BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

"We covenant with our Lord and with one another"—so runs the Salem covenant, which may be taken as typical—"we avouch the Lord to be our God, and ourselves to be his people, in the truth and simplicity of our spirits. We promise to walk with our brethren, with all watchfulness and tenderness, avoiding jealousy and suspicion, back-bitings, censurings, provokings, secret risings of spirit against them; but in all offenses to follow the rule of our Lord Jesus, and to bear and forbear, give and forgive, as he hath taught us. We do hereby promise to carry ourselves in all lawful obedience to those that are over us, in church and commonwealth. We resolve to approve ourselves to the Lord in our particular callings; shunning idleness as the bane of any state; nor will we deal hardly or oppressingly with any, wherein we are the Lord's stewards."

Town and church were thus the basis of settlement; but whatever measure of self-direction either might enjoy, neither was regarded as independent. All legal authority was vested in the company and exercised by the officers and freemen assembled in general court. Yet of the two thousand settlers who came over in 1630, less than a score were members of the company. Authority so narrowly confined could not long remain unquestioned in a primitive community. In October, 1630, one hundred and nine persons petitioned to be admitted to the freedom of the corporation. It was a critical moment in the history of this "due form of Government." Without numbers, the colony could not thrive; without restriction of authority, it would be in danger of falling away from the ideals of its founders. The circumstance was one of many to reveal the essential difference, in respect to primary motive, between leaders and followers. The mass of the settlers had migrated primarily to secure economic enfranchisement: too great restraint would drive them to the north, where colonists were desired by Mason and Gorges, or to Plymouth, where the tolerant Pilgrims would welcome them perhaps on easier terms. But Winthrop and his associates had migrated primarily to establish a community that should live by God's law; and to admit all freeholders to share in its direction would end in the defeat of that high purpose.

Weight of numbers prevailed at last; and the history of Massachusetts Bay in the seventeenth century is the story of the vain and pathetic effort of single-minded men to identify the temporal and the spiritual commonwealths. The compromise presently made was the first step in the final surrender. The one hundred and nine petitioners were admitted; but it was shortly voted, in plain violation of the charter, that the rights of the freemen should be confined to the election of the assistants; and, "to the end that the body of the commons may be preserved of honest and good men, it was likewise ordered that for time to come no man shall be admitted to the freedom of this body polliticke but such as are members of some of the churches within the lymitts of the same." In order to preserve the purity of the state still more effectively, it was voted, in 1636, that even church members should be excluded unless the churches to which they belonged had secured the approbation both of the magistrates and of a majority of the churches already established.

The suffrage remained thus restricted until 1684, although a nominal modification was made in 1664. But the freemen were not long content to see their privileges confined to the election of assistants and magistrates. The first protest was characteristically English. In 1632 the minister of Watertown Church, George Phillips, more independent in his manner of thinking than the majority of the clergy, induced his congregation to pass the first resolution in America against taxation without representation: "It was not safe," they contended, "to pay money after that sort for fear of bringing their posterity into bondage." A magisterial reprimand from Governor Winthrop reduced the protestants to the level of an apology; but in 1634 the freemen demanded to see the charter, and when it became generally known that supreme authority was vested in the freemen assembled in general court, rather than in the board of assistants, the latter was forced to concede to the former a share in the business of lawmaking. Since it was inconvenient for all the freemen to attend the sessions of the general court in person, they adopted the custom of sending two deputies from each town to represent them. The assistants, thus overbalanced by the deputies, demanded the privilege of the negative voice, a contention which the deputies were inclined to deny, but which resulted, in 1644, in the separation of the general court into two houses, the board of assistants constituting the upper chamber and the deputies the lower. During the same period the discretionary powers of the magistrates in administering the laws gave the deputies much concern; and their constant protests were not without effect, although the victory was mainly to the magistrates. The results of the first decade of conflict between leaders and followers over the distribution of political power are registered in the famous Body of Liberties which was promulgated in 1641.

In spite of concessions to the freemen, political privilege remained narrowly limited. Between 1631 and 1674 the total number of freemen admitted was 2527, about one fifth of the adult male residents. The suffrage was thus far more exclusive than a freehold test would have made it. In town meeting, voting was not always restricted to freemen; but in deciding important matters non-freemen were usually excluded. And yet the formal restriction of political privilege, narrow as it was, gives no true measure of the real concentration of political power. Deference to the magistrate, no less than the habit of protest against illegal action, was an English tradition. The circumstances of the migration had tremendously accentuated the force of the religious appeal, and the freemen, being church members, were of all the settlers precisely that part most disposed to defer to the wishes of the clergy, and to select for magistrates those whom they approved.

"They daily direct their choice to make use of such men as mainly endeavor to keepe the truths of Christ unspotted, neither will any christian of sound judgment vote for any but such as earnestly contend for the faith, although the increase of trade and traffique may be a great inducement to some."

The freemen sometimes demonstrated their power, but the same men were customarily returned to office year after year. The magistrates and the clergy, a handful of men with practically permanent tenure, men of strong character and of great ability for the most part, virtually governed Massachusetts Bay for two generations.

They governed the colony, these "unmitred popes of a pope-hating commonwealth," yet not without storm and stress; and of all their difficulties, the quarrel with the freemen over the distribution of political power was far from being the most perplexing. In 1681, Roger Williams, a young minister of engaging personality, with "many precious parts, but very unsettled in judgemente," came to Boston. He scrupled to "officiate to an unseparated people," and soon went down to Plymouth, where he "begane to fall into strange oppinions, and from opinion to practise; which caused some controversie, by occasion whereof he left them something abruptly." Returning to Massachusetts, he became minister of Salem Church, which was itself thought to be tinged with radicalism. But the radicalism of Williams went beyond all reason. He maintained that the land of New England belonged to the Indians, and that the settlers were therefore living "under a sin of usurpation of others possessions." And he denied that the state had any rightful authority in matters of conscience, holding with Robert Browne that "concerning the outward provision and outward justice [the magistrates] are to look to it; but to compell religion, to plant churches by power, and to force a submission to Ecclesiasticall Government by lawes and penalties, belongeth not to them." By farmer and magistrate alike the man was regarded as a nuisance, and after three troubled years was banished from the colony.

The ideas of Williams were too relevant not to arouse controversy, but too remote from the spirit of the age to win many adherents. Of another sort was Mistress Anne Hutchinson, a woman of "nimble wit and active spirit," one of those popular village characters who go about among the poor and sick, bringing wholesome draughts of cordial, gossip, and consolation. As a taster of dry sermons there was none better; so that many women of Boston, and not a few men, fell into the habit of assembling at her house, where she discoursed on the latest sermon or Thursday lecture, and by exegesis and comment and criticism made all clear. And her doctrine went straight to the heart and intelligence of the average man in the seventeenth century, as it does to-day and has in all ages. "Come along with me says one of them. I'le bring you to a woman that preaches better Gospell than any of your black-coats that have been at the University, a woman of another kind of spirit, who hath had many revelations of things to come; and for my part, saith he, I had rather hear such a one that speaks from the mere motion of the spirit, without any study at all, than any of your learned Scollers, although they may be fuller of Scripture." This, indeed, was the secret of Mistress Anne's power, that she spoke the language of the untutored, and infused into the scholastic categories of theology the elemental and familiar emotions of daily life.

The issue raised by Anne Hutchinson soon passed into politics, and the little colony was divided into irreconcilable factions. The good woman had a great following in Boston, including not a few in high places. Wheelwright was her avowed defender; John Cotton was half convinced. The credit of the party was raised by the accession of the brilliant Sir Harry Vane, lately come from England, and destined to return hither to vex a greater than Winthrop. Vane was as radical in politics as Mistress Anne was in religion; and the two made common cause against the magistrates and clergy. Had the issue been confined to Boston the result could not have been doubtful, for the Boston Church was predominantly Hutchinsonian; but the ministers as a body supported Winthrop and Wilson, and the old magistrates were returned in the election of 1637. The victory was a crucial one. The erratic Vane went off to England; Cotton returned to his first allegiance; and when the cause of all the trouble was cited to appear before the court in the fall of the same year, the decree of banishment was a foregone conclusion. Like Luther before the diet, Anne Hutchinson pressed for reasons—"I desire to know wherefore I am banished." It was in the spirit of the Roman Church that Governor Winthrop replied—"say no more; the Court knows wherefore, and is satisfied."

The direct result of the expulsion of Williams and Anne Hutchinson was the founding of Rhode Island, famous as an early experiment in the separation of Church and State. Williams, with his few followers, denied admittance to Plymouth, went on to the south and founded the town of Providence. Into this region there shortly came the much larger group, including William Coddington, who followed Anne Hutchinson into exile. The settlements of Portsmouth and New Port, which they established there, were united with Providence, under a patent procured by Williams in 1643, to form the colony of Rhode Island, where flourished, to the scandal of its neighbors, that "soul liberty" of which Williams was the apostle. Yet not without difficulty. Peopled by those who were too eccentric not to prove troublesome, the history of the little colony was a stormy one—its peace "like the peace of a man who has the tertian ague"; but its fame is secure, and, its founder, condemned by the common sense of his age, will ever be celebrated as the prophet of those primary American doctrines, democracy and religious toleration.

Rhode Island was founded by those who were not allowed to remain in Massachusetts; Connecticut by those who, finding its conditions too restricted, did not wish to remain there. Few facts have been more potent in determining the history of America than the steady migration in search of better opportunities. A decade had not passed before the westward movement began. As early as 1633 many people at the Bay, fired by favorable reports which John Oldham brought back from the Connecticut Valley, began to have "a hankering after it." In 1634 the people of Newtown, under the leadership of Thomas Hooker, asked permission of the general court to remove there, advancing, in support of their petition, "their want of accommodation for their cattle, the fruitfulness and commodiousness of Connecticut, and the strong bent of their spirits to remove thither." The petition was at first denied, but in 1636, permission having at last been obtained, a considerable number from the towns of Newtown, Dorchester, Watertown, and Roxbury migrated to the west and south and settled the towns—Hartford, Wethersfield, and Windsor—which became the nucleus of the colony of Connecticut.

While the fertility of the Connecticut Valley was doubtless attractive, some of the motives which actuated Hooker and his followers lie concealed in the naïve phrase, "the strong bent of their spirits." Thomas Hooker, and to a less extent John Haynes and Roger Ludlow, were men of outstanding ability. But as their towns were second to Boston, they themselves were overtopped in influence by Winthrop and Cotton, Dudley and Wilson. In the compact community of Massachusetts Bay, ideas as well as cattle found accommodation difficult. In religion and politics Hooker was more radical than Winthrop: he was not wholly out of sympathy with Anne Hutchinson; and he defended the proposition that "the foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people," whereas Winthrop maintained that the best part of the people "is always the least, and of that best part the wiser part is always the lesser." And so, when the petitioners were permitted to leave, the strong bent of their spirits directed them, not only to the Connecticut, but southward without the limits of the Massachusetts jurisdiction.

While Hooker and his associates, with room for their cattle and their ideas, clear of Boston's shadow and the din of disputes over the negative voice and the covenant of works, were establishing a more liberal Bible Commonwealth on the Connecticut, Theophilus Eaton, a merchant of "fair estate and great esteem for religion," and John Davenport, a dispossessed London minister, were establishing at New Haven a Bible Commonwealth stricter even than that of Massachusetts. They had arrived, with their congregation of well-to-do middle-class Londoners, at Boston in 1637, where they remained during the winter. Winthrop would have retained them permanently; but Davenport found the colony distracted by the Hutchinson episode, and was as much distressed by the concessions which had been made to the "mere democracy" as Hooker had been by the restraints in favor of a "mixed aristocracy." They therefore moved on, accompanied and followed by some inhabitants of Massachusetts, to establish at New Haven a community in which the Scriptures should be the "only rule attended to in ordering the affairs of government." But these "Brahmins of New England Puritanism" did not find the peace which they pursued. The distractions which they left Boston to avoid attended them in the wilderness; and in the end the colony was united with the settlements to the north, where the liberal ideas of Hooker had proved compatible, not only with strict morality and frugal prosperity, but with religious and spiritual concord as well. The charter of 1662 which founded the larger Connecticut embodied the ideas of Hooker rather than those of Davenport, and was so wisely contrived that it stood the shock of the Revolution and survived to the nineteenth century as the fundamental law of Connecticut.

Internal difficulties growing out of conflicting ideals of Church and State had scarcely achieved the dispersion of the New England settlements before external dangers began to draw them together. As early as 1637, and again in 1639, the Connecticut settlements, threatened by the Dutch and the Indians, applied to Massachusetts Bay for support against the common danger. The Dutch and the Indians were less dangerous to Massachusetts than to Connecticut, but the possibility of royal interference touched her more nearly. In 1634 Laud had obtained the appointment of a commission to inquire into her affairs, and in 1642 the "ill news we have had out of England concerning the breach between King and Parliament" gave further apprehension with respect to the colony's chartered liberties. Accordingly, the third proposal of Connecticut in 1642 met with a favorable response, and in the following year the New England Confederation was founded. Rhode Island was without the pale, but Massachusetts, Connecticut, Plymouth, and New Haven entered into a "firm and perpetual league of friendship and amity for offense and defense, mutual advice and succor, both for preserving and propagating the truth and liberties of the Gospel, and for their own mutual safety and welfare." The affairs of the league were to be administered by a board of two commissioners from each colony. Massachusetts, with a greater population than the other three combined, agreed to bear her proper burden in men and money, and presumed at times to exercise a corresponding influence. The smaller colonies were naturally more willing to accept her money than disposed to submit to her dictation; but in spite of disputes, the Confederation was maintained for forty years, an effective influence in its day, and the first of many compromises which led in the end to that more perfect union which still endures.

Neither revolution in England nor the stress of conflicting ideals in the colony turned the first generation of Massachusetts Bay leaders from the straight course which they had laid. Magistrates and clergy went steadily forward, emerging from Nonconformity into practical Separatism, as resistant to Parliamentary as to royal control, as cool toward Cromwell as toward Charles. During the quarter-century of their domination, Massachusetts maintained a virtual independence of the mother country and the effective leadership of Now England. Towards the middle of the century the theocratic principle might have seemed more firmly established than ever before. The relative tranquillity which followed the banishment of Anne Hutchinson appeared to be a clear justification of the action of the general court on that occasion. It was therefore without hesitation that the authorities acted when Anne Austin and Mary Fisher, two Quaker missionaries from Barbados, arrived at Boston in 1656. The women were reshipped to Barbados; and a law was straightway enacted which decreed the flogging and imprisonment of any of the "cursed sect of haeritics commonly called Quakers" who might come within the colony's jurisdiction.

In the seventeenth century, it was agreed that, next to the Münster Anabaptists, the Quakers were of all dissenting sects the most pestilent and blasphemous. They used no force in propagating their beliefs or in defending their lives. They were believers in equality, and refused to doff their hats to any man, respecting neither magistrate nor priest. They were believers in liberty; no man to be restrained in matters of opinion; but every man to go or come, to speak or remain silent, as God's commands, by direct inner revelation, might be laid upon him. And it appeared that God had laid his command upon many to go among the unregenerate bearing testimony, and with sharp-tongued reproach and reviling to prick as with thorns the seared conscience of a perverse and stiff-necked generation. Persecution they welcomed as the martyr's portion, the sure evidence of well-doing. "Where they are most of all suffered to declare themselves, there they least of all desire to come." And so, impelled by the force of the divine spirit, they came among the reserved and seemly Puritans of Boston, with scandalous impropriety of action bringing the staid Sunday sermon or Thursday lecture to irremediable confusion, with voluble harangue and wealth of stinging epithet pouring scorn upon the self-selected leaders of the chosen people.

The harassed magistrates wished only to be rid of them. But unlike Williams and Anne Hutchinson, the Quakers came back as often as they were banished; and as often as they returned, their conduct became more outrageous, and, the penalties inflicted more severe. Yet oppression bore its proper fruit. Persecution engendered sympathy; sympathy ripened into conviction; and the more heretics were confined in the prisons, the more heresy flourished in the streets. The popularity of Anne Hutchinson's teachings had demonstrated how eagerly the average man turned from the literalism of the Puritan clergy in response to the appeal of one who spoke "from the mere motion of the spirit." Quakerism was above all a spiritual gospel addressed to the emotions. Its humane and liberal teachings, obscured but not concealed by the extravagance of speech and conduct in its first apostles, stood out in striking contrast to the repressive policy of the Puritan government as well as to the cold, gray intellectualism of the Puritan religion. The Quakers were a political danger as well as a public nuisance; for whether few or many were likely to profess the Quaker faith, among covenanted and uncovenanted alike their teachings fell on the fruitful soil of discontent. The magistrates were well aware at last that a crisis was impending; and they went steadily forward, with circumspection and not without apprehension, indeed, but without flinching, to meet the final test. In 1659 and 1660, according to law established and known, five Quakers were condemned to death, and four were hanged on Boston Common.

The event was a significant one in early Massachusetts history, for it revealed, in respect to theory and practice alike, the insecure foundation upon which the Church-State rested. In respect to theory, the Quakers were a perplexing problem precisely because they remorselessly pressed the basic principles of Protestantism to their logical conclusion. The doctrine of the inner light, like Anne Hutchinson's notion of personal illumination, was implicit in the premises of Luther, who had grounded the great protest on the conception of a covenant of grace, and had laid it down, as the primary thesis, that "good works do not make the good man, but the good man does good works." Luther's revolt had, indeed, raised a vital social question: Are belief and conduct in matters religious to be determined by the social will registered in decrees of Church or State, or by the individual will following the promptings of reason and conscience? For most dissenters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was a logical difficulty in assenting to the first proposition and a practical objection to assenting to the second: it was logically difficult to deny the authority of Rome, which the practice and traditions of centuries had recognized as voicing the will of Christendom, without denying the validity of any external authority whatever; but it was practically impossible to appeal unreservedly to the authority of the individual reason and conscience without running into free thought and allowing religion to dissolve in an infinite variety of opinion. Generally speaking, most Protestant sects appealed from the outer to the inner authority in order to establish their beliefs, and then from the inner to the outer authority in order to maintain them. Luther himself, having denied the right of the Church to compel his conscience, straightway maintained that it was not forHerr Omnesto determine matters of religion, and fell back on the State as the defender of his faith against the dangers of dissent. But it is indeed true that "the business of dissenters is to dissent"; and the Massachusetts magistrates found that the very arguments they had used to deny the authority of Laud were now employed to deny their own. This was the logical opening in the Puritan armor, that the Protestant Church-State or State-Church was but a masked and attenuated Catholicism destined to be destroyed by the very principles upon which it had been originally established.

If in respect to theory the hanging of the Quakers was a confession, in the realm of practical politics it was but a Pyrrhic victory. The authority of magistrate and clergy, strained to the breaking point, never quite recovered its old security. The capital law was itself passed by a bare majority, and the successive executions carried popular opposition to the verge of insurrection. Nor did the executions achieve the desired end. The last sentence was never carried into effect, and for years the Quakers continued to molest the colony, pushing their extravagances sometimes to the farthest limit. To fall to mere flogging after having inflicted the death penalty was a fatal anti-climax which marks a turning-point in Massachusetts history—the beginning of the end of Winthrop's Bible Commonwealth.

The end was doubtless hastened by the Stuart Restoration and the recall of the charter; but the theocratic ideal, carrying the germ of its own decay, was predestined to failure. For the founders of the Bible Commonwealth it was an axiom that Church and State were but two sides of the same shield; a matter of course that the "body of the commons" must be "preserved of honest and good men"; a reasonable hope that all good men would be found within the churches. And the circumstances of the migration seemed, indeed, a miraculous preparation for this easy solution of human government; for persecution was taken to be but "a strange contrivance of God" to gather "a chosen company of men"—the sifted wheat for planting an ideal commonwealth. Yet of the first settlers more than half refused to take the covenant, thus renouncing the privileges of the ideal commonwealth without obtaining relief from its burdens. A most disconcerting circumstance this at the beginning, and of ill omen for the future! Doubtless some strange perversity of the natural man, some inscrutable judgment of God for the discipline of his people, must have kept so many outside the fold.

But in truth not all who came to Plymouth or Massachusetts were of the sifted wheat. Under the stress of persecution and the stimulus of migration, the mass of the first settlers doubtless caught something of the spiritual exaltation which inspired the leaders. But it was not for the many to live on that high level of purposeful resolution and enduring courage. It is a significant fact that of those who came over with Winthrop and Dudley two hundred returned in the ships that brought them out; and of those who remained who shall say how many met the stern realities of the New World with a sinking sense of disillusionment, finding the material conditions of life harder and the spiritual peace less satisfying than they had imagined? And many there were who had never been touched by the Puritan ideal. "Men being to come over into a wilderness," says the kindly Bradford, "in which much labour and servise was to be done about building and planting, such as wanted help in that respecte, when they could not have such as they would, were glad to take such as they could, and so, many untoward servants, sundry of them proved, were thus brought over, both men and women kind; who, when their terms were expired, became families of themselves, which gave increase hereunto. Another and maine reason hereof was, that men, finding so many godly disposed persons willing to come into these parts, some began to make a trade of it, to transport passengers and their goods, and hired ships for that end; and then, to make up their freight and advance their profite, cared not who the persons were, so they had money to pay them. And also ther were sente by their freinds some under hope that they would be made better; others that they might be eased of such burthens, and they kept from shame at home that would necessarily follow their dissolute courses. And by this means the country became pestered with many unworthy persons, who, being come over, crept into one place or other."

Such unworthy persons doubtless swelled the mass of uncovenanted. Yet the historian is apt to think that for many, honest and good men enough, the cold inner temple of the ideal commonwealth must have proved more forbidding than its wind-swept outer courts. To enter its portals was an ordeal which the average man will not readily undergo, involving, as an initial procedure, a confession of faults and a profession of faith, a public revelation of inner spiritual condition, an exposure of soul to the searching and curious inspection of the sanctified. And the covenant itself was found to be no warmed and cloistered retreat, secure from the rude impact and impertinent gaze of the world. Quite the contrary! To enter the covenant was to renounce all private spiritual possessions, to give one's intimate convictions into the keeping of others, to subscribe to a very communism of the emotional life. This un-Roman Church was after all but a public confessional, in which every brother was a confessor, and life itself a penance for constructive sin. The soul that is constantly exposed grows callous or diseased; and the New England covenant provided a regimen well suited to repel the normal mind or induce in its patients a fatal spiritual anæmia.

And with every decade the house of the covenant became at once more difficult to enter and less comfortable to abide in. The Puritan was not necessarily a sad or solemn person. Yet the light heart and the merry mind were not the salient characteristics even of the cheerful Winthrop or the genial Cotton; while the conditions of life in the wilderness—the unrelieved round of exacting labor, the ever present danger from the lurking Indians, the long cold winters with their certain harvest of death from diseases which could be ascribed only to the will of God and met with resignation instead of skill, the succession of funerals as depressing as they were public and pervading—were well calculated to deepen the somber cast of the Puritan temper and accentuate the critical and introspective tendency of his mind. Inspection of one's own and one's neighbor's conduct was, indeed, always a Puritan duty; shut within the restricted horizon of a New England village, it became a necessity and almost a pleasure. When few stirring events diverted thought from the petty and the personal, when pent-up emotion found little outlet in the graces or amusements of social intercourse, observation and introspection fastened upon the minutiæ of life and every eccentricity of speech and conduct was weighed and assessed. Close espionage on conduct was matched by the careful scrutiny accorded every novel opinion. When the weekly sermon was the universal topic of conversation, the refinements of belief were more discussed than essentials; often discussed, they were often questioned—by strict Separatists like Roger Williams; by cavilers at infant baptism like that "anciently religious woman," the Lady Deborah Moodie; by fervid emotionalists, such as Anne Hutchinson or the Quaker missionaries: and every discussion of the creed left it more precisely defined, more narrow, and more official. Under the stress of conflicting opinion and the attrition of acrid debate, the covenant of grace steadily hardened into a covenant of barren works, in which an air of sanctimony became an easy substitute for the sense of sanctification, and the tithe of mint and cummin was allowed to overbalance the weightier matters of the law.

While the covenant became more inelastic, and its rule of life more strictly defined, the call of the world became more insidious and alluring. As the colony became established beyond the fear of failure, and life fell from an artificial and self-conscious venture to be but a natural experience, as wealth increased and opportunities for relaxation and idle amusement multiplied, the elemental instincts of human nature, stronger than decrees of state, would not be denied. During the third decade after the founding, the Christmas festival found its way into the colony, and "dancing in ordinarys upon the marriage of some person" gave occasion for scandal. Extravagance in "apparill both of men and women" became the subject of repeated legislation: "we cannot but to our grief take notice," so runs the law of 1651, "that intolerable excesse and bravery have crept in uppon us, and especially amongst people of mean condition, to the dishonor of God, the scandall of our profession, the coruption of estates, and altogether unsuitable to our povertie." Non-attendance at church did not become a problem for the magistrates until 1646, but the fine then imposed proved ineffective; and year by year the desecration of the Sabbath became more marked and more difficult of correction. Many and sundry abuses were committed "by several persons on the Lord's day, not only by children playing in the streets and other places, but by youthes, maydes, and other persons, both strangers and others, uncivilly walkinge in the streets and fields, travelling from towne to towne, going on shipboard, frequentinge common howses and other places to drinke, sport, and otherwise to misspend that precious time."

"Maydes and youthes!" The words are significant, for by 1653 the first generation of native-born New Englanders had indeed come upon the scene to vex the Puritan fathers. How different from that of the first settlers must have been the outlook of those who had never been in England. They had never been oppressed by bishop or king; had never felt the insidious temptation of a cathedral church, or witnessed the mockery of the mass, or been repelled by a surpliced priesthood desecrating God's house with incense and music; had never seen a maypole with its accompaniment of licentious revelry, or witnessed the debauching effects of a holiday festival. They had solemnly sat in unwarmed churches; they had been present at elections; had seen men standing in the pillory or women whipped through the streets; they had diverted themselves at weddings or the husking-bee, or by walking in the woods, or by drinking in a tavern. But no frivolous and superstitious world of Anti-Christ compassed them about to point the moral of the harsh Puritan tale. Their Puritanism was induced by precept and example rather than by the compelling impact of a corrupt society.

Yet no conventionalized Puritanism, no mere living on the dead level of habitual virtues could satisfy the leaders of the great migration. The founding of Massachusetts was preëminently a self-conscious movement, the work of able and resolute men who brought an unquenchable moral enthusiasm to the support of a clearly defined purpose. They had counted the cost and made their choice; and every instinct of proud and self-contained men disposed them to minimize the difficulties which they encountered in the New World and to exaggerate those which they had overcome in the Old. Having staked their judgment on the wisdom of the venture, they were bound to be justified in the event. To admit that life on the physical and moral frontier was less than they had imagined would be a humiliating confession of failure; and worse than a confession of failure; for God had appointed this refuge for them, and not to abide in it in all contentment would be to cavil at his purpose, to question his decree. With the instinct of true pioneers they therefore idealized the barren wilderness, pronouncing its air most healing, its soil most fertile; and with unfailing optimism proving, by the very sufferings they endured, how practicable, how spacious and attractive was the habitation which they had set themselves to fashion.

Thus it was that the very influences which relaxed the hold of the Puritan ideal upon the mass of the people served only to strengthen its hold upon their leaders. With resolution stiffened by every obstacle, magistrates and clergy pressed on to the appointed task, never doubting that they were called upon to justify the ways of God to man. Drawing their inspiration from Geneva and the ancient Hebrew code, they assumed, with a courage as sublime as it proved futile, to foster moral and spiritual excellence by decrees of state. Indifference or opposition only called them to a stricter rule; for every physical disaster, every denial of the creed or departure from the straight line of life, was thought to be God's judgment upon them for some want of faith or failure in the law. And in later years the chastisements of the Lord were many:—the desolating King Philip's War; persistent interference with their chartered Liberties; dissensions in the Boston Church and quarrels of magistrates and clergy; the rise of "an anti-ministerial spirit" and the growth of worldliness and lax living among the people. "What are the reasons that have provoked the Lord to bring his judgments upon New England?" Such was the primary question which the Synod of 1679 was called upon to answer. "Declension from the primitive foundation work, innovation in doctrine and worship"—this, according to a committee of the deputies, was the true cause. "A spirit of division, persecuting and oppressing of God's ministers and precious saints," said Mr. Flint of Dorchester, "is the sin that is unseen." And not a few maintained that all their troubles were but well-merited punishments for having dealt too leniently with the Quakers.

And yet, in the year 1679, such explanations as these were falling to the level of the conventional for many of the magistrates and even for some of the clergy. After forty years few of the original leaders were still alive. Winthrop died in 1649, Cotton in 1652, Thomas Dudley in 1653, John Wilson in 1667, Richard Mather in 1669. The days of persecution and exile influenced the thinking of the second generation, indeed, not so much as an experience, but rather as a tradition or a tale that is told. Liberal influences, which were to oust the Mathers from control of Harvard College, were already gaining ground in Cambridge, while Boston had become the center of powerful material interests which were to prove incompatible with the rigid ideals of the founders. "The merchants seem to be rich men," writes Mr. Harris in 1675, "and their houses as handsomely furnished as most in London." In 1680 more than one hundred ships traded at the Bay, carrying fish, provisions, and lumber to southern Europe, to the Madeiras, and to the English sugar colonies in the West Indies. Many men who rose to prominence in the third quarter of the century were more concerned for the temporal than for the spiritual commonwealth; and when material interests thus came into competition with the interests of religion, not a few were prepared to compromise with the world, and so a secular and moderate spirit crept in to corrupt the counsels of government.

The rise of the moderate party and the divergence between clergy and magistrate is therefore a notable feature of the last years of Massachusetts history under the charter. In 1679, after the death of Leverett, Bradstreet was elected governor. He was the leader of the party of conciliation, one of many who, renouncing the rigid and uncompromising policy of the clergy, were ready to coöperate with Randolph in the hope of securing the essential interests of the colony by a timely submission to the English Government. And it is significant of the growing influence of the property interests that the moderates were stronger in the upper than in the lower chamber. In 1682 the governor and a majority of the assistants, "upon a serious consideration of his Majesty's intimation that his purpose is only to regulate our charter, in such a manner as shall be for his service and the good of this his colony," announced themselves willing to surrender the bulwark of the Puritan liberties. But the House of Deputies voted to "adhere to their former bills," preferring with the clergy rather to "die by the hand of others, than by their own."

The event reveals the opposition of the material and the ideal interests which was a prime cause in the defeat of the great Puritan experiment. The assistants were "men of the best estates," says Randolph, while the deputies were "mostly an inferior sort of planters." Randolph was a prejudiced observer; but it is undoubtedly true that the upper chamber spoke for the shipbuilders and traders of Boston. Forty years earlier, when Laud was preparing to annul the charter, both magistrates and clergy made ready for forcible resistance. It was no longer possible. Massachusetts had ceased to be a wilderness community cut off from contact with the outside world. Her rapidly growing trade depended upon English markets. The base of the fisheries was shifting northward, and a French company at Nova Scotia was already seizing New England ships. Without English protection trade would be ruined and the colony itself fall a prey to France. Forcible resistance was therefore not to be thought of. The material interests of Massachusetts bound her to the home Government, and practical men were apt to think that even the spiritual City of God would suffer less under Anglican than under Catholic control.

The recall of the charter but opened free passage to the latent forces that were already beginning to transform the life and thought of New England. The theocratic ideal had so far lost its hold that the event to which the clergy and a remnant of the magistrates looked forward as to a cosmic catastrophe was accepted with resignation or indifference by the mass of the people. Neither disaster nor serious disturbance accompanied the inauguration of the new régime. The extension of the suffrage to the freeholders removed more discontent than it created. A government controlled by property interests approved itself as well as one directed by religious ideas. The colony was no more distracted by the introduction of the Anglican service than by the erection of the second Boston Church; and even the passing of Harvard College, that citadel and fortress of the old theocracy, into the hands of Boston and Cambridge liberals, was far less a tragedy to Massachusetts than it was to the Mathers.

The life of Cotton Mather was, indeed, a kind of tragedy, for he was the most distinguished of those who grew to manhood under the old order only to witness its fall and live in degenerate days. Not less able than his father, but how much less influential! In early years his voice was a commanding one, but he was destined to see his popularity wane and to live most of his long life in comparative isolation and neglect in the very community where Increase Mather had been a high priest indeed. In such men as Cotton Mather the old spirit lived on, sharply accentuated by defeat; and transformed, in such men as Jonathan Edwards, by dint of morbid introspection and brooding on the sins of a perverse generation, into a kind of disease, or spiritual neurasthenia. Such men could but look back with poignant regret to the golden age that was past. Of that golden age, Cotton Mather himself, "smitten with a just fear of encroaching and ill-bodied degeneracies," sat down to write the history, recording in theMagnalia"the great things done for us by our God," in the hope that he might thereby do something "to prevent the loss of the primitive principles and the primitive practices."

But he had imagined a vain thing. For even as the century drew to its close, the old Bay colony was already drifting from its back-water moorings, out into the main current of the world's thought. None could know to what uncharted seas of political and religious radicalism they were bearing on. None could foresee the time when Calvin's Institutes would give way to the Suffolk Resolutions, when Adams would speak in place of Endicott, or the later day when Emerson would preach a new antinomianism more desolating than any known to Winthrop or Bradford.

This period is fully treated in Channing'sHistory of the United States, I, chaps, VIII-XIV; and in Tyler'sEngland in America, chaps. V-VII, IX-XIX. See also Fiske'sOld Virginia and Her Neighbours, I, chaps. VII-XI, XIV; and Eggleston'sBeginners of a NationandThe Transit of Civilization from England to America. The constitutional aspects of the colonial settlements are exhaustively treated in Osgood'sThe American Colonies in the 17th Century. For the economic and social history of the colonies, see Bruce'sSocial Life in VirginiaandThe Economic History of Virginia in the 17th Century, and Weeden'sEconomic History of New England. Contemporary pamphlets relating to the colonies are to be found in Force'sTracts and Other Papers, 4 vols. Washington, 1838. To understand the motives and ideals of the Separatists and Puritans one must read their own accounts. Of these, the most charming is Bradford'sHistory of Plymouth Plantation. This, as well as Governor Winthrop'sJournal, is printed in Jameson'sOriginal Narratives of Early American History. Johnson'sWonder Working Providence, in the same collection, is a history from the point of view of a loyal Puritan of average education and intelligence. Morton'sNew English Canaan(1632) andThe Simple Cobler of Aggawam(1647) are printed in Force'sTracts and Other Papers, vols. II, III. A hostile account of the Puritan experiment is in Samuel Gorton'sLetter to Nathaniel Morton, in Force'sTracts, etc., vol. IV. About three quarters of a century after the founding of Massachusetts, Cotton Mather wrote hisMagnalia Christi Americana, or the Ecclesiastical History of New England, 2 vols. Hartford, 1855. In Bk. I he gives an account of the founding from the point of view of one who felt that New England was then departing from the "primitive principles."

ENGLAND AND HER COLONIES IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

Your trade is the mother and nurse of your seamen; your seamen are the life of your fleet; your fleet is the security of your trade, and both together are the wealth, strength, and glory of Britain.Lord Haversham.

Your trade is the mother and nurse of your seamen; your seamen are the life of your fleet; your fleet is the security of your trade, and both together are the wealth, strength, and glory of Britain.

Lord Haversham.

The decay of the old Puritanism in Massachusetts, so distressing to Cotton Mather, was but a faint reflection of the change which had come over England since the return of Charles II to Whitehall. With the fall of the Puritan régime moral earnestness and high emotional tension, regarded as contrary to nature and reason, gave way to a rationalizing habit of mind, to seriousness tempered with well-bred common sense or spiced with a pinch of cynical indifference. Religion fell to be a conventional conformity. Theologians, wanting vital faith in God, were content to balance the probabilities of his existence. Amusement became the avocation of a leisure class, and the average man was intent like Samuel Pepys to put money in his purse, in order to indulge himself "a little the more in pleasure, knowing that this is the proper age to do it." From Milton and the Earl of Clarendon to William Pitt, England was no country of lost causes and impossible enthusiasms. It was a pragmatic age, in which the scientific discoveries of Newton are the highest intellectual achievement, and the conclusion of Pope that "everything that is is best" gives the quality of poetic insight.

In this age the direction of English affairs fell to men well suited to the national temper. The first Charles suffered martyrdom for his faith; the second, determined never again to go on his travels, set the standard of public morality by selling himself to France, and with a smile professing the belief that honor in man and virtue in woman were but devices to raise the price of capitulation. And so he often found it; for he was himself served by men who, having renounced their Puritan principles for place and power, were prepared to forswear the Stuarts in order to follow the rising star of William of Orange. William was an able statesman, indeed, but his interest was in the grand alliance; he "borrowed England on his way to Versailles," and governed it in the interest of the Dutch Coalition. Queen Anne and the first Georges reigned but did not govern; and in the early eighteenth century power fell to men of supple intelligence and complacent conviction—to Marlborough and little Sidney Godolphin, to Harley and St. John and Sunderland, and at last to Robert Walpole, the very personification of the shrewd curiosity, the easy-going morals, the material ambitions of his generation.

Little wonder if in such an age colonies were regarded as providentially designed to promote the trade's increase. The recall of the Massachusetts charter was but one of many circumstances which reveal the rise in England of renewed interest in the plantations. Faith in colonial ventures had never, indeed, quite disappeared, nor had the early Stuarts ever been wholly indifferent to their American possessions. But the fate of the Virginia Company had cooled the ardor of moneyed men, and the Civil War, focusing attention for a generation upon fundamental questions of morals and politics, absorbed the energies of government and nation. With the establishment of the Protectorate imperial interests again claimed attention. Cromwell, calling the merchants to counsel, inaugurated a vigorous policy of maritime and colonial expansion. The Dutch war and the conquest of Jamaica recalled to men's minds the triumphs of Elizabeth; and those who gathered round Charles II—bankrupt nobles, pushing merchants, and able statesmen—turned to the business of trade and colonies with an enthusiasm unknown since the days of Gilbert and Raleigh.

Yet it was an enthusiasm well tempered to practical ends, purged of resplendent visions and vague idealisms. The plantations, regarded as incidents in the life of commerce, were thought to be important when they were found to be prosperous. In 1661 the king was assured that his American possessions were "beginning to grow into Commodities of great value and Esteeme, and though some of them continue in tobacco yet upon the Returne hither it smells well, and paies more Custome to his Majestie than the East Indies four times ouer." It was a statement of which the new king was not likely to miss the significance. Determined to preserve the prerogative without offending the nation, Charles was never indifferent to the material welfare of England; the expansion of trade would increase his own revenue, while the vigilance which preserves liberty he thought likely to be relaxed among a prosperous and well-fed people. To commercial and colonial expansion the merry monarch therefore gave his best attention. If he yawned over dull reports in council, he listened to them with ready intelligence, and was prepared to encourage every reasonable project for the extension of the empire.

For new colonial ventures opportunity was not lacking. Widely separated settlements along the American coast were cut in twain by New Netherland and flanked on either side by the possessions of France and Spain. To forestall rivals in occupying all the territory claimed by England, and to exploit intelligently its commercial resources, seemed at once a public duty and a private opportunity. And no region was thought more important, either in a commercial or a military way, than the Cape Fear and Charles River valleys. So at least reasoned the Earl of Clarendon, Ashley Cooper, and Sir John Colleton; to them, associated with five others, was accordingly issued in 1663, and again in 1665, a proprietary grant to the Carolinas. The patentees, upon whom the charter conferred the usual right to establish and govern colonies, expected that the surplus population of Barbados and the Bahamas, where capital and slavery were driving out white laborers and small farmers, would readily migrate to the Charles River, and there engage in the cultivation of commodities—such as silk, currants, raisins, wax, almonds, olives, and oil—which, being raised neither in England nor in any English plantation, would serve to redress the balance of trade and doubtless net a handsome profit to those with faith to venture the first costs of settlement. With the English market assured, a thriving trade and a prosperous colony seemed the certain result.

In these expectations the patentees were disappointed. Dissenters already settled in the region of Albemarle Sound were little disposed to submit to restrictions which they had left Virginia to avoid. In 1665 and 1666 some discontented Barbadians, making an essay to settle on the coast farther south, found the country less inviting than they had been led to expect, and returned to Barbados as the lesser evil. The terms on which the proprietors granted land, liberal enough but frequently changed; restrictions laid on trade almost before there was anything to exchange; the doctrinaire Fundamental Constitutions which John Locke, fresh from the perusal of Harrington, wrote out in the quiet of his study for governing little frontier communities the like of which he had never seen,—all had little effect but to irritate those who were already on the ground and discourage others from going there. In 1667, there were no inhabitants in Carolina south of Albemarle Sound; in 1672 scarcely more than four hundred. Not silk and almonds but provisions were raised; for it was necessary "to provide in the first place for the belly" before endeavoring to redress the balance of England's commerce. As late as 1675 the proprietors complained that an expenditure of £10,000 had returned them nothing but the "charge of 5 or 600 people who expect to live on us." An exaggeration, doubtless; but in truth the Carolinas never profited the proprietors anything, never drew off much of the surplus population of Barbados, nor supplied England with olives or capers. North Carolina raised tobacco, which was carried by New England traders to Virginia or the Northern colonies. The inhabitants of the Southern province, reinforced by French Huguenots and English dissenters, exported provisions to the West Indies. Yet South Carolina, disappointing to the proprietors, was destined in the next century, when rice became its staple product, to serve in an almost ideal way the purpose for which it had been founded.

The Carolina charter had scarcely been issued before the Dutch were ousted from the valley of the Hudson. It was an old grievance that the Hollanders, under many obligations to England, should have presumed to occupy territory already granted by James I to the Plymouth Company. And now, wedged in between the New England and the Southern colonies, holding the first harbor on the continent and well situated to share with France in exploiting the fur trade, the grievance had become intolerable. But the offense of all was the complacence with which the merchants of New Amsterdam ignored the English Trade Acts. Reconciled at last to the strange perversity of Virginia in raising tobacco, the English Government had made the best of a bad bargain by laying a prohibition upon its cultivation in England; yet with this result: an English industry had been suppressed by law only that the Dutch, who still contested England's right to share in the spice and slave trade, might carry Virginia tobacco to European ports, smuggle European commodities into the English settlements, and so diminish the profits of British merchants and annually deprive the royal exchequer of £10,000 of customs revenue. When the Dutch war was imminent in 1664, an English fleet, therefore, took possession of Now Amsterdam in order to secure to England the commercial value of the tobacco colonies. Before the conquest was effected the king conferred upon his brother, the Duke of York, a proprietary feudal grant of all the territory lying between the Connecticut and Delaware Rivers.

At the time of the conquest the colony of New Netherland was occupied by Dutch farmers and traders on western Long Island and on both sides of the Hudson as far north as the Mohawk River; central Long Island was inhabited in part by New Englanders; the eastern end entirely so. To establish English authority in the province, harmonizing at once the interests of the Catholic Duke of York, the Dutch Protestants, and the New England Puritans, was a difficult task, but it was accomplished with much skill by Colonel Nicolls, who was the first English governor. Religious toleration was granted; land titles were confirmed; and a body of laws, known as the Duke's Laws, based upon Dutch custom and New England statutes, was prepared by the governor and with some murmuring accepted by the inhabitants. In 1683 Governor Dongan, yielding to popular demand, established a legislative body consisting of the governor's council and a house of eighteen deputies elected by the freeholders, and the freemen of the corporations of Albany and New York. With the accession of James as King of England, the province temporarily lost its popular assembly; in 1688 it was annexed to New England under the jurisdiction of Andros; and after the Revolution it was distracted for many years by political quarrels growing out of the Leisler Rebellion. Yet none of these events interfered with the economic development of the colony. In 1674 the population was about 7000. Natural increase, together with immigrants from England and New England, Huguenot exiles from France, and refugees which the armies of Louis XIV drove out of the Palatinate, swelled the number to about 25,000 in 1700. Dutch merchants at Albany did a thriving business in furs; and in 1695 New York City, with a population of 5000, was already the center of an active trade, mainly West Indian, by no means wholly legal, in provisions and sugar.

The conquest of New Amsterdam was scarcely completed before the Duke of York, by "lease and re-lease," and for the sum of ten shillings, conveyed to his friends, Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, the territory between the Hudson and the Delaware Rivers, afterwards known as New Jersey. Dutch settlers already occupied the west shore of New York Harbor; and there were Swedes as well as Dutch on the lower Delaware. Favorable concessions offered by the proprietors soon attracted New Englanders from Long Island and Connecticut, who located in the region of Monmouth and Middletown. The proprietors nevertheless found more vexation than profit in their venture; and in 1673 Lord Berkeley sold his rights to two Friends, John Fenwick and Edward Byllinge, who were intent upon founding a refuge for the Quakers in America. Many Quakers soon settled in West Jersey along the Delaware, and upon the death of Carteret the proprietary rights to East Jersey were purchased by William Penn and other Friends who had succeeded to the rights of Fenwick and Byllinge. A mixed population and conflicting claims made the history of the first Quaker colony a turbulent one. In 1688 both Jerseys were annexed to New York; and in 1702, the proprietors having surrendered all their rights, the two colonies became the single royal province of New Jersey.

Of those who were interested in securing a refuge for the Quakers, the most active was William Penn, who had suffered ridicule and persecution for his faith, and who now desired a clearer field than the Jerseys offered for his political and religious experiments. In 1681 he therefore procured from the king a proprietary grant of the territory lying west of the Delaware from "twelve miles north of New Castle Town unto the three and fortieth degree of Northern Latitude." The land within these vague limits was thought to be "wholly Indian," and the purposes of Penn did not run counter to the colonial policy of the Government. Optimism or ignorance disposed the Lords of Trade to believe that Pennsylvania could as readily as the Carolinas be devoted to the cultivation of "oyle, dates, figgs, almons, raisins, and currans." To the political hobbies of Penn the Government was indifferent, while the intractable Quakers were classed with jailbirds and political offenders as people who were more useful to England in the plantations than at home. The proprietor's "Account of the Province of Pennsylvania," translated into Dutch, German, and French, promising religious and political liberty, and offering land on easy terms to rich and poor alike, attracted good colonists in large numbers. Within ten years there were 10,000 people, mostly Quakers, in Pennsylvania and the Delaware counties. Political wrangling, somewhat difficult to understand and scarcely worth unraveling, distracted the colony of brotherly love for many years; but from the beginning the province prospered. The settlers were as thrifty as New England Puritans, and they had better soil and a more hospitable climate. Provisions were soon raised for export; and in 1700, according to Robert Quarry, the Quakers of Pennsylvania had "improved tillage to that degree that they have made bread, flower, and Beer a drugg in all the markets of the West Indies."

As early as 1656 London merchants were inquiring "whether it would not be a prudentiall thing to draw all the Islands, Colonies, and Dominions of America under one and the same management here." Enterprising capitalists who had ventured their money in Jamaica or Barbados were content to leave the honor and profit of founding new colonies to idealists like Penn and Shaftesbury; but they eagerly welcomed the restored monarch after the unsettled conditions of 1659, and were prepared, even before he landed, to tell him "how the forraigne plantations may be made most useful to the Trade and Navigation of these Kingdomes." Of all the busy promoters whose private interests were, by some strange whim of Providence, in such happy accord with the nation's welfare and the theories of economists, none was more conspicuous than Martin Noel. He was a man of varied activities: a stockholder in the East India Company; a farmer of the inland post office and of the excise; a banker who made loans, and issued bills of exchange and letters of credit. His many ships traded in the West Indies, in New England and Virginia, and in the Mediterranean. During the wars of the Protectorate he was himself a commissioner of prize goods, issued letters of marque, and judged the prizes taken by his own vessels. A center of great interest was his place at the Old Jewry; the resort of ship captains, merchants, investors, contractors, officials of the Government. The capital for financing one of the Jamaica expeditions was raised there by Noel, who was rewarded by a grant of twenty thousand acres of sugar land after the conquest of the island. He had been intimate with Cromwell, and after the return of Charles won the reputation of being, in all affairs of trade and plantations, "the mainstay of the Government." It was through Martin Noel, and men of his kind, that the old colonial system began to be shaped to serve the ends of the moneyed and mercantile interests of England.

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