In the early days of the arts of life it is usual for the separate
transactions of each day to be slow and cumbrous; but the experience of
life may be rapid nevertheless. While traveling was a rough jog-trot,
and forest-land took years to clear, and the harvest weeks to gather,
property grew fast, marriages were precipitate and repeated, one
generation trod on the heels of another, and the old folks complained
that The Enemy made rapid conquest of the new territory which they
had hoped he could not enter. When any work--of house-building, or
harvesting, or nutting, or furnishing, or raising the wood-pile--had to
be done, it was secured by assembling all the hands in the neighborhood,
and turning the toil into a festive pleasure. We have all read of such
"bees" in the rural districts of America down to the present day; and we
can easily understand how the "goodmen" and "goodies" watched for the
good and the evil which came out of such celebrations--the courtship and
marriage, and the neighborly interest and good offices on the one
hand, and the evil passions from disappointed hopes, envy, jealousy,
tittle-tattle, rash judgment, and slander on the other. Much that was
said, done, and inferred in such meetings as these found its way long
afterward into the Tragedy at Salem. Mr. Upham depicts the inner side of
the young social life of which the inquisitorial meeting-house and the
courts were the black shadow:
"The people of the early colonial settlements had a private and interior
life, as much as we have now, and the people of all ages and countries
have had. It is common to regard them in no other light than as a
severe, somber, and pleasure-abhorring generation. It was not so with
them altogether. They had the same nature that we have. It was not all
gloom and severity. They had their recreations, amusements, gayeties,
and frolics. Youth was as buoyant with hope and gladness, love as warm
and tender, mirth as natural to innocence, wit as sprightly, then as
now. There was as much poetry and romance; the merry laugh enlivened
the newly opened fields, and rang through the bordering woods as loud,
jocund, and unrestrained as in these older and more crowded settlements.
It is true that their theology was austere, and their policy, in Church
and State, stern; but, in their modes of life, there were some features
which gave peculiar opportunity to exercise and gratify a love of social
excitement of a pleasurable kind." (Vol. i. p. 200.)
Except such conflicts as arose about the boundaries of estates when the
General Court was remiss in making and enforcing its decisions, the
first and greatest strifes related to Church matters and theological
doctrines. The farmers had more lively minds, better informed as to law,
and more exercised in reasoning and judging than their class are usually
supposed to have; for there never was a time when lawsuits were not
going forward about the area and the rights of some landed property
or other; and intelligent men were called on to follow the course of
litigation, if not to serve the community in office. Thus they were
prepared for the strife when the operation of the two Churches pressed
for settlement.