phenomena,
to be identical with the Inner Light, or voice of the Spirit--but
rather in the recognition of the universality of something which had
heretofore been regarded as exceptional and extraordinary. In the
Seventeenth Century there was a general revolt of the oppressed against
oppression, declaring itself in all phases of the outer and inner life;
of these, there must needs be one interior to all the rest, and
Quakerism seems to have been it. It was a revolution within
revolutions; it saw in the man's own self the only tyrant who could
really enslave him; and by bringing him into the direct presence of
God, it showed him the way to the only real emancipation. Historically,
it was the vital element in all other emancipating movements; it was
their logical antecedent: the hidden spring feeding all their rivers
with the water of life. It enables us to analyze them and gauge their
values; it is their measure and plummet. And this, not because it is
the final or the highest word justifying the ways of God to man--for it
has not proved to be so: but because it indicated, once for all, in
what direction the real solution of the riddle of man was to be sought:
a riddle never to be fully solved, but forever approximately guessed.
Quakerism has not maintained its relative position in religious
thought; but it was the finest perception of its day, and in the
turmoil of the time it fulfilled its purpose. Probably its best effect
was the development it gave to the humbler element of society--to the
yeomen and laborers; affording them the needed justification for the
various demands for recognition that they were urging. Puritanism
banished Quakers, and even hanged them; but the Quaker was the
Puritan's spiritual father, although he knew it not. And therefore the
Quaker, who was among the last to appear in America as a settler in
virgin soil, had a right thereto prior to any one of the others. There
must be a soul before there can be a body.
On the other hand, a soul without a body is not adapted to life in this
world; and an America peopled exclusively by Quakers would have been
unsatisfactory. It is a prevailing tendency of man, having hit upon a
truth, to begin to theorize upon it, and, as the phrase is, run it into
the ground. Quakers would not fight, would not take an oath, would not
baptize, or wear mourning, or flatter the senses with pictures and
statues. A Quaker would resist evil and violence only by enlightening
them. He would not be taxed for measures or objects which he did not
approve. He could see but one way of reforming the world, and thought
that God was equally circumscribed in His methods. But though the
leaven may make bread wholesome, we cannot subsist on leaven alone. The
essence of Americanism may be in a Quaker, but he is far from being a
complete American, and therefore he was fain to take his place only as
a noble ingredient in that wonderful mixture. By degrees, the
singularities which distinguished him were softened; his thee and thy
yielded to the common forms of speech; his drab suit altered its cut
and hue; his hat came off occasionally; his women abated the rigor of
their poke bonnets; he was able to say to the enemy of his country,
"Friend, thee is standing just where I am going to shoot." The
disintegration of his individuality set free the good that was in him
to permeate surrounding society; his fellow flowers in the garden were
more beautiful and fragrant for his sake.
When persecution of Quakers was at its worst, they became almost
dehumanized, attaching more value to their willingness to endure
ill-usage than to the spiritual principle for avouching which they were
ill-used. Many persons--such is the oddity of human nature--were drawn
to the sect for love of the persecution; and gave way to extravagances
such as Fox would have been the first to denounce. But when toleration
began, these excesses ceased, and they bethought themselves to make a
home in the wilderness of their own. There was room enough. George Fox
returned from his pilgrimage to the Atlantic colonies in 1674, with
good accounts of the resources of the new country; and the owner of New
Jersey sold half of it to John Fenwick for a thousand pounds; and the
next year the latter went there with many Friends, and picked out a
pleasant spot on the east bank of the Delaware for the first
settlement, to which he gave the name of Salem. It was at this juncture
that William Penn became, with two others, assigns of the proprietor of
the colony, and thus took the first step toward assuming full
responsibility for it. He did not, however, personally visit America
till seven years later.
Penn was the son of an English admiral: not the kind of timber,
therefore, out of which one would have supposed a great apostle of
non-resistance could be made. He was brought up to the use of ample
wealth, and his training and education were aristocratic. After leaving
Oxford, he made the grand tour, and came home a finished young man of
the world, with the pleasures and rewards of life before him. He had
good brains and solid qualities, and the old admiral had high hopes of
him. No doubt he would have made a very good figure in the English
world of fashion; but destiny had another career marked out for him.
The plain Man with the Leather Breeches got hold of him; and all the
objurgations, threats, and even the act of disinheritance of the
admiral were powerless to extricate him from that grasp. Penn had found
something which seemed to him more precious than rubies, and he was
quite as resolute as the old hero of the Navy. Penn could endure the
beating and the being turned into the streets, but he could not stop
his ears and eyes to the voice and light of God in his soul. He did not
care to conquer another Jamaica, but he passionately desired to
minister to the spiritual good of his fellow creatures. He was of a
sociable and cheerful disposition; he could disarm his adversary in a
duel; he could take charge of the family estates, and qualify himself
for the law; the king was ready to smile upon him; but all worldly
ambitions died away in him when he heard Thomas Lee testify of the
faith that overcomes the world. Nothing less than that would satisfy
Penn. In 1666, when he was two and twenty, he made acquaintance with
the inside of a jail on account of his conscientious perversities; but
the only effect of the experience was to make him perceive that he had
thereby become "his own freeman." When he got out, his friends cut him
and society made game of him; finally, he was lodged in the Tower,
which, he informed Charles II., seemed to him "the worst argument in
the world." They let him out in less than a year, but in less than a
year more he was again arrested and put on trial. The jury, after
having been starved for two days and heartily cursed by the judge,
brought him in not guilty; upon which the judge, with a fine sense of
humor, fined them all heavily and sent him back to prison. But this was
too much for the admiral, who paid his fines and got him out; and,
being then on his death-bed, surrendered at discretion, restoring to
him the inheritance, and observing, not without a pensive satisfaction,
that he and his friends would end by "making an end of the priests."
A six months' term in Newgate was still in store for Penn; but after
that they gave up this method of reforming him. He spent the next years
in exhorting Parliament and reproving princes all over Europe; and in
the midst of these labors he met one of the best and most beautiful
women in England; she had suitors by the score, but she loved William
Penn, and they were married. She was the wife of his mind and soul as
well as of his bed and board. He was now doubly fortified against the
world, and doubly bound to his career of human benevolence. His studies
and meditations had made him a profound philosopher and an able
statesman; and in all ways he was prepared to begin the great work of
his life.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, the Quakers in the new world were building up the framework
of their state. They decreed to put the power in the people, and all
the articles of their constitution embody the utmost degree of freedom,
with constant opportunities for the electors to revise or renew their
judgments. When the agent of the Duke of York levied customs on ships
going to New Jersey, the act drew from the colonists a remarkable
protest, which was supported by the courts. They had planted in the
wilderness, they said, in order, among other things, to escape
arbitrary taxation; if they could not make their own laws in a land
which they had bought, not from the Duke, but from the natives, they
had lost instead of gaining liberty by leaving England. Taxes levied
upon planting left them nothing to call their own, and foreshadowed a
despotic government in England, when the Duke should come to the
throne. The future James II. gave up his claim, and in 1680 signed an
indenture to that effect. Later, at the advice of Penn, they so amended
their constitution as to give them power to elect their own governor. A
charter was drawn up by Penn and confirmed in 1681, and he became
proprietor. No man ever assumed such a trust with less of personal
ambition or desire for gain than he. "You shall be governed by laws of
your own making," said he; "I shall not usurp the right of any, or
oppress his person." He had already made inroads on his estate by
fighting the cause of his brethren in England in the courts; but when a
speculator offered him six thousand pounds down and an annual income
for the monopoly of Indian trade, he declined it; the trade belonged to
his people. He was ardently desirous to benefit his colony by putting
in operation among them the schemes which his wisdom had evolved; but
he would not override their own wishes; they should be secured even
from his power to do them good; for, as liberty without obedience is
confusion, so is obedience without liberty slavery. Instead therefore
of imposing his designs upon them, he submitted them for their free
consideration. Pennsylvania now occupied its present boundaries, with
the addition of Delaware; and western New Jersey ceased to be the
nominal home of the Friends in America. In 1682, Penn embarked for the
Delaware. He had founded a free colony for all mankind, believing that
God is in every conscience; and he was now going to witness and
superintend the working of his "holy experiment."
On October 29th he was received at Newcastle by a crowd of mixed
nationality, and the Duke of York's agent formally delivered up the
province to him. The journey up the Delaware was continued in an open
boat, and the site of Philadelphia was reached in the first week of
November. There a meeting of delegates from the inhabitants was held
and the rules which were to govern them were reviewed and ratified.
Among these it was stipulated that every Christian sect was eligible to
office, that murder only was a capital crime, that marriage was a civil
contract, that convict prisons should be workhouses, that all who paid
duties should be electors, and that there should be no poor rates or
tithes. Then Penn proceeded to lay out the city of Philadelphia, where
they "might improve an innocent course of life on a virgin Elysian
shore." It was here that the Declaration of Independence was signed
ninety-three years afterward.
In March, before the leaves had budded on the tall trees whose
colonnades were as yet the only habitation for the emigrants, the
latter set to work to settle their constitution. "Amend, alter or add
as you please," was the recommendation with which Penn submitted it to
them--the work of his ripest wisdom and loving good-will. To the
governor and council it assigned the suggestion of all laws; these
suggestions were then to be submitted by the assembly to the body of
the people, who thus became the direct law-makers. To Penn was given
the power to negative the doings of the council, he being responsible
for all legislation; but he could originate and enforce nothing. He
would accept no revenues; and, indeed, except in the way of helpfulness
and counsel, never in any way imposed himself upon his people. He was
the proprietor; but in all practical respects, Pennsylvania was a
representative democracy. That they should be free and happy was his
sole desire.
In its relations with the Indians, the colony was singularly fortunate;
the doctrine of non-resistance succeeded best where least might have
been expected from it. All lands were purchased, conferences being held
and deeds signed; and the red men were given thoroughly to understand
that nothing but mutual good was intended. They took to the new idea
kindly; the law of retaliation had been the principle of their lives
hitherto; but if a man did good to them, and dealt honestly by them,
should not they retaliate by manifesting the same integrity and
good-will? At one time it was reported that a band of Indians had
assembled on the border with the design of avenging some grievance with
a massacre. Six unarmed Quakers started at once for the scene of
trouble, and the Indians subsided. It has long been admitted that it
takes two sides to make a fight; but this was an indication that it
needs resistance to make a massacre. Penn, who was fond of visiting the
Indians in their wigwams, and sharing their hospitality, formed an
excellent opinion of them. He discoursed to them of their rights as
men, and of their privileges as immortal souls; and they conceded to
him his claim to peaceful possession of his province. Not less
remarkable was the fate of witchcraft in Pennsylvania. The Swedes and
Finns believed in witches, upon the authority of their native
traditions; and a woman of their race having acted in a violent and
unaccountable manner, they put her on her trial for witchcraft. Both
Swedes and Quakers composed the jury; there were no hysterics; the
matter was dispassionately canvassed; impressions and prejudices were
not accepted as evidence; and in the end the verdict was that though
she was guilty of being called a witch, a witch she nevertheless was
not. The distinction was so well taken that no more witch trials or
panics occurred. This was in 1684, eight years before the disasters in
New England. But newspapers did not exist in those days, and public
opinion was undeveloped.
The colony, receiving a world-wide advertisement by dint of the
excellence of its institutions and the singularity of its principles,
became a magnet to draw to itself the "good and oppressed" of all
Europe. There were a good many of them; and within a couple of years
from the time when Philadelphia meant blaze-marks on trees and three or
four cottages, it had grown to be a real town of six hundred houses.
The colony altogether mustered eight thousand people. With justifiable
confidence, therefore, that all was well, and would stay so, Penn, with
many loving words for his people, returned to England to continue the
defense of the afflicted there. A dispute as to the right boundaries of
Delaware and Maryland was also to be determined; but it proved to be a
lingering negotiation, chiefly noteworthy on account of its leading to
the fixing of the line by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, which
afterward became the recognized boundary between the States where
slaves might be owned and those where they might not. The line was
surveyed, finally, in 1767.