October to May, convinced him it was no place in which to build a colony,
especially with the French near at hand to be reckoned with, in addition
to the weather. The French upon the near-by coasts had not forgotten how
Captain Argall had put in at their struggling settlements and burned
them, scarcely ten years ago, carrying off cattle and settlers alike as
his prize of private war, and meant to have no English for neighbors if
they could find means to drive them off. Calvert had stayed his year
out at “Avalon” only because his ships were as heavily armed and better
handled. The bleak land with “a sad fare of winter” upon it, which let no
blade of herbage appear in the earth, nor any fish even in the sea, for
close upon eight months together, seemed hardly worth fighting for.
He turned his thoughts southward, therefore, and in 1629,—the very
year Parliaments ceased to sit and the Massachusetts people got their
charter,—asked King Charles to grant them lands on either side the great
Bay of Chesapeake, close by Virginia: from the Potomac northward and
eastward, across the Bay, to the fortieth degree of north latitude and
the river and bay of Delaware. All this was land granted long ago to the
Virginia Company; but the Virginia Company was dead; the King had resumed
his sovereign rights with the withdrawal of its charter,—cared very
little whether he twice granted the same thing or not,—and was Calvert’s
friend, as his father had been before him. The Virginian colonists were
hot against the grant, and many influential persons in England, who
seemed to hope still to see the old Virginia Company revived, protested
to the Privy Council against it. But though they held the matter off
for a year and a half, until Calvert was dead, they did not prevent it.
The charter was issued in 1632, and Cecilius Calvert, the second Lord
Baltimore, carried out his father’s plans in his father’s spirit.
It had been evident from the first that George Calvert had meant his
colony to be, among other things, a place of refuge, freedom, and
safety for men of his own faith. There had long been stories afloat
in London how he had carried Romish priests with him to Newfoundland,
and had celebrated mass there every Sunday. He had named his colony
there Avalon because it was at Glastonbury, which men had once called
Avalon, in old Somersetshire, that the Church of Rome had first set up
her altars in Britain. The colonists whom Cecilius Calvert sent out to
Maryland late in the autumn of 1633 were by no means all Romanists, but
probably quite half of them were; and Jesuit priests, who had covertly
come aboard after the ships left the Thames, went with them to act as
their spiritual leaders and preceptors in the New World. Protestants and
Catholics, however, consorted very comfortably together on the voyage
and after the landing. It was no part of Lord Baltimore’s purpose to be
a proselytizer and make converts of all whom he sent out, and he was too
cool and prudent a man to wish to set up a colony to which none but Roman
Catholics should be admitted. He knew very well how all England would
soon be talking and protesting about such a colony as that, should he
attempt it. He meant only to make a place so free that Roman Catholics
might use full liberty of worship there no less than Protestants, for he
knew that there was as yet no such place in America.
[Illustration: THE SECOND LORD BALTIMORE]
His colonists reached their new home in March, 1634, and chose for their
place of settlement a high bluff which rose upon the eastern bank of a
little stream which emptied itself into the great Potomac but a little
way from the Bay. The mighty Potomac, flowing silent between its wide
banks there in the lonely wilderness, made a deep impression on them.
“The Thames, compared with it,” they said, “can scarcely be considered a
rivulet. It is not rendered impure by marshes, but on each bank of solid
earth rise beautiful groves of trees, not choked up with an undergrowth
of brambles and bushes, but as if laid out by the hand, in a manner so
open that you might easily drive a four-horse chariot in the midst of
the trees.” It was this broad and stately stream which was to be their
boundary line, separating them from Virginia. Lord Baltimore called his
province Maryland, in honor of the queen, and the first settlement there
on the bluff they called St. Mary’s, in honor of the Virgin.
It was a very bitter thing to the Virginians that they should be obliged
thus to give up all the fair region of the upper Bay to these new-comers,
whom they disliked equally as intruders and as papists; and feeling ran
so high among them against Lord Baltimore’s people that they deemed it an
intolerable sort of treason for any man to speak so much as a kind word
concerning them. They knew that they might themselves once have had all
the Bay for the taking, and now the King had granted it away forever.
They had, indeed, established a trading outpost on Kent’s Island, which
lay within reach of the spreading stream of the great Susquehanna, the
noble river which brought its waters to the Bay all the long way which
lay between Virginia and the forest haunts of the mighty Iroquois at the
north,—the forests whence the rich furs came which all the continent
coveted. Mr. Clayborne, who was of the governor’s council, had interested
himself to make commerce there with the natives; and Mr. Clayborne, with
his good estates and high credit in Virginia, his influential commercial
connections in London, his indomitable will and strong relish for action,
was an ill man to oust. He insisted not only upon his own rights of
property in the island, which no man of Lord Baltimore’s interest would
have denied or interfered with, but also upon Virginia’s jurisdiction
over it. There could be no questioning the fact, nevertheless, that the
island lay within the King’s new grant; and though Mr. Clayborne begged
aid of the Privy Council at home, and even put arms into the hands of his
servants to keep his own by force, it was of no avail. The King’s grant
made Lord Baltimore master, and Mr. Clayborne had to stomach as best he
could the unpalatable necessity of submitting.
Maryland’s settlers had come to stay, and yearly spread and multiplied;
and the Virginians in due time let their anger cool. Singular good
fortune and provident good management made them secure from the first
against any starving time such as there had been at Jamestown, or any
bitter struggle to live and make a beginning. They had found an Indian
village at St. Mary’s where they landed, long established and set in the
midst of open fields cultivated and ready for the plough. The Indians
whose home the place had been freely sold them both its wigwams and
its fallow clearings, for a few hatchets and hoes and a little cloth.
Before the white men came they had resolved to quit the region, to be
rid of fear of the Susquehannocks, the terrible Iroquois neighbors
whose inroads made peace impossible. Here were cornfields ready for the
planting, therefore, and the very first autumn of their stay in that wide
wilderness the new colonists had grain enough to send a shipload to New
England, to be exchanged for salt codfish. The Virginians, for all they
hated them, did not refuse to sell them cattle and swine at a profit; and
want was not an enemy they needed to reckon with.
Maryland turned out another Virginia in its ways of life and government.
In form, indeed, its government was very different. The King had no
direct authority there. Lord Baltimore was made by his charter literally
proprietor of the colony,—a sort of feudal prince, from whom, and not
from the King, all titles and all authority were to be derived. He was
empowered to confer rank even, and set up a kind of nobility, should
he choose; and though his charter obliged him to submit such laws and
regulations as he might think best to impose upon his province to the
approval of the freemen of the colony, or their deputies, “called
together for the framing of laws,” that need have restrained him little
more than the King was restrained by the Parliament at home. He could
create “manors,” also, with their separate courts, and proprietors as
independent, almost, as the barons of old; and as the colony grew he did
bestow here and there, upon a few of the richer men among his colonists,
these greater gifts of privilege. The King had meant to reproduce in
him the ancient powers of the stout churchmen who had kept the northern
border against the Scot, and had had their separate sovereignty, as if of
independent princes, for reward, making of their majestic cathedral on
the high banks of Wear—
“Half house of God,
Half castle ’gainst the Scot.”
He was to have, said his charter, “as ample rights, jurisdictions,
privileges, prerogatives, royalties, liberties, immunities, and royal
rights as any bishop of Durham within the bishopric or county palatine of
Durham, within our kingdom of England.”
But, notwithstanding his power was so great on paper, he did not in fact
use it to give the colony a character apart. Assemblies of the freemen
met and made terms with the proprietor in Maryland as they had met and
made terms with the company in Virginia. At first, while all the settlers
were still within easy reach of St. Mary’s, there were no elections.
The freemen came themselves instead of choosing representatives. It was
only by slow degrees that a system of elections was established. But
in the end things were arranged there very much as they were arranged
in Virginia, in matters of government no less than in matters of daily
life. There were broad rivers in Maryland as in Virginia, and ships
traded from wharf to wharf upon them as in the older colony. There were
few villages and many spreading plantations. Virginians might have felt
that there was practically little difference between their own colony
and Lord Baltimore’s, had they not seen Roman Catholics enjoy rights of
worship there which were not granted them in Virginia. Virginians were
expected to observe the ritual and order of the Church of England. Only
in Maryland was there freedom in such matters, and the freedom there
made Virginians feel, uneasily, that Maryland was in some unlawful way
a Jesuit and papist refuge, which would bear jealous watching. The two
colonies might speedily have forgot their differences but for that.
_Authorities_ on the history of Maryland during the seventeenth
century. The most trustworthy general authorities are John
Leeds Bozman’s _History of Maryland_ (1632-1660); William
Hand Browne’s _Maryland: the History of a Palatinate_; John
V. L. McMahon’s _An Historical View of the Government of
Maryland_; the first volume of J. A. Doyle’s _English Colonies
in America_; William T. Brantly’s _English in Maryland,
1632-1691_, in the third volume of Winsor’s _Narrative and
Critical History of America_; Edward D. Neill’s _Terra
Mariae_; Bancroft and Hildreth’s general histories; and the
excellent monographs scattered here and there in the nineteen
volumes of the _Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical
and Political Science_.
The more important _original sources_ are to be found in the
_Maryland Archives_, edited by W. Hand Browne; in the _Fund
Publications_ of the Maryland Historical Society; in Bacon’s
_Laws of Maryland_; in Peter Force’s _Tracts and Other Papers
relating to the Colonies in North America_; in W. Hazard’s
_Historical Collections, Consisting of State Papers and Other
Documents_; and in Stedman and Hutchinson’s _Library of
American Literature_.
V. THE EXPANSION OF NEW ENGLAND
While Maryland was being established, a county palatine, and Virginians
accommodated their life and temper to the intrusion, affairs moved
with strong tide in New England, and the whole face of the country was
changed for the English, the Indians, and the Dutch alike. During the
ten years 1630-1640, the first ten years after Mr. Winthrop’s company
came to Boston, a great and ever-increasing immigration poured steadily
in at the Bay. These were the years during which there was no Parliament
in England, the years during which the government at home seemed most
intolerable, and the Puritan colonies in America most inviting, to all
Englishmen who took their politics and their religion seriously. No fewer
than twenty thousand people came within that single decade to seek homes
in New England. In 1634 fourteen ships came in at the Bay with settlers
in the single month of June, and the next summer eleven came in in a
single day. In 1638 three thousand immigrants arrived within a space of
three months. There could be no pause in events while such a tide was
running.
[Illustration: ARRIVAL OF WINTHROP’S COMPANY IN BOSTON HARBOR]
Most of the new-comers found the Bay settlements altogether to their
liking, and made their homes there very contentedly. They did not object
to the strictness of the church government set up by the masterful rulers
of the Massachusetts towns, for they were themselves Puritans almost to
a man, and liked very well to see their own opinions made compulsory. It
did not incommode them that the sterner ministers of the settlements made
bold to imitate his Grace of Canterbury and silence those who differed
with them. It was an age “when every sect demanded tolerance, yet none
had the generosity to grant it,” and it was very comfortable to dwell
with your own sect.
There was a great deal besides the church in New England,—a great deal
to make the novel life in the wilderness stirring and interesting, and
worth taking part in. The government, it was true, tried to regulate
everything, just as the government at home did: made laws as to what
wages should be paid to laborers, what prices should be charged by the
merchants; prescribed what uses the farmer should make of his corn, how
the fisheries should be conducted, and the fur trade with the Indians
carried on. But it was not so easy to enforce such regulations as it was
to make them. Fishermen fished in the open sea, upon a long coast, where
there were few magistrates; fur traders carried on their barter with the
Indians in the depths of the forest; merchants quietly took whatever
purchasers were willing to pay; farmers used their land as they thought
most profitable and advantageous; and the simple life of the colony was
freer than life in England, after all.
[Illustration]
There was not a little uneasiness and disquiet, nevertheless. These
stirring, austere, uncompromising Puritans, who had crossed the sea to
live in a wilderness rather than submit to Laud and the King, were not
likely to be all of one mind, or always submissive to one another when
they differed; and within less than five years after Mr. Winthrop’s
first company had established themselves at the Bay signs of a partial
breaking up began to appear. Each town was a sort of little commonwealth,
and every town followed its minister, if he was of the mettle to lead.
Some came from one quarter of the old land which had bred them all, some
from another, some from quiet hamlets or rustic country-sides, some
from busy towns; and each group, choosing its own place of neighborhood
and settlement, kept its own flavor of local habit. And not the flavor
of local habit only, but its own favorite views, also, it might be,
upon questions of doctrine and polity, or its own strong preferences
as to liberty of worship. Congregations had and kept their several
characters; the politics of the growing commonwealth sprang out of their
differences; and their ministers were their politicians. The Reverend
Thomas Hooker, of Newtown, and the Reverend John Cotton, of Boston, were,
in those first days, the most notable men among all the ministers of the
colonies. Laud had picked both of them out as heretics specially to be
feared and disciplined; they had been obliged to make their escape very
secretly from England, and had been welcomed at the Bay with a special
satisfaction and distinction of greeting upon their landing, in 1633.
They were both scholars, and both orators whom it moved men to hear; but
they were of opposite views and unlike tempers in dealing with affairs.
It was observed after Mr. Hooker was settled at Newtown “that many of the
freemen grew very jealous of their liberties.” The men of Watertown, near
by, ventured to protest very strongly against being taxed for a fort to
be built at Newtown, notwithstanding it was meant to serve in case of
need against a common enemy; and it was not doubted that Mr. Hooker’s
very liberal opinions in matters of government had spread to them, and
inclined them thus to press their independence. He was very downright,
very formidable in debate; Newtown was contesting with Boston the right
to be considered the capital and centre of the Bay settlements; the
freemen of the lesser towns looked to it for leadership, and found Mr.
Hooker clear in counsel and fit to lead.
Mr. Cotton’s views were much more to the liking of the magistrates.
“Democracy,” he said, “I do not conceive that God ever did ordain as
a fit government either for church or commonwealth. If the people be
governors, who shall be governed?” He had, moreover, “such an insinuating
and melting way in his preaching that, he would usually carry his very
adversary captive,”—a man less rugged than Mr. Hooker, more fitted
to charm, the mystical power of a poet and the winning force of an
ardent evangelist set forth for all to see in his fine eyes, his ruddy
countenance, his locks of chestnut brown, his carriage as of a man sure
of his mission and of his mastery. The magistrates generally invited him
to preach, accordingly, at every crisis in affairs, to the freemen or to
the courts which were to decide what to do, and he had presently such an
ascendency “that whatever he delivered in the pulpit was soon put into
an order of court or set up as a practice in the church.” The Newtown
people, who deemed Mr. Hooker no less a master of wise speech and sound
doctrine than Mr. Cotton, and Mr. Haynes, their chief citizen, as worthy
to be governor as Mr. Winthrop himself, or Mr. Dudley, one or the other
of whom the freemen seemed determined always to choose, grew jealous of
a government which seemed to lie so entirely with Boston. They found the
combined government of church and company itself a little burdensome. The
water, too, at their wharves was too shallow, the soil on their fields
too thin, and they were straitened for lack of meadow. Interest, pride,
and opinion were very subtly compounded in their disquietude, and neither
soft words nor harsh could rid them of it.
[Illustration: JOHN COTTON]
They were too loyal and too prudent to wish to disturb the peace and
order of the colony by insisting too strenuously or too hastily upon
having their own way; but they did not dissemble their discontent, and
asked leave of the company’s government to remove to another place of
settlement. There was not a little alarm and opposition when it was
learned that they wished actually to go outside the Massachusetts grant
and establish themselves entirely apart on the distant Connecticut.
But it became evident very soon that their spirits were too strongly
bent upon their new purpose to be restored to ease or contentment where
they were. Moreover, the same desire to get away began to show itself
elsewhere,—in Watertown and Roxbury and Dorchester; and, with great
bodies of new settlers constantly coming in, there seemed no conclusive
reason why they should be held, unwilling, within the colony. Though the
matter had to be fought through long debates and many delays, therefore,
the magistrates at last felt themselves constrained to grant Newtown’s
petition; and the people of Watertown, Roxbury, and Dorchester chose to
consider themselves included in the permission. The three years 1635-1637
saw a notable migration begin. By the spring of 1637 there were fully
eight hundred settlers on the banks of the Connecticut and on the shores
of the Sound below.
[Illustration: MINOT HOUSE, DORCHESTER]
Dutch seamen had discovered the Connecticut so long ago as 1614, when
the Virginia Company was still young, and the Massachusetts colony not
yet thought of. They had explored also the shores of the Sound below,
and both river and Sound had seen their trading boats pass often to and
fro these many years. The Dutch had seen the English multiplying fast
at Plymouth and the Bay of Massachusetts; had realized that they must
be quick to secure what they had discovered and meant to claim; had
formally purchased a tract of land from the Indians at the mid-course
of the Connecticut; and at last, just before the English came, had
built a little fort there to mark their possession, placing it at the
fine turn of the river to which, as it fell out, Mr. Hooker also and
his congregation from Newtown were presently to take a fancy. The Dutch
agent in charge had hardly got further in his first work there than the
throwing up of an earthen redoubt or two and the planting of a couple of
small guns, and had but just named his post “Good Hope” (1633), when the
English began to come. Men from Plymouth came first, to build a trading
post, and then there followed these congregations from the Bay, as
careless of the rights of the Plymouth men as of the rights of the Dutch.
When once their coming had begun they crowded in faster and faster,
closer and closer, despite every protest. Not many years went by before
they were ploughing the very piece of land upon which the little Dutch
fort stood, saying that it was a shame to let good bottom soil lie idle.
[Illustration: SIGNATURE OF WOUTER VAN TWILLER]
Governor Winthrop had sent word to Van Twiller, the Dutch commander at
Fort Amsterdam, that he must not build upon the Connecticut. It lay, he
said, within the territories of the King of England. But Van Twiller
had replied that he held the lands upon the river by as good a title,
in the name of the States General of Holland and the authorized West
India Company. “In this part of the world are divers heathen lands that
are empty of inhabitants,” he had pleaded, “so that of a little part or
portion thereof there need not be any question.” The tide of English
immigrants swept in, nevertheless: a few from Plymouth, a great many from
the Bay. The Dutch blustered and threatened and protested; but they did
nothing more, and were soon outnumbered and surrounded. “These people
give it out,” reported a Dutch sea-captain returned from the river, “that
they are Israelites, and that we at our colony are Egyptians.” They
called their own countrymen in Virginia the same. It was their mission
to set up Puritan commonwealths. Those who were not of their faith and
order of living were but a better kind of heathen whom they hoped either
to oust or to keep at a safe distance.