X
Earlier attempts to colonize New England. The unwise management that ruined nearly all projects for colonization in that age and that produced such disasters in Virginia, had defeated every earlier attempt to plant English people on the New England coast. Gosnold had taken a colony to Elizabeth Island in Buzzard's Bay in 1602, but the men went back in the ship in order to share the profit of a cargo of sassafras. Captain George Popham was the head of a party that undertook to colonize the coast of Maine in 1607, but having suffered "extreme extremities" during the winter, the colonists returned the following year. In 1615 Captain John Smith himself set out with sixteen men, only to be taken by a French privateer. These and other attempts ending in failure, and many disastrous trading voyages, led to a belief that the Indian conjurers, who were known to be the devil's own, had laid a spell on the northern coast to keep the white people away. This enchanted land might long have lain waste if Captain Jones of the Mayflower, sailing to Hudson River or the region south of it, had not run foul of the shoals of Cape Cod.
XI
Sufferings at Plymouth. The Pilgrims suffered, like their predecessors, from the prevailing unskillfulness in colony-planting. They had escaped from the horrors of the Mayflower, but how much better was the wild land than the wild sea; the rude, overcrowded forest cabins than the too populous ship? "All things stared upon them with a weather-beaten face," says Bradford. The horrors of the first winter in Virginia were repeated; here, as at Jamestown, nearly all were ill at once, and nearly half of the people died before the coming of spring. The same system of partnership with mercenary shareholders or "adventurers" in England that had brought disaster in Virginia was tried with similar results at Plymouth, and a similar attempt at communism in labor and supply was made, this time under the most favorable conditions, among a people conscientious and bound together by strong religious enthusiasm. It resulted, as such sinking of personal interest must ever result, in dissensions and insubordination, in unthrift and famine.
Bradford. The colony was saved from the prolonged misery that makes the early history of Virginia horrible by the wise head and strong hand of its leader. William Bradford, who had been chosen governor on the death of Carver, a few months after the arrival at Plymouth, had been a youth but eighteen years old when he fled with the rest of the Scrooby church to Holland. He was bred to husbandry and had inherited some property. In Holland he became a silk worker and on attaining his majority set up for himself in that trade. He was still a young man when first chosen governor of the little colony, and he ruled New Plymouth almost continuously till his death – that is, for about thirty-seven years. He was of a magnanimous temper, resolute but patient, devotedly religious, but neither intolerant nor austere. He had a genius for quaintly vivid expression in writing that marked him as a man endowed with the literary gift, which comes as Heaven pleases where one would least look for it.
XII
Abolition of communism. After two years of labor in common had brought the colony more than once to the verge of ruin, Bradford had the courage and wisdom to cut the knot he could not untie. During the scarce springtime of 1623, he assigned all the detached persons in the colony to live with families, and then temporarily divided the ancient Indian field on which the settlement had been made among the several families in proportion to their number, leaving every household to shift for itself or suffer want. "Any general want or suffering hath not been among them since to this day," he writes years afterward. The assignment was a revolutionary stroke, in violation of the contract with the shareholders, and contrary to their wishes. But Bradford saw that it was a life-and-death necessity to be rid of the pernicious system, even at the cost of cutting off all support from England. In his history he draws a very clear picture of the evils of communism as he had observed them. 60
XIII
Significance of Plymouth. Why should the historian linger thus over the story of this last surviving remnant of the "Brownists"? Why have we dwelt upon the little settlement that was never very flourishing, that consisted at its best of only a few thousand peaceful and agricultural people, and that after seventy years was merged politically in its more vigorous neighbor the colony of Massachusetts Bay? Historical importance does not depend on population. Plymouth was the second step in the founding of a great nation. When Bradford and the other leaders had at last successfully extricated the little settlement from its economical difficulties, it became the sure forerunner of a greater Puritan migration. This tiny free state on the margin of a wilderness continent, like a distant glimmering pharos, showed the persecuted Puritans in England the fare-way to a harbor.
CHAPTER THE FOURTH.
THE GREAT PURITAN EXODUS
I
Result of the Pilgrim settlement. Men who undertake a great enterprise rarely find their anticipations fulfilled; they are fortunate if their general aim is reached at last in any way. The Pilgrims had migrated, hoping to be "stepping-stones to others," as they phrased it. They thought that many like-minded in matters of religion would come to them out of England, but the Separatist movement had been worn out by persecution. There were few open dissenters left, and the Pilgrims, by their long exile, had lost all close relations with their own country. Among those that came to Plymouth from England were some whose coming tended to dilute the religious life and lower the moral standards of the colony. The fervor of the Pilgrims themselves abated something of its intensity in the preoccupations incident to pioneer life. The hope of expanding their religious organization by the rapid growth of the colony was not fulfilled; discontented Puritans were not eager to settle under the government of Separatists, and ten years after their migration the Plymouth colony contained little more than three hundred people.
The religious motive. None the less the hope of the Pilgrims was realized; they became stepping-stones to thousands of others. Captain John Smith laughed at the "humorous ignorances" of these "Brownist" settlers, but, humorous or not, ignorant or not, the "Brownists" remained on the coast while other emigrants retreated. In spite of their terrible suffering none of the Pilgrims went back. This is the capital fact in their history. A new force had been introduced into colonization. Henceforth persecuted or discontented religionists, prompted by a motive vastly more strenuous and enduring than cupidity, were to bear the main brunt of breaking a way into the wilderness.
Commercial settlements. The first effect of the slender success at Plymouth was to stimulate speculative and merely adventurous migration. From 1607 until the arrival of the Pilgrims in 1620 no English colony had landed on the northern coast; but after the Pilgrims came, fish-drying and fur-buying stations began to appear on the banks of the Piscataqua and the coast eastward in 1622 and 1623. These tiny settlements were germs of New Hampshire and Maine, the only New England plantations begun without any admixture of religious motives. A commercial colony was tried in Massachusetts Bay as early as 1622, but it failed. There were other like attempts. In 1624 some men of Dorchester, headed by John White, the "Patriarch" Puritan clergyman, sent out a colony to Cape Ann. The members of this company were to grow maize to supply fishing ships, and in the season the same men were to lend a hand on board the ships, which would thus be saved the necessity for carrying double crews. But this plausible scheme proved a case of seeking strawberries in the sea and red herrings in the wood. Farmers were but lubbers at codfishing, and salt-water fishermen were clumsy enough in the cornfield. John White's The Planter's Plea, in Young's Chronicles of Mass. Losses of several sorts forced the Dorchester Company to dissolve. Four members of their futile colony, encouraged by a message from White, remained on Cape Ann. Removing to the present site of Salem, they waited at the risk of their lives for the coming of a new colony from England.
Individual settlers. Solitary adventurers of the sort known on nearly every frontier were presently to be found in several places. The scholarly recluse was represented by Blackstone, who had selected for his secluded abode a spot convenient to a spring of good water where the town of Boston was afterward planted; the inevitable Scotch adventurer was on an island in Boston Harbor; Samuel Maverick, a pattern of frontier hospitality and generosity, took up his abode on Noddle's Island; while the rollicking and scoffing libertine was found in Thomas Morton, who with some rebellious bond servants got possession of a fortified house in what is now Braintree. Here Morton welcomed renegade servants from Plymouth and elsewhere. He wrote ribald verses which he posted on his Maypole, and devised May-dances in which the saturnine Indian women participated. He broke all the commandments with delight, carried on a profitable trade in selling firearms to the savages in defiance of royal proclamations, and wrought whatever other deviltry came within his reach, until his neighbors could no longer endure the proximity of so dangerous a firebrand. Little Captain Standish, whom Morton derisively dubbed "Captain Shrimp," descended on this kingdom of misrule at last and broke up the perpetual carnival, sending Morton to England. 61
The settlement of New England was thus beginning sporadically and slowly. If the Massachusetts Puritans had not come, these feeble and scattered plantations might have grown into colonies after a long time, as such beginnings did in New Hampshire and Maine, and later in North Carolina, but having no strong neighbor to support them, it is likely that they would all have been driven away or annihilated by some inevitable collision with the Indians.
II
Puritanism at the accession of Charles I. English Puritanism throughout the reign of James I had been the party of strict morals, of austere and Pharisaic scrupulosity, of rigid Sabbath observance, and of Calvinistic dogmatism. During that reign it had passed through its last transformation in becoming a political party – the party of anti-Catholic politics at home and abroad. Because Parliament was on its side, the mere course of events had made the Puritan party favor the predominance of Parliament, and this brought it to represent liberalism in politics. By his unconcealed partisanship, James had contrived to make the Puritans a permanent opposition suspected of disliking monarchy itself. Charles I was even more the antagonist of Puritanism than James.
Later Puritanism conservative. In one other respect the position of Puritanism had been gradually changed by mere parallax. In Elizabeth's reign it had been the party of innovation. It was no longer the party of change in religion when Charles came to the throne. The adoption of the Arminian system of doctrine by many of the High-churchmen, and the reactionary innovations now proposed by ecclesiastics like Laud, had left Puritanism to stand for Protestant conservatism. It was immeasurably the gainer with the mass of slow-moving people by this change of relative position. The parliamentary struggle with James and Charles added to the religious Puritans a numerous body of political Puritans who, without much care about religion, were fain to ally their political discontent with the discontent of those who resisted ecclesiastical retrogression. This compact party, powerful after all its defeats, was bound by its position to cherish every aspiration for the improvement of morals, every indignant movement for the suppression of abuses, and it became the ally of every popular resentment against royal absolutism or episcopal encroachment, and the advocate, almost to fanaticism, of an anti-Spanish foreign policy, and a domestic policy in which repression and persecution of Roman Catholics held first place.
III
Rise of Laud. But the king and the High-churchmen were the party in possession. Buckingham, in the first years of Charles, was more than ever dominant at court, and Buckingham's favorite, just rising above the horizon, was Dr. Laud, Bishop of St. Davids at the death of James, and soon afterward translated to Bath and Wells and then to London. It soon came to be understood that he was only waiting for the death of his opponent, Archbishop Abbott, to take the primacy, much of the power of which he had already contrived to grasp. 62 On the death of Buckingham, Laud succeeded him as chief favorite at court. The one great and real service which this able and indefatigable divine rendered the world is the last he would have chosen. He was the main spur to the settlement of Puritan colonies in New England.
Character of Laud. Do our best, we moderns shall hardly avoid injustice in our opinion of Laud. The changes of time and the advance of ideas have rendered a sympathetic judgment of him difficult. Ecclesiastic above all, he was not, like Whitgift and Bancroft, a Protestant High-churchman. He sought to make the English church Catholic and mediæval, yet he would on no account attach it to Rome. Like Whitgift, he made the church dependent on royal authority, and in this he was far removed from the earlier churchmen. There was nothing spiritual in his nature; his personal devotion had neither agony nor exaltation. He had none of the mediæval enthusiasm that prompted the vigils of his contemporary, Nicholas Ferrar, for example, and elevated the master of Little Gidding to a saintship, amiable and touching. Notwithstanding the energy of Laud's devotion, his nature was as shallow and objective as it was sincere. It has been remarked that when Laud spoke of the beauty of holiness he meant no more than decorum in public worship, the beauty of a well-ordered church and of proper intonation and genuflexion. He seemed to touch a modern note when he proposed to suppress the futile debate between Calvinists and Arminians because it tended to disturb Christian charity; but Laud's Christian charity, like his holiness, was purely external; it was merely quiet submission to one ritual and one form of discipline. His relentless, vindictive, and even cruel temper toward opponents showed him incapable of conceiving of charity in any spiritual sense. He disliked controversy because it put obstacles in the way of uniformity, and he had no taste for speculative debate because it tended to undermine authority. His intellect was utterly practical and phenomenally acute. It was incredibly energetic, and its energy was intensified by its narrowness. His attachment to the church had no relation to the beneficent utilities of the church. The church was a fetich for which he was ready to die without a murmur. In his zeal he was reckless of personal danger and sometimes unmindful of the moral complexion of his actions. His egotism was so interblended with his zeal that he could not separate one from the other, nor can the student of his character. A disservice to him was an affront to Almighty God. The very honesty of such a man is pernicious; a little duplicity might have softened the outward manifestations of his hard nature. Unhappily, there was not even indolence or self-indulgence to moderate his all but superhuman activity, which pushed his domination to its possibilities, and, with a vigilance aspiring to omniscience, penetrated to the minutest details in the administration of church and state. He even filed papers giving the elements of the debates on good works as an evidence of sanctification carried on between Hooker and Cotton in the cabin meeting-houses of New England. For the rest he presents the paradoxes one expects in so marked a character. While he had no taste for the credulous dogmatism of his time, he showed a certain relish for superstitions in recording dreams and omens, yet he had none of the timidity of superstition. He was, moreover, fearless in peril, and he faced unpopularity without flinching. Stubborn and inflexible with the clergy and the populace, obdurate and pitiless with those who had offended him or his king or his church, he was flexible and insinuating in his relations with those in power. His unworthy yielding to his early patron, the Earl of Devonshire, in a matter which concerned his ecclesiastical conscience, gave him a bitter and lifelong repentance. His complacence to Buckingham, and his servile devotion to Charles, seem a little despicable. Letter to Selden in Chalmers, art. Laud. He was even willing at the last to make terms with Parliament, when it became plain that Parliament was the new master. Though obsequious, he was the farthest possible from a coward, and he accepted death on the scaffold with the serene composure of a martyr.
IV
Political conditions promote emigration. The great migration to New England set in soon after the beginning of Laud's ascendency in the ecclesiastical government of England. It waned as he declined, and ceased forever with his fall. There is a witty justness in the phrase by which a colonial historian dubs Laud "the father of New England." Other archbishops had contented themselves with crushing the Separatists, but, with characteristic boldness and logical thoroughness, Laud struck at the powerful Puritan party which had contrived for more than half a century to remain in the Church of England while protesting against the discipline and service of the church. The arbitrary government of the new king, the dissolution of Parliament, and the imprisonment of liberal leaders cut off hope of securing church reform or a relaxation of oppressive laws. Gorges's Briefe Narration. High-church pulpits resounded with arguments in favor of the king's absolute authority and the duty of unquestioning obedience, while the declared principles of the king and his court left the property, liberty, and life of the subject exposed to the rapacity or the vindictiveness of those in power. In view of these things, some of the Puritans began to think the American wilderness a better place of residence than England.
V
Religious motives for Puritan emigration. The state of the church was even more a reason for removal than the oppressions of the government. Persecution had failed to drive Puritan ministers or their followers into what they deemed the capital sin of schism. They hated the domination of the bishops, communion with the ungodly, and the absence of a rigid discipline. But they had been sustained through long years of waiting by the hope of delivering the church from those who oppressed and defiled her. They proposed, whenever they could gain power, to winnow the chaff from the wheat, and they probably destined the chaff to swift destruction. But the hope of seeing a church without spot or wrinkle, prayer book or bishop, died under the reactionary policy of Buckingham and Laud, and many came to look with favor on a project whose full import was only whispered in the ear, to found in the wilds of America a "particular church," as they phrased it – a new church with a right of priority in a new land and backed by the sanction of the government of the country. It was no modern generalized love of liberty, civil or religious, but a strenuous desire to find a place where they might make real their ideal of church organization that brought the Puritans out of their comfortable nests in England to dwell in poor cabins in a wilderness. It is a motive for braving dangers by sea and land hard of comprehension in our Sadducean age.
Fear of judgments. There was one other consideration still more difficult for men of our day to understand. Political and military reverses had apparently well-nigh wrecked Protestantism on the Continent. Many Protestants in the Palatinate and elsewhere were making peace by becoming Roman Catholics. "All other churches of Europe are brought to desolation, & our sinnes, for which the Lord beginnes allreaddy to frowne upon us & to cutte us short, doe threatne evill times to be comminge upon us." These words are set down in the Reasons for New England as the second consideration. In another part of the same paper it is urged that the "woefull spectacle" of the ruin of "Churches beyound the Seas," "may teach us more wisdome to avoide the Plauge when it is foreseene & not to tarry as they did till it overtake us." Life and Letters of Winthrop, i, 390, 313. The dominance of Old Testament ideas is easily seen here. But this fleeing from judgments that were to fall not on the lives or possessions of men, but on the churches themselves – judgments of a spiritual nature, apprehended only by inference – was a refinement of Hebraism never known to the Hebrews. The delusion that Laud meant to hand over the English church bound hand and foot to Rome may have made such judgments seem visibly imminent. 63