amid all her great men. The extreme narrowness of Puritan opinion, even
when modified by Baptists and Quakers, was not favorable to the rise of
men like the great Virginians of the eighteenth century. A milder
intellectual climate, a temper less given to disputes about faith and
works, election and reprobation, was needful to produce characters so
broad, so moderate, and yet so firm, as Washington’s. New England did
give birth to Franklin, in the very midst of Mathers and Sewalls; but he
had to slip away to Philadelphia, in order to grow into his full stature
as philanthropist and philosopher. The intolerance of New England
deprived us, for more than a century, of the opportunity to produce
genius and the gentler forms of heroism. We had the Adamses to set the
Revolution on foot, the soldiers of New Hampshire and rural New England
to fight its battles; but its noblest leader must come to us from the
Potomac, and take us back there, when the long fight was won, to
establish our government beside its waters, in sight of his own broad
domain. It was not till this century, now declining, that Concord could
show an intellectual Washington; and Emerson must be born in Boston,
less provincial than our meadowy village, our “rural Venice,” as Thoreau
called it in times of river-freshet.
Naturally, when men appear on earth of Washington’s or of Emerson’s
stamp, there has been a long preparation for their advent. They are not
found among Hottentots or corn-crackers, ‘longshoremen or cowboys; but
in some long-tilled garden of the human species, where certain qualities
have been inbred by descent and betterment for many generations. Poverty
may be their birthright, as in the case of that greatest of Washington’s
successors, Abraham Lincoln, but the experiences that are transmuted by
descent into greatness are quite as often those of poverty as of wealth.
Self-reliance, veracity, courage, and the gift of command are essentials
in the founders and preservers of nations; these are fostered in all new
colonies, and therefore were common qualities in New England, as in
Kentucky and Virginia, in their early years. But among the planters of
Virginia there grew up a form of society, now forever extinct there, in
which these high qualities, together with courtesy and breadth of view,
were cultivated and flourished to an extent which the Calvinistic
rigors and enforced economies of New England never knew. That petty
system of inquiring into creeds and points of doctrine which our
ancestors brought with them from the Puritan parishes of England, and
which was increased here by infusions from Scotland, and the tyranny of
ecclesiastical control in Massachusetts and Connecticut, was not wholly
unknown in Virginia; but its ill effects were dissipated by the customs
of large landholding, outdoor sports, and certain traditions of honor
and breeding which the best of the Virginians brought with them from
England, and kept up by their habit of frequent intercourse with the
mother-country.
It was no sin in Virginia to dance and play the fiddle; the Anglican
Church, while prescribing a formal creed, did not concern itself to
inquire every Sunday, or every Thursday, into all the dogmatic
abstractions of the Westminster Assembly’s Catechism, longer or shorter;
men’s minds were left to take the course most natural to them. But in
New England, along with much acute speculation (the best type of which
is Jonathan Edwards), there went a morbid conscientiousness, turning
its eyes upon inward and even petty matters, and leading to numberless
quarrels about Original Sin, Half-way Covenants, Justification by Faith,
etc. Concord was less infested by this carping, persecuting, quarrelsome
spirit than most of New England; yet the church records, and the
collections of old Dr. Ripley, show there was much of it. Emerson
declares, and justly, that good sense has marked our town annals: “I
find no ridiculous laws, no eaves-dropping legislators, no hanging of
witches, no ghosts, no whipping of Quakers, no unnatural crimes.” But
the spirit which led to these mischiefs in other regions of
Massachusetts and Connecticut was all about us; and it narrowed the
minds and the opportunities of Concord before the Revolution. It was
chiefly in New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont, where ecclesiastical
domination was less rigid, that mental freedom manifested itself. In the
other colonies of the North, wealth and culture were apt to be on the
side of England, when our troubles began; in Virginia and the Carolinas,
and to some extent in New Hampshire and Maine, wealth took the colonial
side.
We may call the imaginative force and
[Illustration: A. BRONSON ALCOTT. (1875.)]
breadth of the Concord authors “Shakespearian” for lack of a better
word; but there was a man of singular mental penetration sometimes
visiting here,--Jones Very, of Salem,--who once made a wider
generalization--whether wisely or not. When Very was asked to
discriminate betwixt Wisdom and Genius, he said, “Wisdom is of God;
Genius is the decay of Wisdom”; adding in explanation, “To the
pre-existent Shakespeare, wisdom was offered; he did not accept it, and
so he died away into genius.” We had a superior sage here (Bronson
Alcott), who had little of the Shakespearian genius, but much of that
mystic wisdom which Very thought older and nobler than genius. Religion
was his native air,--the religion of identity, not of variety; he could
not be polytheistic, as many Christians are, even while fancying
themselves the most orthodox worshippers of the One God. He had that
intense application of the soul to one side of this sphere of life,
which led him to neglect the exercise of intellectual powers that were
amply his. His gift it was, not to expand our life into
multiplicity,--which was the tendency of Emerson, as of Goethe and
Shakespeare,--but to concentrate multiplicity in unity, seeking ever the
one source whence flow these myriad manifestations. His friends used to
call him, in sport, the “Vortical philosopher,” because his speculations
all moved vortically toward a centre, or were occupied with repeating
one truth in many forms. He was a votary of the higher Reason; not
without certain foibles of the saint; but belonging unmistakably to the
saintly order. Of course he was the mock of the market-place, as all but
the belligerent saints are; but he was a profound, vivifying influence
in the lives of the few who recognized his inward light.
From Alcott, in his old age,--he was in his eightieth year when the
experiment began,--came the impulse to that later manifestation of the
same spirit which had led Emerson and his youthful friends to the
heights and depths of Transcendentalism. I speak of the Concord School
of Philosophy, which, in the last years of Emerson and Alcott, and with
the co-operation of disciples of other philosophic opinion, gave to the
town a celebrity in some degree commensurate with its earlier
reputation. It began in the library of Alcott’s Orchard House, where his
genial daughter, Louisa, had written several of her charming books; it
was continued in a chapel, built for the purpose, under the lee of
Alcott’s pineclad hill, and amid his orchard and vineyard. It brought to
reside in Concord that first of American philosophers, Dr. W. T. Harris;
and it gathered hundreds of eager or curious hearers to attend the
lectures and debates on grave subjects which a learned body of teachers
gave forth. It continued in existence from the summer of 1879 to that of
1888, when its lessons were fitly closed with a memorial service for
Bronson Alcott, its founder, who had died in March, 1888. As was said by
the Boston wit of the fight on the 19th of April,--“The Battle of
Lexington; Concord furnished the ground, and Acton the men,”--so it
might
[Illustration: L. M. Alcott.]
be said of this summer university, that Concord provided chiefly the
place in which St. Louis and Illinois, New York and Boston, Harvard and
Yale, held converse on high topics. Yet Concord gave the school
hospitality, and several of its famous authors took part in the
exercises,--sometimes posthumously, by the reading of their manuscripts,
as in the case of Thoreau.
Along with the events and the literature that have given our town a name
throughout the world, there has flowed quietly the stream of civil
society, local self-government and domestic life; broadened at critical
times by manifestations of political energy, in which families like
those of Hoar, Heywood, Barrett, Whiting, Robinson, Gourgas, etc., have
distinguished themselves. Benefactors like Munroe, who built the Public
Library, Dr. Ripley, who for half a century filled the pulpit and took
pastoral care, and John Tileston, who brought the public schools to
their present useful form; soldiers of the Civil War, like Colonel
Prescott and Lieutenant Ripley, and hundreds of unnamed soldiers in the
battle of life,--women no less than men,--have given their innumerable
touch of vigor and grace to the ever-building structure of Concord
life. Painters of our own have added color, and sculptors like French,
Elwell and Ricketson have adorned the town with art. And so we pass on
into the new century, with no conscious loss of vital power,--yet with a
keen regret for the great men who have gone from among us.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
PLYMOUTH
THE PILGRIM TOWN
BY ELLEN WATSON
“Glory of Virtue, to fight, to struggle, to right the wrong;--
Nay, but she aimed not at glory, no lover of glory she;
Give her the glory of going on, and still to be.”
TENNYSON’S _Wages_.
To the stout-hearted Pilgrims who landed here in 1620 this “glory of
going on, and still to be” has been meted in lavish measure. For nearly
three hundred years the fire first kindled in far-away Scrooby in the
hearts of John Robinson, Elder Brewster, Richard Clyfton, the youthful
William Bradford and their devoted followers has burned with a clear
flame; the torch of truth there lit by them has been handed on from
generation to generation.
For the many latter-day pilgrims who visit the shrines of New England,
the gray boulder on Clarke’s Island where the weary voyagers rested
after their stormy cruise in the shallop; the humble rock on our shore
where they at length found shelter; our noble statue of “clear-eyed
Faith” and the not far distant monument on Bunker Hill, will ever bear
like testimony to the courage of that little band of independent
thinkers. Meeting in secret in the Manor-House of Scrooby, these
far-sighted heroes, when they “shooke of the yoake of antichristian
bondage” of the Church of England, made possible for their descendants a
later Declaration of Independence!
And every year, with the new knowledge it brings, adds to the pathos of
that early endeavor after religious and civil liberty. Many English
scholars, generously overlooking the Separation of 1776, have traced on
the mother soil of Old England the very beginnings of the Separatist
movement, and thanks to their careful study of musty records and yellow
parchments we now have a satisfactory, though still incomplete, record
of those few eventful lives to which we proudly owe our present freedom.
One enthusiast even finds the earliest evidences of this movement in the
concerted action of certain rebellious weavers of the twelfth
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF A PAGE FROM GOVERNOR BRADFORD’S MANUSCRIPT,
“PLIMOTH PLANTATION.”
THE ORIGINAL IS NOW IN THE BOSTON STATE HOUSE.]
[Illustration: _Copyright, 1893, by A. S. Burbank._
PULPIT ROCK, CLARKE’S ISLAND.]
century--thirty weavers of the diocese of Worcester--who were summoned
before the Council of Oxford to answer a charge of making light of the
sacraments and of priestly power. Though they answered that they were
Christians and reverenced the teachings of the apostles, they were
driven from the country as heretics, to perish of cold. This “pious
firmness” on the part of the council, writes the short-sighted
chronicler, not only cleansed the realm of England from the pestilence
which had crept in, but also prevented it from creeping in again. But
the pestilence did creep in again and again and the weeds grew apace,
for which thanks are chiefly due to John Wyclif and his followers.
Even before the Reformation Foxe tells of “secret multitudes who tasted
and followed the sweetness of God’s Holy Word, and whose fervent zeal
may appear by their sitting up all night in reading and hearing.” But we
must be content to trace our ancestry and our love of liberty to the
early years of the seventeenth century, at which time, as we may now all
read in the clear lettering of Bradford’s own pen,
“truly their affliction was not smale; which notwithstanding they
bore sundrie years with much patience, till they were occasioned to
see further into things by the light of y^{e} word of God. How not
only these base and beggerly ceremonies were unlawfull, but also
that y^{e} lordly & tiranous power of y^{e} prelats ought not to be
submitted unto; which thus, contrary to the freedome of the
gospell, would load & burden mens consciences, and by their
compulsive power make a prophane mixture of persons and things in
the worship of God. And that their offices & calings, courts and
cannons &c. were unlawfull and antichristian; being such as have no
warrante in y^{e} word of God; but the same that were used in
poperie & still retained.”
So these brave men, whose hearts the Lord had touched with heavenly zeal
for His truth,
“as y^{e} Lords free people joined them selves into a church
estate, in y^{e} felowship of y^{e} gospell, to walke in all his
wayes, made known, or to be made known unto them, according to
their best endeavours, whatsoever it should cost them, the Lord
assisting them. And that it cost them something this ensewing
historie will declare.”
The charming scene of these secret meetings is now well known. In the
little village of Scrooby, where the three shires of Nottingham, York
and Lincoln join their borders, then stood a stately manor-house, once
the favorite hunting-seat of the archbishops of York. Under this
hospitable but already somewhat crumbling roof William Brewster, who had
been appointed “Post” of Scrooby in 1590, welcomed these sufferers for
conscience sake. Hither they stole through the green country lanes, from
far around to listen to the “illuminating ministry” of Richard Clyfton,
“a grave & reverêd preacher who under God had been a means of y^{e}
conversion of many. And also that famous and worthy man, Mr. John
Robinson, who afterwards was their pastor for many years till y^{e}
Lord tooke him away by death.”
Here, too, from the neighboring hamlet of Austerfield, came the lad
William Bradford, already eager for spiritual guidance.
[Illustration: THE EARLY NORMAN DOORWAY AT AUSTERFIELD CHURCH.]
Walking under the elm-trees of the highroad, and through the yellow
gorse, across green meadows and by the banks of the placid Idle, he
stopped perhaps to admire the mulberry-tree planted there by the
world-weary Cardinal Wolsey. That arch-enemy of the Reformation little
thought that a branch of this tree would one day cross the Atlantic, to
be preserved with Pilgrim relics by friends of that “new, pernicious
sect of Lutherans,” against which he warned the king!
Near Bradford’s birthplace in Austerfield now stands, completely
restored, the twelfth-century parish church where he was baptized in
1590, and from which he “seceded” when about seventeen years old. Did
the quaint old bell-cote with the two small bells, the beautiful Norman
arch of the southern doorway with its rich zigzag ornament and
beak-headed moulding, the wicked-looking dragon on the tympanum, with
the tongue of flame--did this perfect picture of Old-World beauty flash
across his memory when, some thirty years later, he helped build the
rude fort on our Burial Hill, which served as the first “Meeting-House”
in New England?
We like to believe that Bradford belonged to the honest yeoman class,
that he “was used to a plaine country life & the innocente trade of
husbandrey”; we know that he had a natural love of study which led him,
despite the many difficulties he met, to master the Dutch tongue as well
as French, Latin, Greek and Hebrew, which latter tongue he studied the
more, “that he might see with his own eyes the ancient oracles of God in
all their native beauty.”
[Illustration: Copyright by A. S. Burbank.
THE OLD FORT AND FIRST MEETING-HOUSE, ON BURIAL HILL, 1621.]
Associated as teacher here with the venerable Richard Clyfton, “the
minister with the long white beard,” and succeeding him as pastor, we
have found the eloquent John Robinson, that winner of all men’s hearts,
that helper of all men’s souls. A youthful student at Cambridge, living
in an age and in an atmosphere of religious questioning, he was deeply
troubled with scruples concerning conformity. He tells us “had not the
truth been in my heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, I had
never broken those bonds of flesh and blood wherein I was so straitly
tied, but had suffered the light of God to have been put out in mine
unthankful heart by other men’s darkness.” Happy in finding congenial
spirits in the new community at Scrooby, Bradford tells us he soon
became
“every way as a commone father unto them.” “Yea, such was y^{e}
mutuall love and reciprocall respecte that this worthy man had to
his flocke and his flocke to him that it might be said of them as
it once was of that famouse Emperour, Marcus Aurelious and y^{e}
people of Rome, that it was hard to judge wheather he delighted
more in haveing such a people, or they in haveing such a pastor.
His love was greate towards them, and his care was all ways bente
for their best good, both for soul & body.”
Under his inspiring guidance, and with William Brewster as their
especial stay and help, they were mercifully enabled to “wade through
things.” Some twenty-three years older than Bradford, we learn from that
modest chronicler, who wrote “in a plaine stile, with singuler regard
unto y^{e} simple trueth in all things,” that Brewster had also a wider
experience of the world.
“After he had attained some learning, viz., the knowledge of the
Latin tongue and some insight into the Greek, and spent some small
time at Cambridge, and then being first seasoned with the seeds of
grace and virtue, he went to the Court, and served that religious
and godly gentleman, Mr. Davison, divers years, when he was
Secretary of State, who found him so discreet and faithful, as he
trusted him above all others that were about him, and only employed
him in matters of greatest trust and secrecy.”
After the innocent Davison was committed to the Tower by the treacherous
“Good Queen Bess,” Brewster retired to Scrooby, where he greatly
promoted and furthered their good cause: “he himself most commonly
deepest in the charge, and sometimes above his ability, and in this
estate he continued many years, doing the best he could, and walking
according to the light he saw, until the Lord revealed further unto
him.”
But these assemblies, however humble and secret, could not long escape
the vigilant eye of the law. They were now
“hunted and persecuted on every side, so as their former
afflictions were but as flea-bitings in comparison of these which
now came upon them. For some were taken and clapt up in prison,
others had their houses besett & watcht night and day, & hardly
escaped their hands; and y^{e} most were faine to flie and leave
their howses and habitations, and the means of their livelihood.”
“Seeing them selves so molested, and that ther was no hope of their
continuance ther, by a joynte consente they resolved to goe into
the Low-Countries, wher they heard was freedome of Religion for all
men.”
This quitting their native soil, their dear friends and their happy
homes to earn their living, they knew not how, in a foreign country, was
indeed considered by many of them to be “an adventure almost desperate,
a case intolerable, & a misserie worse than death.” But after many
betrayals, many delays, many hardships by land and sea, they finally
weathered all opposing storms. At Amsterdam, that friendly city of the
Netherlands Republic, whose Declaration of Independence dates from July
26, 1581, they met together again, with no small rejoicing.
But in the midst of the wealth of this fair city they soon saw “the
grime and grisly face of povertie coming upon them like an armed man,
with whom they must bukle and incounter, and from whom they could not
flye.” For this reason, and to avoid religious contentions already rife
there, in a year’s time they decided to remove to Leyden, “a fair and
bewtifull citie, & of a sweete situation.” Here the story of the long
siege of Leyden, bravely sustained in 1573, must have excited their
ready sympathy, and the city’s choice of a university, offered by
William of Orange, instead of the exemption the city could have had from
certain imposts, must have won the admiration of these scholarly men.
The stay of the English exiles here of some twelve years--the period of
the truce between Holland and Spain--was, though trying, no doubt a good
preparation for the greater hardships they were to endure. While
Bradford wove fustian and his fellow-workers carded wool, made hats and
built houses, Brewster printed “heretical” books, and taught English
“after y^{e} Latin manner.” The harmony of their peaceful and
industrious lives attracted many friends, until some three hundred
kindred spirits joined John Robinson in his prayers for “more light.”
One who soon proved himself to be an invaluable member of the community
was Edward Winslow, a highly educated gentleman from Worcestershire. His
energy, his diplomacy and practical experience of the world, his
influence with Cromwell and other powerful friends in high places,
removed many difficulties in the way of the struggling colony that was
to be. Four times he was their chosen agent in England, and was thrice
elected governor.
Here John Carver, a trusted adviser, who later became the first governor
of New Plymouth, was chosen deacon of their church.
Serving in the troops sent over by Elizabeth to aid the Dutch in
maintaining the Protestant religion against the Spaniards was the
valiant soldier, Myles Standish, of the Dokesbury branch of the
Standishes of Lancashire, who date from the Conquest. There the
beautiful Standish church still bears on its buttresses the family
shield--three standing dishes argent on a field azure--and Standish Hall
is still hung with portraits of warriors in armor, beruffed lawyers with
pointed beards, and gay courtiers of the Queen--the Roman Catholic
ancestors of our plain fighter! Luckily for us all, he
[Illustration: Copyright by A. S. Burbank.
Governor Edward Winslow]
cast in his lot with the plucky workers he met in Leyden, and his cheery
presence and courage must have been of great service in planning the
perilous voyage on which they were about to embark.
For, as the truce with Spain drew to a close, and as the older among
them began to consider the uncertain future that lay before their
children, they longed to take refuge on some freer soil, however far
away. As Bradford writes, with a courage at once humble and sublime:
“Lastly (and which was not least) a great hope and inward zeall
they had of laying some good foundation, or at least to make some
way thereunto, for y^{e} propagating and advancing y^{e} gospell of
y^{e} kingdom of Christ in those remote parts of y^{e} world: yea,
though they should be but even as stepping-stones unto others for
y^{e} performing of so great a work.”
So, “not out of newfangledness, or other such like giddie humor, but for
sundrie weightie and solid reasons,” the voyage was determined upon, and
the King’s consent to their emigration to America sought.
Winslow tells us, in his _Briefe Narrative of the True Grounds for the
First Planting of New England_, that when their plans were laid before
King James he remarked that “it was a good and honest notion,” and
asking further what profits might arise, he was answered, “fishing.” “So
God have my soul,” he said, “so God have my soul, ’tis an honest trade;
‘twas the apostles’ own calling!” And we may state here, notwithstanding
Bradford’s statement that in the beginning “we did lack small hooks,”
New England, before 1650, annually sent to Europe £100,000 worth of
dried codfish.
After many weary negotiations, a patent was at length obtained, but the
future colonists were refused a formal grant of freedom in religious
worship under the King’s broad seal. A loan was made by some seventy
“Merchant Adventurers” in England, and late in July, 1620, we find our
future colonists on the quay at Delfthaven, ready to embark on the
_Speedwell_. They are surrounded by their tearful friends, for whom,
Winslow says, “they felt such love as is seldom found on earth.”