CHAPTER IX.WITCHCRAFT.

The Witch-Caldron at Salem.—How its Bubbling raised Teapot Lids and has kept open other Lids ever since.—The Young Female Witches at Salem condemned to the Ties of Matrimony; the Old Ones to harder Knots.—The Sin of being Old considered.—The Scarlet Letter.—Examples of Witchcraft cited.—The Delusion of Adam and Eve at the first Pomological Convention in Eden.—Woman as Man’s Familiar Spirit; and her Conjuries.—Cases of David, Samson, and Herod.—Antony dissolved in that Egyptian Drink, Pearl Water.—The Maid of Orleans and what an Arc she subtended.—The Philters of Love, Ambition, Heroism, etc., administered to Men and Nations.—Their Effects.—Delusions, like Measles, catching.—The Frenzies of Fashion fully described.—The Stock Exchange.—Private Witchcrafts at Quiltings, Apple-Parings, etc.—Red Corn and other Red Ears.—Sweet Witches.—A Jury of Gushing Girls.—Punishment of Men incapable of being bewitched.

Just as the last sands were dropping at once out of the hour-glasses of the seventeenth century and of a few old women at Salem, a strange trouble bubbled up in that little teapot of a place, which not only raised its lid at the time, but has kept a great many wide-open eyes fixed on it ever since, to see how it happened, and whether it would not, perhaps, do it again. Do it again! of course not; and very sorry that it ever did it at all. Let us distill from it first-proof historical stimulation, while we wait for the colts to cool off.

Young women had often at Salem, as elsewhere,troubled men, and for the misdemeanor had been condemned to the stocks—of marriage. But what to do with the ill-favored, old ladies who, in 1692, were accused of breaking the rest of both old and young,—of disturbing two organs, the spleen and gall, lying near that excitable old offender, the heart, and of stopping judicial digestion,—puzzled the brain of the wisest, yea, even the solid, well-set cerebrum of Cotton Mather. Much pondering was there, much exorcising, much studying of the twenty-eighth chapter of 1 Samuel, and diligent rummaging of chronicles, Jewish, Egyptian, French, and English, to find descriptions of the vice, and the punishments therefor. The sin of being old is, in a new country where young activities are alone valuable, always great. At quaint, gable-ended Salem it became a swinging crime.

How the knot was eventually not cut, but tied, all the world knows. Everybody remembers how those aged agitators were taken around the neck, not by future spouses, as the young Salemites were, but by cords most unsilken. The delusion of course soon vanished with the twenty victims; but the Scarlet Letter, written at the time, which tells the affecting story, is still handed around unsealed, and will ever be read with witching interest.

1692.1869.The Penalties of Witchcraft.

1692.

1869.

The Penalties of Witchcraft.

’Tis the old tale, with new characters and scenery to adapt it to the time and place. The Bible opens with it. In that earliest recorded pomological convention, attended by only three delegates, Adam, Eve, and Satan, the deception by one of them—a model trickster, whose plan has since been often followed in other conventions—of the female delegate, who then broughtover the third, led to a very wicked delusion, which has got a great many people in a very sad scrape. If woman was a witch in Paradise, what has she not been out? She has been “man’s familiar spirit” ever since, conjuring up visions before the eyes of young men, as stately as the sheeted form at Endor, or as pleasing as the walking figure of Bathsheba to the enamored eye of the Chief Singer. Samson could pull down the pillars of Gaza, but could not muster strength enough to open his eyes to Delilah’s illusions, or to raise his shorn head from her delightful pillow. Then there was that very fast woman, Herodias, who got a-head of John the Baptist on a charger. How she bewitched Herod by a pair of nimble heels!—a feat by which so many dancers have whirled reason from her throne, and men from theirs.

What a splendid necromancer was Cleopatra, dissolving poor Antony, rich pearls, and the Roman Empire in the drugged cup of her beauty. We see the Duumvir now in that Alexandrian palace, under her wildering magic. The air without twinkles with the clash of impatient Roman shields, and the earnest gleamings of battle-axes, hungry to hew for him a way through living Romans up to the Capitoline hill; but he, at the feet of the sorceress, swearing oaths falser than Abigail Williams’s, in Salem court-house, tosses away from him the round globe of empire as carelessly as the ragged Egyptian harlequin in the next square flings up his cup and balls for the passing amusement of the idle crowd.

Then, too, the Maid of Orleans, who subtends such a brilliant Arc in the annals of France;—but whyiterate history, which is but a biographical dictionary of characters who, by the impact of enthusiasms, genius, delusive heroism, or passion-working frenzies, have given to others, individuals, communities, armies, or nations, philters of delirious patriotism, love-potions, noble discontents under real or fancied wrongs, which have whirled them on to glory, to sudden graves, to state coronations, or have lifted them up to Calvaries of glorious self-sacrifices higher than themselves, and loftier than the ages which have grown upwards as they gazed?

Delusions, whether in Salem, Chicago, New York, or any other place afflicted with common councils and their accompanying symptoms, municipal debts, are as catching as measles, and lead often to eruptions just as disagreeable. The semiannual frenzies which, year after year, seize whole communities, men, women, and children, persons tall or short, fat or lean, blond or brunette, making them rush simultaneously and with hot celerity to throw away or alter their last six months’ garments, bonnets, hats, or foot-clothings, because Madame Folie in Good-for-nothing Street, Paris, thinks it for her interest that they should, and to betake themselves all to other garments, bonnets, hats, and foot-clothing of another cut and color,—cuts and colors uniform for all ages, sizes, and complexions,—are quite as unaccountable to people at a distance, and even to themselves a year after, as the Salem delusion now, when we take it up in our long historic fingers, and measure it by the rule of good, cool, common sense. The panics of the stock exchange, starting out of a rumor in some obscure corner, and swelling intotense statements and positive beliefs, which grasp even cool business brains and well-filled purses, and shake both empty on the winds, find their strange echoes back from the study of wise but momentarily deluded Cotton Mathers and the disordered judgment-seats of Salem magistrates.

But the public and published examples of witchcraft are few compared with countless cases always going on in every community, urban or rural, unrecognized by any tribunals judicial or historic. At every apple-paring in New England,—in the husking-parties throughout the West, where the finding of the red ear of corn suddenly makes every kissful girl the personal owner of two redder ears,—in the quilting frolics at the South, where the young gentlemen of the place come in, after the sewing is done, and sow roses on cheeks white before,—by story-telling brooks that keep sacred the secrets of lovers, while babbling their own,—along the roadside, in quiet nooks, in village parlors, in crowded cities where mammon tries in vain to cheat the sweet witches out of their devotees,—everywhere, in fine, where hearts are not utterly trade-mailed, office-clad, or ossified, the tender delirium which early entered our great, glorious mad-house of a world, produces effects which are never understood by some, which confound the wise unwisdom of old judicial heads, and sometimes get inwrought into fine tragedies, before which even those of New England, although told by a good fellow or transfigured by a Longfellow, pale away faded and colorless.

The man who is incapable of being bewitched bysomebody or something, may make a good bargain, and live on unlovingly a long time,—like an air-plant, never touching his mother earth, or feeling its inspiriting magics; but he will never get much out of life except meat, drink, and cold-sheeted sleeps, nor add much to the happiness or greatness of his kind. He who lives in the United States beyond a fair age, without getting inextricably tangled in the witching meshes of some good mate, should be tried by a jury of gushing girls, and condemned for life to the pillow-ry with some of the modern witches of New England or the sorceresses of the South.

Whosoever, then, accuses the witchcrafts of other times and ages, let him, ere he casts the first stone, look into his own heart, or around among his own household or community, and, borrowing a charity from his thoughts, say, if he can, “Go in—pieces.”

Cotton Mather exorcising a Witch.(p. 176)

CHAPTER X.OF THE MANNERS, MORALS, HABITS, AND LAWS OF THE COLONISTS IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

First-class Telescope to see theMannersof a Past Age.—Difficulties of Near-sighted and Long-sighted People.—Near Objects more embarrassing to the Observer than Distant.—Why?—The Ghosts of the past.—The Manners and Dress of Stuyvesant, Eliot, Calvert, Rolfe, etc. described.—Manners of the Mass detailed; in their Work, Play, Diet, Courtship, Fashions, Treatment of Young Ladies and Gentlemen, Children, Servants, etc.—Superior Advantages of Paterfamilias then in making Acquaintance with his Wife and Children.—Fast Girls and Calicoes.—The Isothermal Lines ofEthics.—Certain Vices, like Eggs, laid secretly and hatched afterwards.—The Fashions of Crime at various Epochs compared.—Jails and Jail-Birds.—The ingenious Crimes of Trade, Corporations, Schools, and Seminaries noted.—How Sects are frozen or thawed by Temperature.—Northern and Southern Sectarianisms.—Why Episcopacy flourished in Warm Latitudes.—The Early Commercial Morality of New York.—Baptists, Congregationalists, and Independents.—TheHabitsof the Century; their Material, Color, Durability, and Wear.—TheLawsmainly imported.—What a Business the Colonists carried on, notwithstanding, in the Domestic Article.—Kindness of the Proprietors in furnishing Ready-made Office-holders not appreciated.—American Itch for Law-making.—Laws against Criminals.—Their Crimson Color.—How the Rains of Mercy fell on hard Enactments, and the Thaw which followed.—Coroners’ Inquests sat upon.—Verdicts under various Lights.—Justices of the Peace, and the Law they peddled.—Administrations of Law then and now contrasted.—How Colors, although imponderable, turned the Judicial Scales.

Firstly,Manners.—Historians, especially in modern times, are accustomed to entertain their readers with varied and variegated descriptions of themanners of the people, period, or century under their telescopes; and as we have a first-rate historical Dollond, adjusted for day and night observations, and can bring down a past age so near as to enable our readers to see not only the cut of their great-great-great-grandfather’s coats, the quality of their metal buttons on the outside, and of the metal within their pockets, but can note and enjoy even the shape of their mouths, the character of the good things going in, and the better things coming out of them; nay, can catch and fix the evanescent and subtle flavor of their humor and wit, as they exhale in rosynimbi, we shall not withhold some of the latest and most valuable discoveries we have been thus enabled to make. Some near-sighted people find a difficulty, as they look about upon their contemporaries, in arriving at results which they can crystallize around class nodules. They see only individual specimens, and wonder how the photographic historian can bring out by his machine picturesque groups, clothed in appropriate costume, artistically arranged. But this difficulty arises from the unhappy fact that the objects observed lie directly under their eye. The others lie without. Besides such obtuse-eyed watchers of their own times, who experience an embarrassment in getting fitting words to express their ideas of an average man, age, habits, or morals,—a process much like that of producing our current Sherry wines by boiling down and simmering off a variety of ingredients,—lose sight of the precipitating, coagulating, forming mass, in their anxiety to note the frisky bubbles that come up to the agitated surface. Besides, long-sighted chroniclers can see anddescribe the habits and manners of the distant past with more clearness, and certainly with more telling effect, than the troublesome present, with its distressing individualities and exceptions, lying, amid the disturbing cross-lights of actual, hard, well-known facts. If, in bringing up the ghost of a period long buried, we get the wrong dress on it, or chance to summon back a spectre, invested with habits that fitted another epoch as well or better, we are not teased or contradicted by any foolish survivor, pushed by children-like questions, or worried into redness of face by puzzling inquiries or an awkward silence.

And so reasoning, we feel sure that, if our inspection of the accoutrements, manœuvres, and drill of the companies that march before us in the seventeenth century, is not absolutely accurate, the fault will not lie in the distance, nor in the atmosphere, nor yet in the instrument, but in one of these two causes, either that they have sent up the wrong squads or else that the originals had not, after all, much manners to be inspected.

It is generally believed that Lord Chesterfield invented manners: but as he was not born until 1694, just as the seventeenth century was getting staggeringly infirm and indifferent to its externals, and as he did not procure the publication of his Letters until the characters on the blue slate-stones over the bones of the deceased age had become blurred and weather-dimmed, the question of the comparison of their manners with his patent methods and rules did not, we may well believe, much vex those earnest old toilers of the sea and on the land.

Single figures stand out in sharp and pleasing picturesqueness against the distant horizon of those Colonial days; in Virginia, John Rolfe; in New York, Petrus Stuyvesant; in Massachusetts, John Eliot; George Calvert, in Maryland; Theophilus Eaton, in Connecticut; Sir John Yeomans, in North Carolina; Roger Williams, in Rhode Island; and many others, who seem in their granite integrity to be poised, like calm sculpture, in ruff and wrist-frill, broad-lapelled coats, short-clothes, silk stockings, and real, unplated silver knee and sleeve buckles.—These figures, tall and stately, with high-bred, courtly manners, bland faces lit up by purposes and convictions, with large, generous waistcoats, made capacious for the pendulations of their big, loving hearts beneath, still arrest our admiring eyes. The great mass of the Colonists, however, were resolute workers, living on a spare diet, sleeping on hard beds, with shake-downs for their friendly, and shake-ups for their unfriendly, guests. Their tastes were simple and confined to a few objects. Those modern houses in which we dwell, more appropriately called museums, the best parts kept for show, and having not one, but several mermaids, a What-is-it, and an assortment of woolly animals with tails for heads, and heads omitted, would have paralyzed and shocked the most advanced Colonists. Their manners were taking, but they were mainly exhibited in taking grain from the fields, fish from the sea, and scant returns from their store sales. The graces were shown mainly by husbands in lifting their spouses on and off pillions, to and from church, and by young men in those sweetly rough complimentsthat love contrives in all times, and among all classes, to shape out from a scanty, lingual stock in exchange for sheep’s-eyes and assenting blushes.

As it took vessels at that period several months to come from France, the settlers were somewhat late in their knowledge of the foreign modes; but as the styles were the latest known, it was all the same in New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Boston. That rotatory machine which now turns out fashions semiannually, now clipping a yard or so from the top of a dress and adding it to the bottom, here expanding a bonnet to the size of a parasol, then contracting it to dimensions less than the milliner’s bill for it; at one time running a flat iron down in front, and at another tacking a donkey’s load on behind, had not yet been invented. Paterfamilias recognized his own children, day after day, and even year after year, in the same modes and garments; the serviceable gray or serge, during week-days, and the decent, plain, unarresting, and unstunning habiliments, reverently donned for Sunday. The girls were not fast, although the colors of their calicoes were. Their bright carnations they wore all the time, only a little more so on Sunday evenings when the sparks lit them up, especially if a match was near.

In general a homespun candor quaintly marked family and neighborhood intercourse, and homespun honesty, integrity, and good sense, public and private actions. Of course all ages have common types of roguery. Each, too, has its own special representatives who commit crimes according to a prevailing mode, and who might easily be put into the fashion-platesof the Old Bailey or Sing-Sing. In these respects the times whereof we speak kept company, to some extent, with their predecessors. But among the sparse settlements, the appropriators and spoilers of others’ property and rights had such a hard time to do a thriving business, and found that honest work laid up so much more at the year’s end, that after a little while they learned to prefer the ways of the virtuous, not from principle, but from interest, and left off courses that led to the poor-house, if they missed the jail.

There were here and there dandies who imported their manners with their clothes; but as the girls then had the good sense to believe that these, so far from being superior to those of domestic growth, did not wear so long or well, and had a way of changing so often as to be worth less than the duty imposed to bring them in, such foreign importations gradually fell off.

Young ladies at home then sewed the tares, instead of the wicked old Sower. The “help” was only looked for, and always found in, the house; which was kept up for the sake of the family, and not for the servants. People worked all the hours in which they did not sleep, and thus kept their minds from being agitated by the operation of “eight-hour laws,” the tortures of party squeezes, and the bore of concerts and lectures. Children were put to bed before midnight, were satisfied with their simple toys, and remained children nature’s full term. Parents ruled, and not the baby, which crowed as much as it pleased, except over its begettors.

It must be said, however, that elderly people eventhen bewailed the decay of the times, and often, over their pipes or knitting, conjured up visions of more virtuous days, when they were young, amid the green fields of old England, the emerald meadows of Holland, or on the hardy plains of Sweden.

Secondly,Morals.—Ethics have no isothermal lines, fencing in the moral qualities, as nature girdles the earth with wavy zones for fruits, arctic, temperate, and tropical. And yet certain vices and virtues prevail, as trade-winds, more at one period, or over one tract at a given time than at or over another. It would almost seem as if certain moral or immoral ovarian eggs had been early and secretly laid in some wide districts, or among certain nations, where they were afterwards washed over by the impregnating milt of peculiar influences, and then broke into ready and abundant life.

There were jails in all the Colonies, and very early. The variety of the jail-bird never wanted specimens. The crimes against the person were more frequent at first than those against property, for the obvious reason that there were more of the former than the latter; as property multiplied, however, it was, as usual, viciously coveted.

The vices of an early age are more vigorous but rarer. Mean crimes; ambidextrous, cunning contrivances under the forms but against the spirit of law; ingenious larcenies by railway companies, by chartered corporations, by trust companies, by commercial partnerships, by seminaries and academies, where the pupils provide their own furniture, silver, and a greatpart of the instruction, and pay twice—ordinary and extraordinary—for everything they ought to get and do not; sharp, unscrupulous trade, slicing down realities so thin that they hardly serve to veneer our wants, and diluting truth so much that the millionth part of a grain will supply a whole store for twenty-four hours; the brokerage of office; the thousand deceits, infiltrated through the spongy textures of doubtful natures, and sprouting out, like rice, when the water of gain is poured upon it;—these all are the luxuries of a higher civilization. They have nothing to feed on in a simple state of society. They drift in upon an older one like barnacles and foul creepers on the copper fastenings of noble, well-freighted ships. Like blood in super-refined sugar, subtle vices look so white in the mixture that we almost fail to see their crimsoning hues. We speak of the crimes and misdemeanors of the Colonial times as indications of the prevailing morality, just as flies in open pans of cream tell its quality and richness.

Morality, we have said, is not bounded by isothermal lines; and yet climate and soil do seriously affect the prevailing moral tones and hues, just as earthly lakes take on the passing colors of the heavens above.

The Puritan sternness of New England convictions—as iron-like as the firs and larches on her own hills—swept in as gray gustiness across her early history as her northeasters over her wide fields. The latter pinched her children physically till they became of the same blue tint as their church regulations. The rigidity of even Huguenot faith could not stand the continual sun of South Carolina, which, at length, sorelaxed its sharp lines that they ceased to cut at all across that compressed globe of iniquity, human slavery. The moral qualities of Virginia were like its own soil, at first stiff and deep, but gradually deteriorating until they got down into such a narcotic, stony poverty, that the plough of vigorous truth seldom turned up.

Forms of church worship, rites, and ceremonies usually flourish best in warm latitudes, where the passive swing on ecclesiastical ropes, suspended between time-crusted pillars, requires less exertion than climbing the tree, Zaccheus-like for one’s self. The vines which, all along down the well-sunned slopes, from the Chesapeake Bay southwards, lean lovingly upon the magnolia and cottonwood, shaping themselves often into verdant gothic arches, grasped with no tighter fingers the supports which safely steadied their trusting confidence, than did their sunny-hearted cultivators curl securely the tendrils of their religious faith around the Episcopal oaks, whose acorns, dropped from rook-nested boughs in England, and gathered and planted here, soon sprang up and spread their cool shades for an easy, luxurious faith.

The dominant morality of New York early borrowed its ingredients, as its capital, from whomsoever would lend it anything. Although all these contributions came to it through the Narrows, they soon broadened, on being landed. Thither came the sturdy, broad-breeched, meadow-bottomed Dutch, bringing the well-pounded creed of Dort, hardened and tempered, like blistered steel, upon the anvil of war, through the preceding century. The mace of iron-glaived Alva had again and again struck it; but the sturdy strokes hadsent more fire into than they had ever brought from it. There, too, came Protestants from the Rhine, who had gone through the flames of St. Bartholomew’s day, and escaping first from France to Old Netherlands, and thence to New Netherlands, had carried with them, more carefully than their old delft, the sharp Articles of Calvinism. From Bohemia came the scholars of Huss; from Piedmont, the hunted Waldenses; from France, the men who turned their faces to centripetal Rome as their Mecca,—their religious creeds mixing and mingling in the wide-armed Bay of New York, which ever welcomed all religions that built houses on its shores or belted its waist with commercial girdles. The Baptists were early washed over to our coasts, and finding ample rivers for their aquatic rite, spread with every new wave of emigration. Congregational and Independent churches grew like young bullocks in almost every New England valley,—even putting their stiff necks through the Connecticut natural Ox-Bow at Hadley,—the only yoke they ever would submit to. We speak of churches and sects as propagators of morality, and as the yardsticks which measured the colonial morals; for as yet wicked men had not learned to use the church as covers, whence to spread nets for simpletons that lighted, like pigeons, on or near the adjacent grounds. In general, it may be said, that in spite of Puritan rites in New England showing the forbidding and cold side of the warm-hearted Gospel, in spite of the hedged Episcopal orchards of Virginia, where the blossoming odors were sought to be kept wholly inside the very high walls, in spite of the fermenting influences in New York, and thediscouragements from various local causes in the other Colonies, Rhode Island and Maryland excepted, the colonists were healthily moral.

The schoolmaster got early abroad; and, generally boarding around in the school district, and making himself miscellaneously useful, wedged some educating notions into the heads of all,—in the younger by day, and in the older during the evenings. And thus the church, the school-house, industry, which pushed back idleness and its brood of vices, simple agricultural ways, the absence of city sores, and the rugged, conscientious pursuit of wholesome livelihoods in largely ventilated spaces, all concurred to hand up the Colonies along the unplanked roads of the age, to the outstretched hand of the eighteenth century.

Thirdly,the Habitsof the period were few and simple; generally made of conscientious, native materials, coarse but strong; and were exceedingly well preserved.

They were of a mixed color, but on the whole good.

Fourthly,the Lawswere at first and usually imported. Most of them were designed and upholstered in those second-class shops in London, the proprietors’ manufactories, which were owned by certain royal joint-stock subscribers, whose object was to make as much money as possible out of their articles. With this supreme object in view, their enactments were mainly framed to secure to themselves as much as could be of the proceeds of colonial labor, and leave the colonial purchasers to pay their own expenses andrun the risks from the weather, poor crops, and Indian interruptions. To accomplish this, the proprietors sought to have the colonists devote as much of their time as possible to work. They endeavored to relieve them from the necessity of wasting precious moments in disposing of their products or in supplying themselves with materials, or in gossiping in assemblies about foolish rights, or in squandering their days in electing officers, or gadding about the townships in electioneering for themselves or others.

Did the Colonies want materials, wheat to sow the first year, crockery, furniture, store goods?

The companies could so easily send over a ship with them.

Did the prosperous colonist wish to dispose of his surplus crop?

The companies would take it for him, and sell it in England.

Was a governor, a judge, an office-holder of any kind, such as collector, portwarden, etc., needed?

Why, the companies kept them already made at their manufactory in London, and would express one through by their fast-sailing line in ample time, even if it took three months, and would deliver them wherever desired, at Plymouth, Hartford, Charleston, or Jamestown.

Expressing a Colonial Governor from London.(p. 189)

The colonists very early felt the inconvenience of this little arrangement; and, being a sharp set, soon perceived the loss in thus buying and selling exclusively in a foreign market, stuff which they could suit themselves better with at home, even if the articles did not have the companies’ trade-mark or shine withtheir patented varnish. Gradually they tried their hands at law-making and officer-making, and, finding how easy it was, took a great liking to the business; and at length, dropping the foreign-made articles one after another, came to carry on a considerable manufacture of their own. The Yankee colonists were particularly handy at making church regulations, and so multiplied them that we doubt whether any churches then existing had such a large and full collection. In fact, in some parts of New England, church-members had a difficulty often in knowing what to do, not having sufficient time to read the long codes, and yet conscientiously fearing lest they might offend against some of their minute provisions prescribing or proscribing action. It may be remarked, in passing, that thiscacœthes faciendi legesis an itch highly American, no ointment having yet been found strong enough to cure it. The colonists early insisted on acquiring their lands in fee, not liking any leases but releases. The old fable of Anteus was again vivified. The man who stands on the soil gets the strength of the earth; and forthwith wrestles down his opponents, want or idleness, be they never so herculean. And so the simple land-owners of the Colonies, touching constantly their own acres, sucked up law-making power from their pores, and even imbibed a certain resisting faculty to cannons bored by any one but themselves.

They had an aversion to roads not made with their own hands; to laws of entail or inheritance, disposing of their lands which they had chopped out of the raw side of a continent; and, in fine, became so resolutely resistant to all resolutions moved on the far Atlanticside, unless seconded on this by themselves through their own representatives, that we are compelled by authentic documents to believe, if the ten commandments had been enacted by the royal law-makers without Colonial ratification, the sturdy settlers would have practically expunged all the “nots” from the suspected decalogue.

In those early times nothing was more criminal than the laws against criminals. Like the medical practitioners, the legal doctors believed in blood-letting for all ailments. Misdemeanors, now disposed of at quarter sessions and by police magistrates with small fines or petty imprisonment, then dangled at the hideous cross-bars.

The soft, April-like rains of clemency, now and then, however, began to fall upon these hard enactments. Quakers mildly doubted whether these scarecrows really frightened other offenders off the fields of crime. Silent tears, shed in secret household places over brothers and sons hung up on high hills for stealing or trespass, began to gather, like the waters of fountains hidden away in the depths of valleys, and to create that large American river, Public Sentiment,—larger than the Hudson, the Ohio, or the Mississippi,—which, rising and rising, has swept so many abuses and errors into the gulfs of time.

That solemn Saxon joke, a coroner’s inquest, as gloomy in its dissections, and as funny in its illogical conclusions, as in the land of the heptarchy, was not denied to those deodand colonists whose hearts suddenly stopped beating, and whose mortal wrecks, thrown up on that very weary shore “Crow’nersLaw” were always prizes for small bunglers. For live men,habeas corpus, that great opener of illegally locked doors, began at the close of the century to be provided.

If colonial judges sometimes wrote to England to know how to decide cases politically edged, for fear they might cut a royal prerogative or sharpen popular rights; or if justices of the peace—those small pedlers of very common law, and uncommon specimens of judicial wares—dribbled out decisions for plaintiff or defendant, not knowing which was which, the puzzled magistrate giving opinions about the off ox, without knowing which was the “off” or which the “near” ox; or if sometimes in extreme cases the obfuscated and doubting arbiter of law consulted his wife and retailed her caudle lecture to the astonished suitor, as his well-considered judgment in the case,—in the main it may be averred that justice was as well tolled from the mills, as in these latter days when the judicial miller takes from the bag before the grist goes in, and sees to it that his private gutter taps the hopper before it shakes itself into the customer’s heap. Color is supposed to lurk just under the outer skin, and, if placed on the scales, to be imponderable; but it was always found that positive colors, when put on the judicial Fair banks, were very light; the white, which is no color at all, invariably weighing down that side of the balance, when a cinnamon-colored Indian or a black-berried African was found in the other. The black man always lost at the checker-board, even when the moves were claimed to be on the square. In fact, until a few years past,when the military game called “drafts” began, luck never favored that color at the little game of law, at which two can play and one pay, or in fact at any of the larger games of life in America. The bleaching-powders that whiten even the ermine were slow in coming into use. The seventeenth century, like so many of its ancestors, while working its double team, one white and the other black, to draw its loads, took better care at baiting-places and at the taverns over night of the white horse than of the other.

CHAPTER XI.THE COLONIES IN THE LOWER HALF OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

The Colonial Colts in the large, open Field of the Eighteenth Century.—The Effects of a Sniff of French Gunpowder.—Queen Anne’s War, 1702–1713; its Cost and Results in Europe and America.—Acadia changes its Name to Nova Scotia.—How the Colonies started a Newspaper in 1704.—Philadelphia in a Sheet in 1719; and how comfortable it was.—The Franklin Bros. furnish Food too condensed even for Boston.—Benjamin quits the Hub; foots it, without tiring, to New York.—How he got through New Jersey without paying Toll.—Enters Philadelphia with Two Loaves, and sets up an Intellectual Bakery.—Banks built on the Sands of Credit.—Moving Accidents.—John Law’s Scheme to use the Mississippi Valley; how it grew; what it promised, and how it performed.—A French Pasquinade.—The Results of a Bank Panic in the Eighteenth Century.—The Effects on the Manufacture of Children.—Number of Colonists in 1713 and 1743.—The Condition of Delaware, New Hampshire, and Vermont.—The Training of Young America.—Yale College and its Mustard-like Growth.—The American Learned Oak.—The Connection between Slate-Pencil and Gum Chewing and Female Education.—What took Place between 1713 and 1743.—A Negro Plot in New York.—Negroes thrown overboard, and the Bubbles that rose.—How large Historic Doors swing on small Hinges.—Examples from A to W.—What happened because Maria Theresa was a Female.—The English Georges; what Bulls they were, and made.—The Transatlantic Bullocks; how they rushed into King George’s War in 1744, and what Mischief they did for Four Years.

The colonial colts which we left tied up to the bars of the eighteenth century could not, with their American blood, stand there for any length of time without chafing to be let into “fresh fields andpastures new.” The bars down, off they scampered, dashing up their heels and tossing their heads in the fresh air.

Scarcely, however, had they gone a stone’s throw in the great unfenced field, before they snuffed a sulphurous smell from the adjacent lot, the French settlements of Acadia. Queen Anne, the second daughter of James II., who, in 1702 had succeeded her sister Mary, which aforesaid Mary, with her husband, the Orange William, had, as we have already seen, found England too small for them and the aforementioned James, also took a fancy that France was being made too comfortable for her migratory parent, and, in order to keep him travelling, bombarded that country. This little experiment, called in the large-bore histories, Queen Anne’s War, lasted eleven years, and cost England about one sixteenth of her entire value. She obtained, however, as compensation for this outlay, these results in Europe: several fresh monuments in Westminster Abbey, a staggering back-load of debt, a crowd of one-sleeved men, many young women in becoming widow’s caps, Marlborough and wife with salaries amounting yearly to three hundred and twenty-six thousand dollars besides the snug little box at Blenheim Palace, the glorious though empty victories of Ramillies, Malplaquet, Oudenarde, and Blenheim, and that very big elephant, the rock of Gibraltar.

Of course our colts became intensely excited by the gunpowdery air, tore away into the northern French lot, and fell to kicking most lustily. The French fillies there naturally bit back and let fly their gallic-shod heels freely; but the New England poniesso worried and wounded them in the flanks and hips as to drive them clean out of the field. Port Royal was reduced and became Ann-apolis; and Acadia, battered by colonial guns to a wreck, and turning up in her distress under the name of Nova Scotia, grasped one of those long humane lines which the Marine Society, or government located at London, threw out at that time continually for distressed communities. To this sea line the blue-nosed, fish-shaped peninsula has since held with the bite of a codfish, trolled and played by the Izaak Walton of nations, until the fish shows signs of letting go the hook.

Amid the Alpine glaciers of war, however, there bloomed, as travellers find high up among the ice-fields, the graceful and tender flowers of gentler life.

The Colonies started the century with a newspaper. The Boston “News-Letter,” printed on a foolscap sheet, andissuedissuedonce a week, in 1704, only twenty-eight years after the first newspaper was started, and in the very year the first editor, Roger l’Estrange, died, was the parent of that large family of children of all sizes and with such varied characters, which are now disseminated through almost every village of the land, and has acquired such a wide influence, interest, and large real estates among us. Meet it was that this prolific stock should have originated on the spot where, as is now pretty well proved, the first white men who visited our continent made their first landing within our borders, seven hundred years before. It must not, however, be supposed, that the pioneers in newspapers were Danes. From all that can now be ascertained, they were Bohemians. We may add that the “News-Letter”was never merged in the New York “Herald.” As it never issued but a single edition on any one day, and had no contemporaries at first to cull from, it did not become the New York “Express.” It is also a common mistake to suppose that it was afterwards expanded into the “North American Review,” or became by cultivation that large, flowering double monthly rose, “The Atlantic.” The “News-Letter” offered no premiums to multiply subscribers or to divide the claims of competitors; for it had no rival for fifteen years. Then Philadelphia, always emulous, got up a second sheet, a warm, gray worsted one, which wrapped up comfortably her growing youth, and displayed most acceptably her comely proportions. Two years later, in 1721, James Franklin established at Boston “The New England Courant,” the fourth American newspaper, full of audacious thinking and independent notions, some of which were furnished by his brother Benjamin, then a stripling of fifteen years. The criticisms were too strong, even for Boston; and after trying in vain for two years to nurse the place up to the wholesome diet, Benjamin left it. After a perilous journey to New York, whence he footed it across New Jersey without being policed or tolled,—for the Camden and Amboy Railroad had not yet subjected that Province to its sway,—he entered Philadelphia with two loaves of bread for himself. He soon set up a good intellectual oven of his own, and distributed, not Boston brown bread, but well-baked, healthy, family loaves, made of the best white flour to be had, to the world and—Philadelphia.

In 1740 there were eleven newspapers in America,one in each of the Colonies of New York, Virginia, and South Carolina, three in Pennsylvania, and five in Boston, which thus early began to gather Massachusetts to a head.

But these were not the only papers issued. The Bank of England had been established in 1694; and eighteen years later, paper credits were issued by South Carolina to the amount of £48,000. Massachusetts with her presses could of course print more promises, and in 1714 she beat South Carolina by £2,000. Other Colonies followed, even Rhode Island, distrusting Providence, built a paper-house on the sands of credit. The floods soon came upon all these unstable edifices, and there were many “moving accidents by flood” to the washed banks. The slight silver foundations were undermined, and the banking-houses fell, and “great was the fall thereof.” Twenty-five years after the first bank was established, few of the credits were worth over twenty cents on the promised dollar. Those of North Carolina descended to seven,—almost as low as Confederate paper in 1865.

But the scheme most American in size and promises was started in France by a Scotchman in 1716. He proposed to the French Regent and established upon the boundless trust in the untold, because not unfolded, mining wealth of the valley of the Mississippi, a company, spawning 200,000 shares of stock, aggregating at the par value one thousand millions of livres, which, on the iron strength of human faith, six millions only of silver in its own vaults, and the handsome certificates that hinted at more figures than ordinary arithmetic can compute, agreed to pay thevast public debt of France, swollen under Louis XIV. higher than a Mississippi freshet, and to distribute forty per cent annually to the stockholders.Omne ignotum pro magnifico.It seemed as if the steel armor of De Soto, buried in the oozy bottom of the Mississippi River, touched by John Law’s paper wand, had dissolved, and by a wonderful alchemy had been turned into liquid gold, whose exuberant floods were to make of France an auriferous Delta. The prophets of a rise were many, the real profits very few; and in four years the principal had gone where De Soto’s armor was rusting. The golden Armada of France was snagged, and dispersed beyond the reach of diver or bell. The speed with which shares, swollen from one thousand to ten thousand, were suddenly pricked and vanished, and the rapid changes in the fortunes of their holders, are well expressed by a French pasquinade of the period:—

“Lundi, j’achetais des actions;Mardi, je gagnai des millions;Mercredi, j’ornai mon menage;Jeudi, je pris un equipage;Vendredi, je m’en fis au bal;Et Samedi, a l’hopital.”[A]

“Lundi, j’achetais des actions;

Mardi, je gagnai des millions;

Mercredi, j’ornai mon menage;

Jeudi, je pris un equipage;

Vendredi, je m’en fis au bal;

Et Samedi, a l’hopital.”[A]

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