Chapter V • Other Dreamers in Israel

I • Nathaniel Ward • Elizabethan Puritan

The most caustic pen of early New England was wielded by the

lawyer-minister and wit, Nathaniel Ward of Ipswich, author of the

crotchety little book, _The Simple Cobler of Aggawam_, and chief

compiler of the celebrated _Body of Liberties_. He is a strange figure

to encounter in the raw little settlements. To come into his presence

is to feel oneself carried back to an earlier age, when the courtly

wits were weaving their silken terms into gorgeous tapestries. Born

about the year 1578, he was only five years younger than Ben Jonson.

Highly educated and intimate with the best society of England and the

continent, he was well advanced in middle life when he set foot in the

new world, and in his late sixties when he wrote _The Simple Cobler_.

Far more strikingly than any of his emigrant brethren he belonged in

taste and temperament to the later Elizabethan world, which lingered on

into the reigns of James and Charles, zealously cultivating its quaint

garden of letters, playing with inkhorn terms, and easing its cares

with clever conceits. Faithful disciple of Calvin though he was, he

was something of a courtier as well, with a rich sap of intelligence,

which, fermented by much thought and travel in many lands, made him the

raciest of wits, and doubtless the most delightful of companions over

a respectable Puritan bottle. “I have only Two comforts to Live upon,”

Increase Mather reported him as saying. “The one is in the Perfections

of Christ; The other is in The Imperfections of all Christians.”

_The Simple Cobler of Aggawam_ is certainly the brightest bit of

Renaissance English penned in America--an Elizabethan clipped garden

set down in a wilderness of theology. It deserves to be far better

known than it is, not only for its “convenient condiments” of speech

that will tickle the palate of an epicure, but for its quaint

exposition of the muddled state of England in the year 1645. Like a

belated Euphuist, Nathaniel Ward delighted in fantastic words.

If I affect termes [he confessed, by way of apology] it is my

feeblenesse; my friends that know me, thinke I doe not: I confesse,

I see I have here and there taken a few finish stitches, which may

haply please a few Velvet eares; but I cannot now well pull them

out, unlesse I should seame-rend all. It seems it is a fashion

with you to sugar your papers with Carnation phrases, and spangle

your speeches with new quodled words.... I honour them with my

heart, that can expresse more than ordinary matter in ordinary

words; it is a pleasing eloquence; them more, that study wisely

and soberly to inhance their native language.... Affected termes

are unaffecting things to solid hearers; yet I hold him prudent,

that in these fastidious times, will helpe disedged appetites

with convenient condiments, and bangled ears, with pretty quicke

pluckes.[70]

The casual reader is chiefly impressed by the quaint satire of the

book, with its caustic comment on women’s fashions--the “foole-fangles”

of “nugiperous Gentledames,” who “transclout” themselves into “gant

bar-geese, ill-shapen-shotten-shell-fish”; and it is such bits that

are commonly picked out for reprinting in the anthologies. But the

real significance of the work lies elsewhere. _The Simple Cobler_ is

an old man’s plea for accommodation of differences. It is bitter with

intolerance of toleration; it is torn between an old loyalty to King

Charles whom Ward knew and loved--“my long Idolatry towards you,” as

he confesses sadly--and a new loyalty to Parliament; and it is sobered

by a strong concern over the desperate condition of England, which

required looking to speedily, he believed, if the realm were not to be

torn past all mending. On both sides there was abundant “misprision

of Treason,” which properly considered, he held to be no other than

a “misprision of Reason”; and it was in the hope of summoning reason

back to the national councils that the Cobbler offered his humble

suggestions for the consideration of Englishmen.

Ward had been a lawyer before he turned to the ministry, and he seems

to have impressed himself upon his fellow emigrants chiefly as a

“subtile statesman.” In his own way he was a political philosopher,

little given like Roger Williams to exploring theory and examining

principles, but applying rather a shrewd common sense to the problems

of the times. He was convinced that old ways no longer sufficed; that

prerogative and liberty could not much longer strain and pull against

each other without rending the whole fabric of the commonwealth;

and the kernel of the book lies in a new theory of constitutional

government for England which he offers as a convenient way out of the

difficulties. Ward recognized that new interests were challenging the

long sway of King and Tories; and as the antagonisms of rival interests

strengthened, the insufficiency of the traditional use and wont to

maintain a due balance of power was daily becoming more apparent. Hence

had resulted confusion, and out of the confusion, civil war. From

these patent facts Ward had convinced himself that there must be an

overhauling of the fundamental law of England: the twilight zones must

be explored and charted; the several rights and privileges of King,

Lords, and Commons, must be sharply delimited; and thus every party in

the government be brought to understand the exact bounds of its sphere.

Neither King nor Commons would then encroach upon the other, and royal

prerogative and popular will no longer dwell at sword’s point with each

other. What was needed, in short, was a written constitution, carefully

arrived at by common consent, the terms of which should be just to all.

Hitherto God “hath taken order, that ill prerogatives, gotten by the

Sword, should in time be fetched home by the Dagger, if nothing else

will doe it: Yet I trust there is both day and means to intervent this

bargaine.”

To preserve a just balance between rival interests in the state, and

to hold all parties to their responsibility to God, were then the two

problems to which Nathaniel Ward addressed himself, and the manner

and terms of his argument are sufficiently revealed in the following

passages:

Authority must have power to make and keep people honest; People,

honesty to obey Authority; both a Joynt-Councell to keep both safe.

Morall Lawes, Royall Prerogatives, Popular Liberties, are not of

Mans making or giving, but Gods: Man is but to measure them out

by Gods Rule: which if mans wisdome cannot reach, Mans experience

must mend: And these Essentialls, must not be Ephorized or Tribuned

by one or a few Mens discretion, but lineally sanctioned by

Supreame Councels. In _pro-re-nascent_ occurrences, which cannot be

foreseen; Diets, Parliaments, Senates, or accountable Commissions,

must have power to consult and execute against intersilient dangers

and flagitious crimes prohibited by the light of Nature: yet it

were good if States would let People know so much beforehand, by

some safe woven _manifesto_, that grosse Delinquents may tell no

tales of Anchors and Buoyes, nor palliate their presumptions with

pretense of ignorance. I know no difference in these Essentialls,

between Monarchies, Aristocracies, or Democracies.... And in all,

the best Standard to measure Prerogatives, is the Ploughstaffe; to

measure Liberties, the Scepter: if the tearms were a little altered

into Loyall Prerogatives and Royall Liberties, then we should be

sure to have Royall Kings and Loyall Subjects....

He is a good King that undoes not his Subjects by any one of his

unlimited Prerogatives: and they are a good People, that undoe not

their Prince, by any one of their unbounded Liberties, be they the

very least. I am sure either may, and I am sure neither would be

trusted, how good soever. Stories tell us in effect, though not in

termes, that over-risen Kings, have been the next evills to the

world, unto fallen Angels; and that over-franchised people, are

devills with smooth snaffles in their mouthes. A King that lives

by Law, lives by love: and he that lives above Law, shall live

under hatred doe what he can. Slavery and knavery goe as seldome

asunder, as Tyranny and Cruelty. I have a long while thought it

very possible, in a time of Peace ... for disert Statesmen, to

cut an exquisite thred between Kings Prerogatives, and Subjects

Liberties of all sorts, so as _Caesar_ might have his due, and

People their share, without such sharpe disputes. Good Casuists

would case it, and case it, part it, and part it; now it, and then

it, punctually.[71]

Nathaniel Ward was no democrat like Hooker and therefore no

Congregationalist. “I am neither Presbyterian, nor plebsbyterian, but

an Interpendent,” he said of himself. But his “Interpendency” would

seem to have been only an individualistic form of Presbyterianism. For

the radical Sectaries who were rising out of the turmoil of revolution,

he had the contempt of a thoroughbred Jacobean gentleman; and for their

newfangled notion of religious toleration and their fetish of popular

liberties--founded and nourished he believed in sentimentalism--he

would substitute the solid reality of absolute truth, the faithful

friend and coadjutor of which he professed himself to be. “Justice and

Equity were before time, and will be after it”; and he regarded it as

folly to try to circumvent them. He would have no great altering of

the fundamental arrangements of society, such as Independents like

Roger Williams were seeking. The solidarity of church and state was an

anciently accepted principle, far safer to trust in, he believed, than

the vagaries of unhistorical sects.

Experience will teach Churches and Christians, that it is farre

better to live in a State united, though a little Corrupt, then

in a State, whereof some Part is incorrupt, and all the rest

divided.... The Scripture saith, there is nothing makes free but

Truth, and Truth saith, there is no Truth but One.... He that is

willing to tolerate any Religion, or discrepant way of Religion,

besides his own, unlesse it be in matters meerly indifferent,

either doubts of his own, or is not sincere in it.... He that is

willing to tolerate any unsound opinion, that his own may also be

tolerated, though never so sound, will for a need hang Gods Bible

at the Devils girdle.[72]

As an honest Christian and a loyal subject he would honor both the

divine and temporal authorities; nevertheless, in order that the

law of God and the law of the land might be known of all and march

together, he would have the exact terms of the constitution written

out by “disert statesmen” in time of peace, and published broadly, in

Massachusetts as well as in England. And so when he was commissioned to

draw up a body of liberties for the new commonwealth, he found the task

congenial. As a lawyer he seems to have been concerned at the non-legal

methods of the magistrates in dispensing judgment, so repugnant to the

spirit of the Common Law; and in the election sermon of 1641, that he

was invited to preach, he “advanced several things that savored more of

liberty, than some of the magistrates were prepared to approve.”[73]

But it was the lawyer protesting against court methods that spoke

out, not the liberal concerned with broader liberties. In a letter

to Winthrop, December 22, 1639, dealing with the body of laws, he

questioned, “Whether it will not be of ill consequence to send the

Court business to the common consideration of the Freemen,” adding:

I fear it will too much exauctorate the power of that Court to

prostrate matters in that manner, I suspect both Commonwealth and

Churches have discended to lowe already. I see the spirits of the

people runne high, and what they gett they hould. They may not be

denyed their proper and lawfull liberties, but a question whether

it be of God to interest the inferiour sort in that which should be

reserved _inter optimates penes quos est sancire leges_ [_i.e._ to

the aristocracy with whom rests the power to establish the law].[74]

The celebrated _Body of Liberties_ was presented three years after _The

Simple Cobler_ was written, and in spite of his frankly aristocratic

bias, Nathaniel Ward did a real service to Massachusetts by

incorporating into the law of the commonwealth many of the old English

safeguards of person and property, in some instances advancing beyond

current English practice. Yet true to his Hebraic leanings, and in

harmony with the spirit of the theocracy, he added certain brutalities

drawn from the Mosaic code that were soon to drop away.

There is something refreshing in the extraordinary frankness of this

old Puritan of the days of Elizabeth. He was no demagogue, but a stout

upholder of authority, who accepted the rule of caste and the law of an

eye for an eye. The militant severity of his judgments, and the caustic

wit of his comments, suggest somewhat startlingly how long and bitter

would be the struggle in New England before the spirit of liberalism

should find wide acceptance there. Gentlemen of the immigrant

generation were set in their ways, and none more inflexibly than

Nathaniel Ward. He was too old to adjust himself to new conditions, a

fact which he recognized by returning to England to die, leaving behind

as a warning certain pithy quatrains of which this is one:

The upper world shall Rule,

While Stars will run their race:

The nether world obey

While People keep their place.

II • John Eliot • A Theocratic Utopia

At the session of the General Court holden at Boston, May 22, 1661, it

was ordered:

This Court taking notice of a booke entituled Christian

Commonwealth, written ... by Mr. John Eliot of Roxbury in New

England, which ... is justly offensive and in speciall relating

to kingly Gouvernment in England, the which the said Mr. Eliot

hath also freely and fully acknowledged to this Court. It is

therefore ordered by this Court and the Authority thereof, that the

said Booke be totally suppressed and the Authors acknowledgement

recorded; and that all persons whatsoever in this jurisdiction

that have any of the said Bookes in theire Custody shall on theire

perrills within fowerteene dayes after publication hereof either

cancel or deface or deliver them unto the next Magistrate or to the

Secretary, whereby all farther divulment and improovement of the

said offensive Booke may be prevented.[75]

The little book over which such a pother was made by the New England

magistrates in the days when they were under the censorious eye of the

newly restored Stuart government was the single venture in the field

of political speculation by the excellent John Eliot, apostle to the

Indians. It was a slender volume, written about 1650, although not

printed till 1659; but within the narrow compass of twenty-one pages

this dreamer in Israel has sketched the outlines of an ideal Christian

commonwealth. It was a day and a world of idealists, and so John Eliot

paused in the midst of his missionary labors to fashion a brick for the

building of that temple which the Puritans of the Protectorate were

dreaming of. The idols had been broken by the hammer of Cromwell; the

malevolent powers of this world were brought low; it remained now only

for the people of God to enter into a solemn covenant to establish a

commonwealth after the true divine model. That no mistake should be

made in so important a matter, John Eliot was moved to send out of the

American wilderness the plan of a Christian Utopia, sanctioned by the

Mosaic example and buttressed at every point by chapter and verse,

which he offered to the godly Puritans of England as a suitable guide

to their feet.

Naked theocracy is nowhere else so uncompromisingly delineated as in

the pages of _The Christian Commonwealth_. At the basis of Eliot’s

political speculations were the two germinal conceptions which animated

his theocratic brethren generally: the conception that Christ is King

of Kings before whom all earthly authority must bow, and the conception

that the Scripture alone reveals the law of God. So long as the Stuarts

were ruling at St. James’s speculative theocrats found it expedient

to gloss their principles with nice distinctions between temporal and

spiritual overlords; but with monarchy overthrown, they came out boldly

and urged the English people to put away all profane institutions.

“_Scripturae plentitudinem adoro_,” John Cotton had exclaimed; and to

the same purpose John Eliot laid down the thesis:

There is undoubtedly a forme of civil Government instituted by God

himself in the holy Scriptures; whereby any Nation may enjoy all

the ends and effects of Government in the best manner, were they

but perswaded to make trial of it. We should derogate from the

sufficiency and perfection of the Scriptures, if we should deny it.

The prayers, the expectation, and faith of the Saints in the

Prophecies and Promises of holy Scripture, are daily sounding in

the ears of the Lord, for the downfall of Anti-christ, and with

him all humane Powers, Polities, Dominions, and Governments; and

in the room thereof, we wait for the coming of the Kingdom of the

Lord Jesus, who by his Divine Wisdom, Power, Government and Laws,

given us ... in the holy Scriptures, will reign over all the

Nations of the earth in his due time: I mean the Lord Jesus will

bring down all people, to be ruled by the Institutions, Laws, and

Directions of the Word of God, not only in Church-Government and

Administrations, but also in the Government and Administration of

all affairs in the Common wealth. And then Christ reigneth, when

all things among men, are done by the direction of the word of his

mouth: his Kingdom is then come amongst us, when his will is done

on earth, as it is done in heaven, where no Humane or Angelical

Policy or Wisdom doth guide anything, but all is done by Divine

direction (Ps. 103:20); and so it shall be on earth, when and where

Christ reigneth.

Much is spoken of the rightful Heir of the Crown of England, and

of the unjustice of casting out the right Heir; but Christ is the

onely right Heir of the Crown of England (Ps. 2:8) and of all other

Nations also (Rev. 11:15).

That which the Lord now calleth England to attend is not to search

humane Politics and Platformes of Government, contrived by the

wisdom of man; but as the Lord hath carried on their works for

them, so they ought to go unto the Lord, and enquire at the Word of

his mouth, what Platforme of Government he hath therein commanded

and prescribed.

From his Scriptural premises Eliot deduced a system of government that

is altogether remarkable, not only for its rejection of the Separatist

theory of natural rights, but for its naïve simplicity. Since the

law has been declared once for all, perfect and final, there is no

need for a legislative branch of government; and since Christ is sole

ruler and king, there is no place for a profane head of the state;

it remains only for the Christian theorist to provide a competent

magisterial system to hear causes and adjudicate differences. Society

is concerned wholly with duties and not at all with rights; government,

therefore, begins and ends with the magistrate. In order to secure a

suitable magistracy, Eliot proposed to divide society into groups of

tens, fifties, hundreds and thousands, each of which should choose its

rulers, who in turn should choose their representatives to the higher

councils; and so there was evolved an ascending series of magistrates

until the supreme council of the nation was reached, the decisions of

which should be final.

The duties of all the Rulers of the civil part of the Kingdom of

Christ, are as followeth: ... to govern the people in the orderly

and seasonable practice of all the Commanders of God, in actions

liable to Political observations whether of piety and love to God,

or of justice and love to man with peace.

Far removed as _The Christian Commonwealth_ was from the

democratic political theory of the Army radicals, or the practical

constitutionalism of Nathaniel Ward, it was the logical culmination

of all theocratic programs. The ideal of social unity, of relentless

conformity, according to which the rebel is a social outcast to be

silenced at any cost, dominates this godly Utopia as mercilessly as

it dominated the policy of Laud. In setting up King Jesus for King

Charles, there was to be no easing of the yoke upon rebellious spirits;

and in binding society upon the letter of the Scripture there was to

be no consideration for the aspirations of the unregenerate. It is not

pleasant to consider what the Saints would have made of New England if

their will had prevailed. Curious as this little work is--testifying

rather to the sincerity of Eliot’s Hebraism than to his political

intelligence or his knowledge of men--it is characteristic of the

idealist who consecrated his life to the Indian mission. How little

disturbed he was by the perversities and limitations of everyday fact,

is revealed in the policy which he laid down for his Indian converts:

And this Vow I did solemnly make unto the Lord concerning them;

that they being a people without any forme of Government and now

to chuse; I would endeavour with all my might, to bring them to

embrace such Government, both civil and Ecclesiastical, as the Lord

hath commanded in the holy Scriptures; and to deduce all their

Lawes from the holy Scriptures, that so they may be the Lord’s

people, ruled by him alone in all things.

Which vow, considering the state of the Indian tribes to whom it was to

apply, may serve to throw light upon the reason for the scant success

of the Saints in their dealings with the red-men.

Footnotes

[70] _The Simple Cobler_, edition of 1843, pp. 89-90.

[71] _Ibid._, pp. 54-55.

[72] _Ibid._, pp. 8, 10.

[73] _Ibid._, Introduction.

[74] Dean, _Memoir of the Rev. Nathaniel Ward_, pp. 56-57.

[75] _Massachusetts Historical Society Publications_, Vol. IX, Third

Series, p. 128.

Part Two: the Twilight of the Oligarchy • 1660-1720

It is not pleasant to linger in the drab later years of a century that

in its prime had known able men and accomplished notable things. A

world that accepted Michael Wigglesworth for its poet, and accounted

Cotton Mather its most distinguished man of letters, had certainly

backslidden in the ways of culture. The final harvest of the theocracy

must be reckoned somewhat scanty. English Independency had been the

robust and rebellious child of a great age; New England Puritanism

was the stunted offspring of a petty environment. With the passing

of the emigrant generation, a narrow provincialism settled upon

the commonwealth of Massachusetts Bay. Not a single notable book

appeared; scarcely a single generous figure emerged from the primitive

background. A thin soil and the law of Moses created a capable but

ungainly race, prosaic and niggardly. Their very speech lost much of

the native English beauty that had come down from medieval times.

The clean and expressive idiom that Bunyan caught from the lips of

English villagers, with its echoes of a more spontaneous life before

the Puritan middle class had substituted asceticism for beauty, grew

thinner and more meager, its bright homespun dyes subdued to a dun

butternut. The town records which in the first years had been set

down in dignified and adequate phrase became increasingly crabbed and

illiterate, laboriously composed by plain men to whom spelling had

become a lost art. The horizons of life in New England were contracting

to a narrow round of chores and sermons. “When I first saw the Lieut.

Governor,” Sewall remarked of Stoughton, “He was Carting Ears of Corn

from the Uper Barn.” The picture suggests the pastoral note, but it

suggests much else as well.

Against this incursion of the provincial the church was the single

force to be counted on to do battle. The ministers did their best,

but it needed abler men than were available to counteract the growing

formalism of the times. They might lament that their admonitions fell

on unheeding ears, that they preached in vain to a “sermon-proof,

gospel-glutted generation”; but the blame must attach in part to the

formalism of their appeals. The straw was over-threshed. The common

provincialism infected the pulpit as well as the pew, and the creative

vigor of the ministry steadily declined. The ground was being prepared

for superstition and bigotry. As the belief spread through the New

England villages that the end of the world would fall on the end of the

century, men’s thoughts naturally ran much on the demonology that is a

logical consequence of the Hebraic dualism, and the most intelligent

saw no reason to doubt that “the Evening Wolves will be much abroad,

when we are near the Evening of the World.” The psychology was being

prepared for the witch-mania of Salem, and Cotton Mather was only

echoing the common belief when he cried, “An Army of Devils is horribly

broke in upon the place which is the _Centre_, and after a sort, the

First-born of our _English Settlements_.”[76] In this matter, as in so

many others, the ministers were no better than their congregations;

they were blind leaders of the blind, and they lent their sanction to

the intolerance of the mass judgment. In an environment so stifling,

with every unfamiliar idea likely to be seized upon as evidence of the

devil’s wiles, there was no room for free speculation. A generation

under the terror of witchcraft was given over to stark reaction.

The Salem outbreak was the logical outcome of the long policy of

repression, that had hanged Quakers and destroyed independent thought,

in its attempt to imprison the natural man in a strait-jacket of

Puritan righteousness. Emotions long repressed sometimes find sinister

outlets, and the witchcraft madness was only a dramatic aftermath of a

generation of repressions and inhibitions.[77]

It was during these unhappy years that power finally slipped from

the hands of the oligarchy. With the charter gone, a Royal Governor

presiding over the Council, and a property qualification instead of a

religious test for suffrage, the old order was broken past mending.

The members of the oligarchy still hoped against hope, and under the

governorship of Phips they made heroic attempts to bolster up the

cause; but the Quebec expedition was so badly muddled as to bring

the commonwealth to the verge of ruin, and the Governor and Council

wrote to England that God had “spit in our faces.”[78] Whether or

not that was a correct analysis of the divine reaction to the Quebec

fiasco is of no importance today; a good many New Englanders, it would

seem, doubted it, and under the pressure of high taxes, a depreciated

currency and a great debt, they made their dissatisfaction heard at the

royal court. When the English government at last “resolved to settle

the Countrey,” the end of the oligarchy was come. The cautious amongst

them were for throwing the whole responsibility on the Lord: “the

foundations being gone, what can the righteous do?” argued Judge Sewall

with shrewd worldly-wisdom. But the ministers would make no compromise

with Baal. The tongues of false prophets might seduce the people, but

they stood for the old order, fighting a losing fight with righteous

zeal. On June 1, 1702, Sewall noted in his diary that he had “much

adoe to persuade Mr. Willard to dine with me,” the pastor being in a

sulk because the civil representatives had taken precedence over the

ministers in the procession for proclaiming Queen Anne. But in the end

even “good Mr. Willard” was forced to acknowledge that his loyalty was

given to a lost cause.

Footnotes

[76] _Wonders of the Invisible World_, p. 14.

[77] See Lucien Price, “Witchcraft, Then and Now,” in _The Nation_,

Vol. CXV, No. 2987.

[78] J. T. Adams, _The Founding of New England_, p. 442.

Chapter I • Samuel Sewall • Yankee

By good fortune an intimate record of daily life in old New England

has been preserved in abundant detail. The diary of Samuel Sewall

not only narrates the homely activities of Boston in the evening of

the theocracy, _antiquis moribus, prisca fide_, but it unconsciously

reveals the transformation of the English Puritan into the New England

Yankee. The sober Boston citizens who on the Sabbath droned Windsor and

York tunes, and took notes of long sermons, on week-days plied their

gospel of thrift with notable success. They loved the meetinghouse as

their fathers had loved it, but they were the sons and grandsons of

tradesmen, and true to their English instincts they set about erecting

a provincial mercantile society, dominated by the ideals of the little

capitalist. Of this rising world of mercantilism, Samuel Sewall was a

worthy representative. A Puritan magistrate and village capitalist, he

made full use of his opportunities to worship God, to thrive and to

rise. As the older ideal of theocratic stewardship is revealed in the

career of John Winthrop, the newer practice of incipient capitalism is

revealed in the life of Samuel Sewall.

The _Diary_ is a fascinating book, with its petty gossip interwoven

with matters of public concern, and its brisk activities set in a

black border of innumerable funerals: the one among all the books

of the time that is still quick with life after these two hundred

years and more. In its meager entries we can trace the change that

was coming to Massachusetts in the transition from a theocracy to a

royal colony; and we can feel the strong emotions which that change

aroused. The dry facts of history take on flesh and blood; forgotten

names become living men walking the streets of Boston or arguing in

the Council Chamber; Samuel Sewall himself becomes more real to us

than our own contemporaries. He was the veritable embodiment of his

serious, prudential Massachusetts, reflecting its changing fortunes

with painstaking fidelity. In that petty world of conventional piety

and shrewd self-interest, the kind-hearted Judge bustled about, a

sermon in one hand to soothe the doubts of the troubled, and a bit

of chocolate in the other to comfort the bedridden--as honest and

friendly and prosaic a soul as Massachusetts ever bred. If one wishes

to understand the first native New England generation, one cannot do

better than linger over the daily jottings of this lawyer-tradesman,

who knew his Calvin far better than his Coke, and who while busily

adding new acres to his holdings strove to keep the younger generation

uncontaminated by wigs and revels and other godless things, by the

sweet ravishment of the psalms, in the singing of which the voice of

the Judge was lifted up with pathetic earnestness.

For many years after his death fame dealt more than generously with

Samuel Sewall. The prosperity that came to him during his earthly

pilgrimage long provided for his memory, and made of him a greater

figure than either nature or good fortune created. Who does not know

Whittier’s tribute?

Stately and slow, with thoughtful air,

His black cap hiding his whitened hair,

Walks the Judge of the Great Assise,

Samuel Sewall, the good and wise.

His face with lines of firmness wrought,

He wears the look of a man unbought,

Who swears to his hurt and changes not;

Yet touched and softened nevertheless

With the grace of Christian gentleness;

The face that a child would climb to kiss;

True and tender and brave and just,

That man might honor and woman trust.

And a hundred and forty-eight years after the cold January day when

all that was mortal of him was “honorably Inter’d” in the Sewall tomb

whither so many of his family had gone before,[79] a brilliant student

of early American letters gave fresh currency to the stately Sewall of

tradition. “He was a man built, every way, after a large pattern. By

his great wealth, his great offices, his learning, his strong sense,

his wit, his warm human sympathy, his fearlessness, his magnanimity, he

was a visible potentate among men in those days.”[80]

That was before the diary was published and the lay figure of

tradition vanished in presence of the real man. We know Samuel Sewall

now and see him as he was. That he was a great man it is impossible to

make out; but that he was a small man by no means follows. Behind the

formal trappings of magistrate and councilor, we discover a capable,

middle-class soul, honest, simple-hearted, serving himself yet not

unmindful of his fellow townsmen, an excellent neighbor and citizen,

to whom the strongest appeal of life was the economic. Like those

kindred spirits, Defoe and Franklin, the dominant inspiration of his

life was prudential, as befitted the descendant of generations of

tradesmen. “Mr. Henry Sewall, my great Grandfather,” wrote the Judge in

old age, “was a Linen Draper in the City of Coventry in Great Britain.

He acquired a great Estate, was a prudent Man, and was more than once

chosen Mayor of the City.”[81] In turning Puritan the English burgess

did not change his nature, and Samuel Sewall was true to his breeding

in fashioning his life upon that of his great grandfather. To acquire

wealth and honors, to occupy a dignified position among his fellows,

was the dominant ambition of his life. With excellent thrift he fixed

his young affections upon the only child of a wealthy merchant, the

richest heiress in the colony; no penniless “waiting-woman,” for

Samuel Sewall, such as had contented the unworldly Thomas Hooker. He

understood how desirable it is to put money in one’s purse; so he made

a great alliance and proved himself a shrewd husbandman as well as a

kind husband.[82] From commerce and land speculation and money lending

and the perquisites of many offices, he accumulated steadily until his

wealth entitled him to be regarded as one of the first citizens of

Massachusetts. He did not forget his prudence even in his generosities,

but set down carefully in his diary what his benefactions cost, that

there might be no mistake when he came to make his reckoning with the

Lord. He knew his rights and upheld them stoutly; and in the petty

quarrels and litigations in which he found himself involved, he stuck

to the letter of the law and usually won his point. He did not misuse

his official position to feather his own nest, but what might be got

legally from public office he took care to get.

With abundant wealth the path of preferment was easy to him. From

his election to the privileges of a freeman in 1678, at the age of

twenty-six, to the end of a long life, he was continuously engaged

in public affairs. He sought office and was not backward in pushing

his claims upon a desirable post;[83] and by careful attention to

business rather than by exceptional parts, he rose to a place of

very great influence in the commonwealth. Like a competent man of

affairs, he was prompt in meeting engagements--“am, I think, the most

constant attender of Councils,” he remarked of himself approvingly.

He carried out to the letter the early advice given him: “Mr. Reyner

... Advised me not to keep overmuch within, but goe among men, and

that thereby I should advantage myself.”[84] Capable, industrious,

public-spirited, he led a busy and useful life that justified more than

commonly the responsibilities which came to him. His qualities might

be middle-class, but they were sterling and worthy of honor. It was a

fortunate star that led him out of Tory England, where he would never

have been more than a prosperous tradesman, to the new world where

kindred spirits were erecting a commonwealth after his own heart.[85]

Nevertheless with all his excellent qualities Samuel Sewall was not

a great or original nature. The evidence is convincing that he was a

capable executive and administrator rather than a creative thinker

or forceful leader; a Puritan embodiment of Defoe’s merchant ideal;

an example of the man who rises to civic honors by simple business

virtues. He was at home in the narrow round of routine, but for bold

speculation he reveals the incapacity of the practical soul. His

intellectual interests were few; his ready curiosity was that of the

uncreative mind, concerning itself with persons and happenings rather

than with ideas. To say that Sewall possessed either an economic

or political philosophy would be too generous an interpretation of

his opinions. The views which he upheld vigorously were little more

than prejudices. Of the several economic questions which engaged

the attention of the Council during his years of service, the most

insistent was the question of issuing bills of credit to supplement

the scanty currency. There was the usual class alignment, the wealthy

opposing the issues, and the poor generally favoring them. The

position of Sewall was clear. He vigorously opposed every issue, from

the conviction that the only honest money was hard money, even going

so far as to prefer barter to bills.[86] Nowhere does he reveal any

intelligent grasp of the economics of the problem, nor was he aware

that his judgment might have been influenced by his private interests

as a money lender.

In his political views he was equally unconcerned with broad

principles. He seems to have been wholly unread in political theory,

and like his fellow magistrates he never examined fundamentals. He

accepted without question the right of the godly to police society, and

he would have no meddling with affairs of state by tavern and fireside

politicians. As a member of the oligarchy he naturally approved

oligarchic rule. Although he would turn to the democracy for support

against the Lords of Trade, when the latter were moving to overturn

the theocracy, he put no trust in the political wisdom of the common

people. He was as magisterial as John Winthrop in his belief in the

principle of the stewardship of the elders. Stability of government

was the prime essential; there must be no criticism of government by

private individuals or by newspapers. On an occasion when Dudley’s

administration had been sharply attacked in a London paper, a copy of

which had been brought over and talked about, there was a great pother

in Council. Although Sewall was not willing to defend Dudley, he was

troubled.

At last the Council voted, it tended to the disturbance of

the Government. Lt. Govr. and Council order’d me to Reprimand

Mr. Dummer.... I told him how intolerable it was for privat

persons to print Reflections and Censures on the highest Acts of

Government.... Twas ill done of them who printed it in London, and

twas ill done by them that carried it on here.[87]

His characteristic attitude then comes out in the phrase: “I said

... I was for upholding Government whether in or out of it.” Samuel

Sewall was no rebel against authority. But if he was firm in support

of the _de facto_ government, he was insistent that it should be

honest. He protested to Governor Dudley against padding the muster

pay-rolls[88] and he dissented strongly against introducing the current

English practice of buying commissions in the army.[89] The scandalous

corruption of English politics must not be permitted to sully the

government of Massachusetts.

Sewall enjoyed in his lifetime the repute of a scholar. He was Latinist

enough to justify his Harvard degree of Master of Arts; he read a

good deal, and wrote and published books. But he seems to have cared

nothing for pure literature, and was unacquainted with the English

classics. His intellectual interest was in things either occult or

inconsequential. Biblical prophecy was his favorite study, and his

most ambitious work, _Phaenomena Quaedam Apocalyptica_, essayed to

prove that America was to be the final “rendezvous of Gog and Magog.”

Although long a magistrate and judge of the highest court, he was not

a lawyer. He received no preliminary training in the law, and there

are few indications in the _Diary_ that he read the literature of

the profession. His indifference seems to have given concern to his

friends, for on January 13, 1696, four years after he had been chosen

judge, he noted:

When were there at first, Mr. Danforth bad me look on the

Cupboard’s head for a book; I told him I saw there a Law-book,

Wingate on the Common Law. He said he would lend it me, I should

speak to Amsden to call for it; and if he died, he would give it

me. Again when took leave after prayer, He said he lent me that

Book not to wrap up but to read, and if misliked it, should tell

him of it.[90]

Primitive New England did not take kindly to lawyers, and in

administering a patriarchal justice by rule of thumb, Sewall was like

other New England magistrates. Neither did it take kindly to the spirit

of free speculation, and in his potterings over occultisms he was

confessing the sterility of intellectual interests.

If the kind-hearted Judge lacked capacity for bold and liberal thought,

he lacked capacity as well for emotional fervor. He was quite without

imagination. Despite his honest concern for his soul, and his sincere

desire for the advancement of God’s kingdom in New England, Sewall did

not possess a deeply religious nature. In his religious life he was

the same prudent, plodding soul, that stowed away in his strong-box

deeds to ample possessions during his pilgrimage through this vale of

tears. The natural man was strong in his two hundred and odd pounds

of flesh, and the religious mysticism that lurked in the heart of

primitive Puritanism found no response in his phlegmatic soul. He was

no Seeker, like Roger Williams, to be driven by a passionate fervor

along untried paths; nor was he a philosopher, like John Wise, to

concern himself with broad ecclesiastical principles. Instead, there

is more than a hint of the tradesman’s conception of religion--one has

only to understand the profitableness of salvation to be led to invest

in it. His religion must be orthodox; no untried methods or gambler’s

chances; a good business man will scrutinize title-deeds with due care,

and the title-deeds to salvation are of the first importance. How

characteristic are the following entries in the diary:

Sabbath, March 2d. I Pray’d in the Family, that might have an

interest in God, Signed, Sealed and Delivered, and that all that

tended to make it sure, might be perfected.

Febr. 6. [1718] This morning ... I had a sweet and very affectionat

Meditation Concerning the Lord Jesus; Nothing was to be objected

against his Person, Parentage, Relations, Estate, House, Home!

Why did I not resolutely, presently close with Him! And I cry’d

mightily to God that He would help me so to doe!

23. 5. [1721] Mr. Prince preaches the Lecture, from Gen. 22. 18

... A very seasonable Discourse. One Fly was discovered in his

Ointment: He asserted that the 1000. years Rev. 20. stood for Three

Hundred and Sixty Thousand years; taking every day of the 1000.

years for a year: as 365. days i.e. years. _Apage has nugas!_

[“Away with this nonsense!”][91]

No higher criticism for Samuel Sewall. If we quibble over the plain

words of Scripture, how shall we be certain of the terms of the

contract?

A man so cautious by nature, and with so large a stake in the existing

order, could not fail to be a conservative, content with a world that

justified itself by the prosperity which it brought him, and which

it would bring to others, he doubted not, if they governed their

conduct with equal prudence. He desired no innovations in church or

state; established forms answered his needs and filled the measure of

his ideal. The existing system was approved by all the respectable

people of the community; there was everything to gain in upholding

it, and likelihood of loss in suffering power to pass into the hands

of a royal governor or of the ignorant poor. And so, determined by

complex motives, by habit, by class ties, by economic interest, and

by honest liking, Samuel Sewall went with the stream of conventional

orthodoxy, strong for the old theocratic principles, seeing no need

for readjustments to meet changing conditions. The true principles of

church and state had been laid down by the fathers, to which the common

acceptance by the best people gave final sanction.

It is characteristic of the prosperous bourgeoisie, and the old Judge

walked the streets of Boston, or sat in his pew, or took his place

on the bench, as stubborn and unimaginative a conservative as any of

his fellows. If his persistent opposition to change, whether in the

matter of wigs, or Christmas keeping, or creed, or politics, was due

in part to a phlegmatic love of use and wont, it was prompted also by

an instinctive fear of innovation. The world doubtless is imperfect,

but it answers to God’s will and we understand its ways and can draw

our contracts with open eyes. Whereas change, however desirable it may

seem theoretically, entails too many disturbing uncertainties. Very

likely it was this subconscious concern for his material interests

that so often made the simple-minded Judge an unintelligent opponent

of all popular movements looking to a freer and more liberal society.

When his native kindliness was touched he spoke out frankly. His

anti-slavery tract (_The Selling of Joseph_), slight in extent and

somewhat overpraised by historians, was not only much in advance of

his time, but it contains one sentence that should not be forgotten,

“There is no proportion between twenty pieces of silver and liberty.”

Equally significant was his stand against capital punishment for

counterfeiting.[92] Such acts as the following must also be set down to

his credit: “I essay’d June 22 [1716], to prevent Indians and Negros

being Rated with Horses and Hogs; but could not prevail.”[93] His

native sense of justice was as strong as his kindliness. Who does not

know of his confession in regard to the witchcraft persecutions--an

act that set all Boston tongues wagging. When he was convinced that he

had made a grievous and sorrowful mistake, he rose in the congregation

while the minister read his public acknowledgment of that mistake,

and his repentance for his share in the unhappy business. Thereafter

in commemoration he kept an annual day of prayer and fasting. We can

forgive him much for that honest and manly act.

To the end of his life Sewall refused to go forward with the changing

times, and his voluntary assumption of the office of _praefectura

morum_ laid him under a heavy responsibility to see that the primitive

ways were upheld. He was magisterial in rebuke and few transgressors

of the strict New England code escaped a censure. One would like to

have James Franklin’s private opinion of the sharp-eyed old Judge. To

Franklin and other members of the Hell-fire Club--young fellows keenly

interested in domesticating the new wit literature in homespun Boston,

openly skeptical, inclining to Arianism and even to deism--he must

have seemed a prosy old reactionary, upholding a decadent orthodoxy

and an obsolete social order. No doubt many a sharp jibe was aimed at

his back, for there were many to whom the older ways began to seem

preposterous. It may very well have been that those who committed a

certain prank which Sewall records may have had him in mind.

Aug. 3. [1717] ... ’Tis sad it should be so, but a virulent Libel

was starch’d on the Three Doors of the Meeting House, containing

the following Words:

TO ALL TRUE-HEARTED CHRISTIANS

Good people, within this House, this very day,

A Canting Crew will meet to fast, and pray.

Just as a miser fasts with greedy mind to spare;

So the glutton fasts, to eat a greater share.

But the sower-headed Presbyterians fast to seem more holy,

And their Canting Ministers to punish sinfull foley.[94]

Happily there is another and pleasanter side to the character of Samuel

Sewall, and one that looked forward to the future instead of backward

to the past. Despite the harshness of the Puritan creed and the bigotry

of Puritan rule, the fields and meadows of New England, that sent a

breath of the countryside through the crooked streets of Boston, were

a wholesome influence in the lives of men and women. Magistrate and

money-lender though he was, Samuel Sewall was a countryman and farmer

also, a judge of milch cows and fat porkers as well as criminals, a

lover of robins and flowers and fruitful orchards, one who sat his

horse well, and when on circuit often drew up at a rail-fence to

discuss the crops with some gossipy farmer. Above all, a lover of

men, the most neighborly soul in the world, mingling freely with all

classes, and although quite properly proud of a visit from the Governor

or other great person, never above chatting with the carpenter, or

doing a kindness to an old nurse. It was the friendly heart of the man

that prompted so many little errands of helpfulness; and if sermons and

tracts and good advice flowed from him like a spring freshet, if he was

magisterial in petty rebuke, such little oddities of the man and the

time did not detract from his sympathy or lessen his helpfulness. Men

stood in awe of Cotton Mather, and children must have run from him, but

neither awe nor fear threw their shadow across Sewall’s path. We can

make too much of the countless funerals that dot his pages, with their

thrifty reckoning of gloves and scarfs and rings that were the queer

perquisites of pallbearers. It was not an unwholesome world despite the

smell of mortality that exudes from the old records, or the terrors of

little children smitten with the fear of hell; and the homely round of

Samuel Sewall’s activities was very far from unwholesome.

It was his neighborliness that made him so representative of the

leveling tendencies of a provincial village life--an easy comradeship

with men of all conditions, unknown to the rigid class divisions

of the old world. Going one day to visit the Jews’ burial place at

Mile-End, while on a visit to London, he invited the sexton to a pot

of beer and a quiet chat, remarking in friendly fashion, “wisht might

meet in Heaven: He answered, and drink a Glass of Beer together,

which we were then doing.”[95] His English friends would scarcely

have understood that homely little scene, so natural to the colonial.

Sewall is the first Yankee who reveals the native kindliness of the New

England village. He was zealous to do good and to deal generously with

others, because he had been generously dealt by. Growing more human

with the ripening years, yet instinctively conservative, stubbornly

intent on managing his own affairs in his own way and by his own

agents, provincial to the core and strong in local pride, he reveals

the special bent of the New England character, as it unconsciously

differentiated itself from its English original. Not American as yet

like Franklin, and no longer wholly English like Winthrop, far from

democratic and yet no Tory, he was the progenitor of a practical race

that was to spread the gospel of economic individualism across the

continent.

Footnotes

[79] Two of his three wives and eleven of his fourteen children he had

buried.

[80] Tyler, _History of American Literature during the Colonial

Period_, Chapter XIII, Part IV.

[81] _Diary_, in _Massachusetts Historical Society Collections_, Fifth

Series, Vol. I, p. xi.

[82] Compare his haggling over the terms of settlement upon a later

proposed marriage; see _Diary_, Vol. III, p. 205.

[83] See _Diary_, Vol. III, p. 168.

[84] _Diary_, Vol. I, p. 32.

[85] The following is part of an obituary notice by his son:

In 1684, He was chosen a Magistrate of the _Massachusetts_ Colony....

In 1692, He was appointed by King William and Queen Mary in their

Royal Charter, one of the first Council for their Majesties in this

Province, into which He was annually chosen and sat till 1725, when

He resign’d his Election, having outlived all the others nominated in

that Fundamental Constitution. In 1692 He was made one of the Judges,

and in 1718, Chief Justice of our Superior Courts of Judicature thro’

the Province, in which He sat till 1728, when his Infirmities growing

on Him, He resign’d that Place also. In 1715, He was made Judge of

Probates for this County of _Suffolk_, and continued in that Office

till 1728, when He laid it down; it being the last Publick Post wherein

He served and honoured his Country. _Diary_, Vol. III, pp. 409-410.

In addition to the above, he was at times an overseer of Harvard

College, censor of the press, and captain of the Ancient and Honourable

Artillery Company; a frequent moderator of Boston town meeting, member

of innumerable committees on church, parish and commonwealth matters,

and adviser at large to whoever was in difficulties.

[86] See _Diary_, Vol. II, p. 366; Vol. III, pp. 87 and 345.

[87] _Diary_, Vol. III, pp. 84-85.

[88] _Diary_, Vol. II, p. 228.

[89] _Ibid._, p. 214.

[90] _Diary_, Vol. I, p. 419.

[91] _Diary_, Vol. I, p. 312; Vol. III, p. 165; Vol. III, pp. 281-282.

[92] See _Diary_, Vol. III, p. 277.

[93] _Ibid._, p. 87.

[94] _Diary_, Vol. III, pp. 116-117. Note the use of the word

Presbyterian in these lines.

[95] _Diary_, Vol. I, p. 301.

Chapter II • The Mather Dynasty

I

For one who is not a loving student of the unamiable bickerings that

clutter the records of early New England, and who does not read them

by the gentle light of filial loyalty, it would seem presumptuous to

venture into the thorny fields tilled by the Mathers. He is certain to

get well scratched, and not at all certain to return with any fruit

gathered. The rancors of dead partisanships beset him on every side,

and the gossip of old wives’ tales fills his ears. He will encounter

many a slanderous hearsay, and the authentic documents to which he

would naturally turn are often inaccessible, and always inhospitable.

The countless tracts, for the most part inconsequential, that issued

in an unbroken stream from the tireless Mather pens, consuming all the

italics in the printer’s case, constitute a veritable _cheval-de-frise_

to protect their authors’ literary reputations from any Philistine

attack; and behind that bristling barricade they have long bidden

defiance to casual invasion. Only a siege can reduce their stronghold

and bring them forth into the clear light of day.

Two generations of Harvard scholarship have essayed the undertaking,

but there is still wanting the detached critic who will set the

Mathers against an adequate historical background, and appraise them

objectively in relation to their times. The Harvard contributions are

excellent in their way, but a consciousness of dealing with Harvard

worthies would seem to have laid the writers under certain inhibitions.

Exposition too easily slides into apologetics. The latest study[96] is

a somewhat meticulous defense. It is an extraordinarily painstaking

document, that has added to our knowledge of Increase Mather’s life and

work, but it was unhappily conceived in the dark of the moon, a season

congenial to strange quirks of fancy. Some tangle it has cleared away,

but fresh obstacles have been added by the intrusion of a thesis to be

defended. In consequence, the interpretation of motives is colored by

special pleading, and the very necessary inquiry into the sources of

those virulent antagonisms that sprang up full-armed in the minister’s

every footprint is put aside as ungermane to a biography. It is an

unfortunate assumption for it puts aside much that is crucial. The

rehabilitation becomes too easy and complete. It proves too much. It

would have us believe that in spite of all the smoke that gathered

about Increase Mather’s militant pilgrimage through life, there was

never any fire of his kindling; that in spite of all the puddles

through which the priestly politician splashed to reach his ends, no

spot or stain ever smutched his gown. The contention may be sound, but

it puts credulity to the strain, and unless one has something of a

Mather stomach for marvels, one is likely to indulge in the luxury of

doubt.

II

The Mathers were a singularly provocative family, capable, ambitious,

certain to have a finger in every pie baking in the theocratic oven.

From the emigrant Richard with the great voice, chief architect of the

Cambridge Platform, to the provincial Cotton, the family combativeness

and love of publicity put their marks on New England history. Of the

three generations, certainly Increase Mather was the most generously

endowed with capacity for leadership; an able man, practical and

assertive, liking to be in the forefront of affairs, not wanting his

light hidden under a bushel. An arch-conservative, he justified his

ways to his conscience by the excellence of the heritage he strove

to conserve. A formalist, he satisfied his intellectual curiosity by

extolling the sufficiency of the creed of the fathers. He closed the

windows of his mind against the winds of new doctrine, and bounded

the fields of speculative inquiry by orthodox fences. He was of the

succession of John Cotton rather than Thomas Hooker, a priestly

theocrat, though never a shuffler like Cotton, less troubled by free

inquiry, less by the intellectual. All his life he was inhibited

from bold speculation by his personal loyalties and interests. As

a beneficiary of things as they were, certain to lose in prestige

and power with any relaxing of the theocracy, it would be asking

too much of human nature to expect him to question the sufficiency

of the established system of which he was the most distinguished

representative. Not to have approved it would have been to repudiate

his habitual way of thinking, his deepest prejudices, his strongest

convictions. He had been molded and shaped by the theocracy; it was

the very marrow of his bones; as well demand that pig iron turn molten

again after it comes from the matrix. The ore of which he was fashioned

was excellent, but once molded it was rigid; there would be no return

to fluidity. And so determined by every impact of environment, by every

appeal of loyalty, and by a very natural ambition, Increase Mather

became a stout upholder of the traditional order, a staunch old Puritan

Tory of the theocratic line. How could any promptings of liberalism

find nourishment in such a mind?[97] Why should one expect to find in

the works of such a man the seeds of new systems of thought or more

generous institutions? He was the outstanding figure of the theocracy

in the days of its overthrow, but intellectually he was not worthy to

unloose the shoe-strings of Roger Williams.

In his professional capacity, Increase Mather was the priest rather

than the theologian, a pastor of the flock, an expounder of the

creed, rather than a seeker after new light. As a minister his mind

was circumscribed by the thinking of John Calvin. He learned nothing

from Luther, and was bitterly hostile to those phases of Independency

that embodied the more generous Lutheran principles. No man was by

temperament better fitted to embrace the coercive spirit of the Genevan

discipline. Strong-willed and ascetic, he discovered in discipline

the chief end for which the children of Adam are created. A profound

admirer of the close-knit Genevan system, he was a Presbyterian in

spirit, a man after Calvin’s own heart, who clung to the old coercions

in an age that was seeking to throw them off. If he counseled

innovation it was in the way of strengthening ministerial authority,

never in the way of liberalizing either creed or practice. It was the

Congregationalism of the Cambridge Platform, and not that of early

Plymouth, that he upheld; and to strengthen that order he turned

earnestly to the practical work of Presbyterianizing. He was the prime

mover in summoning the synod of 1679-80, requested by the Court to

consider amongst other things what “may appeare necessary for the

preventing schismes, haeresies, prophaneness, & the establishment of

the churches in one faith & order of the gospell,”[98] and the chief

suggestions of the body, of which he was the conspicuous leader, were

a return to a stricter discipline, and a strengthening of the passage

in the Savoy Confession of faith--adopted by the synod--by borrowings

from the Westminster Confession, which “more positively set forth the

authority of the state in doctrinal questions.”[99]

In 1691, while in London, Mather had been active in the work of uniting

the Presbyterian and Congregational churches of England, under articles

that would seem to have been more Presbyterian than Congregational;

and in 1705, following the curiously spiteful controversy over the

Brattle Street Church he joined vigorously in the proposed work of

rejuvenating the New England system by engrafting further shoots

from the Presbyterian stock. One of these grafts from the London,

agreement--the principle of licensing ministerial candidates by the

association of ministers, thereby effectively preventing the intrusion

of undesired members--established itself on the Congregational system;

but another--the principle of associational control of the several

churches--was blighted by the attack of John Wise.[100] What this

desired consolidation of power in the hands of the ministers implied,

is suggested by the terms of the Cambridge Platform, which asserted

that “the work & duty of the people is expressed in the phrase of

obeying their Elders,” and that they may not “speak in church, before

they have leave from the elders: nor continue so doing, when they

require silence, nor may they oppose nor contradict the judgment or

sentence of the Elders, without sufficient & weighty cause.”[101]

Recalling that the elders of a church had been reduced in number to the

single minister, one may perhaps venture to suggest that a man ardently

working to strengthen the hands of the ministerial oligarchy by further

Presbyterianizing was no friend to Separatist-Congregationalism, nor

one in whom the spirit of humility would work any lessening of the

authority of the Lord’s stewards.[102]

In his conception of toleration Mather followed naturally in the

footsteps of John Cotton. He would tolerate all views that were not

in error, but his criteria of truth were so far from catholic as to

lead him into constant and vehement attack upon other sects. As a

responsible leader he was careful to clothe his attacks with generous

professions; but he never stepped forward to uphold the right of

free thought, or to dissuade his brethren from heresy-baiting. His

biographer is greatly impressed by the minister’s professions, and

takes them at somewhat more than face value, forgetting the ancient

saying that by the fruits of men’s lives they shall be known. Casuistry

is useful for purposes of defense, and a skillful apologist can explain

away much; but the spirit of toleration revealed in the following

passages was certainly no child of liberalism:

The “Anabaptists” had given trouble in New England. They had

installed as minister a man excommunicated from the Congregational

church, and, when their meeting-house was closed to them, they

persisted in assembling publicly before its barred doors rather

than worship unmolested in a private house. To Mather these were

attacks upon the true faith, and manifest disturbances of the

civil peace. Naturally there is some acidity in his strictures

on the “blasted Error” of “Antipedobaptism.”... He denounces

Baptists roundly enough, points to their kinship with the turbulent

Anabaptists in Europe, and writes: “Are they not generally of a bad

Spirit? Bitter enemies to the Lords most eminent Servants? yea,

to the faithfull Ambassadors, spitting the cruel venome of Asps

against them.”

He then concludes: “Nor is the modern reader likely to disagree”

with the apology by President Oakes, who wrote in an introduction to

Mather’s screed:

It is sufficiently known to those that know the Author, that he is

none of the Ishmaels of the times, that have their hand against

every man and love to be taking a Dog by the Ears ... or to be

dabling in the waters of strife.... They that know his Doctrine

and manner of life, cannot but know that the life of his Spirit

is in the things of practical Divinity, and the great Design of

his ministry is to promote the power and practice of piety in the

greatest instances.... I dare undertake ... his design ... is not

to traduce ... those that are otherwise minded, or expose them to

severities & sufferings on the bare account of their opinion.[103]

From these curious passages the unsympathetic realist is likely to draw

the conclusions that the spirit of mutual admiration came to early

birth in New England, and that it makes a vast difference whose ox

is gored. Something of the same casuistry is employed to explain away

Increase Mather’s unhappy part in the witchcraft mess.[104] The whole

matter is involved and rendered difficult by guilty consciences and the

need to save reputations, and perhaps the facts are not to be got at;

yet it is only another instance to show how quickly candor flies out

at the window when a Mather comes in at the door. One may make much or

little of the son’s statement that Increase grew more tolerant in his

later years; it would seem at best to have been only the difference

between black and dark gray. A dominating man does not take kindly to

differences of counsel. Increase Mather was a stout upholder of the law

and order in the shaping of which he had a hand, but he looked with no

friendly eye on the architects of a different order; and the bitterness

of his later years was the natural consequence of a strong, proud,

ambitious man, thwarted in his dearest projects.

If he contributed nothing to a more liberal theology or church

organization, it is idle to expect him to have contributed to political

speculation. As a leader of the theocracy he meddled much in practical

politics, but it would seem that he was quite unread in the political

philosophers and wholly ignorant of major principles. The great English

liberals of Commonwealth times and later left him untouched. He bought

and read many books, but almost none of a political nature.[105]

Hobbes, Harrington, Sidney, Milton, Filmer, Locke, were as much out

of his intellectual ken as were the speculations of Roger Williams.

Interest in political theory had ceased in Massachusetts with the

banishment of the great Independent, and the principles of liberal

thinkers like Harrington and Milton would have awakened little sympathy

in so stalwart a theocrat as Increase Mather. He was a practical

man, an administrator and mentor, a stern _castigator morum_ to the

commonwealth, and as a college president he had been trained in a

school little notable for its sympathetic consideration of the views

of subordinates. He got on ill with his Harvard tutors, and one of the

unseemliest squabbles of his later years grew out of the bitterness

sowed between a “strong” administrator and his teaching staff.[106] A

man accounted less pious, concerned with ends more patently worldly,

might well be reckoned dictatorial and domineering; but Puritan

righteousness, perhaps, is not to be judged by profane standards, nor

the same severity of judgment applied to politicians laboring in the

theocratic vineyard, that is applied to the common breed.

Perhaps the happiest years of Increase Mather’s arduous life were those

spent in London as agent of the theocratic party to secure such terms

as he could for the settlement of New England. It was a congenial task

and a congenial field. His love of diplomacy and his fondness for

England were both gratified. He mingled there on terms of equality with

the intellectual leaders of English Nonconformity, and matched his wit

with men high in station. He proved himself a skillful manager, but

the threads were too tangled for any Puritan diplomat to smoothe out,

and he fell short of his hopes. The terms of the charter as finally

drafted satisfied few of the Boston theocrats, and his nomination of

Sir William Phipps for Governor was certainly ill-judged. Sir William

had been converted to the true faith by Increase himself and was

reckoned by him a chosen vessel of the Lord; but he turned out to be no

better than a cracked pot, and with the coming of Dudley the political

influence of Increase Mather was finally broken. He was maneuvered

out of his position as president of Harvard and later suffered the

mortification of seeing the post fall into the hands of Leverett, the

old tutor now become an influential politician, with whom he had been

bitterly at outs. “Doubtless there is not any government in the world,”

he wrote, “that has been laid under greater obligations by a greater

man than this government has been by me. Nevertheless I have received

more discouragement in the work of the Lord, by those in government,

than by all the men in the world besides. Let not my children put too

much confidence in men.”[107] It is not pleasant to be ousted from

one’s position by politicians, and if one is certain that the slight

intended for the servant falls on the Master, it is scarcely to be

borne. If waves of black pessimism swept over him in those unhappy

later years when his ambitions were hopelessly frustrated, there was

provocation enough. He had outlived his age and the ablest of the

native-born theocrats had become a byword and a mocking amongst the

profane of Boston.

Not a great man, as the world reckons greatness, Increase Mather

may scarcely be accounted a great Puritan. As a theologian he was

wanting in speculative vigor, and as a pastor he was wanting in

self-denying love. It is not necessary to set him over against Roger

Williams or Jonathan Edwards or William Ellery Channing, to reveal his

intellectual and spiritual shortcomings. One has only to place him

beside so rugged and honest a Puritan as Samuel Hopkins, who in true

Christian humility, utterly regardless of his own fame, gave his life

to theology and the care of the poor and the outcast, to realize how

conventional a soul was Increase Mather, how incurious intellectually,

how ambitious and self-seeking. Men loved Samuel Hopkins even though

they might vigorously reject his doctrine, as they loved Roger Williams

and Ellery Channing; but few seem to have loved Increase Mather. One

might respect his abilities, but he was too austerely forbidding to

like, too overbearing to awaken the spirit of good will. Ideas in

the abstract held no interest for him. His biographer has happily

recalled Mather’s forgotten interest in scientific inquiry, and for

this slight relief from the intolerable drab of his life-story one

may be grateful. Yet one must not build too high on an insubstantial

foundation. In the England that Mather loved, and toward which

he was strongly drawn--hoping that opportunity would offer for a

pulpit there--pottering over natural philosophy had become a mark

of distinction, and a man so envious of repute would have wished to

approve himself to those whom he admired. Though he lived in Boston he

would not have it thought that he was provincial.

Of the miscellaneous literary output that flowed from his pen in

an abundant stream, little need be said. It is of concern only to

minute historians of the local. That he was master of an excellent

prose style, clear and straightforward, is sufficiently evident; if

his matter had been so good, his legitimate fame would have been far

greater. The work on which his reputation largely rests is _An Essay

for the Recording of Illustrious Providences_, printed at Boston and

London in 1684, and twice reissued in the nineteenth century under the

title _Remarkable Providences_. It is an amusing book of old wives’

tales, not singular at all for the times, but characteristic rather;

an expression of the naïveté that crops out in Winthrop’s _History

of New England_, and other writings of the emigrant generation, but

now become a fashion amongst the lesser lights of the Royal Academy

and English Nonconformists. It suited to a nicety the Mather love

of marvels, and Increase constituted himself a generous repository

of all the chimney-corner tales of the countryside. To call such a

book “a scientific and historical recording of phenomena observed

in New England,” as his biographer has done, is to gall the back

of a thesis with hard riding.[108] In one chapter only does Mather

suggest the spirit of scientific inquiry; four out of the twelve deal

with witchcraft and kindred topics; and the rest are made up of such

instances of divine providence as great fish jumping out of the sea

into the boats of starving sailors adrift, of the freaks played by

lightning and tornadoes, and of God’s punishments on wicked Quakers.

At the time it was a harmless enough book, but in the light of after

developments it was scarcely so harmless. The emphasis laid upon

witchcraft was an unfortunate, if unconsidered, influence in preparing

the psychology of New England for the Salem outbreak, and the minister

later reaped a bitter harvest from it.

“Not many years ago,” he wrote in the preface to _Illustrious

Providences_, “I _lost_ (and that’s an afflictive _loss_ indeed!)

several moneths from study by sickness. Let every God-fearing reader

joyn with me in prayer, that I may be enabled to redeem the time,

and (in all ways wherein I am capable) to serve my generation.” That

Increase Mather sincerely desired to serve his generation according to

his lights, none may deny. His labors were appalling, his reputation

was great, and when he died the light of the old churches went out.

The spirit of Presbyterianism went to its grave in New England, and

not till a hundred years later did the new light--which was no other

than primitive English Independency--shine out in the life and work of

William Ellery Channing. After two centuries Unitarianism recovered

for the Massachusetts churches the spirit of early Separatism that had

been lost since the days of the Cambridge Platform. Channing finally

uprooted the vine that Increase Mather had so laboriously tended.

III

Of the unpopularity that gathered about the name of Mather after the

fall of the theocracy, the larger portion fell to the lot of the son,

the eccentricities of whose character made him peculiarly vulnerable to

attack. In his youth the spoiled child of Boston, in middle life he was

petulant and irritable, inclined to sulk when his will was crossed.

In the career of no other New England Puritan is the inquisitorial

pettiness of the Genevan system of theology and discipline revealed

so disagreeably. The heroic qualities of an earlier age had atrophied

in an atmosphere of formalism, and Boston Calvinism of the year 1690

had become a grotesque caricature of a system that in its vigor had

defied the power of Rome and laid kingdoms at its feet. Embodied in

Cotton Mather it was garrulous, meddlesome, scolding, an echo of dead

voices, a shadow of forgotten realities. The common provincialism had

laid its blight upon it. The horizons of the New England imagination

grew narrow, and Puritan anthropomorphism unconsciously reduced the

God of the Hebrew prophets to the compass of a village priest, clothed

in stock and gown, and endowed with the intellect of a parish beadle.

In the egocentric universe wherein Cotton Mather lived and labored

the cosmos had shrunk to the narrow bounds of a Puritan commonwealth,

whereof Boston was the capital and the prosperity of the North Church

the special and particular object of divine concern. The mind of

Increase Mather had been enlarged by contact with English life; the

mind of the son was dwarfed by a village world.

Cotton Mather is an attractive subject for the psychoanalyst. Intensely

emotional, high-strung and nervous, he was oversexed and overwrought,

subject to ecstatic exaltations and, especially during his celibate

years, given to seeing visions. In the carefully edited _Diary_ which

he left for the edification of his natural and spiritual children, at

the beginning of his twenty-third year, is an apologetic entry--“_Cum

Relego, Scripsisse Pudet!_”--that Professor Wendell has put into

English thus:

A strange and memorable thing. After outpourings of prayer, with

the utmost fervor and fasting, there appeared an Angel, whose face

shone like the noonday sun. His features were as those of a man,

and beardless; his head was encircled by a splendid tiara; on his

shoulders were wings; his garments were white and shining; his robe

reached to his ankles; and about his loins was a belt not unlike

the girdles of the peoples of the East. And this Angel said that he

was sent by the Lord Jesus to bear a clear answer to the prayers of

a certain youth, and to bear back his words in reply. Many things

this Angel said which it is not fit should be set down here. But

among other things not to be forgotten he declared that the fate of

this youth should be to find full expression for what in him was

best; ... And in particular this Angel spoke of the influence his

branches should have, and of the books this youth should write and

publish, not only in America but in Europe. And he added certain

special prophecies of the great works this youth should do for

the Church of Christ in the revolutions that are now at hand.

Lord Jesus! What is the meaning of this marvel? From the wiles of

the Devil, I beseech thee, deliver and defend Thy most unworthy

servant.[109]

The passage throws a good deal of light on the psychology of Cotton

Mather. Such visions were clearly the result of abnormal stimuli,

acting on a neurotic temperament. From both sides of his family he

inherited a tense nervous system that was aggravated by precocity and

an unnatural regimen. The inevitable result was a hothouse plant of

Puritan forcing. His religious exaltation flowered from the root of

egoism. His vanity was cosmic. He esteemed himself a beacon set on

a hill, a divine torch which the very hand of God had lighted. The

success or failure of God’s plan for New England, he believed, rested

on his shoulders; and with such heavy responsibilities devolved upon

him he was driven, hot-haste, by the prick of urgency. The king’s

business requireth haste. The work of the Lord cannot wait upon

sluggards. “O then _To work_ as fast as you can,” he wrote in _The

Magnalia_, “and of soul-work and church-work as much as ever you can.

Say to all _Hindrances_ ... ‘You’ll excuse me if I ask you to be short

with me, for my work is great and my time is but little.’” And so with

an amazing activity that was little short of neurosis, he gave himself

over to the great business of managing the affairs of New England in

accordance with God’s will.

In undertaking so difficult a job, he frequently came into conflict

with other interpreters of God’s plan for New England, and partisan

venom gathered about him wherever he passed. Tact was never a Mather

virtue, and Cotton made two enemies to his father’s one. His quarrels

trod on each other’s heels, and a downright vindictiveness breathes

through his private records of them. He railed at whoever disagreed

with him, and imputed silly or malignant motives. The pages of his

diary are filled with epithets that he flung privately at his enemies;

one marvels that so many in the little town of Boston could be singled

out as “strangely and fiercely possessed of the Devil.” Robert Calef,

whose _More Wonders of the Invisible World_ was an inconvenient reply

to his _Wonders of the Invisible World_, was set down as “a very

wicked sort of a Sadducee in this Town, raking together a crue of

Libels ... an abominable Bundle of Lies, written on purpose, with a

Quil under a special Energy and Management of Satan, to damnify my

precious Opportunities of Glorifying my Lord Jesus Christ.”[110] When

an anti-Mather group of Cambridge men set up the Brattle Street Church,

and invited Benjamin Colman, who had received Presbyterian ordination

in England, by way of reply to the Mather group, to become their

pastor, Cotton wrote in his diary:

A Company of Head-strong Men in the Town, the cheef of whom, are

full of malignity to the Holy Waye of our Churches, have built in

this Town, another Meeting-house. To delude many better-meaning Men

in their own Company, and the Churches in the Neighbourhood, they

past a Vote ... that they would not vary from the Practice of these

Churches, except in one little Particular.... But a young Man, born

and bred here, and hence gone for England, is now returned hither,

at their Invitation, equip’d with an _Ordination_, to qualify him,

for all that is intended.

On his “returning and arriving here, these fallacious People” gave

themselves over, in short, to “Their violent and impetuous Lusts,

to carry on the Apostasy,” and Cotton Mather prayed God to make

him an instrument to defeat the “Designs that Satan may have in

the Enterprise.”[111] Similar passages of extravagant abuse of men

so wicked as to disagree with him flowed from his pen in copious

abundance. Although he constantly prayed that his daily life might

be “a trembling walk with God,” he was clearly a difficult fellow to

get on with; and in the opinion of many he was justly described by a

contemporary, as a “malecontent priest,” consumed with an “Hereditary

rancour” that made him “everlastingly opposite” to every will but his

own.

The diary of Cotton Mather is a treasure-trove to the abnormal

psychologist. The thing would be inconceivable if the record were not

in print. What a crooked and diseased mind lay back of those eyes that

were forever spying out occasions to magnify self! He grovels in proud

self-abasement. He distorts the most obvious reality. His mind is

clogged with the strangest miscellany of truth and marvel. He labors

to acquire the possessions of a scholar, but he listens to old wives’

tales with greedy avidity. In all his mental processes the solidest

fact falls into fantastic perspective. He was earnest to do good, he

labored to put into effect hundreds of “Good devices,” but he walked

always in his own shadow. His egoism blots out charity and even the

divine mercy. Consider his account of an “execution sermon” preached

to a nameless girl condemned for killing her natural child, and the

light it throws on both minister and congregation:

The Execution of the miserable Malefactor, was ordered for to have

been the last Week, upon the Lecture of another. I wondred then

what would become of my _Particular_ Faith, of her condition being

so ordered in the Providence of God, that it should furnish me,

with a _special Opportunity_ to glorify Him. While I was entirely

resigning to the wisdome of Heaven all such Matters, the Judges,

wholly without my seeking, altered and allow’d her Execution to

fall on the Day of _my Lecture_. The _General Court_ then sitting,

ordered the Lecture to bee held in a larger and a stronger House,

than that _old_ one, where ’tis usually kept. For my own part, I

was weak, and faint, and spent; but I humbly gave myself up to the

_Spirit_ of my Heavenly Lord and Hee assured mee, that Hee would

send His good Angel to strengthen mee. The greatest Assembly, ever

in this Countrey preach’d unto, was now come together; It may bee

four or five thousand Souls. I could not gett unto the _Pulpit_,

but by climbing over _Pues_ and _Heads_: and there the Spirit of my

dearest Lord came upon mee. I preached with a more than ordinary

Assistance, and enlarged, and uttered the most awakening Things,

for near two hours together. My Strength and Voice failed not; but

when it was near failing, a silent Look to Heaven strangely renew’d

it. In the whole I found Prayer answered and Hope exceeded, and

Faith encouraged, and the Lord using _mee_, the vilest in all that

great Assembly, to glorify Him. Oh! what shall I render to the

Lord![112]

Straightway thereafter, he rendered the Lord another characteristic

service. No sooner was the girl hanged--for whose safekeeping no good

angel seems to have been available after the minister had bespoken

his--than he hastened to the printer to arrange for printing the

sermon, and “annexed thereunto, an History of Criminals executed in

this Land, and effectually, an Account of their dying Speeches, and

of my own Discourses with them in their last Hours.... I entitled the

Book, +PILLARS OF SALT+.” Clearly this was the time to peddle his

wares, when all Boston was talking of the great event; and with a

nose for publicity as keen as Defoe’s, he flung together a jumble of

material, and trusted to its timeliness to sell. Some such origin, no

doubt, accounts for a good many of the small library of titles that

bore his name, an output that seems to have justified the angelic

prophecy of “the books this youth should write and publish.” With a

very lust for printer’s ink, he padded his bibliography like a college

professor seeking promotion; but in spite of all the prayers poured

out in behalf of them, they would seem for the most part to have been

little more than tuppenny tracts, stuffed with a sodden morality, that

not even an angel could make literature of.

Holding so strong a conviction of apostleship, Cotton Mather would

certainly play the politician, and quite as certainly blunder and go

wrong. Far more than his father he was a bookman, who believed that

all knowledge was shut up between pigskin covers. He was as lacking in

worldly wisdom as a child, and in his ecstatic contemplation of the

marvels wrought by God in primitive New England he never discovered

that that older world had passed away. Another age was rising, with

other ideals than ecclesiastical, which the three thousand books in his

library told him nothing about. He was an anachronism in his own day.

Living in an earlier age, when the hierarchy was in its prime, he would

have been carried far on the tide of theocratic prestige; a generation

later, when lay-power had definitely superseded clerical, he would have

taken his place as a stout defender of Tory ways. But at the moment

when a critical realignment of parties was under way in Massachusetts;

when the villagers were becoming democratized and the gentry toryized;

when even the clergy were dividing--Cotton Mather was a general without

an army. He was a primitive Puritan in a Boston that was fast becoming

Yankee, and his love for the theocracy grew stronger with every defeat.

The judgment of after times finds little in his political activities

to approve and much to condemn. After all allowances are made the fact

remains that he was a leader of reaction; and no protestations can

obscure the motive of personal ambition. His own prestige was involved

with that of the theocracy. It was due to the traditional authority

of the ministry that he enjoyed the distinction of being a “Person,

whom the Eye and the Talk of the People is very much upon,” and any

lessening of that authority would hurt him cruelly in his vanity. This

remains the sufficient explanation of his varied political activities

in the course of which he trimmed his sails to different winds. He

first essayed a frontal attack on the secular power, but suffering a

personal slight, he shifted and struck in the dark at an exposed flank;

and finally, receiving only further mortification, he made overtures of

peace and found his way back to the tables of the great. It was against

the administration of the wily and unscrupulous Dudley that he waged

his bitterest warfare. Failing to make headway by open hostility, he

seized upon a current trade scandal, poured out his grievances in an

anonymous pamphlet sent to London to be published, and awaited the

result. It was a slashing attack, done in the tone of a lover of the

ancient rights and privileges of New England, and it must have cut

Dudley to the quick. A quotation or two will suffice to reveal the

nature of the charges:

But, when the President [Dudley] was pleased, out of an Active

and Passive Principle, to tell our Countreymen, in open Council,

_That the People in_ New-England _were all Slaves; and that the_

only _Difference between Them and Slaves, was their not being_

Bought _and Sold: And that they must not think the Privileges_ of

Englishmen _would follow them to the end of the World_. I say,

when the People heard this, they lookt upon themselves in a manner

Lost....

All the People here are Bought and Sold, betwixt the Governour and

his son Paul....

This is the _Third Time_ that he has been Trusted with Power from

the _Crown_ in _America_, and he has constantly Abus’d it, to the

Dishonour of the Government, and almost Ruin of the People he was

sent to Govern.[113]

There was enough truth in the charges to make them serious, but the

spleen was quite too evident. The author was at once discovered and

Cotton Mather suffered a vigorous counter-attack that damaged a

reputation already undermined. Perhaps even worse was the social slight

put upon him by those in government. What it cost him to be left out of

the invitations of the great he reveals in the _Diary_:

2 _d._ 7m. [September] Friday. [1709] The other Ministers of the

Neighbourhood, are this Day feasting with our wicked Governour;

I have, by my provoking Plainness and Freedom, in telling this

_Ahab_ of his wickedness, procured myself to be left out of his

Invitations. I rejoiced in my Liberty from the Temptations, with

which they were encumbred, while they were _eating of his Dainties_

and durst not reprove him. And, considering the Power and Malice of

my Enemies, I thought it proper of me, to be this day Fasting, in

Secret, before the Lord.

Ten years later there is a different story to tell. The minister has

left the opposition bench and gone over to the government. A note in

Sewall’s diary tells the tale:

March, 12. [1718/19] Dr. Cotton Mather prays again [in Council],

Preaches the Lecture from Prov. 29: 18. no Vision. [_Where there is

no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is

he._] The Govr., Lt. Govr., Mr. Dudley, Mr. Belcher press’d hard

that there might be an order of the Govr. and Council to print it.

Col. Tailor, Clark, Davenport, Sewall and others opposed it. For

my part, the Dr. spake so much of his visions of Convulsion and

Mutiny, mentioning our being a dependent Government, and the Danger

of Parliamentary Resentments: that I was afraid the printing of it

might be an Invitation to the Parliament to take away our Charter.

Govr. would have it put to the vote: but when he saw how hardly it

went, caused the Secretary to break off in the midst.[114]

Here is a party alignment that tells its own story, and it needs

no very lively imagination to fill out the meager note and reënact

the little drama. The minister, eager to make overtures of peace,

falls into the Tory note, talks about mob-rule and the sinfulness

of popular unrest, calls upon authority to maintain law and order,

and hints at the expediency of preserving due colonial subservience

in view of possible resentments on the part of certain great men in

England. Sewall, as a “true New-England man,” squirms somewhat under

the implications, but the little group of Tories are loud in praise.

Such a sermon, from so eminent a servant of God, would aid wonderfully

in strengthening the spirit of loyalty to the crown, and it must be

printed and circulated amongst the people. But the opposition proved

too spirited, and the manuscript was not dispatched to the printer, no

doubt to Cotton Mather’s chagrin.

It was easy for so reactionary a nature to slide over into the Tory.

There was not a grain of liberalism in his make-up. His antipathy to

all popular movements was deep-rooted, for he knew no other political

philosophy than that of the obsolete theocracy in which he had grown

up. He was a bourgeois soul who loved respectability and was jealous

of his social position; no fraternizing with the poor and outcast for

him, no profitless excursions into the realms of Utopian justice.

Though he might play to popular prejudices to serve his political ends,

he had scant regard for popular rights. The highest privilege of the

New England people, he believed, was the privilege of being ruled by

the godly. His real attitude towards the plain people is revealed in a

note by his son, that refers to the days following the overturn of the

Andros government:

Upon Discoursing with him of the Affairs he has told me that he

always pressed _Peace_ and _Love_ and _Submission_ unto a legal

Government, tho’ he suffered from some tumultuous People, by doing

so; and upon the whole, has asserted unto me his _Innocency_ and

freedom from all known Iniquity in that time, but declared his

Resolution, from the View he had of the fickle Humors of the

Populace, that he would chuse to be concern’d with them as little

as possible for the future.[115]

As he grew older and the shadow of failure fell across his life,

his bitterness towards a people that had rejected his admonitions

is revealed on many a page of his diary. It was a “silly people,” a

“foolish people,” “insignificant lice”--“The cursed clamour of a people

strangely and fiercely possessed of the Devil”--“My aged father laies

to heart the withdrawal of a vain, proud, foolish people from him in

his age”--“It is the Hour of ... Darkness on this Despicable Town.”

He could not easily forgive those who had wounded his love of power

and lust of adulation, and he was too aloof from the daily life of

men to understand the political and social movements of the times,

too self-centered to understand his fellow villagers. He possessed

none of the sympathetic friendliness that made Samuel Sewall a natural

confidant to every one in trouble. He loved the people when they

honored and obeyed him, but when they hearkened to other counsels he

would fall to scolding like a fishwife. Doubtless he was sincere in

thinking he would gladly die to save his people from their sins, but he

had no mind to neighbor with them or humor their wicked love of power.

He immured himself so closely within the walls of the old theocratic

temple that he never took the trouble to examine the groundsills, and

when the rotten timbers gave way and the structure came tumbling about

his ears, he was caught unprepared and went down in its ruins.

Happily most of the printed output of Cotton Mather has fallen

into the oblivion it deserved. It is barren of ideas, and marred

by pedantic mannerisms that submerge the frequent felicities of

phrase--old-fashioned on the day it came from the press. “In his

_Style_, indeed,” wrote his friend Thomas Prince, “he was something

singular, and not so agreeable to the Gust of the Age. But like his

_manner of speaking_, it was very _emphatical_.” Yet he possessed

very considerable gifts and under happier circumstances he might have

had a notable literary career; but he was the victim of a provincial

environment. He was the most widely read man of his generation in

America, and one of the few who followed sympathetically the current

scientific movement in England. Like old Increase he dabbled in

science; he was proud of his membership in the Royal Society, to which

he forwarded his characteristic _Curiosa Americana_--a hodgepodge of

those marvels in which his generation delighted. It was from an English

source that he got the idea of inoculation for smallpox, which he urged

upon Boston so insistently that a war of scurrilous pamphlets broke

out. He made use of the method in his own family, incurring thereby

much stupid abuse and at least one attack of violence. It was an

intelligent and courageous experiment, that is not to be forgotten in

casting up the accounts of Cotton Mather.

Of his major works two only call for brief consideration: the

celebrated _Magnalia Christi Americana; or, The Ecclesiastical History

of New England_; and the less known _Wonders of the Invisible World_.

The latter is suggestive for the light it throws on the psychology of

the witchcraft mania. The fantastic devil-fear, which bit so deeply

into the imagination of Puritan New England, has already been commented

on. In that common seventeenth-century delusion, Cotton Mather not only

ran with the mob, but he came near to outdistancing the most credulous.

His speech and writings dripped with devil-talk. The grotesqueries that

marked the current marvel-tales crop out nakedly in his writings. “I

have set myself,” he wrote in the _Diary_, “to countermine the whole

_Plot_ of the Devil, against New-England, in every branch of it, as far

as one of my _darkness_ can comprehend such a _Work_ of Darkness.” His

conviction of the malignant activities of Satan was so vivid, that in

delivering a carefully prepared sermon on the _Wiles of the Divil_, he

was fain, he tells us, to pause and lift up his eyes and cry “unto the

Lord Jesus Christ, that he would rate off Satan,” who “all the Time of

my Prayer before the Lecture” had “horribly buffeted me”--by indicting

on the fasting priest certain qualms of the stomach. How tremendous he

conceived to be the battle over a human soul, he describes thus:

The _Wilderness_ through which we are passing to the Promised Land

is all over fill’d with Fiery flying serpents. But, blessed be

God, none of them have hitherto so fastned upon us as to confound

us utterly! All our way to Heaven lies by _Dens of Lions_ and the

_Mounts of Leopards_; there are incredible Droves of Devils in

our way.... We are poor travellers in a world which is as well the

Devil’s Field, as the Devil’s _Gaol_; a world in which every Nook

whereof, the Devil is encamped with _Bands of Robbers_ to pester

all that have their Faces looking Zionward.[116]

In the light of Mather’s logic, “That there is a _Devil_, is a thing

Doubted by none but such as are under the influence of the Devil,” and

“God indeed has the _Devil_ in a _Chain_, but has horribly lengthened

out the Chain,” his private comment on the work--“that reviled

book”--becomes comprehensible.

The _Magnalia_ is a far more important work, the repository of a vast

miscellany of information concerning early New England that his pious

zeal saved from oblivion. It is the _magnum opus_ of the Massachusetts

theocracy, the best and sincerest work that Cotton Mather did. The

theme with which it deals, and about which he accumulates marvels and

special providences together with historical facts, was the thing

which next to his own fame lay nearest his heart--the glory of that

theocracy which men whom he accounted foolish and wicked were seeking

to destroy. The purpose of the book has nowhere been better stated than

by Professor Wendell:

Its true motive was to excite so enthusiastic a sympathy with the

ideals of the Puritan fathers that, whatever fate might befall

the civil government, their ancestral seminary of learning should

remain true to its colours.... The time was come, Cotton Mather

thought, when the history of these three generations might be

critically examined; if this examination should result in showing

that there had lived in New England an unprecedented proportion

of men and women and children whose earthly existence had given

signs that they were among the elect, then his book might go far to

prove that the pristine policy of New England had been especially

favoured of the Lord. For surely the Lord would choose His elect

most eagerly in places where life was conducted most according to

His will.[117]

When old Increase was near the end of his many years, a friend wrote

to ask if he were still in the land of the living. “No, Tell him I

am going to it,” he said to his son; “this Poor World is the land of

the Dying.” The bitter words were sober truth. The New England of the

dreams of Increase and Cotton Mather was sick to death from morbid

introspection and ascetic inhibitions; no lancet or purge known to

the Puritan pharmacopeia could save it. Though father and son walked

the streets of Boston at noonday, they were only twilight figures,

communing with ghosts, building with shadows. They were not unlike

a certain mad woman that Sewall tells of, who went crying about the

town, “My child is dead within me.” The child of Cotton Mather’s hopes

had long been dead within him, only he could not bring himself to

acknowledge it. The fruit of the vine planted by the fathers was still

sweet to him, and when other men complained of its bitterness, and fell

to gathering from other vines, he could only rail at their perversity.

He would not believe that the grapes were indeed bitter and the vine

blighted; that the old vineyard must be re-plowed and planted to fresh

stock. All his life he had set marvels above realities and in the end

his wonder-working providence failed him. Prayers could not bring back

a dead past; passionate conjurations could not strike the living waters

from the cold granite of Puritan formalism. A New England flagellant,

a Puritan Brother of the Cross, he sought comfort in fasts and vigils

and spiritual castigations, and--it is pleasant to learn--in ways far

more natural and wholesome. Incredible as it may seem, the following

record is authentic, and it falls like a shaft of warm sunshine across

the path of the morbid priest: “Augt, 15. [1716].... Now about Dr.

C. Mather Fishing in Spy-pond, falls into the Water, the boat being

ticklish, but receives no hurt.”[118] The restless minister who had

fished overmuch in troubled waters, sometimes, it would appear,

ventured for perch in Spy Pond.

Footnotes

[96] Kenneth B. Murdock, _Increase Mather_, 1925.

[97] Compare Murdock, _Increase Mather_, pp. 394-395.

[98] Quoted in W. Walker, _A History of Congregational Churches, etc._,

p. 187.

[99] _Ibid._, p. 190. His biographer has overlooked the significance of

this. See Murdock, _Increase Mather_, p. 151.

[100] His biographer has somewhat slurred his account of the

“Proposals.” See p. 282. But his justification is worth noting: “If the

original brand of Puritan piety was worth saving, and Mather believed

it was, an oligarchic church government was the only means of securing

it in an age when men were inclined to change their religious ideas as

they changed their thought on other affairs.”

[101] W. Walker, _A History of the Congregational Churches, etc._, p.

205.

[102] Compare Murdock, _Increase Mather_, pp. 361-363.

[103] Murdock, _Increase Mather_, pp. 138-139.

[104] See pp. 294-295, where he seeks unsuccessfully to refute the

position taken by J. T. Adams.

[105] See Murdock, _Increase Mather_, pp. 125-127.

[106] “The Brattle-Street Church Controversy,” for which see _ibid._,

pp. 258 ff.

[107] _Ibid._, pp. 373-4, note.

[108] _Ibid._, p. 170.

[109] _Cotton Mather, Puritan Priest_, p. 64.

[110] _Diary_, Vol. I, p. 271.

[111] _Ibid._, pp. 325-326.

[112] _Diary_, Vol. I, p. 279.

[113] _A Memorial of the Present Deplorable State of New-England ...

by the Male-Administration of their Present Governour, Joseph Dudley,

Esq., and his Son Paul_, London, 1707, in _Massachusetts Historical

Society Collections_, Fifth Series, Vol. VI.

[114] Vol. II, p. 214.

[115] Wendell, _Cotton Mather, etc._, p. 82.

[116] _Wonders of the Invisible World_, p. 63.

[117] _Literary History of America_, pp. 48-49.

[118] Sewall, _Diary_, Vol. III, p. 98.

Chapter III • Stirrings of Liberalism

I • John Wise • Village Democrat

In the days when Sir Edmund Andros was seeking to fasten upon

Massachusetts Bay the principles and practice of Stuart prerogative,

an event occurred that greatly stirred New England. Taxes having

been arbitrarily assessed in Council, the several towns were bidden

appoint commissioners to collect them. When the order reached Ipswich,

John Wise, minister of the second church, gathered the chief members

of his flock together, and it was agreed by them to choose no such

commissioner at the town meeting--“We have a good God, and a good

king, and shall do well to stand for our privileges,” the minister

is reported to have argued. Soon thereafter John Wise was summoned

before a star-chamber court on the charge of sedition. Upon his plea of

colonial privilege, the president of the court, Dudley, is said to have

retorted, “You shall have no more privileges left you than not to be

sold for slaves.” “Do you believe,” demanded Andros, “Joe and Tom may

tell the King what money he may have?” “Do not think,” put in another

judge, “the laws of England follow you to the ends of the earth.”

Thereupon with five others, John Wise was thrown into Boston jail,

where he lay one and twenty days, and whence he was released only after

payment of fifty pounds, giving bond in a thousand pounds for good

behavior, and suffering suspension from the ministry. “The evidence in

the case,” he remarked afterward, “as to the substance of it, was that

we too boldly endeavored to persuade ourselves we were Englishmen, and

under privileges.”[119] The year following, Andros having been driven

out, John Wise brought suit against Dudley for having denied him a writ

of _habeas corpus_.[120]

Two years later Wise served as chaplain in the ill-managed Quebec

expedition under Sir William Phipps. He bore himself well both in

council and on the field; went ashore with the storming party; and if

he had succeeded in his efforts to instil some of his own force into

the leaders, the grand exploit might not have dwindled to such an

unhappy ending. In a long account which he sent to Increase Mather,

then in London, he did not mince matters, or attempt to throw on

the Lord’s shoulders blame that belonged elsewhere, but charged the

fiasco to the cowardice of Major Walley, in command of the assaulting

troops.[121] Clearly the Ipswich minister was a fighting as well as a

praying parson, whom Cromwell would have delighted in.

Posterity has been too negligent of John Wise hitherto. Although

possessed of the keenest mind and most trenchant pen of his generation

of New Englanders, he was uninfected by the itch of publicity that

attacked so many of his fellow ministers, and so failed to challenge

the attention of later times. Called to serve in an outlying portion

of the Master’s vineyard he discovered little opportunity there and

less inclination to magnify his own importance. He was too honest to

persuade himself that God’s fame was bound up with his own, and he

was never forward to push his claims to priority in righteousness.

Nevertheless what little we know of him is to his credit. An

independent man, powerful of body, vigorous of intellect, direct and

outspoken in debate, he seems to have understood the plain people whom

he served, and he sympathized heartily with the democratic ideals then

taking form in the New England villages. Such liberalism as emerged

from the simplicity of village life found intelligent response in

his sympathies, and he dedicated his keen mind and wide reading to

the business of providing it with a philosophical justification.

Some explanation of his democratic leanings may be discovered in

his antecedents. His father was a self-made man who had come over

to Roxbury as an indented servant--most menial of stations in that

aristocratic old Boston world. He must have been of sound and rugged

stock, for in addition to a magnificent physique he endowed his son

with manly independence and democratic self-respect, which stood the

latter in good stead when, after having made his way through Harvard

College, he came to speak for the people against the tax program of

Andros, the reactionary ambitions of the Presbyterians, and the schemes

of the hard-money men. In John Wise, Cotton Mather was to encounter an

antagonist who was more than a match for him.

With the final overthrow of the theocracy and the lessening of the

political power of the clergy, a critical period in the development

of the church was reached, and with it a renewal of the old conflict

between the Presbyterian and Congregational principles. In the year

1705, under the leadership of the Mathers, the Presbyterian party,

which numbered among its adherents most of the ministers of the

larger churches, put forth a series of “Proposals,” looking to a

closer union of the churches, and greater control of the separate

congregations by the ministerial association. This was a challenge to

the Congregationalists which John Wise could not overlook. The question

touched the fundamentals of church organization, and when by way of

preparation he turned to examine critically the work of the fathers, he

found in it quite another meaning than Cotton Mather found. It was as a

liberal that he went back to the past, seeking to recover the original

Congregational principle, which, since the conservative triumph in

the Cambridge Platform of 1648, had been obscured. When he was quite

ready, he published in 1710, his _Churches Quarrel Espoused_, reissued

five years later; and in 1717, his _Vindication of the Government of

the New England Churches_, reissued together with the earlier work in

1772, and again in 1860. The two works were a democratic counterblast

to the Presbyterian propaganda, and they stirred the mind of New

England profoundly. What Edwards did later for the doctrinal side of

Congregationalism, John Wise did for the institutional. His exposition

of the Congregational principle was so luminous and convincing

that it soon came to be regarded as authoritative, and more than a

hundred years after the _Vindication_ appeared the Chief Justice of

Massachusetts cited it in support of a judicial decision.

The significance of John Wise in the history of democratic America

lies in the fact that he followed “an unbeaten path,” justifying the

principle of Congregationalism by analogy from civil polity. Seemingly

alone amongst the New England clergy of his day, he had grounded

himself in political theory; and the doctrine upon which he erected

his argument was the theory of natural rights, derived from a study of

Pufendorf’s _De Jure Naturae et Gentium_, published in 1672. Locke and

the other writers of the English natural-rights school he seems not to

have been acquainted with; but Pufendorf he had read closely, and he

discharged the new theory against his opponents with telling effect.

This was the first effective reply in America to the old theocratic

sneer that if the democratic form of government were indeed divinely

sanctioned, was it not strange that God had overlooked it in providing

a government for his chosen people? Wise was the first New England

minister to break with the literal Hebraism of the old school; like

Roger Williams he was willing to make use of profane philosophies,

basing his argument upon an appeal to history, a method which baffled

the narrow Hebraists, putting them in a quandary.

After examining the three regular forms of civil government, and

showing how each is related to “the many ennobling immunities” of the

subject, Wise turned to the real business in hand, which was to inquire

“whether any of the aforesaid species of regular, unmixed governments,

can with any good show of reason be predicable of the church of Christ

on earth”; whether the monarchical form as exhibited in papacy and

episcopacy, the aristocratic form as exhibited in Presbyterianism, or

the democratic form as exhibited in Congregationalism, is nearest the

divine model as revealed in Scripture and the law of nature?

The gross inadequacy of the monarchical principle appears to him so

certain that he concludes his argument with the comment “that God and

wise nature were never propitious to the birth of this monster.” The

inadequacy of the aristocratic principle seems to him equally clear.

The principle of stewardship, ideal though it may appear in theory, did

not seem to work in practice, and he put his finger shrewdly upon the

weakness of oligarchical rule in Massachusetts. Government by a “select

company of choice persons” might be justified, if--

we could be assured they would make the Scripture, and not their

private will the rule of their personal and ministerial actions;

... but considering how great an interest is embarked, and how

frail a bottom we trust, though we should rely upon the best of

men, especially if we remember what is in the hearts of good

men (namely, much ignorance, abundance of small ends, many times

cloaked with a high pretense in religion; pride skulking and often

breeding revenge upon a small affront, and blown up by a pretended

zeal, yet really and truly by nothing more divine than interest

or ill nature), and also considering how very uncertain we are

of the real goodness of those we esteem good men ... and ... how

Christianity, by the aforesaid principle, had been peeled, robbed

and spoiled already, it cannot consist with the light of nature to

venture again upon such perils, especially if we can find a safer

way home.... In a word an aristocracy is a dangerous constitution

in the church of Christ.[122]

This “safer way home,” as he then proceeded to point out, lay in

following the broad path of democracy:

But to abbreviate, it seems most agreeable with the light of

nature, that if there be any of the regular forms of government

settled in the church of God, it must needs be ... a democracy.

This is the form of government which the light of nature does

highly value, and often directs to as most agreeable to the just

and natural prerogatives of human beings.... It is certainly a

great truth, namely, that man’s original liberty after it is

resigned ... ought to be cherished in all wise governments; or

otherwise a man in making himself a subject, he alters himself

from a freeman into a slave, which to do is repugnant to the law

of nature. Also the natural equality of men amongst men must be

duly favoured; in that government was never established by God or

nature, to give one man a prerogative to insult over another....

Honor all men. The end of all good government is to cultivate

humanity, and promote the happiness of all, and the good of every

man in his rights, his life, liberty, estate, honor, etc., without

injury or abuse to any.[123]

From which he concludes that--

... a democracy in church or state, is a very honorable and

regular government according to the dictates of right reason, And,

therefore ... That these churches of New England, in their ancient

constitution of church order, it being a democracy, are manifestly

justified and defended by the law and light of nature.[124]

A vigorous thinker was John Wise, with a shrewd knowledge of men and

their selfishness. He would rule himself, well or ill, and would have

others do likewise. Stewards in church and state, he would have none

of. “Brethren,” he exclaimed, “ye have been called unto liberty,

therefore Hold your hold brethren!... pull up well upon the oars, you

have a rich cargo, and I hope we shall escape shipwreck ... daylight

and good piloting will secure all.”[125] “There is strong and sharp

reasoning” in his pages, more solid meat in his two volumes than in

all Cotton Mather’s muddled effusions. Like a good Englishman and a

good Yankee he hated arbitrary power as he hated the devil. “The very

name of an arbitrary government is ready to put an Englishman’s blood

into a fermentation; but when it comes and shakes its whip over their

ears, and tells them it is their master, it makes them stark mad.”[126]

Naturally so vigorous an advocate of democracy in the church was

disliked by the gentlemen whose ambitions he thwarted. Such plebeian

views were incomprehensible to Cotton Mather. When _The Churches

Quarrel Espoused_ was reprinted in 1713, prefaced with a commendatory

letter signed by two well-known clergymen, the latter wrote to a friend:

... A furious Man, called John Wise,[127] of whom, I could wish

he had, _Cor bonum_, while we are all sensible, he wants, _Caput

bene regulatum_, has lately published a foolish Libel, against

some of us, for presbyterianizing too much in our Care to repair

some Deficiencies in our Churches. And some of our People, who are

not only tenacious of their Liberties, but also more suspicious

than they have cause to be of a Design in their pastors to make

abridgments of them; they are too much led into Temptation, by

such Invectives. But the Impression is not so great as our grand

Adversary doubtless hoped for.[128]

Two years later, when the _Vindication_ was published, the sulky

theocrat noted in his diary:

25 [May. 1717] G[ood] D[evice]. Should not I take into

Consideration what may be done for the Service of the Ministry and

Religion and the Churches, throughout the Land, that the Poison of

Wise’s cursed Libel may have an Antidote?[129]

Cotton Mather was unable to discover an antidote, and the poison of

Wise’s democratic philosophy was to prove of surprising vitality. As

late as 1772, when his two works were reprinted on subscription, no

fewer than 1133 copies were taken. That the argument of Wise was not

without influence in the struggle then developing seems reasonable; but

that it greatly influenced the thinking of the revolutionary leaders,

as Professor Tyler supposes, is scarcely probable. The argument from

natural rights was well known in 1772, and it was to Locke and not

to Wise that men like Samuel Adams turned for help. Nevertheless, in

denying to him wide influence in the later period we are neither

detracting from the honor that is rightly his as the first colonial to

justify village democracy by an appeal to political philosophy, nor

lessening the repute in which he should be held by Americans as the

early defender of local self-rule.

The instinctive sympathy of John Wise with the plain people among whom

he lived led him to stand with them in another matter that touched the

interests of the farming class. The currency question had thrust its

provocative demands into political councils, and sharply divided the

electorate. City men like Samuel Sewall were jealous to maintain the

English metallic currency, partly through custom and partly because its

scarcity augmented its value; whereas the plain people of Ipswich, like

so many country people, no doubt were impressed with the desirability

of a land-script currency. Into this mighty controversy entered John

Wise, who in the year 1721, under the pen name of _Amicus Patriae_,

is reputed to have been the author of a book entitled, _A Word of

Comfort to a Melancholy Country. Or the Bank of Credit ... fairly

defended by a Discovery of the Great Benefit, accruing by it to the

whole Province, etc. Humbly dedicated to the Merchants in Boston._ It

was “a well-managed and witty plea for paper money and ‘inflation.’”

With the economics of the problem that he was delving into, we are not

concerned; many heads have wrestled with it since; we are concerned

rather to point out that the democratic John Wise was on the same side

with the democratic Franklin, in espousing paper currency.

After all, the significant thing that emerges from the life and work

of John Wise, is the unerring directness with which he seized upon the

core of primitive Congregationalism, and the breadth and vigor with

which he defended it. After a spirited contest lasting three-quarters

of a century, theocratic Puritanism yielded to ecclesiastical

democracy. For two generations it had remained doubtful which way the

church would incline. Dominated by gentlemen, it was warped towards

Presbyterianism; but interpreted by commoners, it leaned towards

Congregationalism. The son of a plebeian. Wise inclined to sympathize

with the spirit of radical Separatism, bred of the democratic

aspirations of Jacobean underlings; and this radical Separatism he

found justified by the new political philosophy, as well as by facts

of the New England village world. The struggle for ecclesiastical

democracy was a forerunner of the struggle for political democracy

which was to be the business of the next century; and in founding his

ecclesiasticism upon the doctrine of natural rights, John Wise was an

early witness to the new order of thought.

II • Social Drifts

Great changes, whether liberal or otherwise as the future might

determine, were to come to Massachusetts from the new order with its

Charter provision establishing a property qualification for suffrage.

The venture in idealism was over and economic determinism reasserted

its sway. New England was to swing back into the broad current of

English political development. Following the Revolution of 1688 a new

theory of the political state was rising in England--the theory that

the state originated in private property and exists primarily for the

protection of property; and this conception, thrust upon New England,

was to cut sharply across the cleavages of the old order and create

new ones. It substituted the dominance of wealth for the stewardship

of righteousness; the stake-in-society principle for the Mosaic code.

It set a premium upon acquisitiveness and subordinated the Puritan to

the Yankee. It prepared the way for class alignments which must grow

sharper with the increase of wealth, and would eventually produce a

Tory group with natural longings for titles and a colonial aristocracy.

How powerful this mercantile-Tory element was to become would depend

upon the counter strength of the rising democratic group, with its

freehold tenure of land, its town meeting, its Congregational church,

and its distrust of aristocratic orders.

For the present, the world of John Wise was the real New England,

thrifty, parsimonious, intensely local, driving straight towards a

homespun democracy. The older fashioned New Englander, whatever his

social position, did not take kindly to Toryism; and when it made its

appearance in the train of the royal officials, swaggering somewhat

and a bit insolent, it seemed to the colonial both alien and wicked.

English Tory and Puritan Yankee frankly disliked each other; their

ideals were incompatible, their manners unlike. A cloud of suspicion

surrounded the English official as he walked the streets of Boston:

suspicion of the hated church which he promptly set up, though not much

given to worship; suspicion of his political motives and the overseas

authority which he represented. In a vague way the New Englanders

were convinced that he constituted a menace to their most cherished

rights and privileges; that he was secretly bent on undermining the

traditional liberties. And the English gentleman, with his casual

old-world arrogance, unwittingly aggravated the common suspicion.