There is little more than this to be derived from study of the Maryland experiment. Let a man manage himself, in big as well as in little things, and he will be happy on raw clams and plain water, with a snow-drift for a pillow—as we saw him happy in Plymouth Bay: but give him roast ortolans and silken raiment, and manage him never so little, and you cannot relieve his discontent. And is it not well that it should be so? Verily it is—if America be not a dream, and immortality a delusion.
Lord Baltimore would perhaps have liked to see all his colonists Catholics; but his experience of religious intolerance had not inflamed him against other creeds than his own, as would have been the case with a Spaniard; it seemed to awaken a desire to set tolerance an example. Any one might join his community except felons and atheists; and as a matter of fact, his assortment of colonists soon became as motley as that of Williams in Providence. The landing of the first expedition on an island in the Potomac was attended by the making and erecting by the Jesuit priests of a rude cross, and the celebration of mass; but there were even then more Protestants than Catholics in the party; and though the leadership was Catholic for many years, it was not on account of the numerical majority of persons of that faith. Episcopalians ejected from New England, Puritans fleeing from the old country, Quakers and Anabaptists who were unwelcome everywhere else, met with hospitality in Maryland. Let them but believe in Jesus Christ, and all else was forgiven them. Nevertheless, Catholicism was the religion of the country. Its inhabitants might be likened to promiscuous guests at an inn whose landlord made no criticisms on their beliefs, further than to inscribe the Papal insignia on the signboard over his door. Thus liberty was discriminated from license, and in the midst of tolerance there was order.
The first settlement was made on a small creek entering the north side of the Potomac. Here an Indian village already existed; but its occupants were on the point of deserting it, and were glad to accept payment from the colonists for the site which they had no further use for. On the other hand, the colonists could avail themselves of the wigwams just as they stood, and had their maize fields ready cleared. Baltimore, meanwhile, through his agent (and brother) Leonard Calvert, furnished them with all the equipment they needed; and so well was the way smoothed before them, that the colony made progress ten times as rapidly as Virginia had done. They called their new home St. Mary's; and the date of its occupation was 1634. Their first popular assembly met for legislation in the second month of the ensuing year. In that and subsequent meetings they asserted their right of jurisdiction, their right to enact laws, the freedom of "holy church": his lordship gently giving them their head. In 1642, perhaps to disburden themselves of some of their obligation to him, they voted him a subsidy. Almost the only definite privilege which he seems to have retained was that of pre-emption of lands. At this period (1643) all England was by the ears, and Baltimore's hold upon his colony was relaxed. In Virginia and the other colonies, which had governors of their own, the neglect of the mother country gave them opportunity for progress; but the people of Maryland, no longer feeling the sway of their non-resident proprietor, and having no one else to look after them, became disorderly; which would not have happened, had they been empowered to elect a ruler from among themselves. Baltimore's enemies took advantage of these disturbances to petition for his removal from the proprietorship; but he was equal to the occasion; and by confirming his colonists in all just liberties, with freedom of conscience in the foreground, he composed their dissensions, and took away his enemies' ground of complaint. In 1649, the legislature sat for the first time in two branches, so that one might be a check upon the other. Upon this principle all American legislatures are still formed.
But the reign of Cromwell in England gave occasion for sophistries in Maryland. All other Englishmen, in the colonies or at home, were members of a commonwealth; but Baltimore still claimed the Marylanders' allegiance. On what grounds?—for since the king from whom he derived his power was done away with, so must be the derivative power. Baltimore stood between them and republicanism. To give edge to the predicament, the colony was menaced by covetous Virginia on one hand, and by fugitive Charles II., with a governor of his own manufacture, on the other. Calamity seemed at hand.
In 1650, the year after Charles I.'s execution, the Parliament appointed commissioners to bring royalist colonies into line; Maryland was to be reannexed to Virginia; Bennett, then governor of Virginia, and Clairborne, unseated Stone, Baltimore's lieutenant, appointed an executive council, and ordered that burgesses were to be elected by supporters of Cromwell only. The question of reannexation was referred to Parliament. Baltimore protested that Maryland had been less royalist than Virginia; and before the Parliament could decide what to do, it was dissolved, carrying with it the authority of Bennett and Clairborne. Stone now reappeared defiant; but the Virginians attacked him, and he surrendered on compulsion. The Virginian government decreed that no Roman Catholics could hereafter vote or be elected.
Baltimore, taking his stand on his charter, declared these doings mutinous; and Cromwell supported him. Stone once more asserted himself; but in the skirmish with the Virginians that followed, he was defeated, yielded (he seems to have had no granite in his composition), and, with his supporters, was ordered to be shot. His life was spared, however; but Cromwell, again appealed to, refused to act. The ownership of Maryland was therefore still undetermined. It was not until 1667 that Baltimore and Bennett agreed to compromise their dispute. The boundary between the two domains was maintained, but settlers from Virginia were not to be disturbed in their holdings. The second year after Cromwell's death, the representatives of Maryland met and voted themselves an independent assembly, making Fendall, Baltimore's appointee, subject to their will. Finally, being weary of turmoil, they made it felony to alter what they had done. The colony was then abreast of Virginia in political privileges, and had a population of about ten thousand, in spite of its vicissitudes.
But the quiet, invincible Lord Baltimore was still to be reckoned with. At the Restoration, he sent his deputy to the colony, which submitted to his authority, and Fendall was convicted of treason for having allowed the assembly to overrule him. A general amnesty was proclaimed, however, and the kindliness of the government during the remainder of the proprietor's undisputed sway attracted thousands of settlers from all the nations of Europe. Between Baltimore and the people, a give-and-take policy was established, one privilege being set against another, so that their liberties were maintained, and his rights recognized. Though he stood in his own person for all that was opposed to democracy, he presided over a community which was essentially democratic; and he had the breadth of mind to acknowledge that because he owned allegiance to kings and popes, was no reason why others should do so. Suum cuique. Could he but have gone a step further, and denied himself the gratification of retaining his hard-earned proprietorship, he would have been one of the really great men of history.
The ripple of events which we have recorded may seem too insignificant; of still less import is the story of the efforts of Clairborne, from 1634: to 1647, to gain, or retain possession of Kent Island, in the Chesapeake, on which he had "squatted" before Baltimore got his charter. Yet, from another point of view, even slight matters may weigh when they are related to the stirring of the elements which are to crystallize into a nation. Maryland, like a bird half tamed, was ready to fly away when the cage door was left open, and yet was not averse to its easy confinement when the door was shut again. But, unlike the bird, time made it fonder of liberty, instead of leading it to forget it; and when the cage fell apart, it was at home in the free air.
The settlement of the Carolinas, during the twenty years or so from 1660 to 1680, presented features of singular grotesqueness. There was, on one side, a vast wilderness covering the region now occupied by North and South Carolina, and westward to the Pacific. It had been nibbled at, for a hundred years, by Spaniards, French and English, but no permanent hold had been got upon it. Here were thousands upon thousands of square miles in which nature rioted unrestrained, with semi-tropic fervor; the topography of which was unknown, and whose character in any respect was a matter of pure conjecture. This wilderness was on one side; on the other were a worthless king, a handful of courtiers, and a couple of highly gifted doctrinaires, Lord Shaftesbury and John Locke, the philosopher. We can picture Charles II. lolling in his chair, with a map of the Americas spread out on his knees, while the other gentlemen in big wigs and silk attire, and long rapiers dangling at their sides, are grouped about him. "I'll give you all south of Virginia," says he, indicating the territory with a sweep of his long fingers. "Ashley, you and your friend Locke can draw up a constitution, and stuff it full of your fine ideas; they sound well: we'll see how they work. You shall be kings every man of you; and may you like it no worse than I do! You'll have no France or Holland to thwart you—only bogs and briers and a few naked blacks. Your charter shall pass the seals to-morrow: and much good may it do you!"
So the theorists and the courtiers set out to subdue the untutored savageness of nature with a paper preamble and diagrams and rules and inhibitions, and orders of nobility and a college of heralds, and institutions of slavery and serfdom, and definitions of freeholders and landgraves, caciques and palatines; and specifications of fifths for proprietors, fifths for the nobility, and the rest for the common herd, who were never to be permitted to be anything but the common herd, with no suffrage, no privileges, and no souls. All contingencies were provided against, except the one contingency, not wholly unimportant, that none of the proposals of the Model Constitution could be carried into effect. Strange, that Ashley Cooper—as Lord Shaftesbury was then—one of the most brilliant men in Europe, and John Locke, should get together and draw squares over a sheet of paper, each representing four hundred and eighty thousand acres, with a cacique and landgraves and their appurtenances in each—and that they should fail to perceive that corresponding areas would never be marked out in the pathless forests, and that noblemen could not be found nor created to take up their stand, like chessmen, each in his lonely and inaccessible morass or mountain or thicket, and exercise the prerogatives of the paper preamble over trees and panthers and birds of the air! How could men of such radiant intelligence as Locke and Shaftesbury unquestionably were, show themselves so radically ignorant of the nature of their fellowmen, and of the elementary principles of colonization? The whole thing reads, to-day, like some stupendous jest; yet it was planned in grave earnest, and persons were found to go across the Atlantic and try to make it work.
Lord Shaftesbury was one of the Hampshire Coopers, and the first earl. He was a sort of English Voltaire: small and thin, nervous and fractious, with a great cold brain, no affections and no illusions; he had faith in organizations, but none in man; was destitute of compunctions, careless of conventions and appearances, cynical, penetrating, and frivolous. He was a skeptic in religion, but a devotee of astrology; easily worried in safety, but cool and audacious in danger. He despised if he did not hate the people, and regarded kings as an unavoidable nuisance; the state, he thought, was the aristocracy, whose business it was to keep the people down and hold the king in check. His career—now supporting the royalists, now the roundheads, now neither—seems incoherent and unprincipled; but in truth he was one of the least variable men of his time; he held to his course, and king and parliament did the tacking. He was an incorruptible judge, though he took bribes; and an unerring one, though he disregarded forms of law. He was tried for treason, and acquitted; joined the Monmouth conspiracy, and escaped to Holland, where he died at the age of sixty-two. What he lacked was human sympathies, which are the beginning of wisdom; and this deficiency it was, no doubt, that led him into the otherwise incomprehensible folly of the Carolina scheme.
Locke could plead the excuse of being totally unfamiliar with practical life; he was a philosopher of abstractions, who made an ideal world to fit his theories about it. He could write an essay on the Understanding, but was unversed in Common-sense. His nature was more calm and normal than Shaftesbury's, but in their intellectual conclusions they were not dissimilar. The views about the common people which Sir William Berkeley expressed with stupid brutality, they stated with punctual elegance. They were well mated for the purpose in hand, and they performed it with due deliberation and sobriety. It was not until five years after the grant was made that the constitution was written and sealed. It achieved an instantaneous success in England, much as a brilliant novel might, in our time; and the authors were enthusiastically belauded. The proprietors—Albemarle, Craven, Clarendon, Berkeley, Sir William Berkeley, Sir John Colleton and Sir George Carteret, and Shaftesbury himself—began to look about for their serfs and caciques, and to think of their revenues. Meanwhile the primeval forest across three thousand miles of ocean laughed with its innumerable leaves, and waved its boughs in the breath of the spirit of liberty. The laws of the study went forth to battle with the laws of nature.
Ignorant of these courtly and scholarly proceedings, a small knot of bonafide settlers had built their huts on Albemarle Sound, and had for some years been living there in the homeliest and most uneducated peace and simplicity. Some had come from Virginia, some from New England, and others from the island of Bermuda. They had their little assembly and their governor Stevens, their humble plantations, their modest trade, their beloved solitudes, and the plainest and least obtrusive laws imaginable. They paddled up and down their placid bayous and rivers in birch-bark canoes; they shot deer and 'possums for food and panthers for safety, they loved their wives and begat their children, they wore shirts and leggins of deerskin like the Indians, and they breathed the pure wholesomeness of the warm southern air. When to these backwoods innocents was borne from afar the marvelous rumors of the silk-stockinged and lace-ruffled glories, originated during an idle morning in the king's dressing-room, which were to transfigure their forest into trim gardens and smug plantations, surrounding royal palaces and sumptuous hunting pavilions, perambulated by uniformed officials, cultivated by meek armies of serfs, looking up from their labors only to doff their caps to lordly palatines and lily-fingered ladies with high heels and low corsages: when they tried to picture to themselves their solemn glades and shadow-haunted streams and inviolate hills, their eyries of eagles and lairs of stag and puma, the savage beauty of their perilous swamps, all the wild magnificence of this pure home of theirs—metamorphosed by royal edict into a magnified Versailles, in which lutes and mandolins should take the place of the wolf's howl and the panther's scream, the keen scent of the pine balsam be replaced by the reek of musk and patchouli, the honest sanctity of their couches of fern give way to the embroidered corruption of a fine lady's bedchamber, the simple vigor of their pioneer parliament bewitch itself into a glittering senate chamber, where languid chancellors fingered their golden chains and exchanged witty epigrams with big-wigged, snuff-taking cavaliers:—when they attempted to house these strange ideas in their unsophisticated brains, they must have stared at one another with a naive perplexity which slowly broadened their tanned and bearded visages into contagious grins. They looked at their hearty, clear-eyed wives, and watched the gambols of their sturdy children, and shook their heads, and turned to their work once more.
The first movements of the new dispensation took the form of trying to draw the colonists together into towns, of reviving the Navigation Acts, of levying taxes on their infant commerce, and in general of tying fetters of official red tape on the brawny limbs of a primitive and natural civilization. The colony was accused of being the refuge of outlaws and traitors, rogues and heretics; and Sir William Berkeley, governor of Virginia, one of the proprietors under the Model Constitution, was deputed to make as much mischief in the virgin settlement as he could.
The colonists numbered about four thousand, spread over a large territory; they did not want to desert their palmetto thatched cabins and strenuously-cleared acres; they disliked crowding into towns; they saw no justice in paying to intangible and alien proprietors a penny tax on their tobacco exports to New England—though they paid it nevertheless. They particularly objected to the interference of Governor Berkeley, for they knew him well. And when the free election of their assembly was attacked, they sent emissaries to England to remonstrate, and meanwhile, John Culpepper leading, and without waiting for the return of their emissaries, they arose and wiped out the things and persons that were objectionable, and then returned serenely to their business. They did not fly into a passion, and froth at the mouth, and massacre and torture; but quietly and inflexibly, with hardly a keener flash from their fearless eyes, they put things to rights, and thought no more about it.
Such treasonable proceedings, however, fluttered the council chambers in London sorely, and stout John Culpepper, who believed in popular liberty and was not afraid to say so, went to England to justify what had been done. He was arrested and put on trial, though he demanded to be tried, if at all, in the place where the offense was committed. The intent of his adversaries was not to give him justice, but simply to hang him; and why go to the trouble and expense of carrying him to Carolina to do that? He went near to becoming a martyr, did stout John; but, unexpectedly, Shaftesbury, who might believe in despotism, but who fretted to behold injustice, undertook his defense and brought him out clear. The rest of the "rebels" were amnestied the following year, 1681. But one Seth Sothel, who had bought out Lord Clarendon's proprietary rights, was sent out as governor; and after escaping from the Algerine pirates, who captured and kept him for a couple of years, he arrived at Albemarle, commissioned, as Bancroft admirably puts it, to "Transform a log cabin into a baronial castle, a negro slave into a herd of leet-men." Sothel was not long in perceiving that this was beyond his powers, but he could steal: and so he did for a few years, when the colonists, thinking he had enough, unseated him, tried him, and sentenced him to a year's exile and to nevermore be officer of theirs.
These planters of North Carolina were good Americans from the beginning, endowed with a courage and love of liberty which foretold the spirit of Washington's army,—and a religious tolerance which did not prevent them from listening with sympathy and approval to the spiritual harangues of Fox, the Quaker, who sojourned among them with gratifying results. Their prejudice against towns continued, and one must walk far to visit them, with only marks on the forest trees to guide. They were inveterately contented, and having emancipated themselves from the blight of the Model Constitution, rapidly became prosperous. The only effect of Messrs. Locke and Shaftesbury's scheme of an aristocratic Utopia was to make the settlers conscious of their strength and devoted to their freedom. Indeed, the North Carolinians were in great part men who had not only fled from the oppressions of England, but had found even the mild restraints of the other colonies irksome.
The fate of the Model in South Carolina was similar, though the preliminary experiences were different. When Joseph West, agent for the proprietors, and William Sayle, experienced in colonizing, took three shiploads of emigrants to the junction of the Ashley and Cooper rivers, about twenty miles south of latitude 33°, they had a copy of the Model with them. But the first thing they did after getting ashore was to vote that its provisions were impracticable, and to revise it to such a degree that, when it was sent over to England for approval, its authors did not recognize their work, and disowned it. But the settlers constituted their assembly on the general lines which might now be called American, and put up their huts, in 1672, on the ground where now stands Charleston. The climate was too hot for white labor, and the timely arrival of negro slaves was welcome; in a few years they doubled the number of the whites. The staple crops of the southern plantations needed much more work than those of New England and the north, and this, as well as the preference of the negroes themselves for the warmer climates, determined the distribution of black slavery on the Atlantic coast.
Dutch settlers presently joined the English; a Scotch-Irish colony at Port Royal was set upon by the Spaniards, who, in accordance with the characteristic Spanish policy, massacred the inhabitants and burned the houses. But later the revocation by Louis XIV. of the amnesty to Huguenots caused the latter to fly their country and disperse themselves over Europe and America; no higher or finer class of men and women ever joined the ranks of exile, and they were everywhere welcomed. Colonies of them settled all along the Atlantic seaboard; and around Charleston many from Languedoc found a congenial home, and became a valuable and distinguished part of the population. America could not have been complete without the leaven of the heroic French Protestants.
Meanwhile the proprietors were gradually submitting, with no good grace, however, to the inevitable. Their Model remained a model—something never to be put to practical use. On paper was it born, and on paper should it remain forever. The proprietors were kings, by grace of Charles II., but they had neither army nor navy, and their subjects declined to be serfs. They declined into the status of land speculators; the governors whom they sent out did nothing but fill their pockets and let the people have the rest. At last, it was enough for the proprietors to suggest anything for the people to negative it, whether it were good or bad. They not only avowed their natural right to do as they pleased, but deemed it due to their self-respect not to do what was pleasing to their tinsel sovereigns in London. And finally, when Colleton, one of the sovereigns in question, tried to declare martial law in the colony, on the plea of danger from Indians or Spanish, the indomitable freemen treated him as their brethren at Albemarle had treated Sothel. The next year saw William and Mary on the English throne; Shaftesbury had died seven years before; and the Great Model subsided without a bubble into the vacuum of historical absurdities.
We left Virginia awaiting the return of the envoys who had gone to ask Charles for justice and protection against the tyranny of Berkeley. Charles, as we know, first promised the reforms, and then broke his promise, as all Stuarts must. But before the envoys could return with their heavy news, there had been stirring things done and suffered in Virginia.
The character of Berkeley is as detestable as any known in the annals of the American colonies. Many of his acts, and all the closing scenes of his career, seem hardly compatible with moral sanity; in our day, when science is so prone to find the explanation of crime in insanity, he would undoubtedly have been adjudged to the nearest asylum. In his early years, he had been stupid and illiberal, but nothing worse; in his old age, he seemed to seek out opportunities of wickedness and outrage, and at last he gave way to transports which could only be likened to those of a fiend from the Pit, permitted for a season to afflict the earth. He was as base as he was wicked; a thief, and perjured, as well as an insatiable murderer. The only trait that seems to ally him with manhood is itself animal and repulsive. He had wholly abandoned any pretense of self-control; and in some of the outbursts of his frenzy he seems to have become insensible even to the suggestions of physical fear. But this can hardly be accorded the name of courage; rather is it to be attributed to the suffusion of blood to the brain which drives the Malay to run amuck.
Virginia had been nurtured in liberty, and was ill prepared for despotism. On the contrary, she was almost ready to doubt the wisdom or convenience of any government whatever, except such as was spontaneously furnished by the generous and magnanimous instincts of her people. There were no towns, and none of the vice and selfishness which crowded populations engender. Roads, bridges, public works of any sort were unknown; the population seldom met except at races or to witness court proceedings. The great planters lived in comparative comfort, but they were as much in love with freedom as were the common people. This state of things was the outcome of the growth of fifty years; and most of the eight thousand inhabitants of the colony were born on the soil, and loved it as the only home they knew.
The chief injury they had suffered was from the depredations of the Indians, who, on their side, could plead that they had received less than justice at the colonists' hands. Border raids and killings became more and more frequent and alarming; the savages had learned the use of muskets, and were good marksmen. They built a fort on the Maryland border, and for a time resisted siege operations; and when at length some of the chiefs came out to parley, they were seized and shot. The rest of the Indian garrison escaped by night, and slaughtered promiscuously all whom they could surprise along the countryside. A force was raised to check them, and avenge the murders; but before it could come in contact with them, Berkeley sent out a peremptory summons that they should return.
What was the explanation of this extraordinary step? Simply that the Governor had the monopoly of the Indian trade, which was very valuable, and would not permit the Indians who traded with him to be driven away. In order to supply his already overloaded pockets with money, he was willing to see the red men murder with impunity, and with the brutalities of torture and outrage, the men, women and children of his own race. But the Indians themselves seem admirable in contrast with the inhumanity of this gray-haired, wine-bloated, sordid cavalier of seventy.
The troops on which the safety of the colonists depended reluctantly retired. Immediately the savages renewed their attacks; three hundred settlers were killed. Still Berkeley refused to permit anything to be done; forts might be erected on the borders, but these, besides being of great expense to the people, were wholly useless for their defense, inasmuch as the savages could without difficulty slip by them under cover of the forest. The raids continued, and the plantations were abandoned, till not one in seven remained. The inhabitants were terror-stricken; no man's life was safe. At last permission was asked that the people might raise and equip a force at their own expense, in the exercise of the universal right of self-protection; but even this was violently forbidden by the Governor, who threatened punishment on any who should presume to take arms against them. All traffic with them had also been interdicted; but it was known that Berkeley himself continued his trading with those whose hands were red with the blood of the wives, fathers and children of Virginia.
Finally, in 1676, the report came that an army of Indians were approaching Jamestown. Unless resistance were at once made, there seemed nothing to prevent the extinction of the colony. Berkeley, apparently for no better reason than that he would not recede from a position once taken, adhered to his order that nothing should be done.
There was at that time in Virginia a young Englishman of about thirty, named Nathaniel Bacon. He was descended from good ancestors, and had received a thorough education, including terms in the Inns of Court. He was intellectual, thoughtful, and self-contained, with a clear mind, a generous nature, and the power of winning and controlling men. He had arrived in the colony a little more than a year before, and had been chosen to the council; he was wealthy and aristocratic, yet a known friend of the people. Born in 1642, he was familiar with revolutions, and had formed his own opinions as to the rights of man. He had a plantation on the site of the present city of Richmond; and during the late Indian troubles, had lost his overseer. Coming down on his affairs to Jamestown, he fell into talk with some friends, who suggested crossing the river to see some of the volunteers who had come together for defense. These men were in a mood of excited exasperation at the sinister conduct of the governor, and ready to follow extreme counsels had they had a leader with the boldness and ability to put himself at their head.
The tall, slender figure and grave features of Bacon were well-known. As he advanced toward the troop of stalwart young fellows, who were sullenly discussing the situation, he was recognized; and something seems to have suggested to them that he was come with a purpose. Conclusions are sudden at such times, and impulses contagious as fire. He was the leader whom they sought. "A Bacon—a Bacon!" shouted some one; and instantly the cry was taken up. They thronged around him, welcoming him, cheering him, exclaiming that they would follow him, that with them at his back he should save the country in spite of the governor! They were fiery and emotional, after the manner of the sons of the Old Dominion, and the wrongs of many kinds which had long been rankling in their hearts now demanded to be requited by some action—no matter how daring. Virginians never shrank from danger.
Bacon had been wholly unprepared for this outburst; but he had a strong, calm soul, a ready brain, and the blood of youth. He knew what the colony had endured, and that it had nothing to hope from the present government. He had come to America after making the European tour, intending only a visit; but he had grown attached to Virginia, and now that chance had put this opportunity to help her, he resolved to accept it. He would throw in his lot with these spirited and fearless young patriots—the first men in America who had the right to call the country their own. Standing before them, with his head bared, and in a voice that all could hear, he solemnly pledged himself to lead them against the Indians, and then aid them to recover the liberties which had been wrested from them. "And do you," he added, "pledge yourselves to me!" His words were heard with tumultuous enthusiasm, and a round-robin was signed, binding all to stick to their captain and to one another. That is a document which history would fain have preserved.
With an army of three hundred Virginians, Bacon set forward against the Indians. Meanwhile Berkeley, enraged at this slight on his authority, called some troops together and despatched them to bring back "the rebels." Thus was seen the singular spectacle of a government force marching to apprehend men who were risking their lives freely to repel a danger imminent and common to all.
But Berkeley was going too far. Bacon's act had the sympathy of all except such as were as corrupt as the governor, and the men of the lower counties revolted, and demanded that the long scandal of the continuous assembly should cease forthwith. Berkeley was intimidated; he had not believed that any spirit was left in the colony; he recalled his men, and consented to the assembly's dissolution. By the time Bacon and his three hundred got back from their successful campaign, the writs for a new election were out; and he was unanimously chosen burgess from Henrico. The assembly of which he thus became a member was for the most part in sympathy with him; and though, for the benefit of the record, censure was passed upon the irregularity of his campaign, and he was required to apologize for fighting without a commission, yet he was at the same time caressed and praised on all sides, returned to the council, and dubbed the darling of Virginia's hopes. The assembly then proceeded to undo all the evil and clean out all the rottenness that had disgraced the conduct of their predecessors. Taxes, church tyranny, restriction of the franchise, illegal assessments, fees, and liquor-dealing were done away with; two magistrates were proved thieves and disfranchised, and trade with Indians was for the present stopped. Bacon received a commission; but Berkeley refused to sign it; and when Bacon appealed to the country, and returned with five hundred men to demand his rights, the governor was beside himself with fury.
Private letters and other documents, made public only long after this date, are the authority for what occurred; but though certain facts are given, explanations are seldom available. Berkeley appears to have been holding court when Bacon and his followers appeared; it is said that he ran out and confronted them, tore his shirt open and declared that sooner should they shoot him than he would sign the commission of that rebel; and the next moment, changing his tactics, he offered to settle the issue between Bacon and himself by a duel. All this does not sound like the acts of a man in his sober senses. It seems probable either that the old reprobate was intoxicated, or that his mind was disordered by passion. Bacon, of course, declined to match his youthful vigor against his decrepit enemy, as the latter must have known he would: and told him temperately that the commission he demanded was to enable him to repel the savages who were murdering their fellow colonists unchecked. The governor, after some further parley, again altered his behavior, and now overpowered Bacon with maudlin professions of esteem for his patriotic energy; signed his commission, and sent dispatches to England warmly commending him. A formal amnesty, obliterating all past acts of the popular champion and his supporters which could be construed as irregular, was drawn up and ratified by the governor; and the clouds which so long had lowered over Virginia seemed to have been at last in the deep bosom of the ocean buried. To those whom coincidences interest it will be significant that this victory for the people was won on the 4th of July, 1676.
Operations against the Indians were now vigorously resumed; but Berkeley had not yet completed the catalogue of his iniquities. Bacon's back was scarcely turned, before he violated the amnesty which he had just ratified, and tried to rouse public sentiment against the liberator. In this, however, he signally failed, as also in his attempt to raise a levy to arrest him; and frightened at the revelation of his weakness, he fled in a panic to Accomack, a peninsula on the eastern side of Chesapeake Bay. Word of his proceedings had in the meantime been conveyed to Bacon by Drummond, former governor of North Carolina, and Lawrence. "Shall he who commissioned us to protect the country from the heathen, betray our lives?" said Bacon. "I appeal to the king and parliament!" He established himself in Williamsburg; at Drummond's suggestion Berkeley's flight was taken to mean his withdrawal from the governorship—which, at any rate, had now passed its appointed limit—and a summons was sent out to the gentlemen of Virginia to meet for consultation as to the future conduct of the colony. It was at this juncture that the envoys returned from England, with the dark news that Charles had refused all relief.
At the conference, after full discussion, it was voted that the colony take the law into their own hands, and maintain themselves not only against the Indians and Berkeley, but if need were against England herself. "I fear England no more than a broken straw," said Sarah Drummond, snapping a stick in her hands as she spoke: the women of Virginia were as resolved as the men. Pending these contingencies, Bacon with his little army again set out in pursuit of the Indians; hearing which, Berkeley, with a train of mercenaries which he had contrived to collect, crossed from Accomack and landed at Jamestown, where he repeated his refrain of "rebels!" He promised freedom to whatever slaves of the colony would enlist on his side, and fortified the little town. The crews of some English ships in the harbor assisted him; and in the sequel these tars were the only ones of his rabble that stayed by him. The neighborhood was alarmed, fearing any kind of enormity, and messengers rode through the woods post haste, and swam the rivers, in the sultry September weather, to find and recall their defenders, and summon them to resist a worse foe than the red man. Before they could reach the young leader, the Indians had been routed, the army disbanded, and Bacon, with a handful of followers, was on his way to his plantation. They were weary with the fatigues of the campaign, but on learning that the prime source of the troubles was intrenched in Jamestown, and that "man, woman and child" were in peril of slavery, they turned their horses' heads southeastward, and galloped to the rescue. They gathered recruits on their way—no one could resist the eloquence of Bacon—and halting at such of the plantations as were owned by royalist sympathizers, they compelled their wives to mount and accompany them as hostages. This indicates to what extremes the violence of Berkeley was expected to go. It was evening when they came in sight of the enemy. But the moon was already aloft, and as the western light faded, her mellow radiance flooded the scene, giving it the semblance of peace. But the impatient Virginians wished to attack at once; and a lesser man than Bacon might have yielded to their urging. Knowing, however, that the country was with him, and feeling that the enemy must sooner or later succumb, he would not win by a dashing, bloody exploit what time was sure to give him. He ordered an intrenchment to be dug, and prepared for a siege. But there was no lust for battle in the disorderly and incoherent force which the frantic appeals and reckless promises of the governor had assembled; they were beaten already, and could not be induced to make a sortie. Desertions began, and all the objurgations, supplications and melodramatic extravaganzas of Berkeley were impotent to stop them; the more shrilly he shrieked, the faster did his sorry aggregation melt away. When it became evident that there would soon be none left save himself and the sailors, he ceased his blustering, and scuttled off toward Gloucester and the Rappahannock.
Bacon, Drummond, Lawrence and their men occupied the abandoned town, in which some of them owned houses, and burned it to the ground. The act was deliberate; the town records were first removed; and the men who had most to lose by the conflagration were the first to set the torch.
Jamestown at that time contained hardly twenty buildings all told; but it was the first settlement of the Dominion, and sentiment would fain have preserved it. A mossy ruin, draped in vines, is all that remains of it now. The ascertainable causes of its destruction seem inadequate; yet the circumstances show that it could not have been done in mere wantonness. Civilized warfare permits the destruction of the enemy's property; but the enemy had retreated, and the expectation was that he would never return. That Bacon had reasons, his previous record justifies us in believing; but what they were is matter of conjecture. As it is, the burning of Jamestown is the only passage in his brief and gallant career which can be construed as a blemish upon it. Unfortunately, it was, also, all but the final one.
He pursued Berkeley, and the army of the latter, instead of fighting, marched over to him with a unanimity which left the governor almost without a companion in his chagrin. The whole of Virginia was now in Bacon's hand; he had no foes; he was called Deliverer; he had never met reverse; he was a man of intellect, judgment and honor, and he was in the prime of his youth; in such a country, beloved, and supported by such a people, what might he not have hoped to achieve? Men like him are rare; in a country just emerging into political consciousness, he was doubly precious. There was no one to take his place; the return of Berkeley meant all that was imaginable of evil; and yet Bacon was to die, and Berkeley was to return.
In the trenches before Jamestown, Bacon had contracted the seeds of a fever which now, in the hour of his triumph, overcame him. After a short struggle he succumbed; and his men, fearing, apparently, that the ghoulish revenge of the old governor might subject his remains to insult, sunk his body in the river; and none know where lie the bones of the first American patriot who died in arms against oppression. His worth is proved by the confusion and disorganization which ensued upon his death. Cheeseman, Hansford, Wilford and Drummond could not make head against disaster. On the governor's side, Robert Beverly developed the qualities of a leader, and a series of small engagements left the patriots at his mercy. Berkeley was re-established in his place; and then began the season of his revenge.
His victims were the gentlemen of Virginia; the flower of the province. He had no mercy; his sole thought was to add insult to the bitterness of death. He would not spare their lives; he would not shoot them; they must perish on the gallows, not as soldiers, but as rebels. When a young wife pleaded for her gallant husband, declaring that it was she who persuaded him to join the patriotic movement, Berkeley denied her prayer with coarse brutality. When Drummond was brought before him, he assured him of his pleasure in their meeting: "You shall be hanged in half an hour." One can see that mean, flushed countenance, ravaged by time and intemperance, with bloodshot eyes, gloating over the despair of his foes, and searching for means to torture their minds while destroying their bodies. Trial by jury was not quick or sure enough for Berkeley; he condemned them by court-martial and the noose was round their necks at once. Their families were stripped of their property and sent adrift to subsist on charity. In his bloodthirstiness, he never forgot his pecuniary advantage, and his thievish fingers grasped all the valuables that his murderous instincts brought within his power. But the spectacle is too revolting for contemplation.
"He would have hanged half the country if we had let him alone," was the remark of a member of the assembly. It was voted that the execution should cease; more than two-score men had already been strangled for defending their homes and resisting oppression. Even Charles in London was annoyed when he heard of the wasteful malignity of "the old fool," and sent word of his disapproval and displeasure. A successor was sent over to supersede him; but he at first refused to go at the king's command, though he had ever used the king's name as the warrant for his crimes. He had sold powder and shot to the Indians to kill his own people with; he had appropriated the substance of widows and orphans whom he had made such; he had punished by public whipping all who were reported to have spoken against him; he forbade the printing-press; but all had been done "for the King". And now he resisted the authority of the king himself. But Charles, for once, was determined, and Berkeley, under the disgrace of severe reprimand, was forced to go. The joy bells clashed out the people's delight as the ship which carried him dropped down the harbor, and the firing of guns was like an anticipation of our celebration of Independence Day. He stood on the poop, in the beauty of the morning, shaking out curses from his trembling hands, in helpless hatred of the fair land and gallant people that he had done his utmost to make miserable. In England, the king would have none of him, and he met with nothing but rebuffs and condemnation on all sides. The power which he had misused was forever gone; he was old, and shattered in constitution; he was disgraced, flouted, friendless and alone. He died soon after his arrival, of mortification; he had lived only to do evil, and to withhold him from it was to take his life away.
It is not the function of the historian to condemn. Berkeley was by birth and training an aristocrat and a cavalier, and he was a creature of his age and station. He had been taught to believe that the patrician is of another flesh and blood than the plebeian; that authority can be enforced only by tyranny; that the only right is that of birth, and of the strongest. He was early placed in a position where every personal indulgence was made easy to him, where there was none to call in question his authority, and where there was temptation to assert authority by oppression, and by arrogating absolute license to act as the whim prompted, and to lay hands on whatever he coveted. Add to these conditions a nature congenitally without generous instincts, a narrow brain, and a sensual temperament, and we have gone far to account for the phenomenon which Berkeley finally, in his approaching senility, presented. He was the type of the worst traits that caused England ultimately to forfeit America; the concentration of whatever is opposite to popular liberties. His deeds must be execrated; but we cannot put him beyond the pale of human nature, or deny that under different circumstances he would have been a better man. We may admit, too, that, in the wisdom of Providence, he was placed where, by doing so much mischief, he was involuntarily the cause of more good than he could ever willingly have accomplished. He taught the people how to hate despotism, and how to struggle against it. He wrought a mutual understanding and sympathy between the upper and lower orders; he led them to define to their own minds what things are indispensable to the existence of true democracy. These are some of the uses which he, and such as he, in their own despite subserved. He and the young Bacon were mortal foes; but he, by opposing Bacon, and murdering his friends, aided the cause for which they laid down their lives.
After his departure there ensued a period of ten years or more, during which the pressure upon Virginia seemed rather to grow heavier than to lighten. The acts of Bacon's assembly were repealed; all the former abuses were restored; the public purse was shamelessly robbed; the suffrage was restricted; the church was restored to power. In 1677 the Dominion became the property of one Culpepper, who had the title of governor for life; and the restraints, such as they were, of its existence as a royal colony were removed. But Culpepper's course was so corrupt as to necessitate his removal, and in 1684 the king resumed his sway. James II. reached the English throne the following year, and his persecutions of his enemies in England gave good citizens to America. But the Virginians, who could be wronged and oppressed, but never crushed, protested against the arbitrary use of the king's prerogative; they were punished for their temerity, but rose more determined from the struggle. No man could be sent to Virginia who was strong enough to destroy its resolve for liberty.
And now the English Revolution was at hand; and we are to inquire what influence the new dispensation was to have on the awakening national spirit of the American colonies.
The American principle, simple in that its perfection is human liberty, is of complex make. It is the sum of the ways in which a man may legitimately be free. But neither Pilgrims, Puritans, New Amsterdamers, Virginians, Carolinians nor Marylanders were free in all ways. Even the Providence people had their limitations. It is not meant, merely, that the old world still kept a grip on them: their several systems were intrinsically incomplete. Some of them put religious liberty in the first place; others, political; but each had its inconsistency, or its shortcoming. None had gone quite to the root of the matter. What was that root?—or, let us say, the mother lode, of which these were efferent veins?
The Pilgrims and Puritans, heretics in Episcopalian England, had escaped from their persecution, but had banished heretics in their turn. Tranquil Lord Baltimore having laid the burden of his doubts at the foot of God's vicegerent on earth, had sought no further, and was indifferent as to what other poor mortals might choose to think they thought about the unknown things. Roger Williams' charity, based on the dogma of free conscience, drew the line only at atheists. The other colonists, since their salient contention was on the lower ground of civil emancipation and self-direction, are not presently considered.
But, to the assembly of religious radicals, there enters a plain Man in Leather Breeches, and sees fetters on the limbs of all of them. "Does thee call it freedom, Friend Winthrop," says he, "to fear contact with such as believe otherwise than thee does? Can truth fear aught? And fear, is it not bondage? As for thee, George Calvert, thee has delivered up thine immortal soul into the keeping of a man no different from what thee thyself is, so to escape the anxious seat; but the dead also are free of anxiety, and thy bondage is most like unto death. Thee calls thy colony folk free, because thee lets them believe what they list; but they do but follow what their fathers taught them, who got it from theirs; which is to be in bondage to the past. And here is friend Roger, who makes private conscience free; but what is private conscience but the private reasonings whereby a man convinceth himself? and how shall he call his conviction the truth, since all truth is one, but the testimony of no man's private conscience is the same as another's? Nay, how does thee know that the atheist, whom thee excludes, is further from the truth than thee thyself is? Truly, I hear the clanking of the chains on ye all; but if ye will accept the Inner Light, then indeed shall ye know what freedom is!"
This Man in Leather Breeches, who also wears his hat in the king's presence, is otherwise known as George Fox, the Leicestershire weaver's son, the Quaker. In his youth he was much troubled in spirit concerning mankind, their nature and destiny, and the purpose of God concerning them. He wandered in lonely places, and fasted, and was afflicted; he sought help and light from all, but there was none could enlighten him. But at last light came to him, even out of the bosom of his own darkness; and he saw that human learning is but vanity, since within a man's self, will he but look for it, abides a great Inner Light, which changeth not, and is the same in all; being, indeed, the presence of the Spirit of God in His creature, a constant guide and revelation, withheld from none, uniting and equalizing all; for what, in comparison with God, are the distinctions of rank and wealth, or of learning?—Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and these things shall be added unto you. In the lowest of men, not less than in such as are called greatest, burns this lamp of Divine Truth, and it shall shine for the hind as brightly as for the prince. In its rays, the trappings of royalty are rags, jewels are dust and ashes, the lore of science, folly; the disputes of philosophers, the crackling of thorns under the pot. By the Inner Light alone can men be free and equal, true sons of God, heirs of a liberty which can never be taken away, since bars confine not the spirit, nor do tortures or death of the body afflict it. So said George Fox and his followers; and their lives bore witness to their words.
The Society of Friends took its rise not from a discovery—for Fox himself held the Demon of Socrates, and similar traditional phenomena, to be identical with the Inner Light, or voice of the Spirit—but rather in the recognition of the universality of something which had heretofore been regarded as exceptional and extraordinary. In the Seventeenth Century there was a general revolt of the oppressed against oppression, declaring itself in all phases of the outer and inner life; of these, there must needs be one interior to all the rest, and Quakerism seems to have been it. It was a revolution within revolutions; it saw in the man's own self the only tyrant who could really enslave him; and by bringing him into the direct presence of God, it showed him the way to the only real emancipation. Historically, it was the vital element in all other emancipating movements; it was their logical antecedent: the hidden spring feeding all their rivers with the water of life. It enables us to analyze them and gauge their values; it is their measure and plummet. And this, not because it is the final or the highest word justifying the ways of God to man—for it has not proved to be so: but because it indicated, once for all, in what direction the real solution of the riddle of man was to be sought: a riddle never to be fully solved, but forever approximately guessed. Quakerism has not maintained its relative position in religious thought; but it was the finest perception of its day, and in the turmoil of the time it fulfilled its purpose. Probably its best effect was the development it gave to the humbler element of society—to the yeomen and laborers; affording them the needed justification for the various demands for recognition that they were urging. Puritanism banished Quakers, and even hanged them; but the Quaker was the Puritan's spiritual father, although he knew it not. And therefore the Quaker, who was among the last to appear in America as a settler in virgin soil, had a right thereto prior to any one of the others. There must be a soul before there can be a body.
On the other hand, a soul without a body is not adapted to life in this world; and an America peopled exclusively by Quakers would have been unsatisfactory. It is a prevailing tendency of man, having hit upon a truth, to begin to theorize upon it, and, as the phrase is, run it into the ground. Quakers would not fight, would not take an oath, would not baptize, or wear mourning, or flatter the senses with pictures and statues. A Quaker would resist evil and violence only by enlightening them. He would not be taxed for measures or objects which he did not approve. He could see but one way of reforming the world, and thought that God was equally circumscribed in His methods. But though the leaven may make bread wholesome, we cannot subsist on leaven alone. The essence of Americanism may be in a Quaker, but he is far from being a complete American, and therefore he was fain to take his place only as a noble ingredient in that wonderful mixture. By degrees, the singularities which distinguished him were softened; his thee and thy yielded to the common forms of speech; his drab suit altered its cut and hue; his hat came off occasionally; his women abated the rigor of their poke bonnets; he was able to say to the enemy of his country, "Friend, thee is standing just where I am going to shoot." The disintegration of his individuality set free the good that was in him to permeate surrounding society; his fellow flowers in the garden were more beautiful and fragrant for his sake.
When persecution of Quakers was at its worst, they became almost dehumanized, attaching more value to their willingness to endure ill-usage than to the spiritual principle for avouching which they were ill-used. Many persons—such is the oddity of human nature—were drawn to the sect for love of the persecution; and gave way to extravagances such as Fox would have been the first to denounce. But when toleration began, these excesses ceased, and they bethought themselves to make a home in the wilderness of their own. There was room enough. George Fox returned from his pilgrimage to the Atlantic colonies in 1674, with good accounts of the resources of the new country; and the owner of New Jersey sold half of it to John Fenwick for a thousand pounds; and the next year the latter went there with many Friends, and picked out a pleasant spot on the east bank of the Delaware for the first settlement, to which he gave the name of Salem. It was at this juncture that William Penn became, with two others, assigns of the proprietor of the colony, and thus took the first step toward assuming full responsibility for it. He did not, however, personally visit America till seven years later.
Penn was the son of an English admiral: not the kind of timber, therefore, out of which one would have supposed a great apostle of non-resistance could be made. He was brought up to the use of ample wealth, and his training and education were aristocratic. After leaving Oxford, he made the grand tour, and came home a finished young man of the world, with the pleasures and rewards of life before him. He had good brains and solid qualities, and the old admiral had high hopes of him. No doubt he would have made a very good figure in the English world of fashion; but destiny had another career marked out for him.
The plain Man with the Leather Breeches got hold of him; and all the objurgations, threats, and even the act of disinheritance of the admiral were powerless to extricate him from that grasp. Penn had found something which seemed to him more precious than rubies, and he was quite as resolute as the old hero of the Navy. Penn could endure the beating and the being turned into the streets, but he could not stop his ears and eyes to the voice and light of God in his soul. He did not care to conquer another Jamaica, but he passionately desired to minister to the spiritual good of his fellow creatures. He was of a sociable and cheerful disposition; he could disarm his adversary in a duel; he could take charge of the family estates, and qualify himself for the law; the king was ready to smile upon him; but all worldly ambitions died away in him when he heard Thomas Lee testify of the faith that overcomes the world. Nothing less than that would satisfy Penn. In 1666, when he was two and twenty, he made acquaintance with the inside of a jail on account of his conscientious perversities; but the only effect of the experience was to make him perceive that he had thereby become "his own freeman." When he got out, his friends cut him and society made game of him; finally, he was lodged in the Tower, which, he informed Charles II., seemed to him "the worst argument in the world." They let him out in less than a year, but in less than a year more he was again arrested and put on trial. The jury, after having been starved for two days and heartily cursed by the judge, brought him in not guilty; upon which the judge, with a fine sense of humor, fined them all heavily and sent him back to prison. But this was too much for the admiral, who paid his fines and got him out; and, being then on his death-bed, surrendered at discretion, restoring to him the inheritance, and observing, not without a pensive satisfaction, that he and his friends would end by "making an end of the priests."
A six months' term in Newgate was still in store for Penn; but after that they gave up this method of reforming him. He spent the next years in exhorting Parliament and reproving princes all over Europe; and in the midst of these labors he met one of the best and most beautiful women in England; she had suitors by the score, but she loved William Penn, and they were married. She was the wife of his mind and soul as well as of his bed and board. He was now doubly fortified against the world, and doubly bound to his career of human benevolence. His studies and meditations had made him a profound philosopher and an able statesman; and in all ways he was prepared to begin the great work of his life.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, the Quakers in the new world were building up the framework of their state. They decreed to put the power in the people, and all the articles of their constitution embody the utmost degree of freedom, with constant opportunities for the electors to revise or renew their judgments. When the agent of the Duke of York levied customs on ships going to New Jersey, the act drew from the colonists a remarkable protest, which was supported by the courts. They had planted in the wilderness, they said, in order, among other things, to escape arbitrary taxation; if they could not make their own laws in a land which they had bought, not from the Duke, but from the natives, they had lost instead of gaining liberty by leaving England. Taxes levied upon planting left them nothing to call their own, and foreshadowed a despotic government in England, when the Duke should come to the throne. The future James II. gave up his claim, and in 1680 signed an indenture to that effect. Later, at the advice of Penn, they so amended their constitution as to give them power to elect their own governor. A charter was drawn up by Penn and confirmed in 1681, and he became proprietor. No man ever assumed such a trust with less of personal ambition or desire for gain than he. "You shall be governed by laws of your own making," said he; "I shall not usurp the right of any, or oppress his person." He had already made inroads on his estate by fighting the cause of his brethren in England in the courts; but when a speculator offered him six thousand pounds down and an annual income for the monopoly of Indian trade, he declined it; the trade belonged to his people. He was ardently desirous to benefit his colony by putting in operation among them the schemes which his wisdom had evolved; but he would not override their own wishes; they should be secured even from his power to do them good; for, as liberty without obedience is confusion, so is obedience without liberty slavery. Instead therefore of imposing his designs upon them, he submitted them for their free consideration. Pennsylvania now occupied its present boundaries, with the addition of Delaware; and western New Jersey ceased to be the nominal home of the Friends in America. In 1682, Penn embarked for the Delaware. He had founded a free colony for all mankind, believing that God is in every conscience; and he was now going to witness and superintend the working of his "holy experiment."
On October 29th he was received at Newcastle by a crowd of mixed nationality, and the Duke of York's agent formally delivered up the province to him. The journey up the Delaware was continued in an open boat, and the site of Philadelphia was reached in the first week of November. There a meeting of delegates from the inhabitants was held and the rules which were to govern them were reviewed and ratified. Among these it was stipulated that every Christian sect was eligible to office, that murder only was a capital crime, that marriage was a civil contract, that convict prisons should be workhouses, that all who paid duties should be electors, and that there should be no poor rates or tithes. Then Penn proceeded to lay out the city of Philadelphia, where they "might improve an innocent course of life on a virgin Elysian shore." It was here that the Declaration of Independence was signed ninety-three years afterward.
In March, before the leaves had budded on the tall trees whose colonnades were as yet the only habitation for the emigrants, the latter set to work to settle their constitution. "Amend, alter or add as you please," was the recommendation with which Penn submitted it to them—the work of his ripest wisdom and loving good-will. To the governor and council it assigned the suggestion of all laws; these suggestions were then to be submitted by the assembly to the body of the people, who thus became the direct law-makers. To Penn was given the power to negative the doings of the council, he being responsible for all legislation; but he could originate and enforce nothing. He would accept no revenues; and, indeed, except in the way of helpfulness and counsel, never in any way imposed himself upon his people. He was the proprietor; but in all practical respects, Pennsylvania was a representative democracy. That they should be free and happy was his sole desire.
In its relations with the Indians, the colony was singularly fortunate; the doctrine of non-resistance succeeded best where least might have been expected from it. All lands were purchased, conferences being held and deeds signed; and the red men were given thoroughly to understand that nothing but mutual good was intended. They took to the new idea kindly; the law of retaliation had been the principle of their lives hitherto; but if a man did good to them, and dealt honestly by them, should not they retaliate by manifesting the same integrity and good-will? At one time it was reported that a band of Indians had assembled on the border with the design of avenging some grievance with a massacre. Six unarmed Quakers started at once for the scene of trouble, and the Indians subsided. It has long been admitted that it takes two sides to make a fight; but this was an indication that it needs resistance to make a massacre. Penn, who was fond of visiting the Indians in their wigwams, and sharing their hospitality, formed an excellent opinion of them. He discoursed to them of their rights as men, and of their privileges as immortal souls; and they conceded to him his claim to peaceful possession of his province. Not less remarkable was the fate of witchcraft in Pennsylvania. The Swedes and Finns believed in witches, upon the authority of their native traditions; and a woman of their race having acted in a violent and unaccountable manner, they put her on her trial for witchcraft. Both Swedes and Quakers composed the jury; there were no hysterics; the matter was dispassionately canvassed; impressions and prejudices were not accepted as evidence; and in the end the verdict was that though she was guilty of being called a witch, a witch she nevertheless was not. The distinction was so well taken that no more witch trials or panics occurred. This was in 1684, eight years before the disasters in New England. But newspapers did not exist in those days, and public opinion was undeveloped.
The colony, receiving a world-wide advertisement by dint of the excellence of its institutions and the singularity of its principles, became a magnet to draw to itself the "good and oppressed" of all Europe. There were a good many of them; and within a couple of years from the time when Philadelphia meant blaze-marks on trees and three or four cottages, it had grown to be a real town of six hundred houses. The colony altogether mustered eight thousand people. With justifiable confidence, therefore, that all was well, and would stay so, Penn, with many loving words for his people, returned to England to continue the defense of the afflicted there. A dispute as to the right boundaries of Delaware and Maryland was also to be determined; but it proved to be a lingering negotiation, chiefly noteworthy on account of its leading to the fixing of the line by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, which afterward became the recognized boundary between the States where slaves might be owned and those where they might not. The line was surveyed, finally, in 1767.
Penn being gone, the people applied themselves to experimenting with their constitution. A constitution which is devised to secure liberty to the subject, including liberty to modify or change it, is as nearly unchangeable as any mortal structure can be. The inhabitants of Pennsylvania had never known before what it was to be free, and they naturally wished to test the new gift or quality in every way open to them. Not having the trained brain and unselfish wisdom that belonged to Penn, of which the constitution was the offspring, they thought that they could improve its provisions. But the more earnestly they labored to this end, the more surely were they brought to the confession that he had known how to make them free better than they themselves did. When they resolved against taxes, they found themselves without revenue; when they refused to discipline a debtor, they found that credit was no longer to be had. They fussed and fretted to their hearts' content, and no great harm came of it, because the constitution was always awaiting them with forgiveness when they had tired themselves with abusing it. The only important matter that came to judgment was the slavery question; Penn himself had slaves, though he came to doubt the righteousness of the practice, and liberated them in his will—or would have done so, had the injunction been carried out by his heirs. Slaves in Pennsylvania were to serve as such for fourteen years, and then become adscripts of the soil—that is to say, they were permitted to become the same thing under another name. Penn ultimately conceived the ambition to vindicate the presence of the Inner Light in the negroes' souls; but he met with small success—even less than with the Indians. The problem of the negro was not to be solved in that way, or at that time. No doubt, if a negro slave could be made to feel that the mere circumstance of external bondage was nothing, so long as his inner man was untrammeled, it would add greatly to the convenience both of himself and his master. But the theory did not seem to carry weight so long as the practice accompanied it; and the world, even of Pennsylvania, was not quite ready to abolish negro slavery in 1687.
Of the thirteen colonies, twelve had now had their beginning, and Georgia, the home of poor debtors, shed little or no fresh light upon the formation of the American principle. The Revolution of 1688, which put William of Orange on the English throne, was now at hand; but before examining its effect upon the American settlements we must cast a glance at the transactions of the previous dozen years in the New England division.
The theory of the English government regarding the American colonies had always been, that they were her property. The people who emigrated had been English subjects, and—to adapt the Latin proverb—Coelum, non Regem, mutant, qui trans mare currunt. Moreover, the English, as was the custom of the age, asserted jurisdiction over all land first seen and claimed by mariners flying their flag; and though Spain and France might claim America with quite as much right as England, yet the latter would not acknowledge their pretensions. A country, then, occupied by English subjects, and owned by England, could not reasonably assert its private independence.
Such was England's position, from which she never fully receded until compelled to do so by force of arms. But the colonists looked at the matter from a different point of view. They held the right of ownership by discovery to be unsubstantial; it was a mere sentiment—a matter of national pride and prestige—not to be valued when it came in conflict with the natural right conveyed by actual emigration and settlement. The man who transferred himself, with his family and property, to a virgin country. Intending to make his permanent home there, should not be subject to arbitrary interference from any one; his vital interests and welfare were involved; he should be ruled by authority appointed by himself; should pay only such taxes as he himself levied for the expenses of his establishment; and should enjoy the profits of whatever products he raised and whatever commerce he carried on. He had withdrawn himself from participation in the advantages of home civilization, and had voluntarily faced a life of struggle and peril in the wilderness, precisely because he had counted these things as nothing in comparison with the gain of controlling his own affairs; but if, nevertheless, the mother country insisted on managing them, or in any way controlling him, then all enterprise became vain, all his sacrifices had been fruitless, and he was in all ways worse off than before he took steps to better himself. An Englishman living in England might rightly be taxed for the protection to life and property and the enjoyment of privileges which she afforded him, and which he, through a representative parliament, created; but England gave no protection to her colonies, and the colonists were not represented in her parliament; neither had the English government been put to any expense or trouble in bringing those colonies into existence; to tax them, therefore, was an act of despotism; it deprived them of the right which all Englishmen possessed to the fruits of their own labor; it robbed them of values for which no equivalent had been yielded; and thus, from freemen, made them slaves. Not less unjustifiable, for the same reasons, was interference with colonial governments, and with religious liberties of all kinds.
England could not categorically refute these arguments; but she could reply that her granting of a charter to the colonies had implied some hold upon them, including a first lien upon commercial products; while so far as governmental jurisdiction was concerned, it might be considered an open question whether the colonies were capable of adequately governing themselves, and she was therefore warranted, in the interests of order, in exercising that function herself. But the reply was a weak one; and when the colonists rejoined that the charter, if it had any practical significance at all, merely gave expression to a friendly interest in the adventure, as a parent might give a son a letter hoping that he would do well; and that the question of government was not an open one, inasmuch as the orderliness and efficiency of their institutions were visible and undeniable:—it was left to England only to say that, once an English subject, always an English subject, and that when she commanded the colonies must comply.
As a matter of fact, she avoided as much as possible putting this ultimatum in precise words; and the colonies were at least as reluctant to oppose a definite defiance. Diplomacy labors long before acknowledging a finality. There was on both sides a deeply-rooted determination to prevail; but an open rupture was shunned. Furthermore, a strong sentiment of loyalty existed in the colonies, which sentimentally and sometimes practically injured the logic of their attitude. They acknowledged the English king to be theirs; they addressed him in deferential and submissive terms; they wished, in some sense, to keep hold of their mother's hand, and yet they protested against the maternal prerogative. Their status was anomalous; and it is easy to say that they should have declared their purpose, from the first, to be an independent nation in the full sense of the world. But the logical and the natural are often at variance. Liberty is not necessarily attainable only through political independence. The colonists, if they wished to be another England in miniature, had not contemplated becoming a people foreign to England, in the sense that France or Spain was. They loved the English flag, in spite of the cross which Endicott disowned; they were proud of the English history which was also theirs. Why should they sever themselves from these? It was not until English injustice and selfishness, long endured, became at last unendurable, that the resolve to live truly independent, or to die, fired the muskets of Lexington and Concord.
The most galling of the measures which weighed upon New England was that called the Navigation Acts. These were passed in the interests of the English trading class, and by their influence. In their original form, in 1661, they had involved no serious injury to the colonies, and had, moreover, been so slackly enforced that they were almost a dead letter. But after Charles II. came to the throne, they assumed a more virulent aspect. They forbade the importation into the colonies of any merchandise, except in English bottoms, captained by Englishmen, thus excluding from American ports every cargo not owned by British merchants. On the other hand, they decreed that no American produce should find its way into other than English hands, except such things as the English did not want, or could buy to better advantage elsewhere; and even these could be disposed of at no ports nearer England than the Mediterranean. Next, by an extension of the Acts, the inhabitants of one colony were forbidden to deal with those of another except on payment of duties intended to be prohibitory. And finally, the colonists were enjoined not to manufacture even for their private consumption, much less for export, any goods which English manufacturers produced. They could do nothing but grow crops, and the only reason that anything whatever was permitted to go from the colonies to foreign ports, was in order that the former might thus get money with which to pay for the forced importations from England. The result of such a policy was, of course, that money was put into the pockets of English shopkeepers, but all other Englishmen gained nothing, and the colonists lost the amount of the shopkeepers' profit, as well as the incidental and incalculable advantages of free enterprise.