Massachusetts in the Puritan group, and some of the special
phases of the growth of the little New England commonwealths,
may be traced in detail in Benjamin Trumbull’s _Complete
History of Connecticut, from 1630 to 1764_; Samuel Greene
Arnold’s _History of Rhode Island_; George W. Greene’s _Short
History of Rhode Island_; Edward E. Atwater’s _History of
the Colony of New Haven to its Absorption into Connecticut_;
Charles H. Levermore’s _The Republic of New Haven_ (one of the
_Johns Hopkins Studies_); Hubbard’s _History of Massachusetts_
in the _Collections_ of the Massachusetts Historical Society;
Peter Oliver’s _The Puritan Commonwealth: An Historical View
of the Puritan Government in Massachusetts_; Charles Francis
Adams’s _Three Episodes of Massachusetts History_; various
monographs in the _Johns Hopkins Studies in Historical and
Political Science_; and W. B. Weeden’s _Economic and Social
History of New England_.
The chief _original sources_ are to be found in the
_Colonial Records_ of Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New
Haven; the _Provincial and Town Papers of New Hampshire_;
the _Massachusetts Colony Records_; the _Collections_ of
the Historical Societies of Massachusetts, Connecticut,
New Hampshire, and Maine; Farmer and Moore’s _Historical
Collections of New Hampshire_; the publications of the Gorges
Society; the _Narragansett Club Publications_; Peter Force’s
_Tracts and Other Papers Relating to the Colonies in North
America_; the _Publications_ of the Prince Society; John
Winthrop’s _History of Massachusetts_, edited by J. Savage,
and _The Life and Letters of John Winthrop_, edited by R. C.
Winthrop; and Thomas Hutchinson’s _History of Massachusetts_.
VI. THE CIVIL WARS AND THE COMMONWEALTH
On the 19th of May, 1643, commissioners representing Massachusetts,
Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven, sitting in Boston, made a formal
agreement that their colonies should be joined in a confederation for
mutual support and defence, under the name of The United Colonies of
New England. Mr. Hooker and Mr. Haynes had been urging such a union for
quite six years, ever since the synod of churches had sat, in 1637, to
draw up its list of heresies and unwholesome opinions in reproof of Mrs.
Hutchinson and her supporters in Boston; for the Connecticut towns had
no charter of their own, and these prudent gentlemen knew how much they
might need the aid and countenance of their neighbor colonies should
the time come when their rights were too narrowly questioned,—by the
Dutch, for example. New Haven, with her government but just formed, and
with as little show of charter rights from the crown as the towns of the
Connecticut, was glad to come into the arrangement for very much the
same reason. Plymouth and Massachusetts agreed because there was common
danger from the Indians all about them and from the French in the north,
and because there were awkward boundary disputes to be settled between
the several colonies, for whose discussion and peaceful decision it would
be well to have some common authority like that of a confederation.
Massachusetts, by far the greatest and strongest of the colonies, no
doubt expected to rule in its counsels. The other colonies hoped to
restrain Massachusetts and hold her back from dominating overmuch.
[Illustration: STATUE OF SIR HENRY VANE]
That same year, 1643, Roger Williams went to England to get a charter
for the settlements in the Narragansett country. It was hard to deny Mr.
Williams anything he seriously set himself to get and went in person
to obtain, and young Mr. Vane, who had been governor of Massachusetts
in Mrs. Hutchinson’s day, and who was Mr. Williams’s friend, being now
returned into England, was one of the “Commissioners for Plantations”
whom the Parliament in England had recently appointed to govern
the colonies; so that by March, 1644, “Rhode Island and Providence
Plantations” had their own separate charter rights, and could assert
them upon a footing of equality with Plymouth and Massachusetts. The
settlements on the Narragansett waters had been excluded from the
confederation formed in Boston because they were thought to be too full
of troublesome persons and uneasy politicians to be safe or peaceful
partners; but now that they had their own charter they could endure the
exclusion without too much anxiety as to how their rights should fare.
[Illustration: CHARLES I.]
The articles of confederation which gave the Puritan colonies their new
union spoke of advice and protection expected from the mother country
over sea; but they said nothing of England’s authority over her colonies.
The contracting parties conducted themselves like independent states,
and asked no one’s leave to unite. At another time, perhaps, they would
have hesitated; but now they had an opportunity that might not come
again. England was convulsed with civil war. At last she was reckoning
with Charles, the false king, who for ten years had refused to summon a
Parliament, and who had seemed from year to year to become more and more
openly an enemy of the liberties which Englishmen most cherished, until
the slow fire of indignation against him, which had smouldered hotter
and hotter the dark years through, burst into flame in Scotland, and
men saw a revolution at hand. Even Charles saw then how fierce a tempest
had sprung up against him, and yielded so far as to consent to call a
Parliament. The Parliament, once called together, assumed a novel tone of
mastery. Under the leadership of such men as the steadfast Pym, direct
in speech, indomitable in purpose, no revolutionist, but a man whom it
was wise for a king who ignored the laws to fear, and Hampden, whom all
just men loved because he was so gentle and gracious in his gallant
uprightness, the Commons impeached the men who had aided the King’s
injustice, and proceeded to bring the government back again under the
ancient restraints of freedom.
Charles saw that he must either yield all or else openly resist. He chose
to resist; set up his royal standard at Nottingham (August, 1642); called
upon all loyal subjects to rally about it for the defence of their king;
and so brought civil war and a revolution upon England. Every one knows
what followed: how at first the cause of the Parliament seemed desperate,
because Pym died and Hampden was slain, and there was no leader in the
field who could withstand Prince Rupert; and then how an increasing
number of steadfast partisans of Parliament in Norfolk, Cambridge,
Essex, Suffolk, and Hertford formed an association, levied troops, and
put Oliver Cromwell beside the Duke of Manchester to command them; how
Cromwell’s horsemen drove Prince Rupert’s men in hopeless, utter rout
from Marston Moor on a July day in 1644; and then, in June of the next
year, at Naseby, repeated the terrible work, and finished what they had
begun, to the utter undoing of the King; and how Charles, on a day in
May, 1646, seeing his cause desperate, surrendered himself into the hands
of the Scots, in order to play the game of politics,—the game of war
having failed; knowing that the Scots, who were Presbyterians, would not
easily come to terms with Cromwell, whom it would be very hard to bring
into any Presbyterian arrangement.
[Illustration: VIEW OF NEW AMSTERDAM, 1656]
Three years went by, and the subtile King lay dead upon the scaffold at
Whitehall (January, 1649), showing a gentle majesty and steadfastness at
the last, though he had not known how to keep faith even with himself and
his own friends while he lived. He was not brought to his death by the
Parliament, but by the army, and the army did not represent the nation.
Cromwell had not put his men to any test of opinion; but in the end it
had turned out that the rank and file of the army were, for the time at
any rate, “Independents,” holding opinions concerning worship and the
government of church and state like those which he held, and the strict
Puritans who had gone over sea into New England. They were the more
likely to hold their opinions stiffly and without compromise because
Parliament, leagued with the leading men of Scotland, was Presbyterian,
was jealous of the army’s rising power, and wished to disband and send
them home without so much as voting their pay. Though Cromwell held them
back as long as he could from violent measures, they at last made bold to
win by force in their contest with the Commons, and he found it best to
lead them. All who were not partisans of the army and of the Independents
were driven from the House, and the handful who remained brought the King
to his trial and condemnation, and finally to his death at Whitehall,
close by the window of his banqueting hall. They were acting for a
minority of the nation, but no one dared withstand them.
[Illustration: WATER GATE, FOOT OF WALL STREET, NEW YORK, 1674]
[Illustration: FIRST MEETING-HOUSE, 1634-1638. ROGER WILLIAMS’S CHURCH]
With such matters as these to look upon at home, there was no time
in England to watch events in the far colonies across the sea. The
New Englanders could form their confederation if they pleased without
molestation. But if the war gave them freedom of action, it brought other
things in its train which were not so acceptable. No new settlers came
any more. Men began to return into England instead,—ministers to give
counsel, as well as soldiers and men of affairs to lend their aid in the
field of action. Stephen Winthrop, the governor’s son, George Fenwick,
of Saybrook, Israel Stoughton, captain of the Massachusetts men sent
against the Pequots, and not a few others of general note, entered the
Parliamentary army. Edward Hopkins, who had but just finished his term
as governor of Connecticut, and Edward Winslow, who had been with the
Plymouth people from the first, went back into England to assist in the
administration of the navy maintained against the King. Mr. Hooker was
begged by letters signed by many chief men of the Parliament to come
over and lend his counsel in the task of reforming the Church, but would
not go because he saw the Presbyterians so strong in Parliament, and did
not wish to be in a minority. It looked for a little as if John Winthrop
himself might be drawn into the struggle at home. Mr. Hugh Peter, of
Salem, who had been a leader among those who drove Roger Williams forth
from the Bay into the wilderness, was among the first despatched to
England to give counsel in the Puritan cause; and it was he who “preached
the funeral sermon to the King, after sentence, out of Esaias”: “Thou
art cast out of the grave like an abominable branch, ... as a carcass
trodden under feet.... Because thou hast destroyed thy land and slain thy
people.” It was a Puritan revolution, and the thoughts and hopes of the
Puritans in New England turned eagerly towards the mother country again.
[Illustration: SIGNATURE OF ROGER WILLIAMS]
[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF ROGER WILLIAMS’S “LANGUAGE OF AMERICA”]
[Illustration: THE CANAL, BROAD STREET, NEW YORK, 1659]
It was a very serious thing for the Puritan colonies that their rapid
growth was thus stopped of a sudden. It meant that no farmer there could
any longer get the high prices for his cattle or for his corn, or for any
crop he might raise, which he had learned to count on while immigrants
poured in; that the value of land suddenly declined; that every trade
fell off; that money, always exceedingly scarce from the first, now
stopped coming in altogether, for it could come only from England. Some
of the colonists lost heart, and hastened to return to England, not to
see the wars, but to escape ruin. Some took themselves off to the islands
of the West Indies, where, they heard, it was easy to live. Some joined
the Dutch at Hudson’s River. It required not a little steadiness of mind
and purpose, not a little painful economy and watchful good management,
to get over the shock of such changes and settle down to make the best of
the new conditions. Happily the colonists were not men to be dismayed,
and had made too good a beginning to fear actual failure. Massachusetts,
with her four counties and thirty towns, her fourteen hundred freemen,
her organized militia, her educated clergy, and her established
leadership among the colonies of the north, was ready to stand upon
her own feet, with a little practice; and the other colonies, on the
Connecticut and on the Sound, had proved themselves from the first to be
fit to live by struggle. Massachusetts had even established a college of
her own, and was no longer entirely dependent upon the universities at
home to supply her clergymen and her gentlefolk with an education. The
General Court had begun the setting up of a proper school in 1636, had
changed the name of Newtown, where the school was placed, to Cambridge,
in order that it might seem to the ear a more suitable home for it, and,
two years later, had called the little college Harvard, in honor of the
young clergyman who, dying in their midst (1638), had bequeathed to it
his library of two hundred and sixty books, and a few hundred pounds, the
half of his modest estate. The doughty little commonwealth had already
learned in no small degree how to be sufficient unto herself.
Only Virginia reaped any sort of direct material benefit from the civil
wars. Her people were not Puritans. They were drawn from the general
body of Englishmen who believed in the sanctity of the Church and of
the crown, at the same time that they loved their own liberty and did
not mean to be imposed upon by any man’s power, whether in church or
state. Perhaps they did not know how much they were attached to the
established order of things in England until those days of revolution
came; for until then they had been very easy-going in church discipline,
and very tolerant indeed of differences of opinion, acting untrammelled
and without too much thought of uniformity, as if in the spirit of the
free wilderness about them; for they were men picked out of every rank
and class, followed no one opinion, lived in separated houses, and
looked every one chiefly to his own business. But when they heard of
what was happening over sea in England they knew their own minds very
promptly, for they looked upon disloyalty as a thing not to be separated
from dishonor. Their assembly, when they learned of the King’s death,
flatly declared it an act of treason, the more impudent because brought
about under the forms of law, and resolved that it was the right of
Charles, the dead monarch’s son, to be king in Virginia “and all other
of his Majesty’s dominions and countries.” They were led in their hot
defiance by their governor, Sir William Berkeley, who had come to them
by the King’s appointment the very year Charles set up his standard at
Nottingham (1642). A bluff, outspoken man was Sir William, bringing with
him to the rural colony the gallant, thoroughbred airs of the court, and
standing square to his opinions and traditions. But the frank and genial
humor of his ordinary moods gave place to very hot and stubborn passion
when he saw how things went against the King at home, and it was he who
led the Burgesses in their defiant protests against the revolution.
[Illustration: FARRER’S MAP OF VIRGINIA, 1651]
The King’s partisans in England, when they found things grow too
desperate for them at home, were quick to perceive that Virginia was
their natural and safest place of refuge, and her open countries began
slowly to fill with exiled Cavaliers. The tide-water counties began to
get a new character with this fresh infusion of rich blood, and Virginia
grew while New England stood still.
[Illustration: JOHN HAMPDEN]
But it was not safe for Virginia, for all she was so far away, to defy
the Puritan government at home. For, the fighting in England over, and
the intrigue that centred about the King ended, the Puritan leaders
were masters of the kingdom. Even Sir William Berkeley swallowed his
mortification and submitted when an armed frigate came into the river
(1652) with commissioners on board whose orders were to reduce Virginia
to obedience to the commonwealth, and who had the promise of all
necessary force to sustain them in what they did. The real temper of
the colony was not as fierce as the tones of the Burgesses’ resolutions
had been when they condemned those who had killed the King. There was a
singular mixture among the Virginians of loyal sentiment and stubborn,
matter-of-fact independence in all practical matters. The rank and file
of them, though Church of England men in religion, had in them a dash of
hard-headed sagacity very like the circumspect caution of the Puritans
themselves,—a way of seeing the wrong time to fight and the right time to
make terms. They saw as well as other men the necessity to bow, at any
rate for the present, to a government which had Cromwell at the head of
its forces,—and Sir William Berkeley accepted the course of prudence with
the rest. The commissioners, fortunately, were men who knew the colony,
and they came with instructions which prescribed in a very generous
spirit what they should do. It had been one of the first acts of the Long
Parliament to grant again to “the Adventurers and Planters in Virginia”
the old charter rights which James had annulled, and to permit the old
Virginia patent to be taken out again under the broad seal of England;
and its commissioners were instructed accordingly. They did not oblige
Virginia to receive a governor at the hands of the Parliament; they
simply ousted the King’s men, and put the government into the hands of
the Burgesses, the people’s representatives. Until 1660 Virginia was to
rule herself, practically as she pleased, herself a commonwealth, subject
to the greater commonwealth over sea.
[Illustration: SIGNATURE OF SIR WILLIAM BERKELEY]
She was very well able to take care of herself. Her neighborly counties
held already more than fifteen thousand thrifty English people,—and more,
a great many, were being added now that ships were fast coming in full of
the fugitive friends of the King,—sixteen hundred, once and again, in
a single company. Twenty thousand cattle grazed upon the broad pastures
which sloped green to the margins of the rivers, as well as great flocks
of sheep, and, in the deep woods, swine without number. Ships passed
constantly in and out at the rivers,—from Boston and New Amsterdam, as
well as from London and Bristol, and the home ports of Holland. Though
many in the colony ate from rich plate and were wealthy, the well-to-do
were not much better off than the humble, after all, for no man needed to
be very poor where there was such abundance for all. It was a democratic
place enough, and the poor man’s small beer went down with as keen a
relish as the rich man’s wine. The rough, disorderly ways of the early
days of settlement were past, and were beginning to be forgotten now.
Virginia had acquired some of the sober dignity and quiet of a settled
commonwealth. Her clergy had often, at first, been as rough fellows as
those not of the cloth, who came to Virginia to have leave to live as
they pleased, and had been no help to religion; but now men of a better
sort began to rule in her churches, and to sweeten her life with true
piety. She could fare very well upon her own resources, whether in church
or state. The Parliament’s commissioners had made rules under which any
reasonable man could live. Any who pleased might drink the King’s health
within doors, at their own boards, if they did nothing against authority
out-of-doors. Speech was not to be throttled, men’s sentiments were not
to be too curiously looked into. The exiled royalists who came steadily
in, seeking a refuge, need sacrifice nothing but what they had already
given up. Their very flight was confession of defeat; here in Virginia
defeat might seem less bitter, though the necessity to obey Parliament
and the Lord Protector was not less imperative.
[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF NORTON’S BOOK AGAINST THE QUAKERS]
In Maryland, Virginia’s neighbor, things wore a much harder face because
of the revolution. The Parliament’s commissioners were friends of
Virginia, and had dealt very lightly with her, but they felt no kindness
for Maryland. Before their coming the little province had had its own
taste of war. Late in 1644 William Clayborne, seeing his opportunity,
had seized Kent Island again, from which Lord Baltimore had driven him
at the first setting up of his government; and in February, 1645, one
Richard Ingle, master of the armed ship _Reformation_, bearing letters of
marque from the Parliament, put men and arms ashore and seized St. Mary’s
itself. The _Reformation_ was one of eight ships the Parliament had
commissioned to bring food, clothes, arms, and ammunition to the province
“for the supply and defence and relief” of the planters who were of its
party against the King; and those who bore the commission used their
power with little scruple. Master Ingle, in particular, had the strong
stomach for adventure and for his own gain which comes to roving sailors
in a lawless age, and a spirit of mastery which was his own. Ships out
of Bristol carried the King’s commission to take ships out of London;
ships out of London the authority of the Parliament to take all craft out
of Bristol, and every man acted for his party and himself. “It pleased
God,” Ingle said, “to enable him to take divers places” from the papists
and malignants, “and to make him a support to the well affected”; and
it was close upon two years before Leonard Calvert found himself strong
enough to bring a force out of Virginia and re-establish his brother’s
authority. The government of the province had not been destroyed, the
while, but there had been a sad time of disorder and reprisal; partisans
of the proprietor and of the King had seen their affairs shamefully
handled; and the men who ruled had governed as if upon an exigency in a
day of revolution. And then, six years later (1652), the parliamentary
commissioners came, and William Clayborne was one of them. At first they
thought it best to make the same moderate use of their power in Maryland
that they had made of it in Virginia, and simply confirmed its government
as it stood, content that it should be conducted in the name of the
Commonwealth in England; but they thought themselves warranted in keeping
their authority under their commission from the Parliament, and two years
later asserted it again to effect a revolution, because they saw the
proprietor likely to regain control of his province. They assisted (1654)
to put the government of the colony into the hands of a group of Puritans
who had made a settlement there, and for a time,—until Cromwell himself
intervened to give Lord Baltimore his rights again,—the distracted
province was ruled very rigorously by a masterful minority.
[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF ONE OF JOHN COTTON’S TREATISES]
The Puritans who were thus made masters had most of them come out of
Virginia. For a little while they had maintained their congregations
unmolested, almost unnoticed, in Virginia, in the quiet lower counties
below the river and near the Bay; but Berkeley had driven them out when
he grew hot against the Puritan revolutionists in England, and they had
made a new home for themselves in tolerant Maryland, where not only
custom, but a formal Act of Toleration, drawn by the proprietor’s own
hand, made them safe against molestation. They did not use their own
power gently, however, when the parliamentary commissioners gave them
control of the government of the colony; and called together an assembly
of their partisans to support them. They repealed the Act of Toleration,
and no more suffered any man to differ with them than Laud had permitted
Englishmen at home to differ with him before the revolution, or than the
Puritan Parliament had tolerated dissent from its purposes since. For
three years they had their own way in all things, and the province was no
better off for their handling when the courts in England at last gave it
back into Lord Baltimore’s hands, in 1657.
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF CROMWELL’S LETTER TO JOHN COTTON]