Those who had returned home disheartened had spread damaging reports
about the colony, not only telling of the sore straits it was in to
live, but also declaring that Mr. Winthrop and his people had openly
repudiated the Church of England and turned separatists, like the people
at Plymouth. It was difficult to quiet these reports, because they were
practically true. It was not easy to explain away what had undoubtedly
been done. Both the immigrants with Mr. Endecott at Salem and those
who had come with Mr. Winthrop had left home members of the Church of
England: Puritans and reformers, indeed, but still not separatists, and
publicly professing a warm loyalty for the mother Church. “We esteem
it an honor,” they had said, as they uttered their final partings at
Yarmouth, “to call the Church of England, from whence we rise, our dear
mother.” “We shall always rejoice in her good, ... and while we have
breath sincerely desire and endeavor the continuance and abundance of her
welfare, with the enlargement of her bounds.” And yet Endecott had hardly
begun his settlement at Salem before he took counsel with Mr. Brewster
and other leaders at Plymouth, and rearranged both the worship and the
government of his church after their model. Mr. Winthrop’s people had
done the same. Those who protested and showed themselves unwilling to
accept the new ways of church government were compelled either to conform
or return home to England. The whole thing looked like the carrying out
of a deliberate plan made beforehand to get rid of the Church as well as
of the government of England: to set up a separate church along with a
separate commonwealth.
[Illustration: MYLES STANDISH]
They could hardly say that it was the necessary result of their removal
to a distant continent; for the numerous body of Englishmen long ago
settled in Virginia had done nothing of the sort, though they maintained
their own churches. The Virginians had remained staunch supporters of the
Church as it was at home. Their own assembly had passed strict laws to
enforce the accustomed discipline of the English Church and to protect
its forms of worship. It could not be said that they did not love their
freedom as much as the settlers at Plymouth and the Bay loved theirs.
They were glad enough to have an ocean between them and the bishops, did
not hesitate to discard the surplice, simplified their worship as they
pleased, and took leave to make very free use of the opportunity to rule
their own affairs. But they loved none the less the ancient Church in
which they had been bred, and they meant to maintain it.
[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF THE “BAY PSALM BOOK”]
Virginia had been planted before the full warmth of the Puritan temper
had made itself felt in England, when it was esteemed a reproach to be
called a separatist, and a proud duty which went along with a man’s
allegiance to hold fast to the standards of the nation’s Church. Virginia
had been recruited, too, as she grew, not out of a special class like the
Puritans, with a cause at their hearts, but out of the general body of
the English people, in whose lives and thoughts the disputes which grew
so keen from year to year within the Church played very little part. They
had brought their religious beliefs and their forms of worship with them
to Virginia as habits in their blood, unseparated and undistinguished
from their English citizenship. The new settlers on Massachusetts Bay,
on the contrary, had been selected out of a special class. They were
men bent for conscience’ sake upon setting up a particular standard of
their own both in church and in state. They had a deliberate plan from
the first to withdraw themselves from the general body of Englishmen and
establish in America what should seem to them “a due form of government,
both civil and ecclesiastical.” “God sifted a whole nation that He might
send choice grain out into this wilderness,” one of their own preachers
said. They tried to explain away their novel proceedings when they wrote
to persons of influence at home; they tried to persuade even themselves
that they were not separatists, but only a distant and necessarily
distinct fragment of the Church of England, of the form which they hoped
and expected to see that great Church some day assume; but they were, in
fact, founding a separate establishment which denied the authority of the
mother Church altogether.
[Illustration: A VIRGINIA PLANTER WITH HIS ATTENDANTS IN HIS BOAT ON THE
JAMES RIVER]
Virginia had slowly grown to a population of five thousand while
the Puritans organized their company and transported it to America.
Virginians bore themselves very much as Englishmen did everywhere.
There was nothing peculiar about them except their hardihood, as of
frontiersmen, and their knowledge of how life was to be managed and set
forward in a wilderness. It had not made much difference among them that
the Virginia Company was dissolved and the colony put into the hands of
the King. For the first four years that followed the change no assemblies
were summoned, it is true, and they were ruled by the governors and the
governors’ councils whom the King appointed. But the governors chosen by
the King during those years were men of their own number, their trusted
friends, already experienced in their affairs, men whom the company also
had employed. Leading men of the colony were appointed to the council
also. The general interest was consulted, though there were no elections.
Before a governor not to the people’s taste was put over them the old
practice of calling assemblies had been resumed. Virginians wished their
individual rights to be left untouched, and watched their government
narrowly to see that it did not impose upon them; but their life went
well enough, and they were not disposed to seek radical changes either in
church or state.
[Illustration: DUTCH WEST INDIA COMPANY’S HOUSE, HAARLEM STREET,
AMSTERDAM]
They were not settled in close groups, and were not always discussing
their common affairs, as men do who live together in towns or organize
themselves in compact neighborhoods for business. There was no real town
in the colony, except Jamestown. The homes of the colony were scattered
through wide neighborhoods along the margins of the rivers, which flowed
broad and deep and from every quarter, the natural highways of the place.
Each planter farmed as much of the fertile land as he could; but he
planted little for sale except tobacco. His tobacco he shipped away in
vessels which came to his own wharf and the wharves of his neighbors to
be laden. It was not hard to live in that genial climate. Great clearings
had at last been made; the sun had been let wholesomely in to take the
feverish vapors of the forest off; and the land had begun to yield health
as well as abundance. Secluded country churches were the neighborhood
gathering places of the colony, for talk as well as for worship. Planters
made their way to Jamestown down the rivers in their own boats, or
through the quiet paths of the forest on horseback, to be present at the
gathering of the assembly, or to attend the quarterly meetings of the
governor’s council, at which lawsuits were heard and determined. It was
all a leisurely way of life, and was not apt to bring changes rapidly
about so long as the King suffered them to enjoy their reasonable liberty
as Englishmen and did not put men who wished to rule overmuch into their
governor’s chair.
New Netherland grew also, in a way which might have looked to a chance
visitor very like the growth of Virginia. The Dutch West India Company
had found that if they kept to the plan with which they had begun, they
could not hope to make anything more than a mere trading station out
of their slow-growing settlement at Fort Amsterdam. The council of the
company, accordingly, determined to offer large tracts of land to any one
who would send over at his own cost fifty adult settlers, with stores and
equipment,—and with the land extraordinary powers of independent control,
which should constitute the owner a sort of feudal prince, as “patroon”
and lord of his estate. The offer had in it the enticing prospect of
dignity and power and safe wealth, such as the landed gentry of Holland
had time out of mind enjoyed and the merchants of the towns had envied
them as long, and some were tempted, as the company had hoped. Some rich
men did bestir themselves to send settlers over, and great stretches of
the best land on both the North and the South rivers of New Netherland
were presently made over to private owners. It was no easier, however,
for private individuals than it had been for the company to bring the
land successfully under cultivation, or to establish settlements which
would thrive and endure; and the new way of building up the colony went
as slowly as the old. Many of the new proprietors failed; only a few
succeeded. The most notable of the estates which were actually peopled
and established was that of Kilian van Rensselaer, the wealthy jeweller
of Amsterdam, which stretched for miles upon either bank of the North
River in the fertile region far up the stream where the company’s Fort
Orange stood, and where the heart of the fur trade with the Indians was.
[Illustration: ENGLISH GENTLEMAN, 1633; ENGLISH GENTLEWOMAN, 1631]
[Illustration: SIGNATURE OF KILIAN VAN RENSSELAER, PATROON]
Even where this new way of growth succeeded, however, it was in fact
very different from the slow and natural spread of broad plantations
in Virginia, where no man was by law more privileged than another. The
Dutch farmers and peasants who slowly filled the estates of the patroons
with tenants were not like the free yeomen of the southern colony of
the English. They were just as little like the New England colonists to
the northward. Among these settlement had still another way of growth.
They did not develop by the slow spreading of private estates along the
river valleys. The New England valleys were not fertile; the rivers were
not deep or broad enough to be the highways of the colony. The sort of
government the Puritan settlers wished to maintain, moreover, would
have been almost impossible had the people not kept together in close
groups for common action and worship. The governor and company who ruled
Massachusetts Bay governed there very watchfully in the midst of the
settlements, and took care to know the men to whom they made grants of
land. Sometimes they made grants to individuals for special services or
liberal contributions to the company’s funds; but usually they gave land
only to bands of settlers who meant to form communities, and who were
under the leadership of persons whom the governor and his associates
trusted. The new settlers of each locality owned their lands jointly, as
if they were a corporation. Their “town meeting” determined what portion
each individual among them was to have for his own use. No other settlers
could join them unless admitted by their town meeting to the partnership.
All local affairs were managed by officers whom the town meeting elected.
Each town, the newest no less than Salem or Charlestown or Roxbury or
Boston, was its own mistress, except when matters which the company
determined in the common interest were to be acted on.
In each town there were “selectmen” chosen to administer the general
business of the town; constables to keep order; cowherds to take the
cattle to the common pasture, keep them there while their owners did
their tasks through the day, and bring them back at sunset; swineherds
to drive the swine to their feeding and return them safe in the evening;
a hayward to catch stray beasts and keep them fast till they were
claimed: a man for each simple duty. The swineherd made his way along the
village streets early in the morning, sounding his horn, and every man
who had swine brought them out to him at the summons to join his noisy
procession, going forth to the woods for their feeding for the day. The
cowherd took all his lowing charges to pasture from a common pen, to
which their owners brought them in the grey of the dawn, and was charged
to be back with them ere the sun should set. The town meeting decided all
things, small and great. It did not hesitate to order in what way the
houses should be set and roofed and distributed along the street, and
their gardens disposed about them. In Newtown the freemen ordered by vote
that all houses within the village “be covered with slate or board, and
not with thatch,” and that they be built so that they should “range even”
and stand just six feet from the street. Every freeman and proprietor of
the village had his vote in the meeting, and deemed himself self-governed
when it governed him.
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF ORDER CREATING BOARD OF SELECTMEN,
CHARLESTOWN, 1634]
The government of the colony as a whole was by no means so democratic.
The “company” governed; and the company consisted only of those who were
admitted as “freemen” by its own vote. At first there were only twenty
such among all the thousand settlers at the Bay, and twelve of these
twenty were the officers of the company. By slow degrees the number was
enlarged; but the company was very reluctant and very cautious about
increasing its membership. Four years went by before there were so many
as three hundred and fifty “freemen,” and by that time there were more
than three thousand settlers. The new and very severe rule was adopted
that no one should be chosen a freeman who was not a member of some
one of the churches of the settlements. In England every subject was
reckoned by law a member of the Church of England; but in Massachusetts
men became members of the churches only by profession of faith and upon a
searching examination in matters of doctrine and worship. Those who did
not hold the strict creed of the Puritan ministers, being excluded from
the church, were excluded also from voting. “The best part is always the
least,” was Mr. Winthrop’s sententious doctrine, “and of that best part
the wiser part is always the lesser.”
The rule of doctrine and church authority did not stop with a restriction
in the number of freemen who should vote in the company’s general
court. Men were fined, whipped, sentenced to have their ears cut off,
or banished the colony altogether for speaking scandalously of either
the church or the government. Several who had come to the Bay before
the Massachusetts Company was formed were so put upon and sought out
for prosecution by their new masters, the magistrates of the company,
for their refusal to conform to the new practices in matters of
worship, that they finally resisted to the length of bringing sentence
of banishment upon themselves, or voluntarily took themselves off to
escape the searching tyranny. It was a very rigorous government, under
which only those could live and be at ease who professed and proved
themselves Puritans; and common men suffered more than gentlemen, after
the manner of the age, so that it seemed an aristocratic as well as an
ecclesiastical establishment.
[Illustration: WILLIAM LAUD, ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY]
The King and his ministers over sea did not fail to observe how the
company made its colony a stronghold for the obstructive Puritans. The
temper of Charles’s government grew harsher and harsher during those
first years of settlement at the Bay, and became as meddlesome and
tyrannical in the management of the Church as in the management of the
State. In 1633 he had made Laud Archbishop of Canterbury. Now he was
backing the implacable primate in a thoroughgoing and pitiless attempt to
clear the Church of all Puritans and nonconformists. Laud was quick to
see what comfort the rapidly growing colony at Massachusetts Bay gave his
enemies, and complained very hotly that it was filling up with persons
openly hostile to the King’s government. Certain persons connected with
the old Council for New England, jealous of the prosperous company
at the Bay, with its independent royal charter, easily persuaded the
all-powerful archbishop, and through him the law officers of the crown,
to take steps to destroy it; and in 1635 the blow came. A judgment was
obtained against the Massachusetts charter in the court of King’s Bench;
the government of the colony was declared transferred into the King’s
hands, as the government of Virginia had been, and orders were issued
which authorized the despatch of a governor-general, to be accompanied,
if necessary, by an armed force. Mr. Cradock, who presided over the
company’s financial board in London, had been summoned by the imperious
primate and by my lord Privy Seal to come before them for an explanation,
and bring the charter of the company with him; and had been rated very
roundly as an “imposturous knave” when he declared that it had been sent
over sea with the colonists. But the spiriting away of its charter had
not been allowed to stay the judgment against the company.
The magistrates at the Bay, when the ugly news reached them, came to the
desperate resolution to resist by force. But troubles in England saved
them. Their charter was, indeed, in law annulled, but the judgment was
not carried out. The King’s purse was empty. His subjects were very slow
about paying the illegal taxes he demanded of them. Signs of revolution
were growing more and more frequent, more and more open and ominous.
Charles could not afford to send an expensive expedition out to New
England, and was much too anxious about things at home to think very
often about the little group of troublesome settlements across the sea.
Mr. Winthrop and his associates, accordingly, lived quietly on under
their forfeited charter, as if nothing had happened, and admitted no one
they did not like to the partnership.
An introduction to the various phases of _the Puritan movement_
in England, which led to the Puritan exodus to America, may
be got in G. H. Curteis’s _Dissent in its Relation to the
Church of England_ (the Bampton lectures for 1871); in David
Masson’s _Life and Times of Milton_; in D. Neal’s _History of
the Puritans_; in Samuel R. Gardiner’s _History of England from
the Accession of James I._, volumes I. and IV.; in the second
volume of J. R. Green’s _History of the English People_; in G.
E. Ellis’s _Puritan Age and Rule_; and in the second volume of
J. A. Doyle’s _English Colonies in America_.
The leading _general authorities_ on the history of
Massachusetts in the seventeenth century are John Gorham
Palfrey’s _History of New England_ (1492-1774) and _Compendious
History of New England_ (1497-1765); J. A. Doyle’s second
and third volumes on _The English Colonies in America_; John
Fiske’s _Beginnings of New England_; S. R. Drake’s _The Making
of New England_; and Justin Winsor’s _Memorial History of
Boston_.
Glimpses of some of the most important special aspects of
Massachusetts history are to be had in W. B. Weeden’s _Economic
and Social History of New England_; Charles Francis Adams’s
_Three Episodes of Massachusetts History_; and Herbert B.
Adams’s _Germanic Origin of the New England Towns_, published
in the first volume of the _Johns Hopkins University Studies in
Historical and Political Science_.
Most of the important _original sources_ of Massachusetts
history are brought together in John Winthrop’s _History of
New England_, edited by J. Savage and _The Life and Letters of
John Winthrop_, edited by R. C. Winthrop; in the _Collections_
and _Proceedings_ of the Massachusetts Historical Society;
in Alexander Young’s _Chronicles of Massachusetts_; in the
_Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay_;
in Peter Force’s _Tracts and Other Papers relating to the
Colonies in North America_; in the _Publications_ of the Prince
Society; in the papers of the American Antiquarian Society; and
in the _New Hampshire Historical Collections_.
IV. THE PROVINCE OF MARYLAND
It was a thing for statesmen to take note of, and all to wonder at, how
Englishmen of all sorts and creeds began to think of America, and to
desire homes there, when once it had become evident that Virginia and
Plymouth and the Massachusetts settlements were certainly permanent, and
colonization no mere scheme of the foolhardy. There were others besides
the Puritans who felt uneasy at home in England because of the troubles
in church and state and the threatening face of affairs. For men who
loved novelty and adventure, life in the New World had always a charm
which even direst hardship could not take away; but such men were nowhere
in a majority, and it was not mere love of adventure that made the
English swarm to America. It was the spirit of liberty and of mastery. It
was the most spirited men who were the most uneasy in those evil days of
the Stuart kings; and because they were cramped and thwarted and humbled
at home they thought the more often and the more wistfully of the freedom
they might find in America. Virginia had been planted and had thriven, it
is true, before there was this sting of uneasiness to drive men over sea.
She had been created because of the spirit of trade and of conquest, the
impulse of international rivalry, the love of gain, and the capacity for
independent action which had come to Englishmen in the stirring sixteenth
century; and it was, after all, that “ancient, primitive, and heroic
work of planting the world” which was to prove the permanent motive of
English success in America. But now, for the time being, there was added
to the high spirit of mastery the unquiet spirit of discontent, and
America reaped a double harvest.
[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF HAMMOND’S “LEAH AND RACHEL”]
It happened that Roman Catholics felt almost as uneasy as Puritans.
James, it was true, had proved himself no Presbyterian, after all, and
Charles had put Laud at the head of the Church, as if to carry it back as
far as possible towards Rome, if not all the way to Rome itself. But it
needed no seer to perceive how the temper of the nation darkened at sight
of these things, and no thoughtful Roman Catholic could find sound reason
to hope for a long period of toleration. America would no doubt prove a
freer place for Roman Catholics as well as for Puritans, and their exodus
began the very year Laud became primate. It was for them that Maryland
was founded by Cecilius Calvert, Lord Baltimore. It was a scheme he had
inherited from his father. Sir George Calvert had been a very noticeable
figure when James was king. He had stood in the Commons, alongside
Wentworth, his friend, as spokesman for the King, whose intimate
companion and devoted servant all knew him to be, facing Sir Edwin Sandys
there, to whom the House had looked for leadership since it began to
fear that James meant some deep mischief to the liberties of England.
There was much to admire in his courtesy, his tact and moderation, his
unobtrusive devotion to affairs. He had none of Wentworth’s striking
initiative and vigor, and showed a modesty, gentleness, and acquiescence
in the service of the court which seemed mere weakness to those who
looked on; and yet he was greatly trusted and won deep esteem. The
opponents of the crown in Parliament thought him servile, and suspected
him of being corrupt, like the rest of the King’s agents; but those who
knew him said that he acted upon conviction in making choice which side
he should take, and both in public and in private bore himself like a man
of honor.
[Illustration: GEORGE CALVERT]
In the last year of the reign he had resigned his offices and withdrawn
from the King’s service, while still in his prime. He had become a
convert to Roman Catholicism, had committed himself with the energy of
real conviction to bringing about the marriage of Prince Charles to
the princess of Spain, and would not draw back to please either the
prince himself or great Buckingham, because he deemed both the cause of
Catholicism and the plighted word of England, given in solemn treaty,
involved in the project. His position at court had become untenable,
and he withdrew both to save his interest and to give candid expression
to his religious convictions. James had created him Baron Baltimore at
parting, as a special evidence of his good will, and then Calvert had
turned to devote himself to plans of colonization. He had been a large
subscriber to the funds of the East India Company, had become a member
of the New England Company, and had served on the commission appointed
in 1624 to wind up the affairs of the great Virginia Company. As far
back as 1620 he had interested himself in colonizing schemes of his own,
while he was yet in the midst of affairs,—before Plymouth was founded. He
had bought an extensive tract of land lying on the southern peninsula of
Newfoundland; had put colonists upon it; and when he turned from holding
office under the King, had himself gone to reside among his settlers.