THE ADVANCE OF CIVILIZATION.
“So work the honey-bees—
Creatures that, by a rule of nature, teach
The art of order to a peopled kingdom.
They have a head and officers of sorts,
Where some, like magistrates, correct at home;
Others, like merchants, venture trade abroad;
Others, like soldiers, armed in their stings,
Make boot upon the summer’s velvet buds;
Which pillage they with merry march bring home
To the tent royal of their emperor,
Who, busied in his tent, surveys
The singing mason building roofs of gold;
The civil citizens kneading up the honey;
The poor mechanic porters crowding in
Their heavy burdens at his narrow gate;
The sad-eyed justice, with his surly hum,
Delivering o’er to executors pale
The lazy, yawning drone.”
SHAKSPEARE’S _Henry V_.
From the year 1630—before that, but more perceptibly after—the
advancing march of civilization carried all before it in New England.
There were, indeed, occasional oscillations in its career of triumph;
but always, when its genius seemed to balk, it ended by bearing off a
trophy.
At Plymouth, all the social and religious forces had “settled down
into fixed ways.” Justice was administered, order was preserved,
education was provided for.[763] The old town began to prosper. The
busy hum of men and the laughter of successful trade echoed through
the streets; and Bradford wrote, “Though the partners have been
plunged into great engagements and oppressed with unjust debts,
yet the Lord has prospered our traffic so that our labor is not
for naught. The people of this plantation begin to grow in their
outward estates, by reason of the flowing of many into the province,
especially into the settlements on Massachusetts Bay; by which means
corn and cattle have risen to a great price, whereby some are much
enriched, while commodities grow plentiful.”[764]
As property and a sense of security increased, the Plymouth Pilgrims
began to show a disposition to disperse, for the convenience
of better pasturage and ampler farm-room. So the three hundred
inhabitants, esteeming themselves crowded, separated, and a new
church and hamlet were planted on the north shore of the shallow
harbor.[765] “The town in which all had lived very compactly till
now,” observes the old Plymouth governor somewhat ruefully, “was left
very thin by this move.” In Bradford’s eyes, it was the beginning of
a movement pregnant with evil.[766] He thought, somewhat plausibly,
that strength and safety lay in the close union of the scattered
colonists. Yet that idea was fatal to colonization, and bolder
theorists determined to educate communities by responsibility, the
best of school-masters. They said,
“Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.”
For several years the church at Plymouth had enjoyed the
ministrations of an ordained clergyman. That Separatist, Mr. Smith,
who had crossed the water with Higginson and Skelton in 1629,
perceiving that he was looked upon with some suspicion by his brother
Pilgrims on account of his “come-outism,” an aroma which they
were not then prepared to exhale, went immediately to Nantasket,
sojourning there “with some stragglers” for several months.[767] One
day a Plymouth boat happened to touch at that port, whereupon Mr.
Smith “earnestly besought the crew to give him and his, with such
things as could be readily carried, passage to Plymouth, as he had
heard that there was likelihood that he might there find house-room
until he could determine where to settle; for he said he was weary of
the uncouth place in which he found himself, where his house was so
poor that neither himself nor his goods could keep dry.”[768]
He was brought to Plymouth, where he “exercised his gifts”—which
were rather “low”[769]—being “kindly entertained and sheltered,”
and finally “chosen into the ministry;”[770] so that Brewster once
again found respite. A little later, Smith’s labors and gifts were
supplemented by Roger Williams—why and how long we shall in due time
discover.
In 1632, an event of no little interest occurred. Governor Winthrop
went to Plymouth to exchange fraternal greetings with Governor
Bradford, and mutual inquiries of “What cheer?” were passed. Winthrop
has related the incident. Let us open his record: “The governor
of Massachusetts Bay, with Mr. Wilson, pastor of Boston, and some
others, went aboard the ‘Lion’ on the 25th of October, and thence
Captain Pierce carried then to Wessagusset, where is now a prosperous
settlement of a graver sort than the old ones. The next morning the
governor and his company went on foot to Plymouth, and came thither
within the evening. The governor of Plymouth, Mr. William Bradford,
a very discreet and grave man, with Elder Brewster and some others,
came forth and met them without the town, and conducted them to
the governor’s house, where they were very kindly entertained, and
feasted every day at several houses.
“On the Lord’s Day there was a sacrament, of which they partook;
and in the afternoon Mr. Roger Williams, according to the Plymouth
custom, propounded a question, to which the pastor, Mr. Ralph Smith,
spoke briefly; then Mr. Williams prophesied;[771] and after, the
governor of Plymouth spoke to the question; after him, the elder;
then some two or three more of the congregation. Then the elder
desired the governor of Massachusetts Bay and Mr. Wilson to speak to
it, which they did. When this was done, Mr. Fuller, their surgeon,
put the congregation in mind of their duty of contribution; whereupon
the governors and all the rest went down to the deacon’s seat, and
put into the box, and then returned.
“On Wednesday, the 31st of October, at about five o’clock in the
morning, the governor and his company came out of Plymouth; whose
governor, pastor, elder, and others, accompanied them nearly half
a mile in the dark. Lieutenant Holmes, one of their chiefest men,
with two companions and Governor Bradford’s mare, came along with
them to a great swamp, about ten miles. When they came to the great
river,[772] they were carried over one by one by Luddam, their
guide, as they had been when they came, the stream being very
strong, and up to the crotch; so the governor called that passage
‘Luddam’s Ford.’ Thence they came to a place called ‘Hue’s Cross.’
The governor being displeased at the name, because such things might
hereafter give the papists occasion to say that their religion was
first planted in these parts, changed the name, and called it ‘Hue’s
Folly.’ So they came that evening to Wessagussett, where they were
bountifully entertained, as before; and the next day all came safe to
Boston.”[773]
This was the first interchange of gubernatorial civilities ever known
in America. It was certainly unique. One governor lent the other
his mare to ride home upon, gave him a guide on whose shoulders he
could be ferried across a rapid stream, and entertained his guest by
beseeching him to “prophesy” on the Sabbath, and by gently reminding
him that the contribution-box was empty.
Such was the homely, hearty, frank hospitality of the Pilgrim fathers
over two hundred years ago. Such were the manners and customs of New
England when Brewster “prophesied” and when Winthrop and Bradford
governed. Looking back across two centuries, we smile; but perhaps,
with all its super-refinement, modern hospitality is no whit in
advance of that which contented Winthrop, and of which it may be said,
“There was no winter in’t; an autumn ’twas,
That grew the more by reaping.”
In this same year of Winthrop’s visit to Plymouth, the Pilgrims had
their first boundary quarrel with the French. The extent of Acadia to
the west was long a subject of dispute.[774] The lands which bordered
on the rival boundaries became a “debatable” ground. Bradford and
his coadjutors had erected a trading station on the Penobscot. This
was now assaulted, and “despoiled of five hundred pounds worth of
beaver-skins, besides a store of coats, rugs, blankets, biscuits;”
and insult was added to injury; for the cavalier Frenchmen bade the
tenants of the plundered post tell the English that “some gentlemen
of the Isle of Rhé had been there to leave their compliments.”[775]
This taunt was not instantly responded to. Indeed, it was put out at
interest, and remained unsettled until the next century, when these
“religious English” gave the intruders indefinite leave of absence
from Canada, and settled the boundary question by annexing the whole
territory.
As an offset to their loss on the eastern rivers, the Plymouth
Pilgrims began to push their enterprise towards the west. “Rumor,
with its thousand tongues,” had frequently hymned the praises of
the Eldorado of Connecticut. The phlegmatic Dutchman, so cold on
other themes, kindled on this, and actually took his pipe out of his
mouth, that he might speak more freely. The taciturn Indian melted
into profuse and graphic eloquence when he painted the beauty and
fertility of these western bottom-lands.[776]
These glowing reports at length won the Pilgrims, tied at first by
the necessity of overcoming a contiguous wilderness, to scout in that
region. Parties visited the banks of the “Fresh river,” as the Dutch
styled it,[777] or the _Connecticut_, as it soon came to be called,
“not without profit,” finding it “a fine place both for planting and
for trade.”[778]
In 1633, Bradford and Winslow, who had himself bathed in the waters
of the silvery river, went up to Boston to solicit from Winthrop
a united effort to colonize the Connecticut valley. In the first
spring after Winthrop’s landing, a Connecticut sachem, expelled
from his hunting-grounds by the prowess of the Pequods, a fierce
and numerous tribe, as powerful in New England as the “Six Nations”
were in New York,[779] had come across the country to offer the
pale-faces a settlement on the banks of the beautiful river, together
with the alliance of his warriors and a yearly tribute of corn and
beaver.[780] The Indian negotiator was well received, but Winthrop
declined to accede to his request, since, “on account of their so
recent arrival, they were not fit to undertake it.”[781] The Plymouth
diplomats received the same answer; and returning home, they resolved
to push into the Connecticut forests unassisted.[782]
Meantime the Dutch, hearing of this purpose and preparation, decided
to preoccupy the land, and so, by antedating the Pilgrim settlement,
claim the soil by priority.[783] They did indeed purchase, from a
Pequod chief, a spot of land where Hartford now stands, and erecting
a “slight fort” in June, 1633, planted cannon, and forbade any
Englishman to pass.[784]
Undeterred by threats, the Pilgrims perfected their arrangements,
and in October sailed by the “Good Hope” of the Dutch, after a
parley and mutual threats[785]—in which they were struck only by a
few Dutch oaths—and planted at Windsor the first English colony in
Connecticut.[786] A twelvemonth later, a company of seventy Dutchmen
quitted New Amsterdam with the avowed purpose of expelling the
Pilgrim pioneers. But after observing the spirit and preparation
of the little garrison, they concluded to end their war-trail in a
reconciliation, and retired without violence.[787]
In the midst of their hardy enterprise, while the door of
civilization was just ajar in Connecticut, an infectious fever came
to scourge the Pilgrims. “It pleased the Lord to visit those at
Plymouth,” says Bradford, “with a severe sickness this year, of which
many fell sick, and upwards of twenty, men, women, and children,
died; among the rest, several of those who had recently come over
from Leyden; and at the last, Samuel Fuller, their surgeon and
physician. Before his death, he had helped many and comforted all;
as in his profession, so otherwise, being a deacon in the church and
a godly man, forward to do good, he was much missed. All were much
lamented, and the sadness caused the people to humble themselves
and seek God; and towards winter it seemed good to him to stay the
sickness.
“This disease swept away many of the Indians in that vicinage; and
the spring before, especially all the month of May, there was such a
quantity of strange flies, like wasps in size, or bumblebees, coming
out of holes in the ground, spreading through the woods, and eating
up every green thing, as caused the forest to ring with their hum
ready to deafen the hearers.[788] They have not been heard or seen
since; but the Indians then said their presence foretokened sickness,
which indeed came in June, July, August, and the chief heat of
summer.”[789]
At this period in colonial history, the tide of emigration seemed
to flow at one time and to ebb at another. It was governed by the
increase or the slack of persecution in England. In 1630, the date
of the alienation of the provincial government, it was at the
flood; in the succeeding year it actually receded. “Climate and the
sufferings of the settlers were against free emigration; and besides,
Morton, Radcliff, and Gardiner, were busy in the island against the
colonists. In 1631, only ninety persons came over. But in 1632, the
sluggish current quickened, and again set westward. Spite of threats,
the Pilgrims had not been molested, and as Laud’s pesterings grew in
virulence, many ships then prepared to start, and some of Britain’s
noblest sons were about to desert her; among them Lord Say, Lord
Rich, the ‘good Lord Brooke,’ Hazlerigge, Pym, Hampden, and Oliver
Cromwell. But on the 31st of February, 1633, the king, in council,
issued an order to stay the flotilla.”[790]
’Tis a high fact, and shows upon what slight hinges the weightiest
events turn. The very foremost chiefs of the maturing revolution were
at this time not only anxious to emigrate, but had actually embarked
for America. Well would it have been for Charles, had he said to the
disaffected Puritans,
“Stand not upon the order of your going,
But go at once.”
Had some good genius nudged the elbow of the king, on that critical
morning when his breathless messenger was hastening to stay the
emigrant flotilla, urged him to say Yes, to its sailing, and foretold
the future, how eagerly the fated monarch would have caught the cue,
and torn that parchment, so pregnant with mischief, which forbade
their departure; and offered the immortal junto jewels of gold and
precious stones as an inducement to be gone, and cried, “Egypt is
glad,” when they set out.
But God made the wrath of man praise him. He struck the besotted
court with judicial blindness. Neither Charles, nor Strafford, nor
Laud could read the hand-writing on the wall. They could not foresee
events which were ere long to
“Fright the isle
From her propriety.”
These “fanatics” were not needed in New England. Their fellows had
already commenced to build, at Plymouth and at Massachusetts Bay, for
God and liberty. So they were detained to organize “resistance to
tyrants” in the senate-house, and to give the arbitrary principle its
death-blow at Naseby and Long Marston Moor.
But though the court, frightened at the prodigious extent of an
emigration which threatened to depopulate the kingdom, had fulminated
a decree against colonization, the departure of Pilgrims was only
hindered, not stayed. They continued to cross the water until, in
1640, this pattering emigration had rained four thousand families and
upwards of twenty thousand settlers into New England.[791] Then for
a few glorious years the exodus ceased. The prospect of reform in
England caused men to remain at home, “in the hope of seeing a new
world” without passing the Atlantic.
In the summer of this same year which witnessed the detention of
Cromwell, and Pym, and Hampden, and Hazlerigge, and Lord Brooke,
a ship was freighted for America; and with two hundred other
passengers, it bore to these shores three men who became as famous
on this side the water as the revolutionists did on the other—John
Haynes, John Cotton, and Thomas Hooker.[792] On board the “Griffin”
at this same time was another eminent minister, Mr. Stone; “and this
glorious triumvirate coming together,” remarks Cotton Mather, “made
the poor people in the wilderness say that God had supplied them
with what would in some sort answer their three great necessities;
_Cotton_ for their clothing, _Hooker_ for their fishing, and _Stone_
for their building.”[793]
Haynes, afterwards governor both of Massachusetts and Connecticut,
was “a man of very large estate, and still larger affections;
of a ‘heavenly’ mind and a spotless life; of rare sagacity and
accurate but unassuming judgment; by nature tolerant; ever a friend
to freedom, ever conciliating peace. He was an able legislator,
and dear to the Pilgrims by his benevolence and his disinterested
conduct.”[794]
Cotton and Hooker speedily became the most revered spiritual
teachers of two commonwealths; Cotton shaped and toned Massachusetts
ecclesiasticism; Hooker was the Moses of Connecticut. Both were
well born; both had been clergymen of the English church; both had
been silenced for non-conformity; both were consummate scholars—in
Mather’s strong phrase, _walking libraries_; both had won wide fame
at home, which, like Joseph’s bough, “ran over the wall” of the
Atlantic ocean, and made their names familiar in every cabin on the
eastern coast.
“Cotton was acute and subtile. The son of a Puritan lawyer, he had
been eminent at Cambridge as a student. He was quick in the nice
perception of distinctions, and pliant in dialectics; in manner
persuasive rather than commanding; skilled in the fathers and the
schoolmen, but finding all their wisdom compactly stored in Calvin;
deeply devout by nature as well as habit from childhood; hating
heresy and still precipitately eager to prevent evil actions by
suppressing ill opinions, yet verging in opinion towards progress
in civil and religious freedom. He was the avowed foe of democracy,
which he feared as the blind despotism of animal instincts in the
multitude. Yet he opposed hereditary power in all its forms; desiring
a government of moral opinion, according to the laws of moral equity,
and ‘claiming the ultimate resolution for the whole body of the
people.’”[795]
Cotton was, if not the originator, then the main mover of the
theocratical idea. “When he came,” says Mather, “there were divers
churches in America, but the country was in a perplexed and divided
state; points of church order he settled with exactness; and
inasmuch as no little of an Athenian democracy was in the mould of
the colonial government, by the royal charter which was then acted
upon, he effectually recommended that none should be electors or
elected except such as were visible subjects of Christ personally
confederated in the church. In this way, and in others, he propounded
an endeavor after a theocracy, as near as might be to that which was
the glory of Israel.”[796]
Cotton was a man of much personal humility. “He learned the lesson
of Gregory, ‘It is better, many times, to fly from an injury by
silence, than to overcome it by replying;’ and he used that practice
of Grynæus, ‘To revenge wrongs by Christian taciturnity.’ On one
occasion he had modestly replied to one that would much talk and
croak of his insight into the revelations: ‘Brother, I must confess
myself to want _light_ in these mysteries.’ The man went home and
sent Cotton a _pound of candles_.”[797]
He was iron in his doctrines, but personally he had the _nimia
humilitas_ which Luther sometimes lamented in Staupitz; so much so,
indeed, that Mather marvels that “the hardest flints should not have
been broken on such a soft bag of cotton.”[798]
Cotton, on landing, in 1633, at once assumed that leading position to
which his intellect entitled him, and his pulpit at Boston speedily
became a leading power in Massachusetts.
Hooker was settled, during his sojourn in the Bay plantation, at
Cambridge.[799] He was a man “of vast endowments, a strong will,
and an energetic mind. Ingenuous in temper, he was open in his
professions. He had been trained to benevolence by the discipline of
affliction, and to tolerance by his refuge from home persecution in
Holland. He was choleric in temper, yet gentle in his affections;
firm in faith, yet readily yielding to the power of reason; the
peer of the reformers, without their harshness; the devoted apostle
to the humble and the poor, severe only to the proud, mild in his
soothings of a wounded spirit, glowing with the raptures of devotion,
and kindling with the messages of redeeming love. His eye, voice,
gesture, and whole frame, were animated with the living vigor of
heart-felt religion; he was public-spirited and lavishly charitable;
and ‘though persecution and banishment had awaited him as one wave
follows another,’ he was ever serenely blessed with ‘a glorious peace
of soul’—fixed in his trust in Providence, and in his adhesion to
the cause of advancing civilization, which he cherished always, even
while it remained to him a mystery.
“This was he whom, for his abilities and services, his contemporaries
placed ‘in the first rank’ of men; praising him as the one rich
pearl with which ‘Europe more than repaid America for the treasures
from her coast.’ The people to whom Hooker had ministered in England
had preceded him in exile; as he landed, they crowded about him
with their cheery welcome. ‘Now I live,’ exclaimed he, as with open
arms he embraced his flock, ‘now I live if ye stand fast in the
Lord.’”[800]
Hooker was an apostle of great boldness and of singular charity.
He had fine tact and a habit of discrimination. He had a saying
that “some were to be saved by compassion, others, by fear, being
pulled out of the fire.” He knew how to reach the heart; once, when
a settlement twenty leagues from his habitation was suffering from
hunger, he sent a ship-load of corn to relieve the sufferers, thus
demonstrating his Christianity by what Chrysostom calls “unanswerable
syllogisms.”[801]
Whitfield once said of him: “Hooker is one in whom the utmost
learning and wisdom are tempered by the finest zeal, holiness, and
watchfulness; for, though naturally a man of choleric temper, and
possessing a mighty vigor and fervor of spirit, which as occasion
served was wondrous useful to him, yet he had as much government of
his choler as a man has over a mastiff dog in a chain; he could let
out his dog or pull him in, as he pleased.”[802]
Mather records that some one once, seeing Hooker’s heroism and
persistent goodness, said: “He is a man who, while doing his Master’s
work, would put a king in his pocket.”[803]
Of this there was an instance. It chanced once that on a fast-day
kept throughout England, the judges on their circuit stopped over at
Chelmsford, where Hooker was to preach. Here, before a vast audience,
and in the presence of the judges, he freely inveighed against the
sins of England, and foretold the plagues that would result. Charles
had recently married a papist princess. The undaunted apostle in
his prayer besought God to set in the heart of the king what His own
mouth had spoken by his prophet Malachi, as he distinctly quoted it:
“An abomination is committed; Judah hath married the daughter of a
strange god; the Lord will cut off the man that doeth this.” Though
the judges turned to and noted the passage thus cited, Hooker came to
no trouble; but it was not long before England did.[804]
Hooker and Cotton have been well called the Luther and Melancthon of
New England; each became the oracle of his plantation.
And now “the prophets in exile began to see the true forms of the
house.” They already held the soil by a twofold title: the royal
charter had granted it to the patentees called the “Massachusetts
Company,” “to be held by them, their heirs and assigns, in free and
common soccage; paying, in lieu of all services, one fifth of the
gold and silver that should be found.”[805] And this vestment the
conscientious Pilgrims had been careful to supplement by actual
purchase from the aborigines.[806]
Every day the old trading corporation assumed new prerogatives,
verging more and more towards a representative democracy. Winthrop
was timid, and doubted the legality of this popular movement.
Cotton was alarmed; and on one election day he essayed to check
the democratic tendency by preaching to the assembled freemen
against rotation in office, arguing that an honest magistrate
held his position as a proprietor holds his freehold. But the
voters were deaf to the fears of the government, and careless, for
once, of the decision of the pulpit. Dudley succeeded Winthrop
in the gubernatorial chair;[807] legislation was intrusted to
representatives chosen by the several towns of Massachusetts
Bay;[808] it was decreed that the freemen at large should be
convened only for the election of magistrates.[809] Thus, in 1634,
the electors exercised their “absolute power,” and “established a
reformation of such things as they judged to be amiss in the model of
government.”[810]
Now the colonial authority was divided between two branches. The
representatives were the legislative, the magistrates were the
executive arm. Both sat together in the outset, forming what
was called “The General Court.” Finally, the magistrates grew
discontented; as the towns increased, so did the representatives; and
they found themselves outvoted; so they pressed for separate houses,
each with a veto on the other. It was granted. The _deputies_ and the
_council_ were inaugurated;[811] and these, under the Republic, have
become the Representatives and the Senate.
Next, a law was framed which forbade arbitrary taxation; it was
decreed that “the deputies alone were competent to grant land or
raise money.”[812] Already “the state was filled with the bane of
village politicians; ‘the freemen of every town in the Bay were busy
in inquiring into their liberties.’ With the important exception of
universal suffrage, in our age so happily in process of complete
establishment, representative democracy was as perfect two centuries
ago as it is to-day. Even the magistrates who acted as judges held
their office by annual popular election. ‘Elections cannot be safe
there long,’ sneered an English lawyer, Leckford, with a shrug. The
same prediction has been made these two hundred years. The public
mind, in perpetual agitation, is still easily shaken, even by slight
and transient impulses; but after all its vibrations, it follows the
laws of the moral world and safely recovers its balance.”[813]
The test of citizenship was indeed exclusive. But the conception
which based the ballot on goodness of the highest type, goodness of
such purity and force that nothing save faith in Christ could create
it—which conferred political power on personal character, was noble,
even while impracticable. But God commissioned an American reformer
to plant the seed of a larger growth by a vehement and potent
protest.