The First Colonial Literature
The simplest and oldest group of colonial writings is made up of records
of exploration and adventure. They are like the letters written from
California in 1849 to the "folks back East." Addressed to home-keeping
Englishmen across the sea, they describe the new world, explain the
present situation of the colonists, and express their hopes for the
future. Captain John Smith's True Relation, already alluded to, is the
typical production of this class: a swift marching book, full of eager
energy, of bluff and breezy picturesqueness, and of triumphant instinct
for the main chance. Like most of the Elizabethans, he cannot help
poetizing in his prose. Cod-fishing is to him a "sport"; "and what sport
doth yeald a more pleasing content, and lesse hurt or charge then
angling with a hooke, and crossing the sweete ayre from Isle to Isle,
over the silent streams of a calme Sea?" But the gallant Captain is also
capable of very plain speech, Cromwellian in its simplicity, as when he
writes back to the London stockholders of the Virginia Company: "When
you send again, I entreat you rather send but thirty carpenters,
husbandmen, gardeners, fishermen, blacksmiths, masons, and diggers up of
trees' roots, well provided, than a thousand of such as we have."
America was but an episode in the wide wanderings of Captain Smith, but
he owes his place in human memory today to the physical and mental
energy with which he met the demands of a new situation, and to the
vividness with which he dashed down in words whatever his eyes had seen.
Whether, in that agreeable passage about Pocahontas, he was guilty of
romancing a little, no one really knows, but the Captain, as the first
teller of this peculiarly American type of story, will continue to have
an indulgent audience.
But other exiles in Virginia were skillful with the pen. William
Strachey's True Reportory of the Wrack of Sir Thomas Gates, Kt., vpon
and from the islands of the Bermudas may or may not have given a hint to
Shakespeare for the storm-scene in The Tempest. In either case it is
admirable writing, flexible, sensitive, shrewdly observant. Whitaker,
the apostle of Virginia, mingles, like many a missionary of the present
day, the style of an exhorter with a keen discernment of the traits of
the savage mind. George Percy, fresh from Northumberland, tells in a
language as simple as Defoe's the piteous tale of five months of illness
and starvation, watched by "those wild and cruel Pagans." John Pory, of
"the strong potations," who thinks that "good company is the soul of
this life," nevertheless comforts himself in his solitude among the
"crystal rivers and odoriferous woods" by reflecting that he is escaping
envy and expense. George Sandys, scholar and poet, finds his solace
during a Virginia exile in continuing his translation of Ovid's
Metamorphoses. Colonel Norwood, an adventurer who belongs to a somewhat
later day, since he speaks of having "read Mr. Smith's travels," draws
the long bow of narrative quite as powerfully as the redoubtable Smith,
and far more smoothly, as witness his accounts of starvation on
shipboard and cannibalism on shore. This Colonel is an artist who would
have delighted Stevenson.
All of these early tellers of Virginia tales were Englishmen, and most
of them returned to England, where their books were printed and their
remaining lives were passed. But far to the northeast of Virginia there
were two colonies of men who earned the right to say, in William
Bradford's quiet words, "It is not with us as with other men, whom small
things can discourage, or small discontentments cause to wish themselves
at home again." One was the colony of Pilgrims at Plymouth, headed by
Bradford himself. The other was the Puritan colony of Massachusetts Bay,
with John Winthrop as governor.
Bradford and Winthrop have left journals which are more than chronicles
of adventure. They record the growth and government of a commonwealth.
Both Bradford and Winthrop were natural leaders of men, grave,
dignified, solid, endowed with a spirit that bred confidence. Each was
learned. Winthrop, a lawyer and man of property, had a higher social
standing than Bradford, who was one of the Separatists of Robinson's
flock at Leyden. But the Pilgrim of the Mayflower and the well-to-do
Puritan of the Bay Colony both wrote their annals like gentlemen and
scholars. Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation runs from 1620 to
1647. Winthrop's diary, now printed as the History of New England,
begins with his voyage in 1630 and closes in the year of his death,
1649. As records of an Anglo-Saxon experiment in self-government under
pioneer conditions these books are priceless; as human documents, they
illuminate the Puritan character; as for "literary" value in the narrow
sense of that word, neither Bradford nor Winthrop seems to have thought
of literary effect. Yet the leader of the Pilgrims has passages of grave
sweetness and charm, and his sketch of his associate, Elder Brewster,
will bear comparison with the best English biographical writing of that
century. Winthrop is perhaps more varied in tone, as he is in matter,
but he writes throughout as a ruler of men should write, with "decent
plainness and manly freedom." His best known pages, justly praised by
Tyler and other historians of American thought, contain his speech
before the General Court in 1645 on the nature of true liberty. No
paragraphs written in America previous to the Revolution would have
given more pleasure to Abraham Lincoln, but it is to be feared that
Lincoln never saw Governor Winthrop's book, though his own ancestor,
Samuel Lincoln of Hingham, lived under Winthrop's jurisdiction.
The theory of government held by the dominant party of the first two
generations of New England pioneers has often been called a "theocracy,"
that is to say, a government according to the Word of God as expounded
and enforced by the clergy. The experiment was doomed to ultimate
failure, for it ran counter to some of the noblest instincts of human
nature. But its administration was in the hands of able men. The power
of the clergy was well-nigh absolute. The political organization of the
township depended upon the ecclesiastical organization as long as the
right to vote was confined to church members. How sacrosanct and awful
was the position of the clergyman may be perceived from Hawthorne's The
Minister's Black Veil and The Scarlet Letter.
Yet it must be said that men like Hooker and Cotton, Shepard and Norton,
had every instinct and capacity for leadership. With the notable
exception of Hooker, such men were aristocrats, holding John Winthrop's
opinion that "Democracy is, among most civil nations, accounted the
meanest and worst form of government." They were fiercely intolerant.
The precise reason for the Hooker migration from Cambridge to Hartford
in 1636--the very year of the founding of Harvard--was prudently
withheld, but it is now thought to be the instinct of escape from the
clerical architects of the Cambridge Platform. Yet no one would today
call Thomas Hooker a liberal in religion, pioneer in political liberty
though he proved to be. His extant sermons have the steady stroke of a
great hammer; smiting at the mind and heart. "Others because they have
felt the heavy hand of God ... upon these grounds they build their
hopes: 'I have had my hell in this life, and I hope to have heaven in
the world to come; I hope the worst is over.'" Not so, thunders the
preacher in reply: "Sodom and Gomorrah they burnt in brimstone and they
shall burn in hell." One of Hooker's successors has called him "a son of
thunder and a son of consolation by turns." The same may be said of
Thomas Shepard, another graduate of Emmanuel College in the old
Cambridge, who became the "soul-melting preacher" of the newer Cambridge
by the Charles. Pure, ravishing notes of spiritual devotion still sing
themselves in his pages. He is wholly Calvinist. He thinks "the truth is
a poor mean thing in itself" and that the human reason cannot be "the
last resolution of all doubts," which must be sought only in the written
Word of God. He holds it "a tough work, a wonderful hard matter to be
saved." "Jesus Christ is not got with a wet finger." Yet, like so many
mystics, he yearns to be "covered with God, as with a cloud," to be
"drowned, plunged, and swallowed up with God." One hundred years later
we shall find this same rhapsodic ecstasy in the meditations of Jonathan
Edwards.
John Cotton, the third of the mighty men in the early Colonial pulpit,
owes his fame more to his social and political influence than to his
literary power. Yet even that was thought commanding. Trained, like
Hooker and Shepard, at Emmanuel College, and fresh from the rectorship
of St. Botolph's in the Lincolnshire Boston, John Cotton dominated that
new Boston which was named in his honor. He became the Pope of the
theocracy; a clever Pope and not an unkindly one. He seems to have
shared some of the opinions of Anne Hutchinson, though he "pronounced
the sentence of admonition" against her, says Winthrop, with much zeal
and detestation of her errors. Hawthorne, in one of his ironic moods,
might have done justice to this scene. Cotton was at heart too liberal
for his rôle of Primate, and fate led him to persecute a man whose very
name has become a symbol of victorious tolerance, Roger Williams.
Williams, known today as a friend of Cromwell, Milton, and Sir Harry
Vane, had been exiled from Massachusetts for maintaining that the civil
power had no jurisdiction over conscience. This doctrine was fatal to
the existence of a theocratic state dominated by the church. John Cotton
was perfectly logical in "enlarging" Roger Williams into the wilderness,
but he showed less than his usual discretion in attacking the
quick-tempered Welshman in pamphlets. It was like asking Hotspur if he
would kindly consent to fight. Back and forth the books fly, for
Williams loves this game. His Bloody Tenet of Persecution for Cause of
Conscience calls forth Mr. Cotton's Bloody Tenet washed and made white
in the Blood of the Lamb; and this in turn provokes the torrential flood
of Williams's masterpiece, The Bloody Tenet yet more Bloody, by Mr.
Cotton's endeavor to wash it white in the Blood of the Lamb. There is
glorious writing here, and its effect cannot be suggested by quoting
sentences. But there is one sentence in a letter written by Williams in
his old age to his fellow-townsmen of Providence which points the whole
moral of the terrible mistake made by the men who sought spiritual
liberty in America for themselves, only to deny that same liberty to
others. "I have only one motion and petition," begs this veteran pioneer
who had forded many a swollen stream and built many a rude bridge in the
Plantations: "it is this, that after you have got over the black brook
of some soul bondage yourselves, you tear not down the bridge after
you."
It is for such wise and humane counsels as this that Roger Williams is
remembered. His opponents had mightier intellects than his, but the
world has long since decided against them. Colonial sermon literature is
read today chiefly by antiquarians who have no sympathy for the creed
which once gave it vitality. Its theology, like the theology of Paradise
Lost or the Divine Comedy, has sunk to the bottom of the black brook.
But we cannot judge fairly the contemporary effect of this pulpit
literature without remembering the passionate faith that made pulpit and
pews copartners in a supreme spiritual struggle. Historians properly
insist upon the æsthetic poverty of the New England Puritans; that their
rule of life cut them off from an enjoyment of the dramatic literature
of their race, then just closing its most splendid epoch; that they had
little poetry or music and no architecture and plastic art. But we must
never forget that to men of their creed the Sunday sermons and the
week-day "lectures" served as oratory, poetry, and drama. These
outpourings of the mind and heart of their spiritual leaders were the
very stuff of human passion in its intensest forms. Puritan churchgoers,
passing hours upon hours every week in rapt absorption with the noblest
of all poetry and prose in the pages of their chief book, the Bible,
were at least as sensitive to the beauty of words and the sweep of
emotions as our contemporaries upon whose book-shelves Spenser and
Milton stand unread.
It is only by entering into the psychology of the period that we can
estimate its attitude towards the poetry written by the pioneers
themselves. The Bay Psalm Book (1640), the first book printed in the
colonies, is a wretched doggerel arrangement of the magnificent King
James Version of the Psalms, designed to be sung in churches. Few of the
New England churches could sing more than half-a-dozen tunes, and a
pitch-pipe was for a long time the only musical instrument allowed.
Judged as hymnology or poetry, the Bay Psalm Book provokes a smile. But
the men and women who used it as a handbook of devotion sang it with
their hearts aflame. In judging such a popular seventeenth-century poem
as Wigglesworth's Day of Doom one must strip oneself quite free from the
twentieth century, and pretend to be sitting in the chimney-corner of a
Puritan kitchen, reading aloud by that firelight which, as Lowell once
humorously suggested, may have added a "livelier relish" to the poet's
"premonitions of eternal combustion." Lowell could afford to laugh about
it, having crossed that particular black brook. But for several
generations the boys and girls of New England had read the Day of Doom
as if Mr. Wigglesworth, the gentle and somewhat sickly minister of
Malden, had veritably peeped into Hell. It is the present fashion to
underestimate the power of Wigglesworth's verse. At its best it has a
trampling, clattering shock like a charge of cavalry and a sound like
clanging steel. Mr. Kipling and other cunning ballad-makers have
imitated the peculiar rhyme structure chosen by the nervous little
parson. But no living poet can move his readers to the fascinated horror
once felt by the Puritans as they followed Wigglesworth's relentless
gaze into the future of the soul's destiny.
Historical curiosity may still linger, of course, over other
verse-writers of the period. Anne Bradstreet's poems, for instance, are
not without grace and womanly sweetness, in spite of their didactic
themes and portentous length. But this lady, born in England, the
daughter of Governor Dudley and later the wife of Governor Bradstreet,
chose to imitate the more fantastic of the moralizing poets of England
and France. There is little in her hundreds of pages which seems today
the inevitable outcome of her own experience in the New World. For
readers who like roughly mischievous satire, of a type initiated in
England by Bishop Hall and Donne, there is The Simple Cobbler of Agawam
written by the roving clergyman Nathaniel Ward. But he lived only a
dozen years in Massachusetts, and his satirical pictures are scarcely
more "American" than the satire upon German professors in Sartor
Resartus is "German." Like Charles Dickens's American Notes, Ward's give
the reaction of a born Englishman in the presence of the sights and the
talk and the personages of the transatlantic world.
Of all the colonial writings of the seventeenth century, those that have
lost least of their interest through the lapse of years are narratives
of struggles with the Indians. The image of the "bloody savage" has
always hovered in the background of the American imagination. Our boys
and girls have "played Indian" from the beginning, and the actual Indian
is still found, as for three hundred years past, upon the frontier
fringe of our civilization. Novelists like Cooper, historians like
Parkman, poets like Longfellow, have dealt with the rich material
offered by the life of the aborigines, but the long series begins with
the scribbled story of colonists. Here are comedy and tragedy, plain
narratives of trading and travel, missionary zeal and triumphs; then the
inevitable alienation of the two races and the doom of the native.
The "noble savage" note may be found in John Rolfe, the husband of
Pocahontas, with whom, poor fellow, his "best thoughts are so intangled
and enthralled." Other Virginians, like Smith, Strachey, and Percy, show
close naturalistic observation, touched with the abounding Elizabethan
zest for novelties. To Alexander Whitaker, however, these "naked slaves
of the devil" were "not so simple as some have supposed." He yearned and
labored over their souls, as did John Eliot and Roger Williams and
Daniel Gookin of New England. In the Pequot War of 1637 the grim
settlers resolved to be rid of that tribe once for all, and the
narratives of Captain Edward Johnson and Captain John Mason, who led in
the storming and slaughter at the Indians' Mystic Fort, are as piously
relentless as anything in the Old Testament. Cromwell at Drogheda, not
long after, had soldiers no more merciless than these exterminating
Puritans, who wished to plough their fields henceforth in peace. A
generation later the storm broke again in King Philip's War. Its tales
of massacre, captivity, and single-handed fighting linger in the
American imagination still. Typical pamphlets are Mary Rowlandson's
thrilling tale of the Lancaster massacre and her subsequent captivity,
and the loud-voiced Captain Church's unvarnished description of King
Philip's death. The King, shot down like a wearied bull-moose in the
deep swamp, "fell upon his face in the mud and water, with his gun under
him." They "drew him through the mud to the upland; and a doleful,
great, naked dirty beast he looked like." The head brought only thirty
shillings at Plymouth: "scanty reward and poor encouragement," thought
Captain Church. William Hubbard, the minister of Ipswich, wrote a
comprehensive Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New England,
bringing the history down to 1677. Under the better known title of
Indian Wars, this fervid and dramatic tale, penned in a quiet parsonage,
has stirred the pulses of every succeeding generation.
The close of King Philip's War, 1676, coinciding as it does with Bacon's
Rebellion in Virginia, marks an era in the development of our
independent life. The events of that year, in the words of Professor
Tyler, "established two very considerable facts, namely, that English
colonists in America could be so provoked as to make physical resistance
to the authority of England, and, second, that English colonists in
America could, in the last resort, put down any combination of Indians
that might be formed against them. In other words, it was then made
evident that English colonists would certainly be safe in the new world,
and also that they would not always be colonists."
While the end of an historical or literary era cannot always be thus
conveniently indicated by a date, there is no doubt that the final
quarter of the seventeenth century witnessed deep changes in the outward
life and the inner temper of the colonists. The "first fine careless
rapture" was over. Only a few aged men could recall the memory of the
first settlements. Between the founding of Jamestown and the rebellion
under the leadership of Nathaniel Bacon almost seventy years had
intervened, an interval corresponding to that which separates us from
the Mexican War. Roger Williams ended his much-enduring and beneficent
life in the flourishing town of Providence in 1684. He had already
outlived Cotton and Hooker, Shepard and Winthrop, by more than thirty
years. Inevitably men began, toward the end of the century, to take
stock of the great venture of colonization, to scrutinize their own
history and present position, to ask searching questions of themselves.
"You have better food and raiment than was in former times," wrote the
aged Roger Clark, in 1676; "but have you better hearts than your
forefathers had?" Thomas Walley's Languishing Commonwealth maintains
that "Faith is dead, and Love is cold, and Zeal is gone." Urian Oakes's
election sermon of 1670 in Cambridge is a condemnation of the prevalent
worldliness and ostentation. This period of critical inquiry and
assessment, however, also gives grounds for just pride. History,
biography, eulogy, are flourishing. The reader is reminded of that
epoch, one hundred and fifty years later, when the deaths of John Adams
and of Thomas Jefferson, falling upon the same anniversary day, the
Fourth of July, 1826, stirred all Americans to a fresh recognition of
the services wrought by the Fathers of the Republic. So it was in the
colonies at the close of the seventeenth century. Old England, in one
final paroxysm of political disgust, cast out the last Stuart in 1688.
That Revolution marks, as we have seen, the close of a long and tragic
struggle which began in the autocratic theories of James the First and
in the absolutism of Charles. Almost every phase of that momentous
conflict had its reverberation across the Atlantic, as the history of
the granting and withdrawal of colonial charters witnesses abundantly.
The American pioneers were quite aware of what was going on in England,
and they praised God or grumbled, thriftily profited by the results or
quietly nullified them, as the case might be. But all the time, while
England was rocked to its foundations, the colonists struck steadily
forward into their own independent life.