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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12767 ***
+
+THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW ENGLAND
+
+OR THE PURITAN THEOCRACY IN ITS RELATIONS TO CIVIL AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY
+
+BY
+
+JOHN FISKE
+
+"The Lord Christ intends to achieve greater matters by this little
+handful than the world is aware of." EDWARD JOHNSON, _Wonder-Working
+Providence of Zion's Saviour in New England_ 1654
+
+1892
+
+
+
+
+To
+
+MY DEAR CLASSMATES,
+
+
+BENJAMIN THOMPSON FROTHINGHAM,
+
+WILLIAM AUGUSTUS WHITE,
+
+AND
+
+FREDERIC CROMWELL,
+
+I DEDICATE THIS BOOK.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+This book contains the substance of the lectures originally given at
+the Washington University, St. Louis, in May, 1887, in the course of my
+annual visit to that institution as University Professor of American
+History. The lectures were repeated in the following month of June at
+Portland, Oregon, and since then either the whole course, or one or more
+of the lectures, have been given in Boston, Newton, Milton, Chelsea,
+New Bedford, Lowell, Worcester, Springfield, and Pittsfield, Mass.;
+Farmington, Middletown, and Stamford, Conn.; New York, Brooklyn, and
+Tarrytown, N.Y.; Philadelphia and Ogontz, Pa.; Wilmington, Del.;
+Chicago, 111.; San Francisco and Oakland, Cal.
+
+In this sketch of the circumstances which attended the settlement of New
+England, I have purposely omitted many details which in a formal history
+of that period would need to be included. It has been my aim to give the
+outline of such a narrative as to indicate the principles at work in
+the history of New England down to the Revolution of 1689. When I was
+writing the lectures I had just been reading, with much interest, the
+work of my former pupil, Mr. Brooks Adams, entitled "The Emancipation of
+Massachusetts."
+
+With the specific conclusions set forth in that book I found myself
+often agreeing, but it seemed to me that the general aspect of the case
+would be considerably modified and perhaps somewhat more adequately
+presented by enlarging the field of view. In forming historical
+judgments a great deal depends upon our perspective. Out of the very
+imperfect human nature which is so slowly and painfully casting off the
+original sin of its inheritance from primeval savagery, it is scarcely
+possible in any age to get a result which will look quite satisfactory
+to the men of a riper and more enlightened age. Fortunately we can learn
+something from the stumblings of our forefathers, and a good many
+things seem quite clear to us to-day which two centuries ago were only
+beginning to be dimly discerned by a few of the keenest and boldest
+spirits. The faults of the Puritan theocracy, which found its most
+complete development in Massachusetts, are so glaring that it is idle to
+seek to palliate them or to explain them away. But if we would really
+understand what was going on in the Puritan world of the seventeenth
+century, and how a better state of things has grown out of it, we must
+endeavour to distinguish and define the elements of wholesome strength
+in that theocracy no less than its elements of crudity and weakness.
+
+The first chapter, on "The Roman Idea and the English Idea," contains a
+somewhat more developed statement of the points briefly indicated in the
+thirteenth section (pp. 85-95) of "The Destiny of Man." As all of the
+present book, except the first chapter, was written here under the
+shadow of the Washington University, I take pleasure in dating it from
+this charming and hospitable city where I have passed some of the most
+delightful hours of my life.
+
+St. Louis, April 15, 1889.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE ROMAN IDEA AND THE ENGLISH IDEA.
+
+When did the Roman Empire come to an end? ... 1-3
+
+Meaning of Odovakar's work ... 3
+
+The Holy Roman Empire ... 4, 5
+
+Gradual shifting of primacy from the men who spoke Latin, and their
+descendants, to the men who speak English ... 6-8
+
+Political history is the history of nation-making ... 8, 9
+
+The ORIENTAL method of nation-making; _conquest without incorporation_
+... 9
+
+Illustrations from eastern despotisms ... 10
+
+And from the Moors in Spain ... 11
+
+The ROMAN method of nation-making; _conquest with incorporation, but
+without representation_ ... 12
+
+Its slow development ... 13
+
+Vices in the Roman system. ... 14
+
+Its fundamental defect ... 15
+
+It knew nothing of political power delegated by the people to
+representatives ... 16
+
+And therefore the expansion of its dominion ended in a centralized
+Despotism ... 16
+
+Which entailed the danger that human life might come to stagnate in
+Europe, as it had done in Asia ... 17
+
+The danger was warded off by the Germanic invasions, which, however,
+threatened to undo the work which the Empire had done in organizing
+European society ... 17
+
+But such disintegration was prevented by the sway which the Roman Church
+had come to exercise over the European mind ... 18
+
+The wonderful thirteenth century ... 19
+
+The ENGLISH method of nation-making; _incorporation with representation_
+... 20
+
+Pacific tendencies of federalism ... 21
+
+Failure of Greek attempts at federation ... 22
+
+Fallacy of the notion that republics must be small ... 23
+
+"It is not the business of a government to support its people, but of
+the people to support their government" ... 24
+
+Teutonic March-meetings and representative assemblies ... 25
+
+Peculiarity of the Teutonic conquest of Britain ... 26, 27
+
+Survival and development of the Teutonic representative assembly in
+England ... 28
+
+Primitive Teutonic institutions less modified in England than in Germany
+... 29
+
+Some effects of the Norman conquest of England ... 30
+
+The Barons' War and the first House of Commons ... 31
+
+Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty ... 32
+
+Conflict between Roman Idea and English Idea begins to become clearly
+visible in the thirteenth century ... 33
+
+Decline of mediaeval Empire and Church with the growth of modern
+nationalities ... 34
+
+Overthrow of feudalism, and increasing power of the crown ... 35
+
+Formidable strength of the Roman Idea ... 36
+
+Had it not been for the Puritans, political liberty would probably have
+disappeared from the world ... 37
+
+Beginnings of Protestantism in the thirteenth century ... 38
+
+The Cathari, or Puritans of the Eastern Empire ... 39
+
+The Albigenses ... 40
+
+Effects of persecution; its feebleness in England ... 41
+
+Wyclif and the Lollards ... 42
+
+Political character of Henry VIII.'s revolt against Rome ... 43
+
+The yeoman Hugh Latimer ... 44
+
+The moment of Cromwell's triumph was the most critical moment in history
+... 45
+
+Contrast with France; fate of the Huguenots ... 46, 47
+
+Victory of the English Idea ... 48
+
+Significance of the Puritan Exodus ... 49
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE PURITAN EXODUS.
+
+Influence of Puritanism upon modern Europe ... 50, 51
+
+Work of the Lollards ... 52
+
+They made the Bible the first truly popular literature in England ...
+53, 54
+
+The English version of the Bible ... 54, 55
+
+Secret of Henry VIII.'s swift success in his revolt against Rome ... 56
+
+Effects of the persecution under Mary ... 57
+
+Calvin's theology in its political bearings ... 58, 59
+
+Elizabeth's policy and its effects ... 60, 61
+
+Puritan sea-rovers ... 61
+
+Geographical distribution of Puritanism in England; it was strongest in
+the eastern counties ... 62
+
+Preponderance of East Anglia in the Puritan exodus ... 63
+
+Familiar features of East Anglia to the visitor from New England ... 64
+
+Puritanism was not intentionally allied with liberalism ... 65
+
+Robert Brown and the Separatists ... 66
+
+Persecution of the Separatists ... 67
+
+Recantation of Brown; it was reserved for William Brewster to take the
+lead in the Puritan exodus ... 68
+
+James Stuart, and his encounter with Andrew Melville ... 69
+
+What James intended to do when he became King of England ... 70
+
+His view of the political situation, as declared in the conference at
+Hampton Court ... 71
+
+The congregation of Separatists at Scrooby ... 72
+
+The flight to Holland, and settlement at Leyden in 1609 ... 73
+
+Systematic legal toleration in Holland ... 74
+
+Why the Pilgrims did not stay there; they wished to keep up their
+distinct organization and found a state ... 74
+
+And to do this they must cross the ocean, because European territory was
+all preoccupied ... 75
+
+The London and Plymouth companies ... 75
+
+First explorations of the New England coast; Bartholomew Gosnold (1602),
+and George Weymouth (1605) ... 76
+
+The Popham colony (1607) ... 77
+
+Captain John Smith gives to New England its name (1614) ... 78
+
+The Pilgrims at Leyden decide to make a settlement near the Delaware
+river ... 79
+
+How King James regarded the enterprise ... 80
+
+Voyage of the Mayflower; she goes astray and takes the Pilgrims to Cape
+Cod bay ... 81
+
+Founding of the Plymouth colony (1620) ... 82, 83
+
+Why the Indians did not molest the settlers ... 84, 85
+
+The chief interest of this beginning of the Puritan exodus lies not so
+much in what it achieved as in what it suggested ... 86, 87
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE PLANTING OF NEW ENGLAND.
+
+Sir Ferdinando Gorges and the Council for New England ... 88, 89
+
+Wessagusset and Merrymount ... 90, 91
+
+The Dorchester adventurers ... 92
+
+John White wishes to raise a bulwark against the Kingdom of Antichrist
+... 93
+
+And John Endicott undertakes the work of building it ... 94
+
+Conflicting grants sow seeds of trouble; the Gorges and Mason claims ...
+94, 95
+
+Endicott's arrival in New England, and the founding of Salem ... 95
+
+The Company of Massachusetts Bay; Francis Higginson takes a powerful
+reinforcement to Salem ... 96
+
+The development of John White's enterprise into the Company of
+Massachusetts Bay coincided with the first four years of the reign of
+Charles I ... 97
+
+Extraordinary scene in the House of Commons (June 5, 1628) ... 98, 99
+
+The King turns Parliament out of doors (March 2, 1629) ... 100
+
+Desperate nature of the crisis ... 100, 101
+
+The meeting at Cambridge (Aug. 26, 1629), and decision to transfer the
+charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company, and the government established
+under it, to New England ... 102
+
+Leaders of the great migration; John Winthrop ... 102
+
+And Thomas Dudley ... 103
+
+Founding of Massachusetts; the schemes of Gorges overwhelmed ... 104
+
+Beginnings of American constitutional history; the question as to
+self-government raised at Watertown ... 105
+
+Representative system established ... 106
+
+Bicameral assembly; story of the stray pig ... 107
+
+Ecclesiastical polity; the triumph of Separatism ... 108
+
+Restriction of the suffrage to members of the Puritan congregational
+churches ... 109
+
+Founding of Harvard College ... 110
+
+Threefold danger to the New England settlers in 1636:--
+
+  1. From the King, who prepares to attack the charter, but is foiled by
+dissensions at home ... 111-113
+
+  2. From religious dissensions; Roger Williams ... 114-116
+     Henry Vane and Anne Hutchinson ... 116-119
+     Beginnings of New Hampshire and Rhode Island ... 119-120
+
+  3. From the Indians; the Pequot supremacy ... 121
+
+First movements into the Connecticut valley, and disputes with the Dutch
+settlers of New Amsterdam ... 122, 123
+
+Restriction of the suffrage leads to disaffection in Massachusetts;
+profoundly interesting opinions of Winthrop and Hooker ... 123, 124
+
+Connecticut pioneers and their hardships ... 125
+
+Thomas Hooker, and the founding of Connecticut ... 120
+
+The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut (Jan 14, 1639); the first written
+constitution that created a government ... 127
+
+Relations of Connecticut to the genesis of the Federal Union ... 128
+
+Origin of the Pequot War; Sassacus tries to unite the Indian tribes in a
+crusade against the English ... 129, 130
+
+The schemes of Sassacus are foiled by Roger Williams ... 130
+
+The Pequots take the war path alone ... 131
+
+And are exterminated ... 132-134
+
+John Davenport, and the founding of New Haven ... 135
+
+New Haven legislation, and legend of the "Blue Laws" ... 136
+
+With the meeting of the Long Parliament, in 1640, the Puritan exodus
+comes to its end ... 137
+
+What might have been ... 138, 391
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE NEW ENGLAND CONFEDERACY.
+
+The Puritan exodus was purely and exclusively English ... 140
+
+And the settlers were all thrifty and prosperous; chiefly country
+squires and yeomanry of the best and sturdiest type ... 141, 142
+
+In all history there has been no other instance of colonization so
+exclusively effected by picked and chosen men ... 143
+
+What, then, was the principle of selection? The migration was not
+intended to promote what we call religious liberty ... 144, 145
+
+Theocratic ideal of the Puritans ... 146
+
+The impulse which sought to realize itself in the Puritan ideal was an
+ethical impulse ... 147
+
+In interpreting Scripture, the Puritan appealed to his Reason ... 148,
+149
+
+Value of such perpetual theological discussion as was carried on in
+early New England ... 150, 151
+
+Comparison with the history of Scotland ... 152
+
+Bearing of these considerations upon the history of the New England
+confederacy ... 153
+
+The existence of so many colonies (Plymouth, Massachusetts, Connecticut,
+New Haven, Rhode Island, the Piscataqua towns, etc.) was due to
+differences of opinion on questions in which men's religious ideas were
+involved ... 154
+
+And this multiplication of colonies led to a notable and significant
+attempt at confederation ... 155
+
+Turbulence of dissent in Rhode Island ... 156
+
+The Earl of Warwick, and his Board of Commissioners ... 157
+
+Constitution of the Confederacy ... 158
+
+It was only a league, not a federal union ... 159
+
+Its formation involved a tacit assumption of sovereignty ... 160
+
+The fall of Charles I. brought up, for a moment, the question as to the
+supremacy of Parliament over the colonies ... 161
+
+Some interesting questions ... 162
+
+Genesis of the persecuting spirit ... 163
+
+Samuel Gorton and his opinions ... 163-165
+
+He flees to Aquedneck and is banished thence ... 166
+
+Providence protests against him ... 167
+
+He flees to Shawomet, where he buys land of the Indians ... 168
+
+Miantonomo and Uncas ... 169, 170
+
+Death of Miantonomo ... 171
+
+Edward Johnson leads an expedition against Shawomet ... 172
+
+Trial and sentence of the heretics ... 173
+
+Winthrop declares himself in a prophetic opinion ... 174
+
+The Presbyterian cabal ... 175-177
+
+The Cambridge Platform; deaths of Winthrop and Cotton ... 177
+
+Views of Winthrop and Cotton as to toleration in matters of Religion ...
+178
+
+After their death, the leadership in Massachusetts was in the hands of
+Endicott and Norton ... 179
+
+The Quakers; their opinions and behavior ... 179-181
+
+Violent manifestations of dissent ... 182
+
+Anne Austin and Mary Fisher; how they were received in Boston ... 183
+
+The confederated colonies seek to expel the Quakers; noble attitude of
+Rhode Island ... 184
+
+Roger Williams appeals to his friend, Oliver Cromwell ... 185
+
+The "heavenly speech" of Sir Harry Vane ... 185
+
+Laws passed against the Quakers ... 186
+
+How the death penalty was regarded at that time in New England ... 187
+
+Executions of Quakers on Boston Common ... 188, 189
+
+Wenlock Christison's defiance and victory ... 189, 190
+
+The "King's Missive" ... 191
+
+Why Charles II. interfered to protect the Quakers ... 191
+
+His hostile feeling toward the New England governments ... 192
+
+The regicide judges, Goffe and Whalley ... 193, 194
+
+New Haven annexed to Connecticut ... 194, 195
+
+Abraham Pierson, and the founding of Newark ... 196
+
+Breaking-down of the theocratic policy ... 197
+
+Weakening of the Confederacy ... 198
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+KING PHILIP'S WAR.
+
+Relations between the Puritan settlers and the Indians ... 199
+
+Trade with the Indians ... 200
+
+Missionary work; Thomas Mayhew ... 201
+
+John Eliot and his translation of the Bible ... 202
+
+His preaching to the Indians ... 203
+
+His villages of Christian Indians ... 204
+
+The Puritan's intention was to deal gently and honourably with the red
+men ... 205
+
+Why Pennsylvania was so long unmolested by the Indians ... 205, 206
+
+Difficulty of the situation in New England ... 207
+
+It is hard for the savage and the civilized man to understand one
+another ... 208
+
+How Eliot's designs must inevitably have been misinterpreted by the
+Indians ... 209
+
+It is remarkable that peace should have been so long preserved ... 210
+
+Deaths of Massasoit and his son Alexander ... 211
+
+Very little is known about the nature of Philip's designs ... 212
+
+The meeting at Taunton ... 213
+
+Sausamon informs against Philip ... 213
+
+And is murdered ... 214
+
+Massacres at Swanzey and Dartmouth ... 214
+
+Murder of Captain Hutchinson ... 215
+
+Attack on Brookfield, which is relieved by Simon Willard ... 216
+
+Fighting in the Connecticut valley; the mysterious stranger at Hadley
+... 217, 218
+
+Ambuscade at Bloody Brook ... 219
+
+Popular excitement in Boston ... 220
+
+The Narragansetts prepare to take the war-path ... 221
+
+And Governor Winslow leads an army against them ... 222, 223
+
+Storming of the great swamp fortress ... 224
+
+Slaughter of the Indians ... 225
+
+Effect of the blow ... 226
+
+Growth of the humane sentiment in recent times, due to the fact that the
+horrors of war are seldom brought home to everybody's door ... 227, 228
+
+Warfare with savages is likely to be truculent in character ... 229
+
+Attack upon Lancaster ... 230
+
+Mrs. Rowlandson's narrative ... 231-233
+
+Virtual extermination of the Indians (February to August, 1676) ... 233,
+234
+
+Death of Canonchet ... 234
+
+Philip pursued by Captain Church ... 235
+
+Death of Philip ... 236
+
+Indians sold into slavery ... 237
+
+Conduct of the Christian Indians ... 238
+
+War with the Tarratines ... 239
+
+Frightful destruction of life and property ... 240
+
+Henceforth the red man figures no more in the history of New England,
+except in frontier raids under French guidance ... 241
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE TYRANNY OF ANDROS.
+
+Romantic features in the early history of New England ... 242
+
+Captain Edward Johnson, of Woburn, and his book on "The Wonder-working
+Providence of Zion's Saviour in New England" ... 243,244
+
+Acts of the Puritans often judged by an unreal and impossible standard
+... 245
+
+Spirit of the "Wonder-working Providence" ... 246
+
+Merits and faults of the Puritan theocracy ... 247
+
+Restriction of the suffrage to church members ... 248
+
+It was a source of political discontent ... 249
+
+Inquisitorial administration of justice ... 250
+
+The "Half way Covenant" ... 251
+
+Founding of the Old South church ... 252
+
+Unfriendly relations between Charles II and Massachusetts ... 253
+
+Complaints against Massachusetts ... 254
+
+The Lords of Trade ... 255
+
+Arrival of Edward Randolph in Boston ... 256
+
+Joseph Dudley and the beginnings of Toryism in New England ... 257, 258
+
+Charles II. erects the four Piscataqua towns into the royal province of
+New Hampshire ... 259
+
+And quarrels with Massachusetts over the settlement of the Gorges claim
+to the Maine district ... 260
+
+Simon Bradstreet and his verse-making wife ... 261
+
+Massachusetts answers the king's peremptory message ... 262
+
+Secret treaty between Charles II. and Louis XIV ... 263
+
+Shameful proceedings in England ... 264
+
+Massachusetts refuses to surrender her charter; and accordingly it is
+annulled by decree of chancery, June 21, 1684 ... 265
+
+Effect of annulling the charter ... 266
+
+Death of Charles II, accession of James II., and appointment of Sir
+Edmund Andros as viceroy over New England, with despotic powers ... 267
+
+The charter oak ... 268
+
+Episcopal services in Boston ... 268, 269
+
+Founding of the King's Chapel ... 269
+
+The tyranny ... 270
+
+John Wise of Ipswich ... 271
+
+Fall of James II ... 271
+
+Insurrection in Boston, and overthrow of Andros ... 272
+
+Effects of the Revolution of 1689 ... 273
+
+Need for union among all the northern colonies ... 274
+
+Plymouth, Maine, and Acadia annexed to Massachusetts ... 275
+
+Which becomes a royal province ... 276
+
+And is thus brought into political sympathy with Virginia ... 276
+
+The seeds of the American Revolution were already sown, and the spirit
+of 1776 was foreshadowed in 1689 ... 277, 278
+
+
+
+
+THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW ENGLAND.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE ROMAN IDEA AND THE ENGLISH IDEA.
+
+
+It used to be the fashion of historians, looking superficially at the
+facts presented in chronicles and tables of dates, without analyzing and
+comparing vast groups of facts distributed through centuries, or even
+suspecting the need for such analysis and comparison, to assign the date
+476 A.D. as the moment at which the Roman Empire came to an end. It was
+in that year that the soldier of fortune, Odovakar, commander of the
+Herulian mercenaries in Italy, sent the handsome boy Romulus, son of
+Orestes, better known as "little Augustus," from his imperial throne
+to the splendid villa of Lucullus near Naples, and gave him a yearly
+pension of $35,000 [6,000 solidi] to console him for the loss of a
+world. As 324 years elapsed before another emperor was crowned at Rome,
+and as the political headship of Europe after that happy restoration
+remained upon the German soil to which the events of the eighth century
+had shifted it, nothing could seem more natural than the habit which
+historians once had, of saying that the mighty career of Rome had ended,
+as it had begun, with a Romulus. Sometimes the date 476 was even set up
+as a great landmark dividing modern from ancient history. For those,
+however, who took such a view, it was impossible to see the events of
+the Middle Ages in their true relations to what went before and what
+came after. It was impossible to understand what went on in Italy in
+the sixth century, or to explain the position of that great Roman power
+which had its centre on the Bosphorus, which in the code of Justinian
+left us our grandest monument of Roman law, and which for a thousand
+years was the staunch bulwark of Europe against the successive
+aggressions of Persian, Saracen, and Turk. It was equally impossible to
+understand the rise of the Papal power, the all-important politics of
+the great Saxon and Swabian emperors, the relations of mediaeval England
+to the Continental powers, or the marvellously interesting growth of the
+modern European system of nationalities. [Sidenote: When did the Roman
+Empire come to an end?]
+
+Since the middle of the nineteenth century the study of history has
+undergone changes no less sweeping than those which have in the same
+time affected the study of the physical sciences. Vast groups of facts
+distributed through various ages and countries have been subjected to
+comparison and analysis, with the result that they have not only thrown
+fresh light upon one another, but have in many cases enabled us to
+recover historic points of view that had long been buried in oblivion.
+Such an instance was furnished about twenty-five years ago by Dr.
+Bryce's epoch-making work on the Holy Roman Empire. Since then
+historians still recognize the importance of the date 476 as that which
+left the Bishop of Rome the dominant personage in Italy, and marked the
+shifting of the political centre of gravity from the Palatine to the
+Lateran. This was one of those subtle changes which escape notice until
+after some of their effects have attracted attention. The most important
+effect, in this instance, realized after three centuries, was not the
+overthrow of Roman power in the West, but its indefinite extension and
+expansion. The men of 476 not only had no idea that they were entering
+upon a new era, but least of all did they dream that the Roman Empire
+had come to an end, or was ever likely to. Its cities might be pillaged,
+its provinces overrun, but the supreme imperial power itself was
+something without which the men of those days could not imagine the
+world as existing. It must have its divinely ordained representative in
+one place if not in another. If the throne in Italy was vacant, it
+was no more than had happened before; there was still a throne at
+Constantinople, and to its occupant Zeno the Roman Senate sent a
+message, saying that one emperor was enough for both ends of the earth,
+and begging him to confer upon the gallant Odovakar the title of
+patrician, and entrust the affairs of Italy to his care. So when
+Sicambrian Chlodwig set up his Merovingian kingdom in northern Gaul, he
+was glad to array himself in the robe of a Roman consul, and obtain from
+the eastern emperor a formal ratification of his rule.
+
+[Transcriber's note: page missing in original.] still survives in
+political methods and habits of thought that will yet be long in dying
+out. With great political systems, as with typical forms of organic
+life, the processes of development and of extinction are exceedingly
+slow, and it is seldom that the stages can be sharply marked by dates.
+The processes which have gradually shifted the seat of empire until the
+prominent part played nineteen centuries ago by Rome and Alexandria,
+on opposite sides of the Mediterranean, has been at length assumed by
+London and New York, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, form a most
+interesting subject of study. But to understand them, one must do much
+more than merely catalogue the facts of political history; one must
+acquire a knowledge of the drifts and tendencies of human thought and
+feeling and action from the earliest ages to the times in which we
+live. In covering so wide a field we cannot of course expect to obtain
+anything like complete results. In order to make a statement simple
+enough to be generally intelligible, it is necessary to pass over many
+circumstances and many considerations that might in one way and another
+qualify what we have to say. Nevertheless it is quite possible for us to
+discern, in their bold general outlines, some historic truths of supreme
+importance. In contemplating the salient features of the change which
+has now for a long time been making the world more English and less
+Roman, we shall find not only intellectual pleasure and profit but
+practical guidance. For in order to understand this slow but mighty
+change, we must look a little into that process of nation-making which
+has been going on since prehistoric ages and is going on here among us
+to-day, and from the recorded experience of men in times long past
+we may gather lessons of infinite value for ourselves and for our
+children's children. As in all the achievements of mankind it is only
+after much weary experiment and many a heart-sickening failure that
+success is attained, so has it been especially with nation-making. Skill
+in the political art is the fruit of ages of intellectual and moral
+discipline; and just as picture-writing had to come before printing and
+canoes before steamboats, so the cruder political methods had to be
+tried and found wanting, amid the tears and groans of unnumbered
+generations, before methods less crude could be put into operation. In
+the historic survey upon which we are now to enter, we shall see that
+the Roman Empire represented a crude method of nation-making which began
+with a masterful career of triumph over earlier and cruder methods, but
+has now for several centuries been giving way before a more potent and
+satisfactory method. And just as the merest glance at the history of
+Europe shows us Germanic peoples wresting the supremacy from Rome, so in
+this deeper study we shall discover a grand and far-reaching Teutonic
+Idea of political life overthrowing and supplanting the Roman Idea. Our
+attention will be drawn toward England as the battle-ground and the
+seventeenth century as the critical moment of the struggle; we shall see
+in Puritanism the tremendous militant force that determined the issue;
+and when our perspective has thus become properly adjusted, we shall
+begin to realize for the first time how truly wonderful was the age that
+witnessed the Beginnings of New England. We have long had before our
+minds the colossal figure of Roman Julius as "the foremost man of all
+this world," but as the seventeenth century recedes into the past
+the figure of English Oliver begins to loom up as perhaps even more
+colossal. In order to see these world-events in their true perspective,
+and to make perfectly clear the manner in which we are to estimate them,
+we must go a long distance away from them. We must even go back, as
+nearly as may be, to the beginning of things. [Sidenote: Gradual
+shifting of primacy from the men who spoke Latin, and their descendants,
+to the men who speak English]
+
+If we look back for a moment to the primitive stages of society, we may
+picture to ourselves the surface of the earth sparsely and scantily
+covered with wandering tribes of savages, rude in morals and manners,
+narrow and monotonous in experience, sustaining life very much as lower
+animals sustain it, by gathering wild fruits or slaying wild game, and
+waging chronic warfare alike with powerful beasts and with rival tribes
+of men. [Sidenote: Political history is the history of nation-making]
+
+In the widest sense the subject of political history is the description
+of the processes by which, under favourable circumstances, innumerable
+such primitive tribes have become welded together into mighty nations,
+with elevated standards of morals and manners, with wide and varied
+experience, sustaining life and ministering to human happiness by
+elaborate arts and sciences, and putting a curb upon warfare by limiting
+its scope, diminishing its cruelty, and interrupting it by intervals of
+peace. The story, as laid before us in the records of three thousand
+years, is fascinating and absorbing in its human interest for those who
+content themselves with the study of its countless personal incidents,
+and neglect its profound philosophical lessons. But for those who study
+it in the scientific spirit, the human interest of its details becomes
+still more intensely fascinating and absorbing. Battles and coronations,
+poems and inventions, migrations and martyrdoms, acquire new meanings
+and awaken new emotions as we begin to discern their bearings upon the
+solemn work of ages that is slowly winning for humanity a richer and
+more perfect life. By such meditation upon men's thoughts and deeds is
+the understanding purified, till we become better able to comprehend our
+relations to the world and the duty that lies upon each of us to shape
+his conduct rightly.
+
+In the welding together of primitive shifting tribes into stable and
+powerful nations, we can seem to discern three different methods that
+have been followed at different times and places, with widely different
+results. In all cases the fusion has been effected by war, but it has
+gone on in three broadly contrasted ways. The first of these methods,
+which has been followed from time immemorial in the Oriental world, may
+be roughly described as _conquest without incorporation._ A tribe grows
+to national dimensions by conquering and annexing its neighbours,
+without admitting them to a share in its political life. Probably there
+is always at first some incorporation, or even perhaps some crude germ
+of federative alliance; but this goes very little way,--only far enough
+to fuse together a few closely related tribes, agreeing in speech and
+habits, into a single great tribe that can overwhelm its neighbours. In
+early society this sort of incorporation cannot go far without being
+stopped by some impassable barrier of language or religion. After
+reaching that point, the conquering tribe simply annexes its neighbours
+and makes them its slaves. It becomes a superior caste, ruling over
+vanquished peoples, whom it oppresses with frightful cruelty, while
+living on the fruits of their toil in what has been aptly termed
+Oriental luxury. Such has been the origin of many eastern despotisms, in
+the valleys of the Nile and Euphrates, and elsewhere. Such a political
+structure admits of a very considerable development of material
+civilization, in which gorgeous palaces and artistic temples may be
+built, and perhaps even literature and scholarship rewarded, with money
+wrung from millions of toiling wretches. There is that sort of brutal
+strength in it, that it may endure for many long ages, until it comes
+into collision with some higher civilization. Then it is likely to end
+in sudden collapse, because the fighting quality of the people has
+been destroyed. Populations that have lived for centuries in fear of
+impalement or crucifixion, and have known no other destination for
+the products of their labour than the clutches of the omnipresent
+tax-gatherer, are not likely to furnish good soldiers. A handful of
+freemen will scatter them like sheep, as the Greeks did twenty-three
+centuries ago at Kynaxa, as the English did the other day at Tel
+el-Kebir. On the other hand, where the manliness of the vanquished
+people is not crushed, the sway of the conquerors who cannot enter into
+political union with them is likely to be cast off, as in the case of
+the Moors in Spain. There was a civilization in many respects admirable.
+It was eminent for industry, science, art, and poetry; its annals are
+full of romantic interest; it was in some respects superior to the
+Christian system which supplanted it; in many ways it contributed
+largely to the progress of the human race; and it was free from some
+of the worst vices of Oriental civilizations. Yet because of the
+fundamental defect that between the Christian Spaniard and his
+Mussulman conqueror there could be no political fusion, this brilliant
+civilization was doomed. During eight centuries of more or less
+extensive rule in the Spanish peninsula, the Moor was from first to last
+an alien, just as after four centuries the Turk is still an alien in
+the Balkan peninsula. The natural result was a struggle that lasted
+age after age till it ended in the utter extermination of one of the
+parties, and left behind it a legacy of hatred and persecution that has
+made the history of modern Spain a dismal record of shame and disaster.
+[Sidenote: The Oriental method of nation-making]
+
+In this first method of nation-making, then, which we may call the
+Oriental method, one now sees but little to commend. It was better than
+savagery, and for a long time no more efficient method was possible,
+but the leading peoples of the world have long since outgrown it; and
+although the resulting form of political government is the oldest we
+know and is not yet extinct, it nevertheless has not the elements
+of permanence. Sooner or later it will disappear, as savagery is
+disappearing, as the rudest types of inchoate human society have
+disappeared.
+
+The second method by which nations have been made may be called
+the Roman method; and we may briefly describe it as _conquest with
+incorporation, but without representation_. The secret of Rome's
+wonderful strength lay in the fact that she incorporated the vanquished
+peoples into her own body politic. In the early time there was a fusion
+of tribes going on in Latium, which, if it had gone no further, would
+have been similar to the early fusion of Ionic tribes in Attika or of
+Iranian tribes in Media. But whereas everywhere else this political
+fusion soon stopped, in the Roman world it went on. One after another
+Italian tribes and Italian towns were not merely overcome but admitted
+to a share in the political rights and privileges of the victors. By the
+time this had gone on until the whole Italian peninsula was consolidated
+under the headship of Rome, the result was a power incomparably greater
+than any other that the world had yet seen. Never before had so many
+people been brought under one government without making slaves of most
+of them. Liberty had existed before, whether in barbaric tribes or
+in Greek cities. Union had existed before, in Assyrian or Persian
+despotisms. Now liberty and union were for the first time joined
+together, with consequences enduring and stupendous. The whole
+Mediterranean world was brought under one government; ancient barriers
+of religion, speech, and custom were overthrown in every direction; and
+innumerable barbarian tribes, from the Alps to the wilds of northern
+Britain, from the Bay of Biscay to the Carpathian mountains, were more
+or less completely transformed into Roman citizens, protected by Roman
+law, and sharing in the material and spiritual benefits of Roman
+civilization. Gradually the whole vast structure became permeated by
+Hellenic and Jewish thought, and thus were laid the lasting foundations
+of modern society, of a common Christendom, furnished with a common
+stock of ideas concerning man's relation to God and the world, and
+acknowledging a common standard of right and wrong. This was a
+prodigious work, which raised human life to a much higher plane than
+that which it had formerly occupied, and endless gratitude is due to the
+thousands of steadfast men who in one way or another devoted their lives
+to its accomplishment. [Sidenote: The Roman method of nation-making]
+
+This Roman method of nation-making had nevertheless its fatal
+shortcomings, and it was only very slowly, moreover, that it wrought
+out its own best results. It was but gradually that the rights and
+privileges of Roman citizenship were extended over the whole Roman
+world, and in the mean time there were numerous instances where
+conquered provinces seemed destined to no better fate than had awaited
+the victims of Egyptian or Assyrian conquest. The rapacity and cruelty
+of Caius Verres could hardly have been outdone by the worst of Persian
+satraps; but there was a difference. A moral sense and political sense
+had been awakened which could see both the wickedness and the folly of
+such conduct. The voice of a Cicero sounded with trumpet tones against
+the oppressor, who was brought to trial and exiled for deeds which under
+the Oriental system, from the days of Artaxerxes to those of the Grand
+Turk, would scarcely have called forth a reproving word. It was by slow
+degrees that the Roman came to understand the virtues of his own method,
+and learned to apply it consistently until the people of all parts of
+the empire were, in theory at least, equal before the law. In theory, I
+say, for in point of fact there was enough of viciousness in the Roman
+system to prevent it from achieving permanent success. Historians have
+been fond of showing how the vitality of the whole system was impaired
+by wholesale slave-labour, by the false political economy which taxes
+all for the benefit of a few, by the debauching view of civil office
+which regards it as private perquisite and not as public trust,
+and--worst of all, perhaps--by the communistic practice of feeding an
+idle proletariat out of the imperial treasury. The names of these deadly
+social evils are not unfamiliar to American ears. Even of the last we
+have heard ominous whispers in the shape of bills to promote mendicancy
+under the specious guise of fostering education or rewarding military
+services. And is it not a striking illustration of the slowness with
+which mankind learns the plainest rudiments of wisdom and of justice,
+that only in the full light of the nineteenth century, and at the cost
+of a terrible war, should the most intelligent people on earth have got
+rid of a system of labour devised in the crudest ages of antiquity and
+fraught with misery to the employed, degradation to the employers, and
+loss to everybody? [Sidenote: Its slow development]
+
+These evils, we see, in one shape or another, have existed almost
+everywhere; and the vice of the Roman system did not consist in the fact
+that under it they were fully developed, but in the fact that it had no
+adequate means of overcoming them. Unless helped by something supplied
+from outside the Roman world, civilization must have succumbed to these
+evils, the progress of mankind must have been stopped. What was needed
+was the introduction of a fierce spirit of personal liberty and local
+self-government. The essential vice of the Roman system was that it had
+been unable to avoid weakening the spirit of personal independence and
+crushing out local self-government among the peoples to whom it had been
+applied. It owed its wonderful success to joining Liberty with Union,
+but as it went on it found itself compelled gradually to sacrifice
+Liberty to Union, strengthening the hands of the central government and
+enlarging its functions more and more, until by and by the political
+life of the several parts had so far died away that, under the pressure
+of attack from without, the Union fell to pieces and the whole political
+system had to be slowly and painfully reconstructed.
+
+Now if we ask why the Roman government found itself thus obliged to
+sacrifice personal liberty and local independence to the paramount
+necessity of holding the empire together, the answer will point us to
+the essential and fundamental vice of the Roman method of nation-making.
+It lacked the principle of representation. The old Roman world knew
+nothing of representative assemblies. [Sidenote: It knew nothing of
+representation]
+
+Its senates were assemblies of notables, constituting in the main an
+aristocracy of men who had held high office; its popular assemblies were
+primary assemblies,--town-meetings. There was no notion of such a thing
+as political power delegated by the people to representatives who were
+to wield it away from home and out of sight of their constituents. The
+Roman's only notion of delegated power was that of authority delegated
+by the government to its generals and prefects who discharged at a
+distance its military and civil functions. When, therefore, the Roman
+popular government, originally adapted to a single city, had come
+to extend itself over a large part of the world, it lacked the one
+institution by means of which government could be carried on over
+so vast an area without degenerating into despotism. [Sidenote: And
+therefore ended in despotism]
+
+Even could the device of representation have occurred to the mind of
+some statesman trained in Roman methods, it would probably have made no
+difference. Nobody would have known how to use it. You cannot invent
+an institution as you would invent a plough. Such a notion as that of
+representative government must needs start from small beginnings and
+grow in men's minds until it should become part and parcel of their
+mental habits. For the want of it the home government at Rome became
+more and more unmanageable until it fell into the hands of the army,
+while at the same time the administration of the empire became more and
+more centralized; the people of its various provinces, even while their
+social condition was in some respects improved, had less and less
+voice in the management of their local affairs, and thus the spirit of
+personal independence was gradually weakened. This centralization was
+greatly intensified by the perpetual danger of invasion on the northern
+and eastern frontiers, all the way from the Rhine to the Euphrates.
+Do what it would, the government must become more and more a military
+despotism, must revert toward the Oriental type. The period extending
+from the third century before Christ to the third century after was a
+period of extraordinary intellectual expansion and moral awakening; but
+when we observe the governmental changes introduced under the emperor
+Diocletian at the very end of this period, we realize how serious had
+been the political retrogression, how grave the danger that the stream
+of human life might come to stagnate in Europe, as it had long since
+stagnated in Asia.
+
+Two mighty agents, cooperating in their opposite ways to prevent any
+such disaster, were already entering upon the scene. The first was the
+colonization of the empire by Germanic tribes already far advanced
+beyond savagery, already somewhat tinctured with Roman civilization, yet
+at the same time endowed with an intense spirit of personal and local
+independence. With this wholesome spirit they were about to refresh and
+revivify the empire, but at the risk of undoing its work of political
+organization and reducing it to barbarism. The second was the
+establishment of the Roman church, an institution capable of holding
+European society together in spite of a political disintegration that
+was widespread and long-continued. While wave after wave of Germanic
+colonization poured over romanized Europe, breaking down old
+boundary-lines and working sudden and astonishing changes on the map,
+setting up in every quarter baronies, dukedoms, and kingdoms fermenting
+with vigorous political life; while for twenty generations this salutary
+but wild and dangerous work was going on, there was never a moment when
+the imperial sway of Rome was quite set aside and forgotten, there was
+never a time when union of some sort was not maintained through the
+dominion which the church had established over the European mind. When
+we duly consider this great fact in its relations to what went before
+and what came after, it is hard to find words fit to express the debt of
+gratitude which modern civilization owes to the Roman Catholic church.
+When we think of all the work, big with promise of the future, that went
+on in those centuries which modern writers in their ignorance used once
+to set apart and stigmatize as the "Dark Ages"; when we consider how the
+seeds of what is noblest in modern life were then painfully sown upon
+the soil which imperial Rome had prepared; when we think of the various
+work of a Gregory, a Benedict, a Boniface, an Alfred, a Charlemagne; we
+feel that there is a sense in which the most brilliant achievements
+of pagan antiquity are dwarfed in comparison with these. Until quite
+lately, indeed, the student of history has had his attention too
+narrowly confined to the ages that have been preeminent for literature
+and art--the so-called classical ages--and thus his sense of historical
+perspective has been impaired. When Mr. Freeman uses Gregory of Tours as
+a text-book, he shows that he realizes how an epoch may be none the less
+portentous though it has not had a Tacitus to describe it, and certainly
+no part of history is more full of human interest than the troubled
+period in which the powerful streams of Teutonic life pouring into Roman
+Europe were curbed in their destructiveness and guided to noble ends by
+the Catholic church. Out of the interaction between these two mighty
+agents has come the political system of the modern world. The moment
+when this interaction might have seemed on the point of reaching a
+complete and harmonious result was the glorious thirteenth century, the
+culminating moment of the Holy Roman Empire. Then, as in the times of
+Caesar or Trajan, there might have seemed to be a union among civilized
+men, in which the separate life of individuals and localities was not
+submerged. In that golden age alike of feudal system, of empire, and of
+church, there were to be seen the greatest monarchs, in fullest sympathy
+with their peoples, that Christendom has known,--an Edward I., a St.
+Louis, a Frederick II. Then when in the pontificates of Innocent III.
+and his successors the Roman church reached its apogee, the religious
+yearnings of men sought expression in the sublimest architecture the
+world has seen. Then Aquinas summed up in his profound speculations the
+substance of Catholic theology, and while the morning twilight of modern
+science might be discerned in the treatises of Roger Bacon, while
+wandering minstrelsy revealed the treasures of modern speech, soon to
+be wrought under the hands of Dante and Chaucer into forms of exquisite
+beauty, the sacred fervour of the apostolic ages found itself renewed in
+the tender and mystic piety of St. Francis of Assisi. It was a wonderful
+time, but after all less memorable as the culmination of mediaeval
+empire and mediaeval church than as the dawning of the new era in which
+we live to-day, and in which the development of human society proceeds
+in accordance with more potent methods than those devised by the genius
+of pagan or Christian Rome. [Sidenote: The German invaders and the Roman
+church] [Sidenote: The wonderful thirteenth century]
+
+For the origin of these more potent methods we must look back to the
+early ages of the Teutonic people; for their development and application
+on a grand scale we must look chiefly to the history of that most
+Teutonic of peoples in its institutions, though perhaps not more than
+half-Teutonic in blood, the English, with their descendants in the New
+World. The third method of nation-making may be called the Teutonic or
+preeminently the English method. It differs from the Oriental and Roman
+methods which we have been considering in a feature of most profound
+significance; it contains the principle of representation. For this
+reason, though like all nation-making it was in its early stages
+attended with war and conquest, it nevertheless does not necessarily
+require war and conquest in order to be put into operation. Of the other
+two methods war was an essential part. In the typical Oriental nation,
+such as Assyria or Persia, we see a conquering tribe holding down a
+number of vanquished peoples, and treating them like slaves: here the
+nation is very imperfectly made, and its government is subject to sudden
+and violent changes. In the Roman empire we see a conquering people hold
+sway over a number of vanquished peoples, but instead of treating them
+like slaves, it gradually makes them its equals before the law; here
+the resulting political body is much more nearly a nation, and its
+government is much more stable. A Lydian of the fifth century before
+Christ felt no sense of allegiance to the Persian master who simply
+robbed and abused him; but the Gaul of the fifth century after Christ
+was proud of the name of Roman and ready to fight for the empire of
+which he was a citizen. We have seen, nevertheless, that for want of
+representation the Roman method failed when applied to an immense
+territory, and the government tended to become more and more despotic,
+to revert toward the Oriental type. Now of the English or Teutonic
+method, I say, war is not an essential part; for where representative
+government is once established, it is possible for a great nation to be
+formed by the peaceful coalescence of neighbouring states, or by their
+union into a federal body. An instance of the former was the coalescence
+of England and Scotland effected early in the eighteenth century
+after ages of mutual hostility; for instances of the latter we have
+Switzerland and the United States. Now federalism, though its rise
+and establishment may be incidentally accompanied by warfare, is
+nevertheless in spirit pacific. Conquest in the Oriental sense is quite
+incompatible with it; conquest in the Roman sense is hardly less so. At
+the close of our Civil War there were now and then zealous people to
+be found who thought that the southern states ought to be treated as
+conquered territory, governed by prefects sent from Washington, and held
+down by military force for a generation or so. Let us hope that there
+are few to-day who can fail to see that such a course would have been
+fraught with almost as much danger as the secession movement itself.
+At least it would have been a hasty confession, quite uncalled for
+and quite untrue, that American federalism had thus far proved itself
+incompetent,--that we had indeed preserved our national unity, but only
+at the frightful cost of sinking to a lower plane of national life.
+[Sidenote: The English method of nation-making] [Sidenote: Pacific
+tendencies of federalism]
+
+But federalism, with its pacific implications, was not an invention of
+the Teutonic mind. The idea was familiar to the city communities of
+ancient Greece, which, along with their intense love of self-government,
+felt the need of combined action for warding off external attack. In
+their Achaian and Aitolian leagues the Greeks made brilliant attempts
+toward founding a nation upon some higher principle than that of mere
+conquest, and the history of these attempts is exceedingly
+interesting and instructive. They failed for lack of the principle
+of representation, which was practically unknown to the world until
+introduced by the Teutonic colonizers of the Roman empire. Until the
+idea of power delegated by the people had become familiar to men's minds
+in its practical bearings, it was impossible to create a great nation
+without crushing out the political life in some of its parts. Some
+centre of power was sure to absorb all the political life, and grow at
+the expense of the outlying parts, until the result was a centralized
+despotism. Hence it came to be one of the commonplace assumptions of
+political writers that republics must be small, that free government
+is practicable only in a confined area, and that the only strong and
+durable government, capable of maintaining order throughout a vast
+territory, is some form of absolute monarchy. [Sidenote: Fallacy of the
+notion that republics must be small]
+
+It was quite natural that people should formerly have held this opinion,
+and it is indeed not yet quite obsolete, but its fallaciousness will
+become more and more apparent as American history is better understood.
+Our experience has now so far widened that we can see that despotism
+is not the strongest but wellnigh the weakest form of government; that
+centralized administrations, like that of the Roman empire, have fallen
+to pieces, not because of too much but because of too little freedom;
+and that the only perdurable government must be that which succeeds in
+achieving national unity on a grand scale, without weakening the sense
+of personal and local independence. For in the body politic this spirit
+of freedom is as the red corpuscles in the blood; it carries the life
+with it. It makes the difference between a society of self-respecting
+men and women and a society of puppets.
+
+Your nation may have art, poetry, and science, all the refinements of
+civilized life, all the comforts and safeguards that human ingenuity can
+devise; but if it lose this spirit of personal and local independence,
+it is doomed and deserves its doom. As President Cleveland has well
+said, it is not the business of a government to support its people, but
+of the people to support their government; and once to lose sight
+of this vital truth is as dangerous as to trifle with some stealthy
+narcotic poison. Of the two opposite perils which have perpetually
+threatened the welfare of political society--anarchy on the one hand,
+loss of self-government on the other--Jefferson was right in maintaining
+that the latter is really the more to be dreaded because its beginnings
+are so terribly insidious. Many will understand what is meant by a
+threat of secession, where few take heed of the baneful principle
+involved in a Texas Seed-bill.
+
+That the American people are still fairly alive to the importance of
+these considerations, is due to the weary ages of struggle in which our
+forefathers have manfully contended for the right of self-government.
+From the days of Arminius and Civilis in the wilds of lower Germany to
+the days of Franklin and Jefferson in Independence Hall, we have been
+engaged in this struggle, not without some toughening of our political
+fibre, not without some refining of our moral sense. Not among our
+English forefathers only, but among all the peoples of mediaeval and
+modern Europe has the struggle gone on, with various and instructive
+results. In all parts of romanized Europe invaded and colonized by
+Teutonic tribes, self-government attempted to spring up. What may have
+been the origin of the idea of representation we do not know; like most
+origins, it seems lost in the prehistoric darkness. Wherever we find
+Teutonic tribes settling down over a wide area, we find them holding
+their primary assemblies, usually their annual March-meetings, like
+those in which Mr. Hosea Biglow and others like him have figured.
+Everywhere, too, we find some attempt at representative assemblies,
+based on the principle of the three estates, clergy, nobles, and
+commons. But nowhere save in England does the representative principle
+become firmly established, at first in county-meetings, afterward in a
+national parliament limiting the powers of the national monarch as the
+primary tribal assembly had limited the powers of the tribal chief. It
+is for this reason that we must call the method of nation-making by
+means of a representative assembly the English method. While the idea of
+representation was perhaps the common property of the Teutonic tribes,
+it was only in England that it was successfully put into practice and
+became the dominant political idea. We may therefore agree with Dr.
+Stubbs that in its political development England is the most Teutonic of
+all European countries,--the country which in becoming a great nation
+has most fully preserved the local independence so characteristic of the
+ancient Germans. The reasons for this are complicated, and to try to
+assign them all would needlessly encumber our exposition. But there is
+one that is apparent and extremely instructive. There is sometimes a
+great advantage in being able to plant political institutions in a
+virgin soil, where they run no risk of being modified or perhaps
+metamorphosed through contact with rival institutions. In America the
+Teutonic idea has been worked out even more completely than in Britain;
+and so far as institutions are concerned, our English forefathers
+settled here as in an empty country. They were not obliged to modify
+their political ideas so as to bring them into harmony with those of the
+Indians; the disparity in civilization was so great that the Indians
+were simply thrust aside, along with the wolves and buffaloes.
+[Sidenote: Teutonic March-meetings and representative assemblies]
+
+This illustration will help us to understand the peculiar features of
+the Teutonic settlement of Britain. Whether the English invaders really
+slew all the romanized Kelts who dwelt in the island, except those who
+found refuge in the mountains of Cumberland, Wales, and Cornwall, or
+fled across the channel to Brittany, we need not seek to decide. It
+is enough to point out one respect in which the Teutonic conquest was
+immeasurably more complete in Britain than in any other part of the
+empire. Everywhere else the tribes who settled upon Roman soil--the
+Goths, Vandals, Suevi, and Burgundians--were christianized, and so to
+some extent romanized, before they came to take possession. Even the
+more distant Franks had been converted to Christianity before they
+had completed their conquest of Gaul. Everywhere except in Britain,
+therefore, the conquerors had already imbibed Roman ideas, and the
+authority of Rome was in a certain sense acknowledged. There was no
+break in the continuity of political events. In Britain, on the other
+hand, there was a complete break, so that while on the continent the
+fifth and sixth centuries are seen in the full midday light of history,
+in Britain they have lapsed into the twilight of half-legendary
+tradition. The Saxon and English tribes, coming from the remote wilds
+of northern Germany, whither Roman missionaries had not yet penetrated,
+still worshipped Thor and Wodan; and their conquest of Britain was
+effected with such deadly thoroughness that Christianity was destroyed
+there, or lingered only in sequestered nooks. A land once christianized
+thus actually fell back into paganism, so that the work of converting it
+to Christianity had to be done over again. From the landing of heathen
+Hengest on the isle of Thanet to the landing of Augustine and his monks
+on the same spot, one hundred and forty-eight years elapsed, during
+which English institutions found time to take deep root in British
+soil with scarcely more interference, as to essential points, than in
+American soil twelve centuries afterward. [Sidenote: Peculiarity of the
+Teutonic conquest of Britain]
+
+The century and a half between 449 and 597 is therefore one of the most
+important epochs in the history of the people that speak the English
+language. Before settling in Britain our forefathers had been tribes in
+the upper stages of barbarism; now they began the process of coalescence
+into a nation in which the principle of self-government should be
+retained and developed. The township and its town-meeting we find there,
+as later in New England. The county-meeting we also find, while the
+county is a little state in itself and not a mere administrative
+district. And in this county-meeting we may observe a singular feature,
+something never seen before in the world, something destined to work
+out vaster political results than Caesar ever dreamed of. This
+county-meeting is not a primary assembly; all the freemen from all the
+townships cannot leave their homes and their daily business to attend
+it. Nor is it merely an assembly of notables, attended by the most
+important men of the neighbourhood. It is a representative assembly,
+attended by select men from each township. We may see in it the germ of
+the British parliament and of the American congress, as indeed of all
+modern legislative bodies, for it is a most suggestive commentary upon
+what we are saying that in all other countries which have legislatures,
+they have been copied, within quite recent times, from English or
+American models. We can seldom if ever fix a date for the beginning
+of anything, and we can by no means fix a date for the beginning of
+representative assemblies in England. We can only say that where
+we first find traces of county organization, we find traces of
+representation. Clearly, if the English conquerors of Britain had left
+the framework of Roman institutions standing there, as it remained
+standing in Gaul, there would have been great danger of this principle
+of representation not surviving. It would most likely have been crushed
+in its callow infancy. The conquerors would insensibly have fallen into
+the Roman way of doing things, as they did in Gaul. [Sidenote: Survival
+and development of Teutonic representative assembly in England]
+
+
+From the start, then, we find the English nationality growing up under
+very different conditions from those which obtained in other parts
+of Europe. So far as institutions are concerned, Teutonism was less
+modified in England than in the German fatherland itself, For the
+gradual conquest and Christianization of Germany which began with
+Charles the Great, and went on until in the thirteenth century the
+frontier had advanced eastward to the Vistula, entailed to a certain
+extent the romanization of Germany. For a thousand years after Charles
+the Great, the political head of Germany was also the political head
+of the Holy Roman Empire, and the civil and criminal code by which the
+daily life of the modern German citizen is regulated is based upon the
+jurisprudence of Rome. Nothing, perhaps, could illustrate more forcibly
+than this sheer contrast the peculiarly Teutonic character of English
+civilization. Between the eighth and the eleventh centuries, when the
+formation of English nationality was approaching completion, it received
+a fresh and powerful infusion of Teutonism in the swarms of heathen
+Northmen or Danes who occupied the eastern coasts, struggled long for
+the supremacy, and gradually becoming christianized, for a moment
+succeeded in seizing the crown. Of the invasion of partially romanized
+Northmen from Normandy which followed soon after, and which has so
+profoundly affected English society and English speech, we need notice
+here but two conspicuous features. First, it increased the power of the
+crown and the clergy, brought all England more than ever under one law,
+and strengthened the feeling of nationality. It thus made England a
+formidable military power, while at the same time it brought her into
+closer relations with continental Europe than she had held since the
+fourth century. Secondly, by superposing a new feudal nobility as the
+upper stratum of society, it transformed the Old-English thanehood into
+the finest middle-class of rural gentry and yeomanry that has ever
+existed in any country; a point of especial interest to Americans, since
+it was in this stratum of society that the two most powerful streams of
+English migration to America--the Virginia stream and the New
+England stream--alike had their source. [Sidenote: Primitive Teutonic
+institutions less modified in England than in Germany]
+
+By the thirteenth century the increasing power and pretensions of the
+crown, as the unification of English nationality went on, brought about
+a result unlike anything known on the continent of Europe; it brought
+about a resistless coalition between the great nobles, the rural gentry
+and yeomanry, and the burghers of the towns, for the purpose of curbing
+royalty, arresting the progress of centralization, and setting up
+representative government on a truly national scale. This grand result
+was partly due to peculiar circumstances which had their origin in
+the Norman conquest; but it was largely due to the political habits
+generated by long experience of local representative assemblies,--habits
+which made it comparatively easy for different classes of society to
+find their voice and use it for the attainment of ends in common. On the
+continent of Europe the encroaching sovereign had to contend with
+here and there an arrogant vassal, here and there a high-spirited and
+rebellious town; in England, in this first great crisis of popular
+government, he found himself confronted by a united people. The fruits
+of the grand combination were _first_, the wresting of Magna Charta from
+King John in 1215, and _secondly_, the meeting of the first House of
+Commons in 1265. Four years of civil war were required to secure these
+noble results. The Barons' War, of the years 1263 to 1267, was an
+event of the same order of importance as the Great Rebellion of the
+seventeenth century and the American Revolution; and among the
+founders of that political freedom which is enjoyed to-day by all
+English-speaking people, the name of Simon de Montfort, Earl of
+Leicester, deserves a place in our grateful remembrance beside the names
+of Cromwell and Washington. Simon's great victory at Lewes in 1264 must
+rank with Naseby and Yorktown. The work begun by his House of Commons
+was the same work that has continued to go on without essential
+interruption down to the days of Cleveland and Gladstone. The
+fundamental principle of political freedom is "no taxation without
+representation"; you must not take a farthing of my money without
+consulting my wishes as to the use that shall be made of it. Only
+when this principle of justice was first practically recognized, did
+government begin to divorce itself from the primitive bestial barbaric
+system of tyranny and plunder, and to ally itself with the forces that
+in the fulness of time are to bring peace on earth and good will to
+men. Of all dates in history, therefore, there is none more fit to be
+commemorated than 1265; for in that year there was first asserted and
+applied at Westminster, on a national scale, that fundamental principle
+of "no taxation without representation," that innermost kernel of the
+English Idea, which the Stamp Act Congress defended at New York exactly
+five hundred years afterward. When we think of these dates, by the way,
+we realize the import of the saying that in the sight of the Lord a
+thousand years are but as a day, and we feel that the work of the Lord
+cannot be done by the listless or the slothful. So much time and so much
+strife by sea and land has it taken to secure beyond peradventure the
+boon to mankind for which Earl Simon gave up his noble life on the field
+of Evesham! Nor without unremitting watchfulness can we be sure that the
+day of peril is yet past. From kings, indeed, we have no more to fear;
+they have come to be as spooks and bogies of the nursery. But the
+gravest dangers are those which present themselves in new forms, against
+which people's minds have not yet been fortified with traditional
+sentiments and phrases. The inherited predatory tendency of men to seize
+upon the fruits of other people's labour is still very strong, and while
+we have nothing more to fear from kings, we may yet have trouble enough
+from commercial monopolies and favoured industries, marching to the
+polls their hordes of bribed retainers. Well indeed has it been said
+that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. God never meant that in
+this fair but treacherous world in which He has placed us we should earn
+our salvation without steadfast labour. [Eternal vigilance is the price
+of liberty]
+
+To return to Earl Simon, we see that it was just in that wonderful
+thirteenth century, when the Roman idea of government might seem to
+have been attaining its richest and most fruitful development, that the
+richer and more fruitful English idea first became incarnate in the
+political constitution of a great and rapidly growing nation. It was not
+long before the struggle between the Roman Idea and the English Idea,
+clothed in various forms, became the dominating issue in European
+history. We have now to observe the rise of modern nationalities, as new
+centres of political life, out of the various provinces of the Roman
+world. In the course of this development the Teutonic representative
+assembly is at first everywhere discernible, in some form or other,
+as in the Spanish Cortes or the States-General of France, but on the
+continent it generally dies out. Only in such nooks as Switzerland and
+the Netherlands does it survive. In the great nations it succumbs before
+the encroachments of the crown. The comparatively novel Teutonic idea of
+power delegated by the people to their representatives had not become
+deeply enough rooted in the political soil of the continent; and
+accordingly we find it more and more disused and at length almost
+forgotten, while the old and deeply rooted Roman idea of power delegated
+by the governing body to its lieutenants and prefects usurps its place.
+Let us observe some of the most striking features of this growth of
+modern nationalities. [Sidenote: Conflict between Roman Idea and English
+Idea begins to become clearly visible in the thirteenth century]
+
+The reader of medieval history cannot fail to be impressed with the
+suddenness with which the culmination of the Holy Roman Empire, in
+the thirteenth century, was followed by a swift decline. The imperial
+position of the Hapsburgs was far less splendid than that of the
+Hohenstauffen; it rapidly became more German and less European, until
+by and by people began to forget what the empire originally meant.
+The change which came over the papacy was even more remarkable. The
+grandchildren of the men who had witnessed the spectacle of a king of
+France and a king of England humbled at the feet of Innocent III., the
+children of the men who had found the gigantic powers of a Frederick II.
+unequal to the task of curbing the papacy, now beheld the successors of
+St. Peter carried away to Avignon, there to be kept for seventy years
+under the supervision of the kings of France. Henceforth the glory of
+the papacy in its political aspect was to be but the faint shadow of
+that with which it had shone before. This sudden change in its position
+showed that the medieval dream of a world-empire was passing away,
+and that new powers were coming uppermost in the shape of modern
+nationalities with their national sovereigns. So long as these
+nationalities were in the weakness of their early formation, it was
+possible for pope and emperor to assert, and sometimes to come near
+maintaining, universal supremacy. But the time was now at hand when
+kings could assert their independence of the pope, while the emperor was
+fast sinking to be merely one among kings.
+
+As modern kingdoms thus grew at the expense of empire and papacy above,
+so they also grew at the expense of feudal dukedoms, earldoms, and
+baronies below. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were as fatal
+to feudalism as to world-empire and world-church. A series of wars
+occurring at this time were especially remarkable for the wholesale
+slaughter of the feudal nobility, whether on the field or under the
+headsman's axe. This was a conspicuous feature of the feuds of the
+Trastamare in Spain, of the English invasions of France, followed by the
+quarrel between Burgundians and Armagnacs, and of the great war of the
+Roses in England. So thorough-going was the butchery in England, for
+example, that only twenty-nine lay peers could be found to sit in the
+first parliament of Henry VII in 1485. The old nobility was almost
+annihilated, both in person and in property; for along with the
+slaughter there went wholesale confiscation, and this added greatly to
+the disposable wealth of the crown. The case was essentially similar in
+France and Spain. In all three countries the beginning of the sixteenth
+century saw the power of the crown increased and increasing. Its vast
+accessions of wealth made it more independent of legislative assemblies,
+and at the same time enabled it to make the baronage more subservient in
+character by filling up the vacant places with new creations of its own.
+Through the turbulent history of the next two centuries, we see the
+royal power aiming at unchecked supremacy and in the principal instances
+attaining it except in England. Absolute despotism was reached first in
+Spain, under Philip II.; in France it was reached a century later, under
+Louis XIV.; and at about the same time in the hereditary estates of
+Austria; while over all the Italian and German soil of the disorganized
+empire, except among the glaciers of Switzerland and the dykes of the
+Netherlands, the play of political forces had set up a host of petty
+tyrannies which aped the morals and manners of the great autocrats at
+Paris and Madrid and Vienna. [Sidenote: Increasing power of the crown]
+
+As we look back over this growth of modern monarchy, we cannot but
+be struck with the immense practical difficulty of creating a strong
+nationality without sacrificing self-government. Powerful, indeed, is
+the tendency toward over-centralization, toward stagnation, toward
+political death. Powerful is the tendency to revert to the Roman, if not
+to the Oriental method. As often as we reflect upon the general state of
+things at the end of the seventeenth century--the dreadful ignorance and
+misery which prevailed among most of the people of continental Europe,
+and apparently without hope of remedy--so often must we be impressed
+anew with the stupendous significance of the part played by
+self-governing England in overcoming dangers which have threatened the
+very existence of modern civilization. It is not too much to say that
+in the seventeenth century the entire political future of mankind was
+staked upon the questions that were at issue in England. To keep the
+sacred flame of liberty alive required such a rare and wonderful
+concurrence of conditions that, had our forefathers then succumbed in
+the strife, it is hard to imagine how or where the failure could have
+been repaired. Some of these conditions we have already considered; let
+us now observe one of the most important of all. Let us note the part
+played by that most tremendous of social forces, religious sentiment,
+in its relation to the political circumstances which we have passed
+in review. If we ask why it was that among modern nations absolute
+despotism was soonest and most completely established in Spain, we find
+it instructive to observe that the circumstances under which the
+Spanish monarchy grew up, during centuries of deadly struggle with the
+Mussulman, were such as to enlist the religious sentiment on the side of
+despotic methods in church and state. It becomes interesting, then, to
+observe by contrast how it was that in England the dominant religious
+sentiment came to be enlisted on the side of political freedom.
+[Illustration: Had it not been for the Puritans, political liberty would
+probably have disappeared from the world]
+
+In such an inquiry we have nothing to do with the truth or falsity of
+any system of doctrines, whether Catholic or Protestant. The legitimate
+purposes of the historian do not require him to intrude upon the
+province of the theologian. Our business is to trace the sequence of
+political cause and effect. Nor shall we get much help from crude
+sweeping statements which set forth Catholicism as invariably the enemy
+and Protestantism as invariably the ally of human liberty. The Catholic
+has a right to be offended at statements which would involve a
+Hildebrand or a St. Francis in the same historical judgment with a
+Sigismund or a Torquemada. The character of ecclesiastical as of all
+other institutions has varied with the character of the men who have
+worked them and the varying needs of the times and places in which they
+have been worked; and our intense feeling of the gratitude we owe to
+English Puritanism need in nowise diminish the enthusiasm with which we
+praise the glorious work of the mediaeval church. It is the duty of
+the historian to learn how to limit and qualify his words of blame or
+approval; for so curiously is human nature compounded of strength and
+weakness that the best of human institutions are likely to be infected
+with some germs of vice or folly. [Sidenote: Beginnings of Protestantism
+in the thirteenth century]
+
+Of no human institution is this more true than of the great medieval
+church of Gregory and Innocent when viewed in the light of its claims
+to unlimited temporal and spiritual sovereignty. In striking down the
+headship of the emperors, it would have reduced Europe to a sort of
+Oriental caliphate, had it not been checked by the rising spirit of
+nationality already referred to. But there was another and even mightier
+agency coming in to curb its undue pretensions to absolute sovereignty.
+That same thirteenth century which witnessed the culmination of its
+power witnessed also the first bold and determined manifestation of the
+Protestant temper of revolt against spiritual despotism. It was long
+before this that the earliest Protestant heresy had percolated into
+Europe, having its source, like so many other heresies, in that eastern
+world where the stimulating thought of the Greeks busied itself with the
+ancient theologies of Asia. From Armenia in the eighth century came the
+Manichaean sect of Paulicians into Thrace, and for twenty generations
+played a considerable part in the history of the Eastern Empire. In the
+Bulgarian tongue they were known as Bogomilians, or men constant in
+prayer. In Greek they were called Cathari, or "Puritans." They accepted
+the New Testament, but set little store by the Old; they laughed at
+transubstantiation, denied any mystical efficiency to baptism, frowned
+upon image-worship as no better than idolatry, despised the intercession
+of saints, and condemned the worship of the Virgin Mary. As for the
+symbol of the cross, they scornfully asked, "If any man slew the son of
+a king with a bit of wood, how could this piece of wood be dear to the
+king?" Their ecclesiastical government was in the main presbyterian, and
+in politics they showed a decided leaning toward democracy. They wore
+long faces, looked askance at frivolous amusements, and were terribly in
+earnest. Of the more obscure pages of mediaeval history, none are fuller
+of interest than those in which we decipher the westward progress of
+these sturdy heretics through the Balkan peninsula into Italy, and
+thence into southern France, where toward the end of the twelfth century
+we find their ideas coming to full blossom in the great Albigensian
+heresy. It was no light affair to assault the church in the days of
+Innocent III. The terrible crusade against the Albigenses, beginning in
+1207, was the joint work of the most powerful of popes and one of the
+most powerful of French kings. On the part of Innocent it was the
+stamping out of a revolt that threatened the very existence of
+the Catholic hierarchy; on the part of Philip Augustus it was the
+suppression of those too independent vassals the Counts of Toulouse, and
+the decisive subjection of the southern provinces to the government at
+Paris. Nowhere in European history do we read a more frightful story
+than that which tells of the blazing fires which consumed thousand after
+thousand of the most intelligent and thrifty people in France. It was
+now that the Holy Inquisition came into existence, and after forty years
+of slaughter these Albigensian Cathari or Puritans seemed exterminated.
+The practice of burning heretics, first enacted by statute in Aragon in
+1197, was adopted in most parts of Europe during the thirteenth century,
+but in England not until the beginning of the fifteenth. The Inquisition
+was never established in England. Edward II. attempted to introduce
+it in 1311 for the purpose of suppressing the Templars, but his utter
+failure showed that the instinct of self-government was too strong in
+the English people to tolerate the entrusting of so much power over
+men's lives to agents of the papacy. Mediaeval England was ignorant and
+bigoted enough, but under a representative government which so strongly
+permeated society, it was impossible to set the machinery of repression
+to work with such deadly thoroughness as it worked under the guidance of
+Roman methods. When we read the history of persecution in England, the
+story in itself is dreadful enough; but when we compare it with the
+horrors enacted in other countries, we arrive at some startling results.
+During the two centuries of English persecution, from Henry IV. to James
+I., some 400 persons were burned at the stake, and three-fourths of
+these cases occurred in 1555-57, the last three years of Mary Tudor.
+Now in a single province of Spain, in the single year 1482, about 2000
+persons were burned. The lowest estimates of the number slain for heresy
+in the Netherlands in the course of the sixteenth century place it at
+75,000. Very likely such figures are in many cases grossly exaggerated.
+But after making due allowance for this, the contrast is sufficiently
+impressive. In England the persecution of heretics was feeble and
+spasmodic, and only at one moment rose to anything like the appalling
+vigour which ordinarily characterized it in countries where the
+Inquisition was firmly established. Now among the victims of religious
+persecution must necessarily be found an unusual proportion of men and
+women more independent than the average in their thinking, and more
+bold than the average in uttering their thoughts. The Inquisition was a
+diabolical winnowing machine for removing from society the most flexible
+minds and the stoutest hearts; and among every people in which it was
+established for a length of time it wrought serious damage to the
+national character. It ruined the fair promise of Spain, and inflicted
+incalculable detriment upon the fortunes of France. No nation could
+afford to deprive itself of such a valuable element in its political
+life as was furnished in the thirteenth century by the intelligent and
+sturdy Cathari of southern Gaul. [Sidenote: The Cathari, or Puritans of
+the Eastern Empire] [Sidenote: The Albigenses] [Sidenote: Effects of
+persecution; its feebleness in England]
+
+The spirit of revolt against the hierarchy, though broken and repressed
+thus terribly by the measures of Innocent III., continued to live on
+obscurely in sequestered spots, in the mountains of Savoy, and Bosnia,
+and Bohemia, ready on occasion to spring into fresh and vigorous life.
+In the following century Protestant ideas were rapidly germinating in
+England, alike in baron's castle, in yeoman's farmstead, in citizen's
+shop, in the cloistered walks of the monastery. Henry Knighton,
+writing in the time of Richard II., declares, with the exaggeration of
+impatience, that every second man you met was a Lollard, or "babbler,"
+for such was the nickname given to these free-thinkers, of whom the most
+eminent was John Wyclif, professor at Oxford, and rector of Lutterworth,
+greatest scholar of the age. [Sidenote: Wyclif and the Lollards]
+
+The career of this man is a striking commentary upon the difference
+between England and continental Europe in the Middle Ages. Wyclif denied
+transubstantiation, disapproved of auricular confession, opposed the
+payment of Peter's pence, taught that kings should not be subject to
+prelates, translated the Bible into English and circulated it among the
+people, and even denounced the reigning pope as Antichrist; yet he was
+not put to death, because there was as yet no act of parliament for the
+burning of heretics, and in England things must be done according to the
+laws which the people had made. [1] Pope Gregory XI. issued five bulls
+against him, addressed to the king, the archbishop of Canterbury, and
+the university of Oxford; but their dictatorial tone offended the
+national feeling, and no heed was paid to them. Seventeen years after
+Wyclif's death, the statute for burning heretics was passed, and the
+persecution of Lollards began. It was feeble and ineffectual, however.
+Lollardism was never trampled out in England as Catharism was trampled
+out in France. Tracts of Wyclif and passages from his translation of
+the Bible were copied by hand and secretly passed about to be read on
+Sundays in the manor-house, or by the cottage fireside after the day's
+toil was over. The work went on quietly, but not the less effectively,
+until when the papal authority was defied by Henry VIII., it soon became
+apparent that England was half-Protestant already. It then appeared
+also that in this Reformation there were two forces cooperating,--the
+sentiment of national independence which would not brook dictation from
+Rome, and the Puritan sentiment of revolt against the hierarchy in
+general. The first sentiment had found expression again and again in
+refusals to pay tribute to Rome, in defiance of papal bulls, and in the
+famous statutes of _praemunire_, which made it a criminal offence to
+acknowledge any authority in England higher than the crown. The revolt
+of Henry VIII. was simply the carrying out of these acts of Edward I.
+and Edward III. to their logical conclusion. It completed the detachment
+of England from the Holy Roman Empire, and made her free of all the
+world. Its intent was political rather than religious. Henry, who wrote
+against Martin Luther, was far from wishing to make England a Protestant
+country. Elizabeth, who differed from her father in not caring a straw
+for theology, was by temperament and policy conservative. Yet England
+could not cease to be Papist without ceasing in some measure to be
+Catholic; nor could she in that day carry on war against Spain without
+becoming a leading champion of Protestantism. The changes in creed and
+ritual wrought by the government during this period were cautious and
+skilful; and the resulting church of England, with its long line of
+learned and liberal divines, has played a noble part in history.
+[Sidenote: Political character of Henry VIII's revolt against Rome]
+
+But along with this moderate Protestantism espoused by the English
+government, as consequent upon the assertion of English national
+independence, there grew up the fierce uncompromising democratic
+Protestantism of which the persecuted Lollards had sown the seeds. This
+was not the work of government. [Sidenote: The yeoman, Hugh Latimer]
+
+By the side of Henry VIII. stands the sublime figure of Hugh Latimer,
+most dauntless of preachers, the one man before whose stern rebuke the
+headstrong and masterful Tudor monarch quailed. It was Latimer
+that renewed the work of Wyclif. and in his life as well as in his
+martyrdom,--to use his own words of good cheer uttered while the fagots
+were kindling around him,--lighted "such a candle in England as by God's
+grace shall never be put out." This indomitable man belonged to that
+middle-class of self-governing, self-respecting yeomanry that has been
+the glory of free England and free America. He was one of the sturdy
+race that overthrew French chivalry at Crecy and twice drove the
+soldiery of a tyrant down the slope of Bunker Hill. In boyhood he worked
+on his father's farm and helped his mother to milk the thirty kine; he
+practised archery on the village green, studied in the village school,
+went to Cambridge, and became the foremost preacher of Christendom. Now
+the most thorough and radical work of the English Reformation was done
+by this class of men of which Latimer was the type. It was work that was
+national in its scope, arousing to fervent heat the strong religious
+and moral sentiment of the people, and hence it soon quite outran the
+cautious and conservative policy of the government, and tended to
+introduce changes extremely distasteful to those who wished to keep
+England as nearly Catholic as was consistent with independence of the
+pope. Hence before the end of Elizabeth's reign, we find the crown set
+almost as strongly against Puritanism as against Romanism. Hence, too,
+when under Elizabeth's successors the great decisive struggle between
+despotism and liberty was inaugurated, we find all the tremendous force
+of this newly awakened religious enthusiasm cooperating with the English
+love of self-government and carrying it under Cromwell to victory. From
+this fortunate alliance of religious and political forces has come all
+the noble and fruitful work of the last two centuries in which men of
+English speech have been labouring for the political regeneration of
+mankind. But for this alliance of forces, it is quite possible that the
+fateful seventeenth century might have seen despotism triumphant in
+England as on the continent of Europe, and the progress of civilization
+indefinitely arrested. [Sidenote: The moment of Cromwell's triumph was
+the most critical moment in history]
+
+In illustration of this possibility, observe what happened in France
+at the very time when the victorious English tendencies were shaping
+themselves in the reign of Elizabeth. In France there was a strong
+Protestant movement, but it had no such independent middle-class to
+support it as that which existed in England; nor had it been able to
+profit by such indispensable preliminary work as that which Wyclif had
+done; the horrible slaughter of the Albigenses had deprived France of
+the very people who might have played a part in some way analogous to
+that of the Lollards. Consequently the Protestant movement in France
+failed to become a national movement. Against the wretched Henry III who
+would have temporized with it, and the gallant Henry IV who honestly
+espoused it, the oppressed peasantry and townsmen made common cause by
+enlisting under the banner of the ultra-Catholic Guises. The mass of
+the people saw nothing in Protestantism but an idea favoured by the
+aristocracy and which they could not comprehend. Hence the great king
+who would have been glad to make France a Protestant country could only
+obtain his crown by renouncing his religion, while seeking to protect
+it by his memorable Edict of Nantes. But what a generous despot could
+grant, a bigoted despot might revoke; and before another century had
+elapsed, the good work done by Henry IV. was undone by Louis XIV., the
+Edict of Nantes was set aside, the process of casting out the most
+valuable political element in the community was carried to completion,
+and seven percent of the population of France was driven away and added
+to the Protestant populations of northern Germany and England and
+America. The gain to these countries and the damage to France was far
+greater than the mere figures would imply; for in determining the
+character of a community a hundred selected men and women are more
+potent than a thousand men and women taken at random. Thus while the
+Reformation in France reinforced to some extent the noble army of
+freemen, its triumphs were not to be the triumphs of Frenchmen, but of
+the race which has known how to enlist under its banner the forces that
+fight for free thought, free speech, and self-government, and all that
+these phrases imply. [Sidenote: Contrast with France; fate of the
+Huguenots]
+
+In view of these facts we may see how tremendous was the question at
+stake with the Puritans of the seventeenth century. Everywhere else the
+Roman idea seemed to have conquered or to be conquering, while they
+seemed to be left as the forlorn hope of the human race. But from the
+very day when Oliver Cromwell reached forth his mighty arm to stop the
+persecutions in Savoy, the victorious English idea began to change the
+face of things. The next century saw William Pitt allied with Frederick
+of Prussia to save the work of the Reformation in central Europe and set
+in motion the train of events that were at last to make the people of
+the Teutonic fatherland a nation. At that same moment the keenest
+minds in France were awaking to the fact that in their immediate
+neighbourhood, separated from them only by a few miles of salt water,
+was a country where people were equal in the eye of the law. It was the
+ideas of Locke and Milton, of Vane and Sidney, that, when transplanted
+into French soil, produced that violent but salutary Revolution which
+has given fresh life to the European world. And contemporaneously with
+all this, the American nation came upon the scene, equipped as no
+other nation had ever been, for the task of combining sovereignty with
+liberty, indestructible union of the whole with indestructible life in
+the parts. The English idea has thus come to be more than national,
+it has become imperial. It has come to rule, and it has come to stay.
+[Sidenote: Victory of the English Idea]
+
+We are now in a position to answer the question when the Roman Empire
+came to an end, in so far as it can be answered at all. It did not come
+to its end at the hands of an Odovakar in the year 476, or of a Mahomet
+II in 1453, or of a Napoleon in 1806. It has been coming to its end as
+the Roman idea of nation-making has been at length decisively overcome
+by the English idea. For such a fact it is impossible to assign a date,
+because it is not an event but a stage in the endless procession
+of events. But we can point to landmarks on the way. Of movements
+significant and prophetic there have been many. The whole course of the
+Protestant reformation, from the thirteenth century to the nineteenth,
+is coincident with the transfer of the world's political centre of
+gravity from the Tiber and the Rhine to the Thames and the Mississippi.
+The whole career of the men who speak English has within this period
+been the most potent agency in this transfer. In these gigantic
+processes of evolution we cannot mark beginnings or endings by years,
+hardly even by centuries. But among the significant events which
+prophesied the final triumph of the English over the Roman idea, perhaps
+the most significant--the one which marks most incisively the dawning
+of a new era--was the migration of English Puritans across the Atlantic
+Ocean, to repeat in a new environment and on a far grander scale the
+work which their forefathers had wrought in Britain. The voyage of the
+Mayflower was not in itself the greatest event in this migration; but
+it serves to mark the era, and it is only when we study it in the mood
+awakened by the general considerations here set forth that we can
+properly estimate the historic importance of the great Puritan Exodus.
+[Sidenote: Significance of the Puritan Exodus]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE PURITAN EXODUS.
+
+
+In the preceding chapter I endeavoured to set forth and illustrate some
+of the chief causes which have shifted the world's political centre of
+gravity from the Mediterranean and the Rhine to the Atlantic and the
+Mississippi; from the men who spoke Latin to the men who speak English.
+In the course of the exposition we began to catch glimpses of the
+wonderful significance of the fact that--among the people who had
+first suggested the true solution of the difficult problem of making a
+powerful nation without sacrificing local self-government--when the
+supreme day of trial came, the dominant religious sentiment was arrayed
+on the side of political freedom and against political despotism. If we
+consider merely the territorial area which it covered, or the numbers
+of men slain in its battles, the war of the English parliament against
+Charles I. seems a trivial affair when contrasted with the gigantic
+but comparatively insignificant work of barbarians like Jinghis or
+Tamerlane. But if we consider the moral and political issues involved,
+and the influence of the struggle upon the future welfare of mankind,
+we soon come to see that there never was a conflict of more world-wide
+importance than that from which Oliver Cromwell came out victorious. It
+shattered the monarchical power in England at a time when monarchical
+power was bearing down all opposition in the other great countries of
+Europe. It decided that government by the people and for the people
+should not then perish from the earth. It placed free England in a
+position of such moral advantage that within another century the
+English Idea of political life was able to react most powerfully upon
+continental Europe. It was the study of English institutions by such men
+as Montesquieu and Turgot, Voltaire and Rousseau, that gave shape and
+direction to the French Revolution. That violent but wholesome clearing
+of the air, that tremendous political and moral awakening, which ushered
+in the nineteenth century in Europe, had its sources in the spirit
+which animated the preaching of Latimer, the song of Milton, the solemn
+imagery of Bunyan, the political treatises of Locke and Sidney, the
+political measures of Hampden and Pym. The noblest type of modern
+European statesmanship, as represented by Mazzini and Stein, is the
+spiritual offspring of seventeenth-century Puritanism. To speak of
+Naseby and Marston Moor as merely English victories would be as
+absurd as to restrict the significance of Gettysburg to the state of
+Pennsylvania. If ever there were men who laid down their lives in the
+cause of all mankind, it was those grim old Ironsides whose watchwords
+were texts from Holy Writ, whose battle-cries were hymns of praise.
+[Sidenote: Influence of Puritanism upon modern Europe]
+
+It was to this unwonted alliance of intense religious enthusiasm with
+the instinct of self-government and the spirit of personal independence
+that the preservation of English freedom was due. When James I. ascended
+the English throne, the forces which prepared the Puritan revolt had
+been slowly and quietly gathering strength among the people for at least
+two centuries. The work which Wyclif had begun in the fourteenth century
+had continued to go on in spite of occasional spasmodic attempts to
+destroy it with the aid of the statute passed in 1401 for the burning
+of heretics. The Lollards can hardly be said at any time to have
+constituted a sect, marked off from the established church by the
+possession of a system of doctrines held in common. The name by which
+they were known was a nickname which might cover almost any amount
+of diversity in opinion, like the modern epithets "free-thinker" and
+"agnostic." The feature which characterized the Lollards in common was a
+bold spirit of inquiry which led them, in spite of persecution, to read
+Wyclif's English Bible and call in question such dogmas and rites of the
+church as did not seem to find warrant in the sacred text. Clad in long
+robes of coarse red wool, barefoot, with pilgrim's staff in hand, the
+Lollard preachers fared to and fro among the quaint Gothic towns and
+shaded hamlets, setting forth the word of God wherever they could find
+listeners, now in the parish church or under the vaulted roof of the
+cathedral, now in the churchyard or market-place, or on some green
+hillside. During the fifteenth century persecution did much to check
+this open preaching, but passages from Wyclif's tracts and texts from
+the Bible were copied by hand and passed about among tradesmen and
+artisans, yeomen and plough-boys, to be pondered over and talked about
+and learned by heart. It was a new revelation to the English people,
+this discovery of the Bible. Christ and his disciples seemed to come
+very near when the beautiful story of the gospels was first read in
+the familiar speech of every-day life. Heretofore they might well have
+seemed remote and unreal, just as the school-boy hardly realizes that
+the Cato and Cassius over whom he puzzles in his Latin lessons were once
+living men like his father and neighbours, and not mere nominatives
+governing a verb, or ablatives of means or instrument. Now it became
+possible for the layman to contrast the pure teachings of Christ with
+the doctrines and demeanour of the priests and monks to whom the
+spiritual guidance of Englishmen had been entrusted. Strong and
+self-respecting men and women, accustomed to manage their own affairs,
+could not but be profoundly affected by the contrast. [Sidenote: Work of
+the Lollards]
+
+While they were thus led more and more to appeal to the Bible as the
+divine standard of right living and right thinking, at the same time
+they found in the sacred volume the treasures of a most original and
+noble literature unrolled before them; stirring history and romantic
+legend, cosmical theories and priestly injunctions, profound metaphysics
+and pithy proverbs, psalms of unrivalled grandeur and pastorals of
+exquisite loveliness, parables fraught with solemn meaning, the mournful
+wisdom of the preacher, the exultant faith of the apostle, the matchless
+eloquence of Job and Isaiah, the apocalyptic ecstasy of St. John. At a
+time when there was as yet no English literature for the common people,
+this untold wealth of Hebrew literature was implanted in the English
+mind as in a virgin soil. Great consequences have flowed from the fact
+that the first truly popular literature in England--the first which
+stirred the hearts of all classes of people, and filled their minds with
+ideal pictures and their every-day speech with apt and telling phrases--
+was the literature comprised within the Bible. The superiority of the
+common English version of the Bible, made in the reign of James I., over
+all other versions, is a fact generally admitted by competent critics.
+The sonorous Latin of the Vulgate is very grand, but in sublimity of
+fervour as in the unconscious simplicity of strength it is surpassed
+by the English version, which is scarcely if at all inferior to the
+original, while it remains to-day, and will long remain, the noblest
+monument of English speech. The reason for this is obvious. The common
+English version of the Bible was made by men who were not aiming at
+literary effect, but simply gave natural expression to the feelings
+which for several generations had clustered around the sacred text. They
+spoke with the voice of a people, which is more than the voice of the
+most highly gifted man. They spoke with the voice of a people to whom
+the Bible had come to mean all that it meant to the men who wrote it. To
+the Englishmen who listened to Latimer, to the Scotchmen who listened
+to Knox, the Bible more than filled the place which in modern times
+is filled by poem and essay, by novel and newspaper and scientific
+treatise. To its pages they went for daily instruction and comfort,
+with its strange Semitic names they baptized their children, upon its
+precepts, too often misunderstood and misapplied, they sought to build
+up a rule of life that might raise them above the crude and unsatisfying
+world into which they were born. [Sidenote: The English version of the
+Bible]
+
+It would be wrong to accredit all this awakening of spiritual life in
+England to Wyclif and the Lollards, for it was only after the Bible, in
+the translations of Tyndall and Coverdale, had been made free to the
+whole English people in the reign of Edward VI. that its significance
+began to be apparent; and it was only a century later, in the time of
+Cromwell and Milton, that its full fruition was reached. It was with the
+Lollards, however, that the spiritual awakening began and was continued
+until its effects, when they came, were marked by surprising maturity
+and suddenness. Because the Lollards were not a clearly defined sect, it
+was hard to trace the manifold ramifications of their work. During the
+terrible Wars of the Roses, contemporary chroniclers had little or
+nothing to say about the labours of these humble men, which seemed
+of less importance than now, when we read them in the light of their
+world-wide results. From this silence some modern historians have
+carelessly inferred that the nascent Protestantism of the Lollards had
+been extinguished by persecution under the Lancastrian kings, and was in
+nowise continuous with modern English Protestantism. Nothing could be
+more erroneous. The extent to which the Lollard leaven had permeated all
+classes of English society was first clearly revealed when Henry VIII.
+made his domestic affairs the occasion for a revolt against the Papacy.
+Despot and brute as he was in many ways, Henry had some characteristics
+which enabled him to get on well with his people. He not only
+represented the sentiment of national independence, but he had a truly
+English reverence for the forms of law. In his worst acts he relied upon
+the support of his Parliament, which he might in various ways cajole or
+pack, but could not really enslave. In his quarrel with Rome he could
+have achieved but little, had he not happened to strike a chord of
+feeling to which the English people, trained by this slow and subtle
+work of the Lollards, responded quickly and with a vehemence upon which
+he had not reckoned. As if by magic, the fabric of Romanism was broken
+to pieces in England, monasteries were suppressed and their abbots
+hanged, the authority of the Pope was swept away, and there was no
+powerful party, like that of the Guises in France to make such sweeping
+measures the occasion for civil war. The whole secret of Henry's swift
+success lay in the fact that the English people were already more than
+half Protestant in temper, and needed only an occasion for declaring
+themselves. Hence, as soon as Catholic Henry died, his youthful son
+found himself seated on the throne of a Protestant nation. The terrible
+but feeble persecution which followed under Mary did much to strengthen
+the extreme Protestant sentiment by allying it with the outraged feeling
+of national independence. The bloody work of the grand-daughter of
+Ferdinand and Isabella, the doting wife of Philip II., was rightly felt
+to be Spanish work; and never, perhaps, did England feel such a sense of
+relief as on the auspicious day which welcomed to the throne the great
+Elizabeth, an Englishwoman in every fibre, and whose mother withal was
+the daughter of a plain country gentleman. But the Marian persecution
+not only increased the strength of the extreme Protestant sentiment, but
+indirectly it supplied it with that Calvinistic theology which was to
+make it indomitable. Of the hundreds of ministers and laymen who fled
+from England in 1555 and the two following years, a great part found
+their way to Geneva, and thus came under the immediate personal
+influence of that man of iron who taught the very doctrines for which
+their souls were craving, and who was then at the zenith of his power.
+[Sidenote: Secret of Henry VIII.'s swift success in his revolt against
+Rome] [Sidenote: Effects of the persecution under Mary]
+
+Among all the great benefactors of mankind the figure of Calvin is
+perhaps the least attractive. He was, so to speak, the constitutional
+lawyer of the Reformation, with vision as clear, with head as cool, with
+soul as dry, as any old solicitor in rusty black that ever dwelt in
+chambers in Lincoln's Inn. His sternness was that of the judge who
+dooms a criminal to the gallows. His theology had much in it that is in
+striking harmony with modern scientific philosophy, and much in it, too,
+that the descendants of his Puritan converts have learned to loathe as
+sheer diabolism. It is hard for us to forgive the man who burned Michael
+Servetus, even though it was the custom of the time to do such things
+and the tender-hearted Melanchthon found nothing to blame in it. It is
+not easy to speak of Calvin with enthusiasm, as it comes natural to
+speak of the genial, whole-souled, many-sided, mirth-and-song-loving
+Luther. Nevertheless it would be hard to overrate the debt which mankind
+owe to Calvin. The spiritual father of Coligny, of William the Silent,
+and of Cromwell must occupy a foremost rank among the champions of
+modern democracy. Perhaps not one of the mediaeval popes was more
+despotic in temper than Calvin; but it is not the less true that the
+promulgation of his theology was one of the longest steps that mankind
+have taken toward personal freedom. Calvinism left the individual man
+alone in the presence of his God. His salvation could not be wrought by
+priestly ritual, but only by the grace of God abounding in his soul; and
+wretched creature that he felt himself to be, through the intense moral
+awakening of which this stern theology was in part the expression, his
+soul was nevertheless of infinite value, and the possession of it was
+the subject of an everlasting struggle between the powers of heaven and
+the powers of hell. In presence of the awful responsibility of life, all
+distinctions of rank and fortune vanished; prince and pauper were alike
+the helpless creatures of Jehovah and suppliants for his grace. Calvin
+did not originate these doctrines; in announcing them he was but setting
+forth, as he said, the Institutes of the Christian religion; but in
+emphasizing this aspect of Christianity, in engraving it upon men's
+minds with that keen-edged logic which he used with such unrivalled
+skill, Calvin made them feel, as it had perhaps never been felt before,
+the dignity and importance of the individual human soul. It was a
+religion fit to inspire men who were to be called upon to fight for
+freedom, whether in the marshes of the Netherlands or on the moors of
+Scotland. In a church, moreover, based upon such a theology there was
+no room for prelacy. Each single church tended to become an independent
+congregation of worshippers, constituting one of the most effective
+schools that has ever existed for training men in local self-government.
+[Sidenote: Calvin's theology in its political bearings]
+
+When, therefore, upon the news of Elizabeth's accession to the throne,
+the Protestant refugees made their way back to England, they came as
+Calvinistic Puritans. Their stay upon the Continent had been short, but
+it had been just enough to put the finishing touch upon the work that
+had been going on since the days of Wyclif. Upon such men and their
+theories Elizabeth could not look with favour. With all her father's
+despotic temper, Elizabeth possessed her mother's fine tact, and
+she represented so grandly the feeling of the nation in its
+life-and-death-struggle with Spain and the pope, that never perhaps in
+English history has the crown wielded so much real power as during the
+five-and-forty years of her wonderful reign.
+
+One day Elizabeth asked a lady of the court how she contrived to retain
+her husband's affection. The lady replied that "she had confidence
+in her husband's understanding and courage, well founded on her own
+steadfastness not to offend or thwart, but to cherish and obey, whereby
+she did persuade her husband of her own affection, and in so doing did
+command his." "Go to, go to, mistress," cried the queen, "You are
+wisely bent, I find. After such sort do I keep the good will of all
+my husbands, my good people; for if they did not rest assured of some
+special love towards them, they would not readily yield me such good
+obedience." [2] Such a theory of government might work well in the hands
+of an Elizabeth, and in the circumstances in which England was then
+placed; but it could hardly be worked by a successor. The seeds of
+revolt were already sown. The disposition to curb the sovereign was
+growing and would surely assert itself as soon as it should have some
+person less loved and respected than Elizabeth to deal with. The queen
+in some measure foresaw this, and in the dogged independence and
+uncompromising enthusiasm of the Puritans she recognized the rock on
+which the monarchy might dash itself into pieces. She therefore hated
+the Puritans, and persecuted them zealously with one hand, while
+circumstances forced her in spite of herself to aid and abet them with
+the other. She could not maintain herself against Spain without helping
+the Dutch and the Huguenots; but every soldier she sent across the
+channel came back, if he came at all, with his head full of the
+doctrines of Calvin; and these stalwart converts were reinforced by the
+refugees from France and the Netherlands who came flocking into English
+towns to set up their thrifty shops and hold prayer-meetings in their
+humble chapels. To guard the kingdom against the intrigues of Philip and
+the Guises and the Queen of Scots, it was necessary to choose the most
+zealous Protestants for the most responsible positions, and such men
+were more than likely to be Calvinists and Puritans. Elizabeth's great
+ministers, Burleigh, Walsingham, and Nicholas Bacon, were inclined
+toward Puritanism; and so were the naval heroes who won the most
+fruitful victories of that century, by shattering the maritime power of
+Spain and thus opening the way for Englishmen to colonize North America.
+If we would realize the dangers that would have beset the Mayflower and
+her successors but for the preparatory work of these immortal sailors,
+we must remember the dreadful fate of Ribault and his Huguenot followers
+in Florida, twenty-three years before that most happy and glorious
+event, the destruction of the Spanish Armada. But not even the devoted
+men and women who held their prayer-meetings in the Mayflower's cabin
+were more constant in prayer or more assiduous in reading the Bible than
+the dauntless rovers, Drake and Hawkins, Gilbert and Cavendish. In the
+church itself, too, the Puritan spirit grew until in 1575-83 it seized
+upon Grindal, archbishop of Canterbury, who incurred the queen's
+disfavour by refusing to meddle with the troublesome reformers or to
+suppress their prophesyings. By the end of the century the majority
+of country gentlemen and of wealthy merchants in the towns had become
+Puritans, and the new views had made great headway in both universities,
+while at Cambridge they had become dominant. [Sidenote: Elizabeth's
+policy, and its effects] [Sidenote: Puritan Sea-rovers]
+
+This allusion to the universities may serve to introduce the very
+interesting topic of the geographical distribution of Puritanism in
+England. No one can study the history of the two universities without
+being impressed with the greater conservatism of Oxford, and the greater
+hospitality of Cambridge toward new ideas. Possibly the explanation
+may have some connection with the situation of Cambridge upon the East
+Anglian border. The eastern counties of England have often been remarked
+as rife in heresy and independency. For many generations the coast
+region between the Thames and the Humber was a veritable _litus
+haereticum._ Longland, bishop of Lincoln in 1520, reported Lollardism as
+especially vigorous and obstinate in his diocese, where more than two
+hundred heretics were once brought before him in the course of a single
+visitation. It was in Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, and
+among the fens of Ely, Cambridge, and Huntingdon, that Puritanism was
+strongest at the end of the sixteenth century. It was as member and
+leading spirit of the Eastern Counties Association that Oliver Cromwell
+began his military career; and in so far as there was anything sectional
+in the struggle between Charles I. and the Long Parliament, it was a
+struggle which ended in the victory of east over west. East Anglia was
+from first to last the one region in which the supremacy of Parliament
+was unquestionable and impregnable, even after the strength of its
+population had been diminished by sending some thousands of picked men
+and women to America. While every one of the forty counties of England
+was represented in the great Puritan exodus, the East Anglian counties
+contributed to it far more than all the rest. Perhaps it would not be
+far out of the way to say that two-thirds of the American people who can
+trace their ancestry to New England might follow it back to the East
+Anglian shires of the mother-country; one-sixth might follow it to those
+southwestern countries--Devonshire, Dorset, and Somerset--which so
+long were foremost in maritime enterprise; one-sixth to other parts of
+England. I would not insist upon the exactness of such figures, in a
+matter where only a rough approximation is possible; but I do not think
+they overstate the East Anglian preponderance. It was not by accident
+that the earliest counties of Massachusetts were called Norfolk,
+Suffolk, and Essex, or that Boston in Lincolnshire gave its name to the
+chief city of New England. The native of Connecticut or Massachusetts
+who wanders about rural England to-day finds no part of it so homelike
+as the cosy villages and smiling fields and quaint market towns as he
+fares leisurely and in not too straight a line from Ipswich toward Hull.
+Countless little unobtrusive features remind him of home. The very names
+on the sign-boards over the sleepy shops have an unwontedly familiar
+look. In many instances the homestead which his forefathers left, when
+they followed Winthrop or Hooker to America, is still to be found,
+well-kept and comfortable; the ancient manor-house built of massive
+unhewn stone, yet in other respects much like the New England farmhouse,
+with its long sloping roof and gable end toward the road, its staircase
+with twisted balusters running across the shallow entry-way, its low
+ceilings with their sturdy oaken beams, its spacious chimneys, and its
+narrow casements from which one might have looked out upon the anxious
+march of Edward IV. from Ravenspur to the field of victory at Barnet
+in days when America was unknown. Hard by, in the little parish church
+which has stood for perhaps a thousand years, plain enough and bleak
+enough to suit the taste of the sternest Puritan, one may read upon
+the cold pavement one's own name and the names of one's friends and
+neighbours in startling proximity, somewhat worn and effaced by the
+countless feet that have trodden there. And yonder on the village green
+one comes with bated breath upon the simple inscription which tells of
+some humble hero who on that spot in the evil reign of Mary suffered
+death by fire. Pursuing thus our interesting journey, we may come at
+last to the quiet villages of Austerfield and Scrooby, on opposite
+banks of the river Idle, and just at the corner of the three shires of
+Lincoln, York, and Nottingham. It was from this point that the Puritan
+exodus to America was begun. [Sidenote: Puritanism was strongest in the
+eastern counties] [Sidenote: Preponderance of East Anglia in the Puritan
+exodus]
+
+It was not, however, in the main stream of Puritanism, but in one of its
+obscure rivulets that this world-famous movement originated. During the
+reign of Elizabeth it was not the purpose of the Puritans to separate
+themselves from the established church of which the sovereign was the
+head, but to remain within it and reform it according to their own
+notions. For a time they were partially successful in this work,
+especially in simplifying the ritual and in giving a Calvinistic tinge
+to the doctrines. In doing this they showed no conscious tendency toward
+freedom of thought, but rather a bigotry quite as intense as that which
+animated the system against which they were fighting. The most advanced
+liberalism of Elizabeth's time was not to be found among the Puritans,
+but in the magnificent treatise on "Ecclesiastical Polity" by the
+churchman Richard Hooker. But the liberalism of this great writer, like
+that of Erasmus a century earlier, was not militant enough to meet the
+sterner demands of the time. It could not then ally itself with the
+democratic spirit, as Puritanism did. It has been well said that while
+Luther was the prophet of the Reformation that has been, Erasmus was the
+prophet of the Reformation that is to come, and so it was to some extent
+with the Puritans and Hooker. The Puritan fight against the hierarchy
+was a political necessity of the time, something without which no real
+and thorough reformation could then be effected. In her antipathy to
+this democratic movement, Elizabeth vexed and tormented the Puritans
+as far as she deemed it prudent; and in the conservative temper of the
+people she found enough support to prevent their transforming the church
+as they would have liked to do. Among the Puritans themselves, indeed,
+there was no definite agreement on this point. Some would have stopped
+short with Presbyterianism, while others held that "new presbyter was
+but old priest writ large," and so pressed on to Independency. It was
+early in Elizabeth's reign that the zeal of these extreme brethren,
+inflamed by persecution, gave rise to the sect of Separatists, who
+flatly denied the royal supremacy over ecclesiastical affairs, and
+asserted the right to set up churches of their own, with pastors
+and elders and rules of discipline, independent of queen or bishop.
+[Sidenote: Puritanism was not intentionally allied with liberalism]
+
+In 1567 the first congregation of this sort, consisting of about a
+hundred persons assembled in a hall in Anchor Lane in London, was
+forcibly broken up and thirty-one of the number were sent to jail and
+kept there for nearly a year. By 1576 the Separatists had come to be
+recognized as a sect, under the lead of Robert Brown, a man of high
+social position, related to the great Lord Burleigh. Brown fled to
+Holland, where he preached to a congregation of English exiles, and
+wrote books which were smuggled into England and privately circulated
+there, much to the disgust, not only of the queen, but of all parties,
+Puritans as well as High Churchmen. The great majority of Puritans,
+whose aim was not to leave the church, but to stay in it and control
+it, looked with dread and disapproval upon these extremists who seemed
+likely to endanger their success by forcing them into deadly opposition
+to the crown. Just as in the years which ushered in our late Civil War,
+the opponents of the Republicans sought to throw discredit upon them by
+confusing them with the little sect of Abolitionists; and just as the
+Republicans, in resenting the imputation, went so far as to frown upon
+the Abolitionists, so that in December, 1860, men who had just voted for
+Mr. Lincoln were ready to join in breaking up "John Brown meetings" in
+Boston; so it was with religious parties in the reign of Elizabeth. The
+opponents of the Puritans pointed to the Separatists, and cried, "See
+whither your anarchical doctrines are leading!" and in their eagerness
+to clear themselves of this insinuation, the leading Puritans were as
+severe upon the Separatists as anybody. It is worthy of note that in
+both instances the imputation, so warmly resented, was true. Under the
+pressure of actual hostilities the Republicans did become Abolitionists,
+and in like manner, when in England it came to downright warfare the
+Puritans became Separatists. But meanwhile it fared ill with the little
+sect which everybody hated and despised. Their meetings were broken up
+by mobs. In an old pamphlet describing a "tumult in Fleet Street, raised
+by the disorderly preachment, pratings, and prattlings of a swarm of
+Separatists," one reads such sentences as the following: "At length they
+catcht one of them alone, but they kickt him so vehemently as if they
+meant to beat him into a jelly. It is ambiguous whether they have kil'd
+him or no, but for a certainty they did knock him about as if they meant
+to pull him to pieces. I confesse it had been no matter if they had
+beaten the whole tribe in the like manner." For their leaders the
+penalty was more serious. The denial of the queen's ecclesiastical
+supremacy could be treated as high treason, and two of Brown's friends,
+convicted of circulating his books, were sent to the gallows. In spite
+of these dangers Brown returned to England in 1585. William the Silent
+had lately been murdered, and heresy in Holland was not yet safe from
+the long arm of the Spaniard. Brown trusted in Lord Burleigh's ability
+to protect him, but in 1588, finding himself in imminent danger, he
+suddenly recanted and accepted a comfortable living under the bishops
+who had just condemned him. His followers were already known as
+Brownists; henceforth their enemies took pains to call them so and twit
+them with holding doctrines too weak for making martyrs. [Sidenote:
+Robert Brown and the Separatists]
+
+The flimsiness of Brown's moral texture prevented him from becoming the
+leader in the Puritan exodus to New England. That honour was reserved
+for William Brewster, son of a country gentleman who had for many
+years been postmaster at Scrooby. The office was then one of high
+responsibility and influence. After taking his degree at Cambridge,
+Brewster became private secretary to Sir William Davison, whom he
+accompanied on his mission to the Netherlands. When Davison's public
+career came to an end in 1587, Brewster returned to Scrooby, and soon
+afterward succeeded his father as postmaster, in which position he
+remained until 1607. During the interval Elizabeth died, and James
+Stuart came from Scotland to take her place on the throne. [Sidenote:
+William Brewster]
+
+The feelings with which the late queen had regarded Puritanism were mild
+compared with the sentiments entertained by her successor. For some
+years he had been getting worsted in his struggle with the Presbyterians
+of the northern kingdom. His vindictive memory treasured up the day when
+a mighty Puritan preacher had in public twitched him by the sleeve and
+called him "God's silly vassal." "I tell you, sir," said Andrew Melville
+on that occasion, "there are two kings and two kingdoms in Scotland.
+There is Christ Jesus the King, and his kingdom the Kirk, whose subject
+James VI. is, and of whose kingdom not a king, nor a lord, nor a head,
+but a member. And they whom Christ hath called to watch over his kirk
+and govern his spiritual kingdom have sufficient power and authority so
+to do both together and severally." In this bold and masterful speech
+we have the whole political philosophy of Puritanism, as in a nutshell.
+Under the guise of theocratic fanaticism, and in words as arrogant as
+ever fell from priestly lips, there was couched the assertion of the
+popular will against despotic privilege. Melville could say such things
+to the king's face and walk away unharmed, because there stood behind
+him a people fully aroused to the conviction that there is an eternal
+law of God, which kings no less than scullions must obey. [3] Melville
+knew this full well, and so did James know it in the bitterness of his
+heart. He would have no such mischievous work in England. He despised
+Elizabeth's grand national policy which his narrow intellect could not
+comprehend. He could see that in fighting Spain and aiding Dutchmen and
+Huguenots she was strengthening the very spirit that sought to pull
+monarchy down. In spite of her faults, which were neither few nor small,
+the patriotism of that fearless woman was superior to any personal
+ambition. It was quite otherwise with James. He was by no means
+fearless, and he cared more for James Stuart than for either England or
+Scotland. He had an overweening opinion of his skill in kingcraft. In
+coming to Westminster it was his policy to use his newly acquired
+power to break down the Puritan party in both kingdoms and to fasten
+episcopacy upon Scotland. In pursuing this policy he took no heed of
+English national sentiment, but was quite ready to defy and insult it,
+even to the point of making--before children who remembered the Armada
+had yet reached middle age--an alliance with the hated Spaniard. In such
+wise James succeeded in arraying against the monarchical principle the
+strongest forces of English life,--the sentiment of nationality, the
+sentiment of personal freedom, and the uncompromising religious fervour
+of Calvinism; and out of this invincible combination of forces has been
+wrought the nobler and happier state of society in which we live to-day.
+[Sidenote: James Stuart and Andrew Melville]
+
+Scarcely ten months had James been king of England when he invited
+the leading Puritan clergymen to meet himself and the bishops in a
+conference at Hampton Court, as he wished to learn what changes they
+would like to make in the government and ritual of the church. In the
+course of the discussion he lost his temper and stormed, as was his
+wont. [Sidenote: King James's view of the political situation]
+
+The mention of the word "presbytery" lashed him into fury. "A Scottish
+presbytery," he cried, "agreeth as well with a monarchy as God and the
+Devil. Then Jack and Tom and Will and Dick shall meet, and at their
+pleasures censure me and my council and all our proceedings .... Stay,
+I pray you, for one seven years, before you demand that from me, and if
+then you find me pursy and fat, and my windpipes stuffed, I will perhaps
+hearken to you .... Until you find that I grow lazy, let that alone."
+One of the bishops declared that in this significant tirade his Majesty
+spoke by special inspiration from Heaven! The Puritans saw that their
+only hope lay in resistance. If any doubt remained, it was dispelled by
+the vicious threat with which the king broke up the conference. "I will
+_make_ them conform," said he, "or I will harry them out of the land."
+
+These words made a profound sensation in England, as well they might,
+for they heralded the struggle which within half a century was to
+deliver up James's son to the executioner. The Parliament of 1604 met
+in angrier mood than any Parliament which had assembled at Westminster
+since the dethronement of Richard II. Among the churches non-conformity
+began more decidedly to assume the form of secession. The key-note of
+the conflict was struck at Scrooby. Staunch Puritan as he was, Brewster
+had not hitherto favoured the extreme measures of the Separatists. Now
+he withdrew from the church, and gathered together a company of men and
+women who met on Sundays for divine service in his own drawing-room at
+Scrooby Manor. In organizing this independent Congregationalist
+society, Brewster was powerfully aided by John Robinson, a native of
+Lincolnshire. Robinson was then thirty years of age, and had taken his
+master's degree at Cambridge in 1600. He was a man of great learning and
+rare sweetness of temper, and was moreover distinguished for a broad and
+tolerant habit of mind too seldom found among the Puritans of that day.
+Friendly and unfriendly writers alike bear witness to his spirit of
+Christian charity and the comparatively slight value which he attached
+to orthodoxy in points of doctrine; and we can hardly be wrong in
+supposing that the comparatively tolerant behaviour of the Plymouth
+colonists, whereby they were contrasted with the settlers of
+Massachusetts, was in some measure due to the abiding influence of the
+teachings of this admirable man. Another important member of the Scrooby
+congregation was William Bradford, of the neighbouring village of
+Austerfield, then a lad of seventeen years, but already remarkable for
+maturity of intelligence and weight of character. Afterward governor of
+Plymouth for nearly thirty years, he became the historian of his colony;
+and to his picturesque chronicle, written in pure and vigorous English,
+we are indebted for most that we know of the migration that started
+from Scrooby and ended in Plymouth. [Sidenote: The congregation of
+Separatists at Scrooby]
+
+It was in 1606--two years after King James's truculent threat--that
+this independent church of Scrooby was organized. Another year had not
+elapsed before its members had suffered so much at the hands of officers
+of the law, that they began to think of following the example of former
+heretics and escaping to Holland. After an unsuccessful attempt in
+the autumn of 1607, they at length succeeded a few months later in
+accomplishing their flight to Amsterdam, where they hoped to find a
+home. But here they found the English exiles who had preceded them so
+fiercely involved in doctrinal controversies, that they decided to
+go further in search of peace and quiet. This decision, which we may
+ascribe to Robinson's wise counsels, served to keep the society of
+Pilgrims from getting divided and scattered. They reached Leyden in
+1609, just as the Spanish government had sullenly abandoned the hopeless
+task of conquering the Dutch, and had granted to Holland the Twelve
+Years Truce. During eleven of these twelve years the Pilgrims remained
+in Leyden, supporting themselves by various occupations, while their
+numbers increased from 300 to more than 1000. Brewster opened a
+publishing house, devoted mainly to the issue of theological books.
+Robinson accepted a professorship in the university, and engaged in the
+defence of Calvinism against the attacks of Episcopius, the successor
+of Arminius. The youthful Bradford devoted himself to the study of
+languages,--Dutch, French, Latin, Greek, and finally Hebrew; wishing,
+as he said, to "see with his own eyes the ancient oracles of God in all
+their native beauty." During their sojourn in Leyden the Pilgrims were
+introduced to a strange and novel spectacle,--the systematic legal
+toleration of all persons, whether Catholic or Protestant, who called
+themselves followers of Christ. Not that there was not plenty of
+intolerance in spirit, but the policy inaugurated by the idolized
+William the Silent held it in check by law. All persons who came to
+Holland, and led decorous lives there, were protected in their opinions
+and customs. By contemporary writers in other countries this eccentric
+behaviour of the Dutch government was treated with unspeakable scorn.
+"All strange religions flock thither," says one; it is "a common harbour
+of all heresies," a "cage of unclean birds," says another; "the great
+mingle mangle of religion," says a third. [4] In spite of the relief
+from persecution, however, the Pilgrims were not fully satisfied with
+their new home. The expiration of the truce with Spain might prove that
+this relief was only temporary; and at any rate, complete toleration
+did not fill the measure of their wants. Had they come to Holland as
+scattered bands of refugees, they might have been absorbed into the
+Dutch population, as Huguenot refugees have been absorbed in Germany,
+England, and America. But they had come as an organized community, and
+absorption into a foreign nation was something to be dreaded. They
+wished to preserve their English speech and English traditions, keep up
+their organization, and find some favoured spot where they might lay the
+corner-stone of a great Christian state. The spirit of nationality was
+strong in them; the spirit of self-government was strong in them; and
+the only thing which could satisfy these feelings was such a migration
+as had not been seen since ancient times, a migration like that of
+Phokaians to Massilia or Tyrians to Carthage. [Sidenote: The flight to
+Holland] [Sidenote: Why the Pilgrims did not stay there]
+
+It was too late in the world's history to carry out such a scheme upon
+European soil. Every acre of territory there was appropriated. The only
+favourable outlook was upon the Atlantic coast of America, where English
+cruisers had now successfully disputed the pretensions of Spain, and
+where after forty years of disappointment and disaster a flourishing
+colony had at length been founded in Virginia. The colonization of the
+North American coast had now become part of the avowed policy of the
+British government. In 1606 a great joint-stock company was formed for
+the establishment of two colonies in America. The branch which was to
+take charge of the proposed southern colony had its headquarters in
+London; the management of the northern branch was at Plymouth in
+Devonshire. Hence the two branches are commonly spoken of as the London
+and Plymouth companies. The former was also called the Virginia Company,
+and the latter the North Virginia Company, as the name of Virginia was
+then loosely applied to the entire Atlantic coast north of Florida. The
+London Company had jurisdiction from 34 degrees to 38 degrees north
+latitude; the Plymouth Company had jurisdiction from 45 degrees down to
+41 degrees; the intervening territory, between 38 degrees and 41 degrees
+was to go to whichever company should first plant a self-supporting
+colony. The local government of each colony was to be entrusted to a
+council resident in America and nominated by the king; while general
+supervision over both colonies was to be exercised by a council resident
+in England. [Sidenote: The London and Plymouth companies]
+
+In pursuance of this general plan, though with some variations in
+detail, the settlement of Jamestown had been begun in 1607, and its
+success was now beginning to seem assured. On the other hand all the
+attempts which had been made to the north of the fortieth parallel had
+failed miserably. As early as 1602 Bartholomew Gosnold, with 32 men, had
+landed on the headland which they named Cape Cod from the fish found
+thereabouts in great numbers. This was the first English name given to
+any spot in that part of America, and so far as known these were the
+first Englishmen that ever set foot there. They went on and gave names
+to Martha's Vineyard and the Elizabeth Islands in Buzzard's Bay; and
+on Cuttyhunk they built some huts with the intention of remaining, but
+after a month's experience they changed their mind and went back to
+England. Gosnold's story interested other captains, and on Easter
+Sunday, 1605, George Weymouth set sail for North Virginia, as it was
+called. He found Cape Cod and coasted northward as far as the Kennebec
+river, up which he sailed for many miles. Weymouth kidnapped five
+Indians and carried them to England, that they might learn the language
+and acquire a wholesome respect for the arts of civilization and the
+resistless power of white men. His glowing accounts of the spacious
+harbours, the abundance of fish and game, the noble trees, the luxuriant
+herbage, and the balmy climate, aroused general interest in England, and
+doubtless had some influence upon the formation, in the following year,
+of the great joint-stock company just described. The leading spirit of
+the Plymouth Company was Sir John Popham, chief-justice of England, and
+he was not disposed to let his friends of the southern branch excel him
+in promptness. Within three months after the founding of Jamestown, a
+party of 120 colonists, led by the judge's kinsman George Popham, landed
+at the mouth of the Kennebec, and proceeded to build a rude village of
+some fifty cabins, with storehouse, chapel, and block-house. When
+they landed in August they doubtless shared Weymouth's opinion of the
+climate. These Englishmen had heard of warm countries like Italy and
+cold countries like Russia; harsh experience soon taught them that there
+are climates in which the summer of Naples may alternate with the winter
+of Moscow. The president and many others fell sick and died. News came
+of the death of Sir John Popham in England, and presently the weary and
+disappointed settlers abandoned their enterprise and returned to their
+old homes. Their failure spread abroad in England the opinion that
+North Virginia was uninhabitable by reason of the cold, and no further
+attempts were made upon that coast until in 1614 it was visited by
+Captain John Smith. [Sidenote: First exploration of the New England
+coast]
+
+The romantic career of this gallant and garrulous hero did not end with
+his departure from the infant colony at Jamestown. By a curious destiny
+his fame is associated with the beginnings of both the southern and the
+northern portions of the United States. To Virginia Smith may be said to
+have given its very existence as a commonwealth; to New England he
+gave its name. In 1614 he came over with two ships to North Virginia,
+explored its coast minutely from the Penobscot river to Cape Cod, and
+thinking it a country of such extent and importance as to deserve a name
+of its own, rechristened it New England. On returning home he made a
+very good map of the coast and dotted it with English names suggested by
+Prince Charles. Of these names Cape Elizabeth, Cape Ann, Charles River,
+and Plymouth still remain where Smith placed them. In 1615 Smith again
+set sail for the New World, this time with a view to planting a colony
+under the auspices of the Plymouth Company, but his talent for strange
+adventures had not deserted him. He was taken prisoner by a French
+fleet, carried hither and thither on a long cruise, and finally set
+ashore at Rochelle, whence, without a penny in his pocket, he contrived
+to make his way back to England. Perhaps Smith's life of hardship may
+have made him prematurely old. After all his wild and varied experience
+he was now only in his thirty-seventh year, but he does not seem to have
+gone on any more voyages. The remaining sixteen years of his life
+were spent quietly in England in writing books, publishing maps, and
+otherwise stimulating the public interest in the colonization of the New
+World. But as for the rocky coast of New England, which he had explored
+and named, he declared that he was not so simple as to suppose that any
+other motive than riches would "ever erect there a commonwealth or draw
+company from their ease and humours at home, to stay in New England."
+[Sidenote: John Smith]
+
+In this opinion, however, the bold explorer was mistaken. Of all
+migrations of peoples the settlement of New England is preeminently
+the one in which the almighty dollar played the smallest part, however
+important it may since have become as a motive power. It was left for
+religious enthusiasm to achieve what commercial enterprise had failed
+to accomplish. By the summer of 1617 the Pilgrim society at Leyden had
+decided to send a detachment of its most vigorous members to lay
+the foundations of a Puritan state in America. There had been much
+discussion as to the fittest site for such a colony. Many were in favour
+of Guiana, which Sir Walter Raleigh had described in such glowing
+colours; but it was thought that the tropical climate would be
+ill-suited to northern men of industrious and thrifty habit, and the
+situation, moreover, was dangerously exposed to the Spaniards. Half a
+century had scarcely elapsed since the wholesale massacre of Huguenots
+in Florida. Virginia was then talked of, but Episcopal ideas had already
+taken root there. New England, on the other hand, was considered too
+cold. Popham's experience was not encouraging. But the country about
+the Delaware river afforded an opportunity for erecting an independent
+colony under the jurisdiction of the London Company, and this seemed
+the best course to pursue. Sir Edwin Sandys, the leading spirit in the
+London Company, was favourably inclined toward Puritans, and through him
+negotiations were begun. Capital to the amount of £7000 was furnished
+by seventy merchant adventurers in England, and the earnings of the
+settlers were to be thrown into a common stock until these subscribers
+should have been remunerated. A grant of land was obtained from the
+London Company, and the king was asked to protect the emigrants by a
+charter, but this was refused. James, however, made no objections to
+their going, herein showing himself less of a bigot than Louis XIV.
+in later days, who would not suffer a Huguenot to set foot in Canada,
+though France was teeming with Huguenots who would have been glad
+enough to go. When James inquired how the colonists expected to support
+themselves, some one answered, most likely by fishing. "Very good,"
+quoth the king, "it was the Apostles' own calling." He declared that no
+one should molest them so long as they behaved themselves properly. From
+this unwonted urbanity it would appear that James anticipated no trouble
+from the new colony. A few Puritans in America could not do much to
+annoy him, and there was of course a fair chance of their perishing, as
+so many other colonizers had perished. [Sidenote: The Pilgrims at Leyden
+decide to make a settlement near the Delaware river]
+
+The congregation at Leyden did not think it wise to cut loose from
+Holland until they should have secured a foothold in America. It was but
+an advance guard that started out from Delft haven late in July, 1620,
+in the rickety ship Speedwell, with Brewster and Bradford, and sturdy
+Miles Standish, a trained soldier whose aid was welcome, though he does
+not seem to have belonged to the congregation. Robinson remained at
+Leyden, and never came to America. After a brief stop at Southampton,
+where they met the Mayflower with friends from London, the Pilgrims
+again set sail in the two ships. The Speedwell sprang a leak, and they
+stopped at Dartmouth for repairs. Again they started, and had put three
+hundred miles of salt water between themselves and Land's End, when the
+Speedwell leaked so badly that they were forced to return. When they
+dropped anchor at Plymouth in Devonshire, about twenty were left on
+shore, and the remainder, exactly one hundred in number, crowded into
+the Mayflower and on the 6th of September started once more to cross the
+Atlantic. The capacity of the little ship was 180 tons, and her strength
+was but slight. In a fierce storm in mid-ocean a mainbeam amidships was
+wrenched and cracked, and but for a huge iron screw which one of the
+passengers had brought from Delft, they might have gone to the bottom.
+The foul weather prevented any accurate calculation of latitude and
+longitude, and they were so far out in their reckoning that when they
+caught sight of land on the 9th of November, it was to Cape Cod that
+they had come. Their patent gave them no authority to settle here, as
+it was beyond the jurisdiction of the London Company. They turned their
+prow southward, but encountering perilous shoals and a stiff headwind
+they desisted and sought shelter in Cape Cod bay. On the 11th they
+decided to find some place of abode in this neighbourhood, anticipating
+no difficulty in getting a patent from the Plymouth Company, which was
+anxious to obtain settlers. For five weeks they stayed in the ship while
+little parties were exploring the coast and deciding upon the best site
+for a town. It was purely a coincidence that the spot which they chose
+had already received from John Smith the name of Plymouth, the beautiful
+port in Devonshire from which the Mayflower had sailed. [Sidenote:
+Founding of Plymouth]
+
+There was not much to remind them of home in the snow-covered coast on
+which they landed. They had hoped to get their rude houses built before
+the winter should set in, but the many delays and mishaps had served to
+bring them ashore in the coldest season. When the long winter came to
+an end, fifty-one of the hundred Pilgrims had died,--a mortality even
+greater than that before which the Popham colony had succumbed. But
+Brewster spoke truth when he said, "It is not with us as with men whom
+small things can discourage or small discontentments cause to wish
+themselves at home again." At one time the living were scarcely able to
+bury the dead; only Brewster, Standish, and five other hardy ones were
+well enough to get about. At first they were crowded under a single
+roof, and as glimpses were caught of dusky savages skulking among the
+trees, a platform was built on the nearest hill and a few cannon were
+placed there in such wise as to command the neighbouring valleys and
+plains. By the end of the first summer the platform had grown to a
+fortress, down from which to the harbour led a village street with seven
+houses finished and others going up. Twenty-six acres had been cleared,
+and a plentiful harvest gathered in; venison, wild fowl, and fish were
+easy to obtain. When provisions and fuel had been laid in for the
+ensuing winter, Governor Bradford appointed a day of Thanksgiving.
+Town-meetings had already been held, and a few laws passed. The history
+of New England had begun.
+
+This had evidently been a busy summer for the forty-nine survivors.
+On the 9th of November, the anniversary of the day on which they had
+sighted land, a ship was descried in the offing. She was the Fortune,
+bringing some fifty more of the Leyden company. It was a welcome
+reinforcement, but it diminished the rations of food that could be
+served during the winter, for the Fortune was not well supplied. When
+she set sail for England, she carried a little cargo of beaver-skins and
+choice wood for wainscoting to the value of L500 sterling, as a first
+instalment of the sum due to the merchant adventurers. But this cargo
+never reached England, for the Fortune was overhauled by a French
+cruiser and robbed of everything worth carrying away.
+
+For two years more it was an anxious and difficult time for the new
+colony. By 1624 its success may be said to have become assured. That the
+Indians in the neighbourhood had not taken advantage of the distress of
+the settlers in that first winter, and massacred every one of them, was
+due to a remarkable circumstance. Early in 1617 a frightful pestilence
+had swept over New England and slain, it is thought, more than half the
+Indian population between the Penobscot river and Narragansett bay. Many
+of the Indians were inclined to attribute this calamity to the murder of
+two or three white fishermen the year before. They had not got over the
+superstitious dread with which the first sight of white men had inspired
+them, and now they believed that the strangers held the demon of the
+plague at their disposal and had let him loose upon the red men in
+revenge for the murders they had committed. This wholesome delusion
+kept their tomahawks quiet for a while. When they saw the Englishmen
+establishing themselves at Plymouth, they at first held a powwow in
+the forest, at which the new-comers were cursed with all the elaborate
+ingenuity that the sorcery of the medicine-men could summon for so
+momentous an occasion; but it was deemed best to refrain from merely
+human methods of attack. It was not until the end of the first winter
+that any of them mustered courage to visit the palefaces. Then an Indian
+named Samoset, who had learned a little English from fishermen and for
+his own part was inclined to be friendly, came one day into the
+village with words of welcome. He was so kindly treated that presently
+Massasoit, principal sachem of the Wampanoags, who dwelt between
+Narragansett and Cape Cod bays, came with a score of painted and
+feathered warriors and squatting on a green rug and cushions in the
+governor's log-house smoked the pipe of peace, while Standish with
+half-a-dozen musketeers stood quietly by. An offensive and defensive
+alliance was then and there made between King Massasoit and King James,
+and the treaty was faithfully kept for half a century. Some time
+afterward, when Massasoit had fallen sick and lay at death's door, his
+life was saved by Edward Winslow, who came to his wigwam and skilfully
+nursed him. Henceforth the Wampanoag thought well of the Pilgrim. The
+powerful Narragansetts, who dwelt on the farther side of the bay, felt
+differently, and thought it worth while to try the effect of a threat.
+A little while after the Fortune had brought its reinforcement, the
+Narragansett sachem Canonicus sent a messenger to Plymouth with a bundle
+of newly-made arrows wrapped in a snake-skin. The messenger threw it
+in at the governor's door and made off with unseemly haste. Bradford
+understood this as a challenge, and in this he was confirmed by a
+friendly Wampanoag. The Narragansetts could muster 2000 warriors, for
+whom forty or fifty Englishmen, even with firearms, were hardly a fair
+match; but it would not do to show fear. Bradford stuffed the snake-skin
+with powder and bullets, and sent it back to Canonicus, telling him that
+if he wanted war he might come whenever he liked and get his fill of it.
+When the sachem saw what the skin contained, he was afraid to touch
+it or have it about, and medicine-men, handling it no doubt gingerly
+enough, carried it out of his territory. [Sidenote: Why the colony was
+not attacked by the Indians]
+
+It was a fortunate miscalculation that brought the Pilgrims to New
+England. Had they ventured upon the lands between the Hudson and the
+Delaware, they would probably have fared worse. They would soon have
+come into collision with the Dutch, and not far from that neighbourhood
+dwelt the Susquehannocks, at that time one of the most powerful and
+ferocious tribes on the continent. For the present the new-comers were
+less likely to be molested in the Wampanoag country than anywhere else.
+In the course of the year 1621 they obtained their grant from the
+Plymouth Company. This grant was not made to them directly but to
+the joint-stock company of merchant adventurers with whom they were
+associated. But the alliance between the Pilgrims and these London
+merchants was not altogether comfortable; there was too much divergence
+between their aims. In 1627 the settlers, wishing to be entirely
+independent, bought up all the stock and paid for it by instalments
+from the fruits of their labour. By 1633 they had paid every penny, and
+become the undisputed owners of the country they had occupied.
+
+Such was the humble beginning of that great Puritan exodus from England
+to America which had so much to do with founding and peopling the United
+States. These Pilgrims of the Mayflower were but the pioneers of a
+mighty host. Historically their enterprise is interesting not so much
+for what it achieved as for what it suggested. Of itself the Plymouth
+colony could hardly have become a wealthy and powerful state. Its growth
+was extremely slow. After ten years its numbers were but three hundred.
+In 1643, when the exodus had come to an end, and the New England
+Confederacy was formed, the population of Plymouth was but three
+thousand. In an established community, indeed, such a rate of increase
+would be rapid, but it was not sufficient to raise in New England a
+power which could overcome Indians and Dutchmen and Frenchmen, and
+assert its will in opposition to the crown. It is when we view the
+founding of Plymouth in relation to what came afterward, that it assumes
+the importance which belongs to the beginning of a new era.
+
+We have thus seen how it was that the political aspirations of James I.
+toward absolute sovereignty resulted in the beginnings of the Puritan
+exodus to America. In the next chapter we shall see how the still more
+arbitrary policy of his ill-fated son all at once gave new dimensions to
+that exodus and resulted in the speedy planting of a high-spirited and
+powerful New England.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE PLANTING OF NEW ENGLAND.
+
+
+When Captain George Weymouth in the summer of 1605 sailed into the
+harbour of Plymouth in Devonshire, with his five kidnapped savages and
+his glowing accounts of the country since known as New England, the
+garrison of that fortified seaport was commanded by Sir Ferdinando
+Gorges. The Christian name of this person now strikes us as rather odd,
+but in those days it was not so uncommon in England, and it does not
+necessarily indicate a Spanish or Italian ancestry for its bearer.
+Gorges was a man of considerable ability, but not of high character. On
+the downfall of his old patron the Earl of Essex he had contrived to
+save his own fortunes by a course of treachery and ingratitude. He had
+served in the Dutch war against Spain, and since 1596 had been military
+governor of Plymouth. The sight of Weymouth's Indians and the recital of
+his explorations awakened the interest of Gorges in the colonization of
+North America. He became one of the most active members of the Plymouth,
+or North Virginia, Company established in the following year. It was he
+who took the leading part in fitting out the two ships with which John
+Smith started on his unsuccessful expedition in 1615. In the following
+years he continued to send out voyages of exploration, became largely
+interested in the fisheries, and at length in 1620 succeeded in
+obtaining a new patent for the Plymouth Company, by which it was made
+independent of the London Company, its old yoke-fellow and rival. This
+new document created a corporation of forty patentees who, sitting in
+council as directors of their enterprise, were known as the Council for
+New England. The president of this council was King James's unpopular
+favourite the Duke of Buckingham, and its most prominent members
+were the earls of Pembroke and Lenox, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, and
+Shakespeare's friend the Earl of Southampton. This council was empowered
+to legislate for its American territory, to exercise martial law there
+and expel all intruders, and to exercise a monopoly of trade within the
+limits of the patent. Such extensive powers, entrusted to a company of
+which Buckingham was the head, excited popular indignation, and in the
+great struggle against monopolies which was then going on, the Plymouth
+Company did not fail to serve as a target for attacks. It started,
+however, with too little capital to enter upon schemes involving
+immediate outlay, and began almost from the first to seek to increase
+its income by letting or selling portions of its territory, which
+extended from the latitude of Philadelphia to that of Quebec, thus
+encroaching upon regions where Holland and France were already gaining
+a foothold. It was from this company that the merchant adventurers
+associated with the Mayflower Pilgrims obtained their new patent in
+the summer of 1621, and for the next fifteen years all settlers in New
+England based their claims to the soil upon territorial rights conveyed
+to them by the Plymouth Company. The grants, however, were often
+ignorantly and sometimes unscrupulously made, and their limits were so
+ill-defined that much quarrelling ensued. [Sidenote: Sir Ferdinando
+Gorges, and the Council for New England]
+
+During the years immediately following the voyage of the Mayflower,
+several attempts at settlement were made about the shores of
+Massachusetts bay. One of the merchant adventurers, Thomas Weston, took
+it into his head in 1622 to separate from his partners and send out a
+colony of seventy men on his own account. These men made a settlement
+at Wessagusset, some twenty-five miles north of Plymouth. They were a
+disorderly, thriftless rabble, picked up from the London streets, and
+soon got into trouble with the Indians; after a year they were glad
+to get back to England as best they could, and in this the Plymouth
+settlers willingly aided them. In June of that same year 1622 there
+arrived on the scene a picturesque but ill understood personage, Thomas
+Morton, "of Clifford's Inn, Gent.," as he tells on the title-page of
+his quaint and delightful book, the "New English Canaan." Bradford
+disparagingly says that he "had been a kind of petie-fogger of
+Furnifell's Inn"; but the churchman Samuel Maverick declares that he
+was a "gentleman of good qualitie." He was an agent of Sir Ferdinando
+Gorges, and came with some thirty followers to make the beginnings of
+a royalist and Episcopal settlement in the Massachusetts bay. He was
+naturally regarded with ill favour by the Pilgrims as well as by the
+later Puritan settlers, and their accounts of him will probably
+bear taking with a grain or two of salt. [Sidenote: Wessagusset and
+Merrymount]
+
+In 1625 there came one Captain Wollaston, with a gang of indented white
+servants, and established himself on the site of the present town
+of Quincy. Finding this system of industry ill suited to northern
+agriculture, he carried most of his men off to Virginia, where he sold
+them. Morton took possession of the site of the settlement, which he
+called Merrymount. There, according to Bradford, he set up a "schoole of
+athisme," and his men did quaff strong waters and comport themselves "as
+if they had anew revived and celebrated the feasts of ye Roman Goddes
+Flora, or the beastly practices of ye madd Bachanalians." Charges of
+atheism have been freely hurled about in all ages. In Morton's case the
+accusation seems to have been based upon the fact that he used the Book
+of Common Prayer. His men so far maintained the ancient customs of
+merry England as to plant a Maypole eighty feet high, about which they
+frolicked with the redskins, while furthermore they taught them the
+use of firearms and sold them muskets and rum. This was positively
+dangerous, and in the summer of 1628 the settlers at Merrymount were
+dispersed by Miles Standish. Morton was sent to England, but returned
+the next year, and presently again repaired to Merrymount.
+
+By this time other settlements were dotted about the coast. There were
+a few scattered cottages or cabins at Nantasket and at the mouth of the
+Piscataqua, while Samuel Maverick had fortified himself on Noddle's
+Island, and William Blackstone already lived upon the Shawmut peninsula,
+since called Boston. These two gentlemen were no friends to the
+Puritans; they were churchmen and representatives of Sir Ferdinando
+Gorges.
+
+The case was very different with another of these earliest settlements,
+which deserves especial mention as coming directly in the line of
+causation which led to the founding of Massachusetts by Puritans. For
+some years past the Dorchester adventurers--a small company of merchants
+in the shire town of Dorset--had been sending vessels to catch fish off
+the New England coast. In 1623 these men conceived the idea of planting
+a small village as a fishing station, and setting up a church and
+preacher therein, for the spiritual solace of the fishermen and sailors.
+In pursuance of this scheme a small party occupied Cape Ann, where after
+two years they got into trouble with the men of Plymouth. Several grants
+and assignments had made it doubtful where the ownership lay, and
+although this place was not near their own town, the men of Plymouth
+claimed it. The dispute was amicably arranged by Roger Conant, an
+independent settler who had withdrawn from Plymouth because he did not
+fully sympathize with the Separatist views of the people there. The
+next step was for the Dorchester adventurers to appoint Conant as their
+manager, and the next was for them to abandon their enterprise, dissolve
+their partnership, and leave the remnant of the little colony to shift
+for itself. The settlers retained their tools and cattle, and Conant
+found for them a new and safer situation at Naumkeag, on the site of the
+present Salem. So far little seemed to have been accomplished; one more
+seemed added to the list of failures.
+
+But the excellent John White, the Puritan rector of Trinity Church in
+Dorchester, had meditated carefully about these things. He saw that
+many attempts at colonization had failed because they made use of unfit
+instruments, "a multitude of rude ungovernable persons, the very scum of
+the land." So Virginia had failed in its first years, and only succeeded
+when settled by worthy and industrious people under a strong government.
+The example of Plymouth, as contrasted with Wessagusset, taught a
+similar lesson. We desire, said White, "to raise a bulwark against the
+kingdom of Antichrist." Learn wisdom, my countrymen, from the ruin which
+has befallen the Protestants at Rochelle and in the Palatinate; learn
+"to avoid the plague while it is foreseen, and not to tarry as they did
+till it overtook them." The Puritan party in England was numerous and
+powerful, but the day of strife was not far off and none might foretell
+its issue. Clearly it was well to establish a strong and secure retreat
+in the New World, in case of disaster in the Old. What had been done at
+Plymouth by a few men of humble means might be done on a much greater
+scale by an association of leading Puritans, including men of wealth and
+wide social influence. Such arguments were urged in timely pamphlets, of
+one of which White is supposed to have been the author. The matter was
+discussed in London, and inquiry was made whether fit men could be found
+"to engage their persons in the voyage." "It fell out that among others
+they lighted at last on Master Endicott, a man well known to divers
+persons of good note, who manifested much willingness to accept of the
+offer as soon as it was tendered." All were thereby much encouraged, the
+schemes of White took definite shape, and on the 19th of March, 1628, a
+tract of land was obtained from the Council for New England, consisting
+of all the territory included between three miles north of the Merrimack
+and three miles south of the Charles in one direction, and the Atlantic
+and Pacific Oceans in the other. [Sidenote: John White and his noble
+scheme]
+
+This liberal grant was made at a time when people still supposed the
+Pacific coast to be not far west of Henry Hudson's river. The territory
+was granted to an association of six gentlemen, only one of whom--John
+Endicott--figures conspicuously in the history of New England. The
+grant was made in the usual reckless style, and conflicted with various
+patents which had been issued before. In 1622 Gorges and John Mason
+had obtained a grant of all the land between the rivers Kennebec
+and Merrimack, and the new grant encroached somewhat upon this. The
+difficulty seems to have been temporarily adjusted by some sort of
+compromise which restricted the new grant to the Merrimack, for in 1629
+we find Mason's title confirmed to the region between that river and the
+Piscataqua, while later on Gorges appears as proprietor of the territory
+between the Piscataqua and the Kennebec. A more serious difficulty was
+the claim of Robert Gorges, son of Sir Ferdinando. That young man had in
+1623 obtained a grant of some 300 square miles in Massachusetts, and had
+gone to look after it, but had soon returned discouraged to England
+and shortly afterward died. But his claim devolved upon his surviving
+brother, John Gorges, and Sir Ferdinando, in consenting to the grant to
+Endicott and his friends, expressly reserved the rights of his sons. No
+such reservation, however, was mentioned in the Massachusetts charter,
+and the colonists never paid the slightest heed to it. In these
+conflicting claims were sown seeds of trouble which bore fruit for more
+than half a century. In such cases actual possession is apt to make nine
+points in the law, and accordingly Endicott was sent over, as soon as
+possible, with sixty persons, to reinforce the party at Naumkeag and
+supersede Conant as its leader. On Endicott's arrival in September,
+1628, the settlers were at first inclined to dispute his authority, but
+they were soon conciliated, and in token of this amicable adjustment the
+place was called by the Hebrew name of Salem, or "peace." [Sidenote:
+Conflicting grants sow seeds of trouble] [Sidenote: John Endicot and the
+founding of Salem]
+
+Meanwhile Mr. White and the partners in England were pushing things
+vigorously. Their scheme took a wider scope. They were determined to
+establish something more than a trading company. From Charles I. it
+was sometimes easy to get promises because he felt himself under no
+obligation to keep them. In March, 1629, a royal charter was granted,
+creating a corporation, under the legal style of the Governor and
+Company of Massachusetts Bay in New England. The affairs of this
+corporate body were to be managed by a governor, deputy-governor, and a
+council of eighteen assistants, to be elected annually by the company.
+They were empowered to make such laws as they liked for their settlers,
+provided they did not contravene the laws of England,--a proviso
+susceptible of much latitude of interpretation. The place where the
+company was to hold its meetings was not mentioned in the charter. The
+law-officers of the crown at first tried to insert a condition that
+the government must reside in England, but the grantees with skilful
+argument succeeding in preventing this. Nothing was said in the charter
+about religious liberty, for a twofold reason: the crown would not have
+granted it, and it was not what the grantees wanted; such a provision
+would have been liable to hamper them seriously in carrying out their
+scheme. They preferred to keep in their own hands the question as to how
+much or how little religious liberty they should claim or allow. Six
+small ships were presently fitted out, and upon them were embarked 300
+men, 80 women, and 26 children, with 140 head of cattle, 40 goats, and
+abundance of arms, ammunition, and tools. The principal leader of this
+company was Francis Higginson, of St. John's College, Cambridge, rector
+of a church in Leicestershire, who had been deprived of his living for
+non-conformity. With him were associated two other ministers, also
+graduates of Cambridge. All three were members of the council. By the
+arrival of this company at Salem, Endicott now became governor of a
+colony larger than any yet started in New England,--larger than Plymouth
+after its growth of nearly nine years. [Sidenote: The Company of
+Massachusetts Bay]
+
+The time was at length ripe for that great Puritan exodus of which the
+voyage of the Mayflower had been the premonitory symptom. The grand
+crisis for the Puritans had come, the moment when decisive action could
+no longer be deferred. It was not by accident that the rapid development
+of John White's enterprise into the Company of Massachusetts Bay
+coincided exactly with the first four years of the reign of Charles I.
+They were years well fitted to bring such a scheme to quick maturity.
+The character of Charles was such as to exacerbate the evils of his
+father's reign. James could leave some things alone in the comfortable
+hope that all would by and by come out right, but Charles was not
+satisfied without meddling everywhere. Both father and son cherished
+some good intentions; both were sincere believers in their narrow theory
+of kingcraft. For wrong-headed obstinacy, utter want of tact, and
+bottomless perfidy, there was little to choose between them. The
+humorous epitaph of the grandson "whose word no man relies on" might
+have served for them all. But of this unhappy family Charles I. was
+eminently the dreamer. He lived in a world of his own, and was slow
+in rendering thought into action; and this made him rely upon the
+quick-witted but unwise and unscrupulous Buckingham, [5] who was silly
+enough to make feeble attempts at unpopular warfare without consulting
+Parliament. During each of Charles's first four years there was an
+angry session of Parliament, in which, through the unwillingness of the
+popular leaders to resort to violence, the king's policy seemed able
+to hold its ground. Despite all protest the king persisted in levying
+strange taxes and was to some extent able to collect them. Men who
+refused to pay enforced loans were thrown into jail and the writ of
+_habeas corpus_ was denied them. Meanwhile the treatment of Puritans
+became more and more vexatious. It was clear enough that Charles meant
+to become an absolute monarch, like Louis XIII., but Parliament began
+by throwing all the blame upon the unpopular minister and seeking to
+impeach him.
+
+On the 5th of June, 1628, the House of Commons presented the most
+extraordinary spectacle, perhaps in all its history. The famous Petition
+of Right had been Passed by both Houses, and the royal answer had just
+been received. Its tone was that of gracious assent, but it omitted the
+necessary legal formalities, and the Commons well knew what this meant.
+They were to be tricked with sweet words, and the petition was not to
+acquire the force of a statute. How was it possible to deal with such a
+slippery creature? There was but one way of saving the dignity of the
+throne without sacrificing the liberty of the people, and that was to
+hold the king's ministers responsible to Parliament, in anticipation
+of modern methods. It was accordingly proposed to impeach the Duke
+of Buckingham before the House of Lords. The Speaker now "brought an
+imperious message from the king, ... warning them ... that he would not
+tolerate any aspersion upon his ministers." Nothing daunted by this,
+Sir John Eliot arose to lead the debate, when the Speaker called him to
+order in view of the king's message. "Amid a deadly stillness" Eliot
+sat down and burst into tears. For a moment the House was overcome
+with despair. Deprived of all constitutional methods of redress, they
+suddenly saw yawning before them the direful alternative--slavery or
+civil war. Since the day of Bosworth a hundred and fifty years had
+passed without fighting worthy of mention on English soil, such an era
+of peace as had hardly ever before been seen on the earth; now half the
+nation was to be pitted against the other half, families were to be
+divided against themselves, as in the dreadful days of the Roses, and
+with what consequences no one could foresee. "Let us sit in silence,"
+quoth Sir Dudley Digges, "we are miserable, we know not what to do!"
+Nay, cried Sir Nathaniel Rich, "we _must_ now speak, or forever hold our
+peace." Then did grim Mr. Prynne and Sir Edward Coke mingle their words
+with sobs, while there were few dry eyes in the House. Presently they
+found their voices, and used them in a way that wrung from the startled
+king his formal assent to the Petition of Right. [Sidenote: Remarkable
+scene in the House of Commons]
+
+There is something strangely pathetic and historically significant [6]
+in the emotion of these stern, fearless men. The scene was no less
+striking on the 2d of the following March, when, "amid the cries and
+entreaties of the Speaker held down in his chair by force," while the
+Usher of the Black Rod was knocking loudly at the bolted door, and the
+tramp of the king's soldiers was heard in the courtyard, Eliot's clear
+voice rang out the defiance that whoever advised the levy of tonnage and
+poundage without a grant from Parliament, or whoever voluntarily paid
+those duties, was to be counted an enemy to the kingdom and a betrayer
+of its liberties. As shouts of "Aye, aye," resounded on every side, "the
+doors were flung open, and the members poured forth in a throng." The
+noble Eliot went to end his days in the Tower, and for eleven years no
+Parliament sat again in England. [7]
+
+It was in one and the same week that Charles I. thus began his
+experiment of governing without a Parliament, and that he granted a
+charter to the Company of Massachusetts Bay. He was very far, as we
+shall see, from realizing the import of what he was doing. To the
+Puritan leaders it was evident that a great struggle was at hand.
+Affairs at home might well seem desperate, and the news from abroad was
+not encouraging. It was only four months since the surrender of Rochelle
+had ended the existence of the Huguenots as an armed political party.
+They had now sunk into the melancholy condition of a tolerated sect
+which may at any moment cease to be tolerated. In Germany the
+terrible Thirty Years War had just reached the darkest moment for
+the Protestants. Fifteen months were yet to pass before the immortal
+Gustavus was to cross the Baltic and give to the sorely harassed cause
+of liberty a fresh lease of life. The news of the cruel Edict of
+Restitution in this same fateful month of March, 1629, could not but
+give the English Puritans great concern. Everywhere in Europe the
+champions of human freedom seemed worsted. They might well think that
+never had the prospect looked so dismal; and never before, as never
+since, did the venture of a wholesale migration to the New World so
+strongly recommend itself as the only feasible escape from a situation
+that was fast becoming intolerable. Such were the anxious thoughts of
+the leading Puritans in the spring of 1629, and in face of so grave a
+problem different minds came naturally to different conclusions. Some
+were for staying in England to fight it out to the bitter end; some were
+for crossing the ocean to create a new England in the wilderness. Either
+task was arduous enough, and not to be achieved without steadfast and
+sober heroism. [Sidenote: Desperate nature of the crisis]
+
+On the 26th of August twelve gentlemen, among the most eminent in the
+Puritan party, held a meeting at Cambridge, and resolved to lead a
+migration to New England, provided the charter of the Massachusetts Bay
+Company and the government established under it could be transferred to
+that country. On examination it appeared that no legal obstacle stood in
+the way. Accordingly such of the old officers as did not wish to take
+part in the emigration resigned their places, which were forthwith
+filled by these new leaders. For governor the choice fell upon John
+Winthrop, a wealthy gentleman from Groton in Suffolk, who was henceforth
+to occupy the foremost place among the founders of New England. Winthrop
+was at this time forty-one years of age, having been born in the
+memorable year of the Armada. He was a man of remarkable strength and
+beauty of character, grave and modest, intelligent and scholarlike,
+intensely religious and endowed with a moral sensitiveness that was
+almost morbid, yet liberal withal in his opinions and charitable in
+disposition. When his life shall have been adequately written, as it
+never has been, he will be recognized as one of the very noblest figures
+in American history. From early youth he had that same power of
+winning confidence and commanding respect for which Washington was so
+remarkable; and when he was selected as the Moses of the great Puritan
+exodus, there was a wide-spread feeling that extraordinary results were
+likely to come of such an enterprise.
+
+In marked contrast to Winthrop stands the figure of the man associated
+with him as deputy-governor. Thomas Dudley came of an ancient family,
+the history of which, alike in the old and in the new England, has not
+been altogether creditable. He represented the elder branch of that
+Norman family, to the younger branch of which belonged the unfortunate
+husband of Lady Jane Grey and the unscrupulous husband of Amy Robsart.
+There was, however, very little likeness to Elizabeth's gay lover
+in grim Thomas Dudley. His Puritanism was bleak and stern, and for
+Christian charity he was not eminent. He had a foible for making verses,
+and at his death there was found in his pocket a poem of his, containing
+a quatrain wherein the intolerance of that age is neatly summed up:--
+
+"Let men of God in courts and churches watch O'er such as do a
+Toleration hatch, Lest that ill egg bring forth a cockatrice To poison
+all with heresy and vice."
+
+Such was the spirit of most of the Puritans of that day, but in the
+manifestation of it there were great differences, and here was the
+strong contrast between Dudley and Winthrop,--a contrast which shows
+itself in their portraits. In that of Dudley we see the typical
+narrow-minded, strait-laced Calvinist for whom it is so much easier to
+entertain respect than affection. In that of Winthrop we see a face
+expressive of what was finest in the age of Elizabeth,--the face of a
+spiritual brother of Raleigh and Bacon.
+
+The accession of two men so important as Winthrop and Dudley served to
+bring matters speedily to a crisis. Their embarkation in April, 1630,
+was the signal for a general movement on the part of the English
+Puritans. Before Christmas of that year seventeen ships had come to
+New England, bringing more than 1000 passengers. This huge wave of
+immigration quite overwhelmed and bore away the few links of possession
+by which Gorges had thus far kept his hold upon the country. In January,
+1629, John Gorges had tried to assert the validity of his late brother's
+claim by executing conveyances covering portions of it. One of these
+was to John Oldham, a man who had been harshly treated at Plymouth, and
+might be supposed very ready to defend his rights against settlers
+of the Puritan company. Gorges further maintained that he retained
+possession of the country through the presence of his brother's tenants,
+Blackstone, Maverick, Walford, and others on the shores of the bay. In
+June, 1629, Endicott had responded by sending forward some fifty persons
+from Salem to begin the settlement of Charlestown. Shortly before
+Winthrop's departure from England, Gorges had sent that singular
+personage Sir Christopher Gardiner to look after his interests in the
+New World, and there he was presently found established near the mouth
+of the Neponset river, in company with "a comly yonge woman whom he
+caled his cousin." But these few claimants were now at once lost in the
+human tide which poured over Charlestown, Boston, Newtown, Watertown,
+Roxbury, and Dorchester. The settlement at Merrymount was again
+dispersed, and Morton sent back to London; Gardiner fled to the coast
+of Maine and thence sailed for England in 1632. The Puritans had indeed
+occupied the country in force.
+
+Here on the very threshold we are confronted by facts which show that
+not a mere colonial plantation, but a definite and organized state was
+in process of formation. The emigration was not like that of Jamestown
+or of Plymouth. It sufficed at once to make the beginnings of half a
+dozen towns, and the question as to self-government immediately sprang
+up. Early in 1631 a tax of £60 was assessed upon the settlements, in
+order to pay for building frontier fortifications at Newtown. This
+incident was in itself of small dimensions, as incidents in newly
+founded states are apt to be. But in its historic import it may serve
+to connect the England of John Hampden with the New England of Samuel
+Adams. The inhabitants of Watertown at first declined to pay this tax,
+which was assessed by the Board of Assistants, on the ground that
+English freemen cannot rightfully be taxed save by their own consent.
+This protest led to a change in the constitution of the infant colony,
+and here, at once, we are introduced to the beginnings of American
+constitutional history. At first it was thought that public business
+could be transacted by a primary assembly of all the freemen in the
+colony meeting four times in the year; but the number of freemen
+increased so fast that this was almost at once (in October, 1630) found
+to be impracticable. The right of choosing the governor and making the
+laws was then left to the Board of Assistants; and in May, 1631, it was
+further decided that the assistants need not be chosen afresh every
+year, but might keep their seats during good behaviour or until ousted
+by special vote of the freemen. If the settlers of Massachusetts had
+been ancient Greeks or Romans, this would have been about as far as they
+could go in the matter; the choice would have been between a primary
+assembly and an assembly of notables. It is curious to see Englishmen
+passing from one of these alternatives to the other. But it was only for
+a moment. The protest of the Watertown men came in time to check these
+proceedings, which began to have a decidedly oligarchical look. To
+settle the immediate question of the tax, two deputies were sent from
+each settlement to advise with the Board of Assistants; while the power
+of choosing each year the governor and assistants was resumed by the
+freemen. Two years later, in order to reserve to the freemen the power
+of making laws without interfering too much with the ordinary business
+of life, the colonists fell back upon the old English rural plan of
+electing deputies or representatives to a general court. [Sidenote: The
+question as to self-government raised at Watertown]
+
+At first the deputies sat in the same chamber with the assistants, but
+at length in 1644 they were formed into a second chamber with increased
+powers, and the way in which this important constitutional change came
+about is worth remembering, as an illustration of the smallness of the
+state which so soon was to play a great part in history. As Winthrop
+puts it, "there fell out a great business upon a very small occasion."
+To a certain Captain Keayne, of Boston, a rich man deemed to be hard and
+overbearing toward the poor, there was brought a stray pig, whereof he
+gave due public notice through the town-crier, yet none came to claim it
+till after he had killed a pig of his own which he kept in the same stye
+with the stray. A year having passed by, a poor woman named Sherman came
+to see the stray and to decide if it were one that she had lost. Not
+recognizing it as hers, she forthwith laid claim to the slaughtered pig.
+The case was brought before the elders of the church of Boston, who
+decided that the woman was mistaken. Mrs. Sherman then accused the
+captain of theft, and brought the case before a jury, which exonerated
+the defendant with £3 costs. The captain then sued Mrs. Sherman for
+defamation of character and got a verdict for £40 damages, a round
+sum indeed to assess upon the poor woman. But long before this it had
+appeared that she had many partisans and supporters; it had become a
+political question, in which the popular protest against aristocracy was
+implicated. Not yet browbeaten, the warlike Mrs. Sherman appealed to the
+General Court. The length of the hearing shows the importance which
+was attached to the case. After seven days of discussion, the vote
+was taken. Seven assistants and eight deputies approved the former
+decisions, two assistants and fifteen deputies condemned them, while
+seven deputies refrained from voting. In other words, Captain Keayne has
+a decided majority among the more aristocratic assistants, while Mrs.
+Sherman seemed to prevail with the more democratic deputies. Regarding
+the result as the vote of a single body, the woman had a plurality of
+two; regarding it as the vote of a double body, her cause had prevailed
+in the lower house, but was lost by the veto of the upper. No decision
+was reached at the time, but after a year of discussion the legislature
+was permanently separated into two houses, each with a veto power upon
+the other; and this was felt to be a victory for the assistants. As for
+the ecclesiastical polity of the new colony, it had begun to take
+shape immediately upon the arrival of Endicott's party at Salem. The
+clergymen, Samuel Skelton and Francis Higginson, consecrated each
+other, and a church covenant and confession of faith were drawn up by
+Higginson. Thirty persons joining in this covenant constituted the first
+church in the colony; and several brethren appointed by this church
+proceeded formally to ordain the two ministers by the laying on of
+hands. In such simple wise was the first Congregational church in
+Massachusetts founded. The simple fact of removal from England converted
+all the Puritan emigrants into Separatists, as Robinson had already
+predicted. Some, however, were not yet quite prepared for so radical a
+measure. These proceedings gave umbrage to two of the Salem party, who
+attempted forthwith to set up a separate church in conformity with
+episcopal models. A very important question was thus raised at once, but
+it was not allowed to disturb the peace of the colony. Endicott was a
+man of summary methods. He immediately sent the two malcontents back to
+England; and thus the colonial church not only seceded from the national
+establishment, but the principle was virtually laid down that the
+Episcopal form of worship would not be tolerated in the colony. For the
+present such a step was to be regarded as a measure of self-defence on
+the part of the colonists. Episcopacy to them meant actual and practical
+tyranny--the very thing they had crossed the ocean expressly to get
+away from--and it was hardly to be supposed that they would encourage
+the growth of it in their new home. One or two surpliced priests,
+conducting worship in accordance with the Book of Common Prayer, might
+in themselves be excellent members of society; but behind the surpliced
+priest the colonist saw the intolerance of Laud and the despotism of
+the Court of High Commission. In 1631 a still more searching measure
+of self-protection was adopted. It was decided that "no man shall be
+admitted to the freedom of this body politic, but such as are members of
+some of the churches within the limits of the same." Into the merits of
+this measure as illustrating the theocratic ideal of society which the
+Puritans sought to realize in New England, we shall inquire hereafter.
+At present we must note that, as a measure of self-protection, this
+decree was intended to keep out of the new community all emissaries of
+Strafford and Laud, as well as such persons as Morton and Gardiner and
+other agents of Sir Ferdinando Gorges.
+
+By the year 1634 the scheme of the Massachusetts Company had so far
+prospered that nearly 4000 Englishmen had come over, and some twenty
+villages on or near the shores of the bay had been founded. The building
+of permanent houses, roads, fences, and bridges had begun to go on quite
+briskly; farms were beginning to yield a return for the labour of the
+husbandman; lumber, furs, and salted fish were beginning to be sent to
+England in exchange for manufactured articles; 4000 goats and 1500 head
+of cattle grazed in the pastures, and swine innumerable rooted in the
+clearings and helped to make ready the land for the ploughman. Political
+meetings were held, justice was administered by magistrates after old
+English precedents, and church services were performed by a score of
+clergymen, nearly all graduates of Cambridge, though one or two had
+their degrees from Oxford, and nearly all of whom had held livings in
+the Church of England. The most distinguished of these clergymen, John
+Cotton, in his younger days a Fellow and Tutor of Emmanuel College, had
+for more than twenty years been rector of St. Botolph's, when he left
+the most magnificent parish church in England to hold service in the
+first rude meeting-house of the new Boston. From Emmanuel College came
+also Thomas Hooker and John Harvard. Besides these clergymen, so many of
+the leading persons concerned in the emigration were university men that
+it was not long before a university began to seem indispensable to
+the colony. In 1636 the General Court appropriated £400 toward the
+establishment of a college at Newtown. In 1638 John Harvard, dying
+childless, bequeathed his library and the half of his estate to the new
+college, which the Court forthwith ordered to be called by his name;
+while in honour of the mother university the name of the town was
+changed to Cambridge.
+
+[Illustration: Founding of Harvard College]
+
+It has been said that the assembly which decreed the establishment
+of Harvard College was "the first body in which the people, by their
+representatives, ever gave their own money to found a place of
+education." [8] The act was a memorable one if we have regard to all the
+circumstances of the year in which it was done. On every side danger was
+in the air. Threatened at once with an Indian war, with the enmity of
+the home government, and with grave dissensions among themselves, the
+year 1636 was a trying one indeed for the little community of Puritans,
+and their founding a college by public taxation just at this time is a
+striking illustration of their unalterable purpose to realize, in this
+new home, their ideal of an educated Christian society. [Sidenote:
+Threefold danger in the year 1636]
+
+That the government of Charles I. should view with a hostile eye the
+growth of a Puritan state in New England is not at all surprising. (1.
+From the king, who prepares to attack the infant colony but is fueled by
+dissensions at home.) The only fit ground for wonder would seem to be
+that Charles should have been willing at the outset to grant a charter
+to the able and influential Puritans who organized the Company of
+Massachusetts Bay. Probably, however, the king thought at first that it
+would relieve him at home if a few dozen of the Puritan leaders could
+be allowed to concentrate their minds upon a project of colonization in
+America. It might divert attention for a moment from his own despotic
+schemes. Very likely the scheme would prove a failure and the
+Massachusetts colony incur a fate like that of Roanoke Island; and at
+all events the wealth of the Puritans might better be sunk in a remote
+and perilous enterprise than employed at home in organizing resistance
+to the crown. Such, very likely, may have been the king's motive in
+granting the Massachusetts charter two days after turning his Parliament
+out of doors. But the events of the last half-dozen years had come to
+present the case in a new light. The young colony was not languishing.
+It was full of sturdy life; it had wrought mischief to the schemes of
+Gorges; and what was more, it had begun to take unheard-of liberties
+with things ecclesiastical and political. Its example was getting to be
+a dangerous one. It was evidently worth while to put a strong curb upon
+Massachusetts. Any promise made to his subjects Charles regarded as
+a promise made under duress which he was quite justified in breaking
+whenever it suited his purpose to do so. Enemies of Massachusetts were
+busy in England. Schismatics from Salem and revellers from Merrymount
+were ready with their tales of woe, and now Gorges and Mason were
+vigorously pressing their territorial claims. They bargained with
+the king. In February, 1635, the moribund Council for New England
+surrendered its charter and all its corporate rights in America, on
+condition that the king should disregard all the various grants by which
+these rights had from time to time been alienated, and should divide
+up the territory of New England in severalty among the members of the
+Council. In pursuance of this scheme Gorges and Mason, together with
+half a dozen noblemen, were allowed to parcel out New England among
+themselves as they should see fit. In this way the influence of the
+Marquis of Hamilton, with the Earls of Arundel, Surrey, Carlisle, and
+Stirling, might be actively enlisted against the Massachusetts Company.
+A writ of _quo warranto_ was brought against it; and it was proposed to
+send Sir Ferdinando to govern New England with viceregal powers like
+those afterward exercised by Andros.
+
+For a moment the danger seemed alarming; but, as Winthrop says, "the
+Lord frustrated their design." It was noted as a special providence that
+the ship in which Gorges was to sail was hardly off the stocks when it
+fell to pieces. Then the most indefatigable enemy of the colony, John
+Mason, suddenly died. The king issued his famous writ of ship-money and
+set all England by the ears; and, to crown all, the attempt to read the
+Episcopal liturgy at St. Giles's church in Edinburgh led straight to
+the Solemn League and Covenant. Amid the first mutterings of the Great
+Rebellion the proceedings against Massachusetts were dropped, and the
+unheeded colony went on thriving in its independent course. Possibly too
+some locks at Whitehall may have been turned with golden keys, [9] for
+the company was rich, and the king was ever open to such arguments. But
+when the news of his evil designs had first reached Boston the people of
+the infant colony showed no readiness to yield to intimidation. In their
+measures there was a decided smack of what was to be realized a hundred
+and forty years later. Orders were immediately issued for fortifying
+Castle Island in the harbour and the heights at Charlestown and
+Dorchester. Militia companies were put in training, and a beacon was
+set up on the highest hill in Boston, to give prompt notice to all the
+surrounding country of any approaching enemy.
+
+While the ill will of the home government thus kept the colonists in a
+state of alarm, there were causes of strife at work at their very doors,
+of which they were fain to rid themselves as soon as possible. Among all
+the Puritans who came to New England there is no more interesting figure
+than the learned, quick-witted pugnacious Welshman, Roger Williams. He
+was over-fond of logical subtleties and delighted in controversy. There
+was scarcely any subject about which he did not wrangle, from the
+sinfulness of persecution to the propriety of women wearing veils in
+church. Yet, with all this love of controversy, there has perhaps
+never lived a more gentle and kindly soul. Within five years from the
+settlement of Massachusetts this young preacher had announced the true
+principles of religious liberty with a clearness of insight quite
+remarkable in that age. Roger Williams had been aided in securing an
+education by the great lawyer Sir Edward Coke, and had lately taken his
+degree at Pembroke College, Cambridge; but the boldness with which he
+declared his opinions had aroused the hostility of Laud, and in 1631 he
+had come over to Plymouth, whence he removed two years later to Salem,
+and became pastor of the church there. The views of Williams, if
+logically carried out, involved the entire separation of church from
+state, the equal protection of all forms of religious faith, the repeal
+of all laws compelling attendance on public worship, the abolition of
+tithes and of all forced contributions to the support of religion. Such
+views are to-day quite generally adopted by the more civilized portions
+of the Protestant world; but it is needless to say that they were not
+the views of the seventeenth century, in Massachusetts or elsewhere. For
+declaring such opinions as these on the continent of Europe, anywhere
+except in Holland, a man like Williams would in that age have run great
+risk of being burned at the stake. In England, under the energetic
+misgovernment of Laud, he would very likely have had to stand in the
+pillory with his ears cropped, or perhaps, like Bunyan and Baxter, would
+have been sent to jail. In Massachusetts such views were naturally
+enough regarded as anarchical, but in Williams's case they were further
+complicated by grave political imprudence. He wrote a pamphlet in which
+he denied the right of the colonists to the lands which they held in New
+England under the king's grant. He held that the soil belonged to the
+Indians, that the settlers could only obtain a valid title to it by
+purchase from them, and that the acceptance of a patent from a mere
+intruder, like the king, was a sin requiring public repentance. This
+doctrine was sure to be regarded in England as an attack upon the king's
+supremacy over Massachusetts, and at the same time an incident occurred
+in Salem which made it all the more unfortunate. The royal colours under
+which the little companies of militia marched were emblazoned with the
+red cross of St. George. The uncompromising Endicott loathed this emblem
+as tainted with Popery, and one day he publicly defaced the flag of the
+Salem company by cutting out the cross. The enemies of Massachusetts
+misinterpreted this act as a defiance aimed at the royal authority, and
+they attributed it to the teachings of Williams. In view of the king's
+unfriendliness these were dangerous proceedings. Endicott was summoned
+before the General Court at Boston, where he was publicly reprimanded
+and declared incapable of holding office for a year. A few months
+afterward, in January, 1636, Williams was ordered by the General Court
+to come to Boston and embark in a ship that was about to set sail for
+England. But he escaped into the forest, and made his way through the
+snow to the wigwam of Massasoit. He was a rare linguist, and had learned
+to talk fluently in the language of the Indians, and now he passed the
+winter in trying to instill into their ferocious hearts something of the
+gentleness of Christianity. In the spring he was privately notified by
+Winthrop that if he were to steer his course to Narragansett bay he
+would be secure from molestation; and such was the beginning of the
+settlement of Providence. [Sidenote: From religious dissensions; Roger
+Williams]
+
+Shortly before the departure of Williams, there came to Boston one of
+the greatest Puritan statesmen of that heroic age, the younger Henry
+Vane. It is pleasant to remember that the man and Anne who did so much
+to overthrow the tyranny of Strafford, who brought the military strength
+of Scotland to the aid of the hard-pressed Parliament, who administered
+the navy with which Blake won his astonishing victories, who dared even
+withstand Cromwell at the height of his power when his measures became
+too violent,--it is pleasant to remember that this admirable man was
+once the chief magistrate of an American commonwealth. It is pleasant
+for a Harvard man to remember that as such he presided over the assembly
+that founded our first university. Thorough republican and enthusiastic
+lover of liberty, he was spiritually akin to Jefferson and to Samuel
+Adams. Like Williams he was a friend to toleration, and like Williams
+he found Massachusetts an uncomfortable home. In 1636 he was only
+twenty-four years of age, "young in years," and perhaps not yet "in
+sage counsel old." He was chosen governor for that year, and his
+administration was stormy. Among those persons who had followed Mr.
+Cotton from Lincolnshire was Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, a very bright and
+capable lady, if perhaps somewhat impulsive and indiscreet. She had
+brought over with her, says Winthrop, "two dangerous errors: first, that
+the person of the Holy Ghost dwells in a justified person; second, that
+no sanctification can help to evidence to us our justification." Into
+the merits of such abstruse doctrines it is not necessary for the
+historian to enter. One can hardly repress a smile as one reflects
+how early in the history of Boston some of its characteristic social
+features were developed. It is curious to read of lectures there in
+1636, lectures by a lady, and transcendentalist lectures withal! Never
+did lectures in Boston arouse greater excitement than Mrs. Hutchinson's.
+Many of her hearers forsook the teachings of the regular ministers, to
+follow her. [Sidenote: Henry Vane and Anne Hutchinson]
+
+She was very effectively supported by her brother-in-law, Mr.
+Wheelwright, an eloquent preacher, and for a while she seemed to be
+carrying everything before her. She won her old minister Mr. Cotton, she
+won the stout soldier Captain Underhill, she won Governor Vane himself;
+while she incurred the deadly hatred of such men as Dudley and Cotton's
+associate John Wilson. The church at Boston was divided into two hostile
+camps. The sensible Winthrop marvelled at hearing men distinguished "by
+being under a covenant of grace or a covenant of works, as in other
+countries between Protestants and Papists," and he ventured to doubt
+whether any man could really tell what the difference was. The
+theological strife went on until it threatened to breed civil
+disaffection among the followers of Mrs. Hutchinson. A peculiar
+bitterness was given to the affair, from the fact that she professed to
+be endowed with the spirit of prophecy and taught her partisans that it
+was their duty to follow the biddings of a supernatural light; and there
+was nothing which the orthodox Puritan so steadfastly abhorred as the
+anarchical pretence of living by the aid of a supernatural light. In a
+strong and complex society the teachings of Mrs. Hutchinson would have
+awakened but a languid speculative interest, or perhaps would have
+passed by unheeded. In the simple society of Massachusetts in 1636,
+physically weak and as yet struggling for very existence, the practical
+effect of such teachings may well have been deemed politically
+dangerous. When things came to such a pass that the forces of the colony
+were mustered for an Indian campaign and the men of Boston were ready to
+shirk the service because they suspected their chaplain to be "under a
+covenant of works," it was naturally thought to be high time to put Mrs.
+Hutchinson down. In the spring of 1637 Winthrop was elected governor,
+and in August Vane returned to England. His father had at that moment
+more influence with the king than any other person except Strafford,
+and the young man had indiscreetly hinted at an appeal to the home
+government for the protection of the Antinomians, as Mrs. Hutchinson's
+followers were called. But an appeal from America to England was
+something which Massachusetts would no more tolerate in the days of
+Winthrop than in the days of Hancock and Adams. Soon after Vane's
+departure, Mrs. Hutchinson and her friends were ordered to leave the
+colony. It was doubtless an odious act of persecution, yet of all
+such acts which stain the history of Massachusetts in the seventeenth
+century, it is just the one for which the plea of political necessity
+may really be to some extent accepted.
+
+We now begin to see how the spreading of the New England colonization,
+and the founding of distinct communities, was hastened by these
+differences of opinion on theological questions or on questions
+concerning the relations between church and state. Of Mrs. Hutchinson's
+friends and adherents, some went northward, and founded the towns of
+Exeter and Hampton. Some time before Portsmouth and Dover had been
+settled by followers of Mason and Gorges. In 1641 these towns were added
+to the domain of Massachusetts, and so the matter stood until 1679, when
+we shall see Charles II. marking them off as a separate province, under
+a royal government. Such were the beginnings of New Hampshire. Mrs.
+Hutchinson herself, however, with the rest of her adherents, bought
+the island of Aquedneck from the Indians, and settlements were made at
+Portsmouth and Newport. After a quarter of a century of turbulence,
+these settlements coalesced with Williams's colony at Providence, and
+thus was formed the state of Rhode Island. After her husband's death in
+1642, Mrs. Hutchinson left Aquedneck and settled upon some land to the
+west of Stamford and supposed to be within the territory of the New
+Netherlands. There in the following year she was cruelly murdered by
+Indians, together with nearly all her children and servants, sixteen
+victims in all. One of her descendants was the illustrious Thomas
+Hutchinson, the first great American historian, and last royal governor
+of Massachusetts.
+
+To the dangers arising from the ill-will of the crown, and from these
+theological quarrels, there was added the danger of a general attack by
+the savages. Down to this time, since the landing of the Pilgrims at
+Plymouth, the settlers of New England had been in no way molested by the
+natives. Massasoit's treaty with the Pilgrims was scrupulously observed
+on both sides, and kept the Wampanoags quiet for fifty-four years. The
+somewhat smaller tribe which took its name from the _Massawachusett_, or
+Great Hill, of Milton, kept on friendly terms with the settlers about
+Boston, because these red men coveted the powerful aid of the white
+strangers in case of war with their hereditary foes the Tarratines, who
+dwelt in the Piscataqua country. It was only when the English began
+to leave these coast regions and press into the interior that trouble
+arose. The western shores of Narragansett bay were possessed by
+the numerous and warlike tribe of that name, which held in partial
+subjection the Nyantics near Point Judith. To the west of these, and
+about the Thames river, dwelt the still more formidable Pequots, a tribe
+which for bravery and ferocity asserted a preeminence in New England
+not unlike that which the Iroquois league of the Mohawk valley was fast
+winning over all North America east of the Mississippi. North of the
+Pequots, the squalid villages of the Nipmucks were scattered over the
+beautiful highlands that stretch in long ridges from Quinsigamond to
+Nichewaug, and beyond toward blue Monadnock. Westward, in the lower
+Connecticut valley, lived the Mohegans, a small but valiant tribe, now
+for some time held tributary to their Pequot cousins, and very restive
+under the yoke. The thickly wooded mountain ranges between the
+Connecticut and the Hudson had few human inhabitants. These hundred
+miles of crag and forest were a bulwark none too wide or strong against
+the incursions of the terrible Mohawks, whose name sent a shiver of fear
+throughout savage New England, and whose forbearance the Nipmucks and
+Mohegans were fain to ensure by a yearly payment of blackmail. Each
+summer there came two Mohawk elders, secure in the dread that Iroquois
+prowess had everywhere inspired; and up and down the Connecticut valley
+they seized the tribute of weapons and wampum, and proclaimed the last
+harsh edict issued from the savage council at Onondaga. The scowls that
+greeted their unwelcome visits were doubtless nowhere fiercer than among
+the Mohegans, thus ground down between Mohawk and Pequot as between the
+upper and the nether millstone. [Sidenote: From the Indians: the Pequot
+supremacy]
+
+Among the various points in which civilized man surpasses the savage
+none is more conspicuous than the military brute force which in the
+highest civilization is always latent though comparatively seldom
+exerted. The sudden intrusion of English warfare into the Indian world
+of the seventeenth century may well have seemed to the red men a
+supernatural visitation, like the hurricane or the earthquake. The
+uncompromising vigour with which the founders of Massachusetts carried
+on their work was viewed in some quarters with a dissatisfaction which
+soon thrust the English migration into the very heart of the Indian
+country.
+
+The first movement, however, was directed against the encroachments of
+the New Netherlands. In October, 1634, some men of Plymouth, led by
+William Holmes, sailed up the Connecticut river, and, after bandying
+threats with a party of Dutch who had built a rude fort on the site of
+Hartford, passed on and fortified themselves on the site of Windsor.
+Next year Governor Van Twiller sent a company of seventy men to drive
+away these intruders, but after reconnoitring the situation the Dutchmen
+thought it best not to make an attack. Their little stronghold at
+Hartford remained unmolested by the English, and, in order to secure
+the communication between this advanced outpost and New Amsterdam, Van
+Twiller decided to build another fort at the mouth of the river, but
+this time the English were beforehand. Rumours of Dutch designs may
+have reached the ears of Lord Say and Sele and Lord Brooke--"fanatic
+Brooke," as Scott calls him in "Marmion"--who had obtained from the
+Council for New England a grant of territory on the shores of the Sound.
+These noblemen chose as their agent the younger John Winthrop, son of
+the Massachusetts governor, and this new-comer arrived upon the scene
+just in time to drive away Van Twiller's vessel and build an English
+fort which in honour of his two patrons he called "Say-Brooke."
+
+Had it not been for seeds of discontent already sown in Massachusetts,
+the English hold upon the Connecticut valley might perhaps have been
+for a few years confined to these two military outposts at Windsor and
+Saybrook. But there were people in Massachusetts who did not look with
+favour upon the aristocratic and theocratic features in its polity. The
+provision that none but church-members should vote or hold office was
+by no means unanimously approved. We see it in the course of another
+generation putting altogether too much temporal power into the hands of
+the clergy, and we can trace the growth of the opposition to it until in
+the reign of Charles II. it becomes a dangerous source of weakness to
+Massachusetts. At the outset the opposition seems to have been strongest
+in Dorchester, Newtown, and Watertown. When the Board of Assistants
+undertook to secure for themselves permanency of tenure, together with
+the power of choosing the governor and making the laws, these three
+towns sent deputies to Boston to inspect the charter and see if it
+authorized any such stretch of power. They were foremost in insisting
+that representatives chosen by the towns must have a share in the
+general government. Men who held such opinions were naturally unwilling
+to increase the political weight of the clergy, who, during these early
+disputes and indeed until the downfall of the charter, were inclined to
+take aristocratic views and to sympathize with the Board of Assistants.
+Cotton declared that democracy was no fit government either for church
+or for commonwealth, and the majority of the ministers agreed with
+him. Chief among those who did not was the learned and eloquent Thomas
+Hooker, pastor of the church at Newtown. When Winthrop, in a letter to
+Hooker, defended the restriction of the suffrage on the ground that "the
+best part is always the least, and of that best part the wiser part is
+always the lesser;" Hooker replied that "in matters which concern the
+common good, a general council, chosen by all, to transact businesses
+which concern all, I conceive most suitable to rule and most safe for
+relief of the whole." It is interesting to meet, on the very threshold
+of American history, with such a lucid statement of the strongly
+contrasted views which a hundred and fifty years later were to be
+represented on a national scale by Hamilton and Jefferson. There were
+many in Newtown who took Hooker's view of the matter; and there, as
+also in Watertown and Dorchester, which in 1633 took the initiative in
+framing town governments with selectmen, a strong disposition was shown
+to evade the restrictions upon the suffrage.
+
+While such things were talked about in the summer of 1633 the
+adventurous John Oldham was making his way through the forest and over
+the mountains into the Connecticut valley, and when he returned to
+the coast his glowing accounts set some people to thinking. Two years
+afterward a few pioneers from Dorchester pushed through the wilderness
+as far as the Plymouth men's fort at Windsor, while a party from
+Watertown went farther and came to a halt upon the site of Wethersfield.
+A larger party, bringing cattle and such goods as they could carry,
+set out in the autumn and succeeded in reaching Windsor. Their winter
+supplies were sent around by water to meet them, but early in November
+the ships had barely passed the Saybrook fort when they found the river
+blocked with ice and were obliged to return to Boston. The sufferings of
+the pioneers, thus cut off from the world, were dreadful. Their cattle
+perished, and they were reduced to a diet of acorns and ground-nuts.
+Some seventy of them, walking on the frozen river to Saybrook, were
+so fortunate as to find a crazy little sloop jammed in the ice. They
+succeeded in cutting her adrift, and steered themselves back to Boston.
+Others surmounted greater obstacles in struggling back through the snow
+over the region which the Pullman car now traverses, regardless of
+seasons, in three hours. A few grim heroes, the nameless founders of a
+noble commonwealth, stayed on the spot and defied starvation. In the
+next June, 1636, the Newtown congregation, a hundred or more in number,
+led by their sturdy pastor, and bringing with them 160 head of cattle,
+made the pilgrimage to the Connecticut valley. Women and children took
+part in this pleasant summer journey; Mrs. Hooker, the pastor's wife,
+being too ill to walk, was carried on a litter. Thus, in the memorable
+year in which our great university was born, did Cambridge become, in
+the true Greek sense of a much-abused word, the _metropolis_ or "mother
+town" of Hartford. The migration at once became strong in numbers.
+During the past twelvemonth a score of ships had brought from England
+to Massachusetts more than 3000 souls, and so great an accession made
+further movement easy. Hooker's pilgrims were soon followed by the
+Dorchester and Watertown congregations, and by the next May 800 people
+were living in Windsor, Hartford, and Wethersfield. As we read of these
+movements, not of individuals, but of organic communities, united in
+allegiance to a church and its pastor, and fervid with the instinct
+of self-government, we seem to see Greek history renewed, but with
+centuries of added political training. For one year a board of
+commissioners from Massachusetts governed the new towns, but at the end
+of that time the towns chose representatives and held a General Court at
+Hartford, and thus the separate existence of Connecticut was begun. As
+for Springfield, which was settled about the same time by a party from
+Roxbury, it remained for some years doubtful to which state it belonged.
+At the opening session of the General Court, May 31,1638, Mr. Hooker
+preached a sermon of wonderful power, in which he maintained that "the
+foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people,"
+"that the choice of public magistrates belongs unto the people by God's
+own allowance," and that "they who have power to appoint officers and
+magistrates have the right also to set the bounds and limitations of
+the power and place unto which they call them." On the 14th of January,
+1639, all the freemen of the three towns assembled at Hartford and
+adopted a written constitution in which the hand of the great preacher
+is clearly discernible. It is worthy of note that this document contains
+none of the conventional references to a "dread sovereign" or a
+"gracious king," nor the slightest allusion to the British or any other
+government outside of Connecticut itself, nor does it prescribe any
+condition of church-membership for the right of suffrage. It was the
+first written constitution known to history, that created a government,
+[10] and it marked the beginnings of American democracy, of which Thomas
+Hooker deserves more than any other man to be called the father. The
+government of the United States today is in lineal descent more nearly
+related to that of Connecticut than to that of any of the other thirteen
+colonies. The most noteworthy feature of the Connecticut republic was
+that it was a federation of independent towns, and that all attributes
+of sovereignty not expressly granted to the General Court remained,
+as of original right, in the towns. Moreover, while the governor and
+council were chosen by a majority vote of the whole people, and by a
+suffrage that was almost universal, there was for each township an
+equality of representation in the assembly. [11] This little federal
+republic was allowed to develop peacefully and normally; its
+constitution was not violently wrenched out of shape like that of
+Massachusetts at the end of the seventeenth century. It silently grew
+till it became the strongest political structure on the continent, as
+was illustrated in the remarkable military energy and the unshaken
+financial credit of Connecticut during the Revolutionary War; and in the
+chief crisis of the Federal Convention of 1787 Connecticut, with her
+compromise which secured equal state representation in one branch of the
+national government and popular representation in the other, played the
+controlling part. [Sidenote: Connecticut Pioneers] [Sidenote: The first
+written constitution]
+
+Before the little federation of towns had framed its government, it had
+its Indian question to dispose of. Three years before the migration led
+by Hooker, a crew of eight traders, while making their way up the river
+to the Dutch station on the site of Hartford, had been murdered by a
+party of Indians subject to Sassacus, chief sachem of the Pequots.
+Negotiations concerning this outrage had gone on between Sassacus and
+the government at Boston, and the Pequots had promised to deliver up
+the murderers, but had neglected to do so. In the summer of 1636 some
+Indians on Block Island subject to the Narragansetts murdered the
+pioneer John Oldham, who was sailing on the Sound, and captured his
+little vessel. At this, says Underhill, "God stirred up the hearts" of
+Governor Vane and the rest of the magistrates. They were determined to
+make an end of the Indian question and show the savages that such things
+would not be endured. First an embassy was sent to Canonicus and his
+nephew Miantonomo, chief sachems of the Narragansetts, who hastened
+to disclaim all responsibility for the murder, and to throw the blame
+entirely upon the Indians of the island. Vane then sent out three
+vessels under command of Endicott, who ravaged Block Island, burning
+wigwams, sinking canoes, and slaying dogs, for the men had taken to the
+woods. Endicott then crossed to the mainland to reckon with the Pequots.
+He demanded the surrender of the murderers, with a thousand fathoms of
+wampum for damages; and not getting a satisfactory answer, he attacked
+the Indians, killed a score of them, seized their ripe corn, and burned
+and spoiled what he could. But such reprisals served only to enrage the
+red men. Lyon Gardiner, commander of the Saybrook fort, complained to
+Endicott: "You come hither to raise these wasps about my ears; then
+you will take wing and flee away." The immediate effect was to incite
+Sassacus to do his utmost to compass the ruin of the English. The
+superstitious awe with which the white men were at first regarded had
+been somewhat lessened by familiar contact with them, as in Aesop's
+fable of the fox and the lion. The resources of Indian diplomacy were
+exhausted in the attempt to unite the Narragansett warriors with the
+Pequots in a grand crusade against the white men. Such a combination
+could hardly have been as formidable as that which was effected forty
+years afterward in King Philip's war; for the savages had not as yet
+become accustomed to firearms, and the English settlements did not
+present so many points exposed to attack; but there is no doubt that
+it might have wrought fearful havoc. We can, at any rate, find no
+difficulty in comprehending the manifold perplexity of the Massachusetts
+men at this time, threatened as they were at once by an Indian crusade,
+by the machinations of a faithless king, and by a bitter theological
+quarrel at home, in this eventful year when they laid aside part of
+their incomes to establish Harvard College. [Sidenote: Origin of the
+Pequot War]
+
+The schemes of Sassacus were unsuccessful. The hereditary enmity of the
+Narragansetts toward their Pequot rivals was too strong to be lightly
+overcome. Roger Williams, taking advantage of this feeling, so worked
+upon the minds of the Narragansett chiefs that in the autumn of 1636
+they sent an embassy to Boston and made a treaty of alliance with the
+English. The Pequots were thus left to fight out their own quarrel; and
+had they still been separated from the English by the distance between
+Boston and the Thames river, the feud might very likely have smouldered
+until the drift of events had given a different shape to it. But as the
+English had in this very year thrown out their advanced posts into the
+lower Connecticut valley, there was clearly no issue from the situation
+save in deadly war. All through the winter of 1636-37 the Connecticut
+towns were kept in a state of alarm by the savages. Men going to their
+work were killed and horribly mangled. A Wethersfield man was kidnapped
+and roasted alive. Emboldened by the success of this feat, the Pequots
+attacked Wethersfield, massacred ten people, and carried away two girls.
+[Sidenote: Sassacus is foiled by Roger Williams] [Sidenote: The Pequots
+take the warpath alone]
+
+Wrought up to desperation by these atrocities, the Connecticut men
+appealed to Massachusetts and Plymouth for aid, and put into service
+ninety of their own number, under command of John Mason, an excellent
+and sturdy officer who had won golden opinions from Sir Thomas Fairfax,
+under whom he had served in the Netherlands. It took time to get men
+from Boston, and all that Massachusetts contributed to the enterprise at
+its beginning was that eccentric daredevil John Underhill, with a force
+of twenty men. Seventy friendly Mohegans, under their chief Uncas, eager
+to see vengeance wrought upon their Pequot oppressors, accompanied the
+expedition. From the fort at Saybrook this little company set sail on
+the twentieth of May, 1637, and landed in brilliant moonlight near Point
+Judith, where they were reinforced by four hundred Narragansetts and
+Nyantics. From this point they turned westward toward the stronghold of
+the Pequots, near the place where the town of Stonington now stands. As
+they approached the dreaded spot the courage of the Indian allies gave
+out, and they slunk behind, declaring that Sassacus was a god whom
+it was useless to think of attacking. The force with which Mason
+and Underhill advanced to the fray consisted of just seventy-seven
+Englishmen. Their task was to assault and carry an entrenched fort or
+walled village containing seven hundred Pequots. The fort was a
+circle of two or three acres in area, girdled by a palisade of
+sturdy sapling-trunks, set firm and deep into the ground, the narrow
+interstices between them serving as loopholes wherefrom to reconnoitre
+any one passing by and to shoot at assailants. At opposite sides of
+this stronghold were two openings barely large enough to let any one go
+through. Within this enclosure were the crowded wigwams. The attack was
+skilfully managed, and was a complete surprise. A little before daybreak
+Mason, with sixteen men, occupied one of the doors, while Underhill made
+sure of the other. The Indians in panic sought first one outlet and then
+the other, and were ruthlessly shot down, whichever way they turned. A
+few succeeded in breaking loose, but these were caught and tomahawked by
+the Indian allies, who, though afraid to take the risks of the fight,
+were ready enough to help slay the fugitives. The English threw
+firebrands among the wigwams, and soon the whole village was in a light
+blaze, and most of the savages suffered the horrible death which they
+were so fond of inflicting upon their captives. Of the seven hundred
+Pequots in the stronghold, but five got away with their lives. All this
+bloody work had been done in less than an hour, and of the English there
+had been two killed and sixteen wounded. It was the end of the Pequot
+nation. Of the remnant which had not been included in this wholesale
+slaughter, most were soon afterwards destroyed piecemeal in a running
+fight which extended as far westward as the site of Fairfield. Sassacus
+fled across the Hudson river to the Mohawks, who slew him and sent his
+scalp to Boston, as a peace-offering to the English. The few survivors
+were divided between the Mohegans and Narragansetts and adopted into
+those tribes. Truly the work was done with Cromwellian thoroughness. The
+tribe which had lorded it so fiercely over the New England forests was
+all at once wiped out of existence. So terrible a vengeance the Indians
+had never heard of. If the name of Pequot had hitherto been a name of
+terror, so now did the Englishmen win the inheritance of that deadly
+prestige. Not for eight-and-thirty years after the destruction of the
+Pequots, not until a generation of red men had grown up that knew not
+Underhill and Mason, did the Indian of New England dare again to lift
+his hand against the white man. [Sidenote: And are exterminated]
+
+Such scenes of wholesale slaughter are not pleasant reading in this
+milder age. But our forefathers felt that the wars of Canaan afforded
+a sound precedent for such cases; and, indeed, if we remember what
+the soldiers of Tilly and Wallenstein were doing at this very time in
+Germany, we shall realize that the work of Mason and Underhill would not
+have been felt by any one in that age to merit censure or stand in need
+of excuses. As a matter of practical policy the annihilation of the
+Pequots can be condemned only by those who read history so incorrectly
+as to suppose that savages, whose business is to torture and slay, can
+always be dealt with according to the methods in use between civilized
+peoples. A mighty nation, like the United States, is in honour bound to
+treat the red man with scrupulous justice and refrain from cruelty in
+punishing his delinquencies. But if the founders of Connecticut, in
+confronting a danger which threatened their very existence, struck with
+savage fierceness, we cannot blame them. The world is so made that it
+is only in that way that the higher races have been able to preserve
+themselves and carry on their progressive work.
+
+The overthrow of the Pequots was a cardinal event in the planting of
+New England. It removed the chief obstacle to the colonization of
+the Connecticut coast, and brought the inland settlements into such
+unimpeded communication with those on tide-water as to prepare the way
+for the formation of the New England confederacy. Its first fruits were
+seen in the direction taken by the next wave of migration, which ended
+the Puritan exodus from England to America. About a month after the
+storming of the palisaded village there arrived in Boston a company of
+wealthy London merchants, with their families. The most prominent among
+them, Theophilus Eaton, was a member of the Company of Massachusetts
+Bay. Their pastor, John Davenport, was an eloquent preacher and a man of
+power. He was a graduate of Oxford, and in 1624 had been chosen vicar
+of St. Stephen's parish, in Coleman street, London. When he heard that
+Cotton and Hooker were about to sail for America, he sought earnestly to
+turn them from what he deemed the error of their ways, but instead he
+became converted himself and soon incurred the especial enmity of Laud,
+so that it became necessary for him to flee to Amsterdam. In 1636 he
+returned to England, and in concert with Eaton organized a scheme of
+emigration that included men from Yorkshire, Hertfordshire, and Kent.
+The leaders arrived in Boston in the midst of the Antinomian disputes,
+and although Davenport won admiration for his skill in battling with
+heresy, he may perhaps have deemed it preferable to lead his flock
+to some new spot in the wilderness where such warfare might not be
+required. The merchants desired a fine harbour and good commercial
+situation, and the reports of the men who returned from hunting the
+Pequots told them of just such a spot at Quinnipiack on Long Island
+Sound. Here they could carry out their plan of putting into practice
+a theocratic ideal even more rigid than that which obtained in
+Massachusetts, and arrange their civil as well as ecclesiastical affairs
+in accordance with rules to be obtained from a minute study of the
+Scriptures. [Sidenote: The colony of New Haven]
+
+In the spring of 1638 the town of New Haven was accordingly founded.
+The next year a swarm from this new town settled Milford, while another
+party, freshly arrived from England, made the beginnings of Guilford. In
+1640 Stamford was added to the group, and in 1643 the four towns were
+united into the republic of New Haven, to which Southold, on Long
+Island, and Branford were afterwards added. As being a confederation of
+independent towns, New Haven resembled Connecticut. In other respects
+the differences between the two reflected the differences between
+Davenport and Hooker; the latter was what would now be called more
+radical than Winthrop or Cotton, the former was more conservative.
+In the New Haven colony none but church-members could vote, and this
+measure at the outset disfranchised more than half the settlers in New
+Haven town, nearly half in Guilford, and less than one fifth in Milford.
+This result was practically less democratic than in Massachusetts where
+it was some time before the disfranchisement attained such dimensions.
+The power of the clergy reached its extreme point in New Haven, where
+each of the towns was governed by seven ecclesiastical officers known as
+"pillars of the church." These magistrates served as judges, and trial
+by jury was dispensed with, because no authority could be found for it
+in the laws of Moses. The legislation was quaint enough, though the
+famous "Blue Laws" of New Haven, which have been made the theme of so
+many jests at the expense of our forefathers, never really existed. The
+story of the Blue Laws was first published in 1781 by the Rev. Samuel
+Peters, a Tory refugee in London, who took delight in horrifying our
+British cousins with tales of wholesale tarring and feathering done by
+the patriots of the Revolution. In point of strict veracity Dr. Peters
+reminds one of Baron Munchausen; he declares that the river at Bellows
+Falls flows so fast as to float iron crowbars, and he gravely describes
+sundry animals who were evidently cousins to the Jabberwok. The most
+famous passage of his pretended code is that which enacts that "no woman
+shall kiss her child on the Sabbath," and that "no one shall play on any
+instrument of music except the drum, trumpet, or jewsharp." [Sidenote:
+Legend of the "Blue Laws"]
+
+When the Long Parliament met in 1640, the Puritan exodus to New England
+came to an end. During the twenty years which had elapsed since the
+voyage of the Mayflower, the population had grown to 26,000 souls. Of
+this number scarcely 500 had arrived before 1629. It is a striking fact,
+since it expresses a causal relation and not a mere coincidence, that
+the eleven years, 1629-1640, during which Charles I. governed England
+without a parliament, were the same eleven years that witnessed the
+planting of New England. For more than a century after this there was no
+considerable migration to this part of North America. Puritan England
+now found employment for all its energies and all its enthusiasm at
+home. The struggle with the king and the efforts toward reorganization
+under Cromwell were to occupy it for another score of years, and
+then, by the time of the Restoration the youthful creative energy of
+Puritanism had spent itself. The influence of this great movement
+was indeed destined to grow wider and deeper with the progress of
+civilization, but after 1660 its creative work began to run in new
+channels and assume different forms. [Sidenote: End of the Puritan
+exodus]
+
+It is curious to reflect what might have been the result, to America and
+to the world, had things in England gone differently between 1620 and
+1660. Had the policy of James and Charles been less formidable, the
+Puritan exodus might never have occurred, and the Virginian type of
+society, varied perhaps by a strong Dutch infusion, might have become
+supreme in America. The western continent would have lost in richness
+and variety of life, and it is not likely that Europe would have made a
+corresponding gain, for the moral effect of the challenge, the struggle,
+and the overthrow of monarchy in England was a stimulus sorely needed
+by neighbouring peoples. It is not always by avoiding the evil, it
+is rather by grappling with it and conquering it that character is
+strengthened and life enriched, and there is no better example of this
+than the history of England in the seventeenth century.
+
+On the other hand, if the Stuart despotism had triumphed in England, the
+Puritan exodus would doubtless have been swelled to huge dimensions. New
+England would have gained strength so quickly that much less irritation
+than she actually suffered between 1664 and 1689 would probably have
+goaded her into rebellion. The war of independence might have been waged
+a century sooner than it was. It is not easy to point to any especial
+advantage that could have come to America from this; one is rather
+inclined to think of the peculiarly valuable political training of the
+eighteenth century that would have been lost. Such surmises are for the
+most part idle. But as concerns Europe, it is plain to be seen, for
+reasons stated in my first chapter, that the decisive victory of Charles
+I. would have been a calamity of the first magnitude. It would have been
+like the Greeks losing Marathon or the Saracens winning Tours, supposing
+the worst consequences ever imagined in those hypothetical cases to have
+been realized. Or taking a more contracted view, we can see how England,
+robbed of her Puritan element, might still have waxed in strength, as
+France has done in spite of losing the Huguenots; but she could not
+have taken the proud position that she has come to occupy as mother of
+nations. Her preeminence since Cromwell's time has been chiefly due to
+her unrivalled power of planting self-supporting colonies, and that
+power has had its roots in English self-government. It is the vitality
+of the English Idea that is making the language of Cromwell and
+Washington dominant in the world.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE NEW ENGLAND CONFEDERACY.
+
+
+The Puritan exodus to New England, which came to an end about 1640, was
+purely and exclusively English. There was nothing in it that came from
+the continent of Europe, nothing that was either Irish or Scotch, very
+little that was Welsh. As Palfrey says, the population of 26,000 that
+had been planted in New England by 1640 "thenceforward continued to
+multiply on its own soil for a century and a half, in remarkable
+seclusion from other communities." During the whole of this period New
+England received but few immigrants; and it was not until after the
+Revolutionary War that its people had fairly started on their westward
+march into the state of New York and beyond, until now, after yet
+another century, we find some of their descendants dwelling in a
+homelike Salem and a Portland of charming beauty on the Pacific coast.
+Three times between the meeting of the Long Parliament and the meeting
+of the Continental Congress did the New England colonies receive a
+slight infusion of non-English blood. In 1652, after his victories at
+Dunbar and Worcester, Cromwell sent 270 of his Scottish prisoners to
+Boston, where the descendants of some of them still dwell. After the
+revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, 150 families of Huguenots
+came to Massachusetts. And finally in 1719, 120 Presbyterian families
+came over from the north of Ireland, and settled at Londonderry in New
+Hampshire, and elsewhere. In view of these facts it may be said that
+there is not a county in England of which the population is more purely
+English than the population of New England at the end of the eighteenth
+century. From long and careful research, Mr. Savage, the highest
+authority on this subject, concludes that more than 98 in 100 of the New
+England people at that time could trace their origin to England in
+the narrowest sense, excluding even Wales. As already observed, every
+English shire contributed something to the emigration, but there was
+a marked preponderance of people from the East Anglian counties.
+[Sidenote: The exodus was purely English]
+
+The population of New England was nearly as homogeneous in social
+condition as it was in blood. The emigration was preeminent for its
+respectability. Like the best part of the emigration to Virginia, it
+consisted largely of country squires and yeomen. The men who followed
+Winthrop were thrifty and prosperous in their old homes from which their
+devotion to an idea made them voluntary exiles. They attached so much
+importance to regular industry and decorous behaviour that for a long
+time the needy and shiftless people who usually make trouble in new
+colonies were not tolerated among them. Hence the early history of New
+England is remarkably free from those scenes of violence and disorder
+which have so often made hideous the first years of new communities.
+Of negro slaves there were very few, and these were employed wholly in
+domestic service; there were not enough of them to affect the industrial
+life of New England or to be worth mentioning as a class. Neither were
+there many of the wretched people, kidnapped from the jails and slums
+of English sea-ports, such as in those early days when negro labour was
+scarce, were sent by ship-loads to Virginia, to become the progenitors
+of the "white trash." There were a few indented white servants, usually
+of the class known as "redemptioners," or immigrants who voluntarily
+bound themselves to service for a stated time in order to defray the
+cost of their voyage from Europe. At a later time there were many of
+these "redemptioners" in the middle colonies, but in New England they
+were very few; and as no stigma of servitude was attached to manual
+labour, they were apt at the end of their terms of service to become
+independent farmers; thus they ceased to be recognizable as a distinct
+class of society. Nevertheless the common statement that no traces of
+the "mean white" are to be found in New England is perhaps somewhat
+too sweeping. Interspersed among those respectable and tidy mountain
+villages, once full of such vigorous life, one sometimes comes upon
+little isolated groups of wretched hovels whose local reputation is
+sufficiently indicated by such terse epithets as "Hardscrabble" or
+"Hell-huddle." Their denizens may in many instances be the degenerate
+offspring of a sound New England stock, but they sometimes show strong
+points of resemblance to that "white trash" which has come to be a
+recognizable strain of the English race; and one cannot help suspecting
+that while the New England colonies made every effort to keep out such
+riff raff, it may nevertheless have now and then crept in. However this
+may be, it cannot be said that this element ever formed a noticeable
+feature in the life of colonial New England. As regards their social
+derivation, the settlers of New England were homogeneous in character to
+a remarkable degree, and they were drawn from the sturdiest part of
+the English stock. In all history there has been no other instance of
+colonization so exclusively effected by picked and chosen men. The
+colonists knew this, and were proud of it, as well they might be. It was
+the simple truth that was spoken by William Stoughton when he said, in
+his election sermon of 1688: "God sifted a whole nation, that He might
+send choice grain into the wilderness." [Sidenote: Respectable character
+of the emigration]
+
+This matter comes to have more than a local interest, when we reflect
+that the 26,000 New Englanders of 1640 have in two hundred and fifty
+years increased to something like 15,000,000. From these men have come
+at least one-fourth of the present population of the United States.
+Striking as this fact may seem, it is perhaps less striking than the
+fact of the original migration when duly considered. In these times,
+when great steamers sail every day from European ports, bringing
+immigrants to a country not less advanced in material civilization
+than the country which they leave, the daily arrival of a thousand new
+citizens has come to be a commonplace event. But in the seventeenth
+century the transfer of more than twenty thousand well-to-do people
+within twenty years from their comfortable homes in England to the
+American wilderness was by no means a commonplace event. It reminds one
+of the migrations of ancient peoples, and in the quaint thought of
+our forefathers it was aptly likened to the exodus of Israel from the
+Egyptian house of bondage.
+
+In this migration a principle of selection was at work which insured an
+extraordinary uniformity of character and of purpose among the settlers.
+To this uniformity of purpose, combined with complete homogeneity of
+race, is due the preponderance early acquired by New England in the
+history of the American people. In view of this, it is worth while to
+inquire what were the real aims of the settlers of New England. What was
+the common purpose which brought these men together in their resolve to
+create for themselves new homes in the wilderness?
+
+This is a point concerning which there has been a great deal of popular
+misapprehension, and there has been no end of nonsense talked about it.
+It has been customary first to assume that the Puritan migration was
+undertaken in the interests of religious liberty, and then to upbraid
+the Puritans for forgetting all about religious liberty as soon as
+people came among them who disagreed with their opinions. But this view
+of the case is not supported by history. It is quite true that the
+Puritans were chargeable with gross intolerance; but it is not true that
+in this they were guilty of inconsistency. The notion that they came to
+New England for the purpose of establishing religious liberty, in
+any sense in which we should understand such a phrase, is entirely
+incorrect. It is neither more nor less than a bit of popular legend. If
+we mean by the phrase "religious liberty" a state of things in which
+opposite or contradictory opinions on questions of religion shall exist
+side by side in the same community, and in which everybody shall
+decide for himself how far he will conform to the customary religious
+observances, nothing could have been further from their thoughts. There
+is nothing they would have regarded with more genuine abhorrence. If
+they could have been forewarned by a prophetic voice of the general
+freedom--or, as they would have termed it, license--of thought and
+behaviour which prevails in this country to-day, they would very likely
+have abandoned their enterprise in despair. [12] The philosophic student
+of history often has occasion to see how God is wiser than man. In other
+words, he is often brought to realize how fortunate it is that the
+leaders in great historic events cannot foresee the remote results of
+the labours to which they have zealously consecrated their lives. It is
+part of the irony of human destiny that the end we really accomplish by
+striving with might and main is apt to be something quite different from
+the end we dreamed of as we started on our arduous labour. So it was
+with the Puritan settlers of New England. The religious liberty that
+we enjoy to-day is largely the consequence of their work; but it is a
+consequence that was unforeseen, while the direct and conscious aim of
+their labours was something that has never been realized, and probably
+never will be. [Sidenote: The migration was not intended to promote what
+we call religious liberty]
+
+The aim of Winthrop and his friends in coming to Massachusetts was the
+construction of a theocratic state which should be to Christians, under
+the New Testament dispensation, all that the theocracy of Moses and
+Joshua and Samuel had been to the Jews in Old Testament days. They
+should be to all intents and purposes freed from the jurisdiction of
+the Stuart king, and so far as possible the text of the Holy Scriptures
+should be their guide both in weighty matters of general legislation and
+in the shaping of the smallest details of daily life. In such a scheme
+there was no room for religious liberty as we understand it. No doubt
+the text of the Scriptures may be interpreted in many ways, but among
+these men there was a substantial agreement as to the important points,
+and nothing could have been further from their thoughts than to found
+a colony which should afford a field for new experiments in the art of
+right living. The state they were to found was to consist of a united
+body of believers; citizenship itself was to be co-extensive with
+church-membership; and in such a state there was apparently no more room
+for heretics than there was in Rome or Madrid. This was the idea which
+drew Winthrop and his followers from England at a time when--as events
+were soon to show--they might have stayed there and defied persecution
+with less trouble than it cost them to cross the ocean and found a new
+state. [Sidenote: Theocratic ideal of the Puritans]
+
+Such an ideal as this, considered by itself and apart from the concrete
+acts in which it was historically manifested, may seem like the merest
+fanaticism. But we cannot dismiss in this summary way a movement which
+has been at the source of so much that is great in American history:
+mere fanaticism has never produced such substantial results. Mere
+fanaticism is sure to aim at changing the constitution of human society
+in some essential point, to undo the work of evolution, and offer in
+some indistinctly apprehended fashion to remodel human life. But in
+these respects the Puritans were intensely conservative. The impulse by
+which they were animated was a profoundly ethical impulse--the desire
+to lead godly lives, and to drive out sin from the community--the same
+ethical impulse which animates the glowing pages of Hebrew poets and
+prophets, and which has given to the history and literature of Israel
+their commanding influence in the world. The Greek, says Matthew Arnold,
+held that the perfection of happiness was to have one's thoughts hit the
+mark; but the Hebrew held that it was to serve the Lord day and night.
+It was a touch of this inspiration that the Puritan caught from his
+earnest and reverent study of the sacred text, and that served to
+justify and intensify his yearning for a better life, and to give it
+the character of a grand and holy ideal. Yet with all this religious
+enthusiasm, the Puritan was in every fibre a practical Englishman with
+his full share of plain common-sense. He avoided the error of
+mediaeval anchorites and mystics in setting an exaggerated value upon
+otherworldliness. In his desire to win a crown of glory hereafter he did
+not forget that the present life has its simple duties, in the exact
+performance of which the welfare of society mainly consists. He likewise
+avoided the error of modern radicals who would remodel the fundamental
+institutions of property and of the family, and thus disturb the very
+groundwork of our ethical ideals. The Puritan's ethical conception of
+society was simply that which has grown up in the natural course of
+historical evolution, and which in its essential points is therefore
+intelligible to all men, and approved by the common-sense of men,
+however various may be the terminology--whether theological or
+scientific--in which it is expounded. For these reasons there was
+nothing essentially fanatical or impracticable in the Puritan scheme: in
+substance it was something that great bodies of men could at once put
+into practice, while its quaint and peculiar form was something that
+could be easily and naturally outgrown and set aside. [Sidenote: The
+impulse which sought to realize itself in the Puritan ideal was an
+ethical impulse]
+
+Yet another point in which the Puritan scheme of a theocratic society
+was rational and not fanatical was its method of interpreting the
+Scriptures. That method was essentially rationalistic in two ways.
+First, the Puritan laid no claim to the possession of any peculiar
+inspiration or divine light whereby he might be aided in ascertaining
+the meaning of the sacred text; but he used his reason just as he would
+in any matter of business, and he sought to convince, and expected to
+be convinced, by rational argument, and by nothing else. Secondly, it
+followed from this denial of any peculiar inspiration that there was no
+room in the Puritan commonwealth for anything like a priestly class, and
+that every individual must hold his own opinions at his own personal
+risk. The consequences of this rationalistic spirit have been very
+far-reaching. In the conviction that religious opinion must be consonant
+with reason, and that religious truth must be brought home to each
+individual by rational argument, we may find one of the chief causes of
+that peculiarly conservative yet flexible intelligence which has enabled
+the Puritan countries to take the lead in the civilized world of
+today. Free discussion of theological questions, when conducted with
+earnestness and reverence, and within certain generally acknowledged
+limits, was never discountenanced in New England. On the contrary, there
+has never been a society in the world in which theological problems have
+been so seriously and persistently discussed as in New England in the
+colonial period. The long sermons of the clergymen were usually learned
+and elaborate arguments of doctrinal points, bristling with quotations
+from the Bible, or from famous books of controversial divinity, and in
+the long winter evenings the questions thus raised afforded the occasion
+for lively debate in every household. The clergy were, as a rule, men
+of learning, able to read both Old and New Testaments in the original
+languages, and familiar with the best that had been talked and written,
+among Protestants at least, on theological subjects. They were also, for
+the most part, men of lofty character, and they were held in high social
+esteem on account of their character and scholarship, as well as on
+account of their clerical position. But in spite of the reverence in
+which they were commonly held, it would have been a thing quite unheard
+of for one of these pastors to urge an opinion from the pulpit on the
+sole ground of his personal authority or his superior knowledge of
+Scriptural exegesis. The hearers, too, were quick to detect novelties
+or variations in doctrine; and while there was perhaps no more than the
+ordinary human unwillingness to listen to a new thought merely because
+of its newness, it was above all things needful that the orthodox
+soundness of every new suggestion should be thoroughly and severely
+tested. This intense interest in doctrinal theology was part and parcel
+of the whole theory of New England life; because, as I have said, it was
+taken for granted that each individual must hold his own opinions at
+his own personal risk in the world to come. Such perpetual discussion,
+conducted, under such a stimulus, afforded in itself no mean school
+of intellectual training. Viewed in relation to the subsequent mental
+activity of New England, it may be said to have occupied a position
+somewhat similar to that which the polemics of the medieval schoolmen
+occupied in relation to the European thought of the Renaissance, and of
+the age of Hobbes and Descartes. At the same time the Puritan theory of
+life lay at the bottom of the whole system of popular education in New
+England. According to that theory, it was absolutely essential that
+every one should be taught from early childhood how to read and
+understand the Bible. So much instruction as this was assumed to be a
+sacred duty which the community owed to every child born within its
+jurisdiction. In ignorance, the Puritans maintained, lay the principal
+strength of popery in religion as well as of despotism in politics; and
+so, to the best of their lights, they cultivated knowledge with might
+and main. But in this energetic diffusion of knowledge they were
+unwittingly preparing the complete and irreparable destruction of the
+theocratic ideal of society which they had sought to realize by crossing
+the ocean and settling in New England. This universal education, and
+this perpetual discussion of theological questions, were no more
+compatible with rigid adherence to the Calvinistic system than with
+submission to the absolute rule of Rome. The inevitable result was the
+liberal and enlightened Protestantism which is characteristic of the
+best American society at the present day, and which is continually
+growing more liberal as it grows more enlightened--a Protestantism
+which, in the natural course of development, is coming to realize the
+noble ideal of Roger Williams, but from the very thought of which such
+men as Winthrop and Cotton and Endicott would have shrunk with dismay.
+[Sidenote: In interpreting Scripture, the Puritan appealed to his
+reason] [Sidenote: Value of theological discussion]
+
+In this connection it is interesting to note the similarity between the
+experience of the Puritans in New England and in Scotland with respect
+to the influence of their religious theory of life upon general
+education. Nowhere has Puritanism, with its keen intelligence and its
+iron tenacity of purpose, played a greater part than it has played in
+the history of Scotland. And one need not fear contradiction in saying
+that no other people in modern times, in proportion to their numbers,
+have achieved so much in all departments of human activity as the people
+of Scotland have achieved. It would be superfluous to mention the
+preeminence of Scotland in the industrial arts since the days of James
+Watt, or to recount the glorious names in philosophy, in history, in
+poetry and romance, and in every department of science, which since the
+middle of the eighteenth century have made the country of Burns and
+Scott, of Hume and Adam Smith, of Black and Hunter and Hutton and
+Lyell, illustrious for all future time. Now this period of magnificent
+intellectual fruition in Scotland was preceded by a period of
+Calvinistic orthodoxy quite as rigorous as that of New England. The
+ministers of the Scotch Kirk in the seventeenth century cherished a
+theocratic ideal of society not unlike that which the colonists of New
+England aimed at realizing. There was the same austerity, the same
+intolerance, the same narrowness of interests, in Scotland that there
+was in New England. Mr. Buckle, in the book which thirty years ago
+seemed so great and stimulating, gave us a graphic picture of this state
+of society, and the only thing which he could find to say about it, as
+the result of his elaborate survey, was that the spirit of the Scotch
+Kirk was as thoroughly hostile to human progress as the spirit of the
+Spanish Inquisition! If this were really so, it would be difficult
+indeed to account for the period of brilliant mental activity which
+immediately followed. But in reality the Puritan theory of life led
+to general education in Scotland as it did in New England, and for
+precisely the same reasons, while the effects of theological discussion
+in breaking down the old Calvinistic exclusiveness have been illustrated
+in the history of Edinburgh as well as in the history of Boston.
+[Sidenote: Comparison with the case of Scotland]
+
+It is well for us to bear in mind the foregoing considerations as we
+deal with the history of the short-lived New England Confederacy. The
+story is full of instances of an intolerant and domineering spirit,
+especially on the part of Massachusetts, and now and then this spirit
+breaks forth in ugly acts of persecution. In considering these facts, it
+is well to remember that we are observing the workings of a system
+which contained within itself a curative principle; and it is further
+interesting to observe how political circumstances contributed to
+modify the Puritan ideal, gradually breaking down the old theocratic
+exclusiveness and strengthening the spirit of religious liberty.
+
+Scarcely had the first New England colonies been established when it was
+found desirable to unite them into some kind of a confederation. It is
+worthy of note that the separate existence of so many colonies was at
+the outset largely the result of religious differences. The uniformity
+of purpose, great as it was, fell far short of completeness. [Sidenote:
+Existence of so many colonies due to slight religious differences]
+
+Could all have agreed, or had there been religious toleration in the
+modern sense, there was still room enough for all in Massachusetts;
+and a compact settlement would have been in much less danger from the
+Indians. But in the founding of Connecticut the theocratic idea had less
+weight, and in the founding of New Haven it had more weight, than
+in Massachusetts. The existence of Rhode Island was based upon that
+principle of full toleration which the three colonies just mentioned
+alike abhorred, and its first settlers were people banished from
+Massachusetts. With regard to toleration Plymouth occupied a middle
+ground; without admitting the principles of Williams, the people of that
+colony were still fairly tolerant in practice. Of the four towns of New
+Hampshire, two had been founded by Antinomians driven from Boston, and
+two by Episcopal friends of Mason and Gorges. It was impossible that
+neighbouring communities, characterized by such differences of opinion,
+but otherwise homogeneous in race and in social condition, should fail
+to react upon one another and to liberalize one another. Still more was
+this true when they attempted to enter into a political union. When, for
+example, Massachusetts in 1641-43 annexed the New Hampshire townships,
+she was of necessity obliged to relax in their case her policy of
+insisting upon religious conformity as a test of citizenship. So in
+forming the New England Confederacy, there were some matters of dispute
+that had to be passed over by mutual consent or connivance. [Sidenote:
+It led to a notable attempt at federation]
+
+The same causes which had spread the English settlements over so wide a
+territory now led, as an indirect result, to their partial union into a
+confederacy. The immediate consequence of the westward movement had been
+an Indian war. Several savage tribes were now interspersed between the
+settlements, so that it became desirable that the military force should
+be brought, as far as possible, under one management. The colony of
+New Netherlands, moreover, had begun to assume importance, and the
+settlements west of the Connecticut river had already occasioned hard
+words between Dutch and English, which might at any moment be followed
+by blows. In the French colonies at the north, with their extensive
+Indian alliances under Jesuit guidance, the Puritans saw a rival power
+which was likely in course of time to prove troublesome. With a view to
+more efficient self-defence, therefore, in 1643 the four colonies of
+Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven formed themselves
+into a league, under the style of "The United Colonies of New England."
+These four little states now contained thirty-nine towns, with an
+aggregate population of 24,000. To the northeast of Massachusetts,
+which now extended to the Piscataqua, a small colony had at length been
+constituted under a proprietary charter somewhat similar to that held by
+the Calverts in Maryland. Of this new province or palatinate of Maine
+the aged Sir Ferdinando Gorges was Lord Proprietary, and he had
+undertaken not only to establish the Church of England there, but also
+to introduce usages of feudal jurisdiction like those remaining in the
+old country. Such a community was not likely to join the Confederacy;
+apart from other reasons, its proprietary constitution and the feud
+between the Puritans and Gorges would have been sufficient obstacles.
+
+As for Rhode Island, on the other hand, it was regarded with strong
+dislike by the other colonies. It was a curious and noteworthy
+consequence of the circumstances under which this little state was
+founded that for a long time it became the refuge of all the fanatical
+and turbulent people who could not submit to the strict and orderly
+governments of Connecticut or Massachusetts. All extremes met on
+Narragansett bay. There were not only sensible advocates of religious
+liberty, but theocrats as well who saw flaws in the theocracy of
+other Puritans. The English world was then in a state of theological
+fermentation. People who fancied themselves favoured with direct
+revelations from Heaven; people who thought it right to keep the seventh
+day of the week as a Sabbath instead of the first day; people who
+cherished a special predilection for the Apocalypse and the Book of
+Daniel; people with queer views about property and government; people
+who advocated either too little marriage or too much marriage; all such
+eccentric characters as are apt to come to the surface in periods of
+religious excitement found in Rhode Island a favoured spot where they
+could prophesy without let or hindrance. But the immediate practical
+result of so much discordance in opinion was the impossibility of
+founding a strong and well-ordered government. The early history of
+Rhode Island was marked by enough of turbulence to suggest the question
+whether, after all, at the bottom of the Puritan's refusal to recognize
+the doctrine of private inspiration, or to tolerate indiscriminately all
+sorts of opinions, there may not have been a grain of shrewd political
+sense not ill adapted to the social condition of the seventeenth
+century. In 1644 and again in 1648 the Narragansett settlers asked leave
+to join the Confederacy; but the request was refused on the ground
+that they had no stable government of their own. They were offered
+the alternative of voluntary annexation either to Massachusetts or to
+Plymouth, or of staying out in the cold; and they chose the latter
+course. Early in 1643 they had sent Roger Williams over to England to
+obtain a charter for Rhode Island. In that year Parliament created a
+Board of Commissioners, with the Earl of Warwick at its head, for the
+superintendence of colonial affairs; and nothing could better illustrate
+the loose and reckless manner in which American questions were treated
+in England than the first proceedings of this board. It gave an early
+instance of British carelessness in matters of American geography. In
+December, 1643, it granted to Massachusetts all the territory on the
+mainland of Narragansett bay; and in the following March it incorporated
+the townships of Newport and Portsmouth, which stood on the island,
+together with Providence, which stood on the mainland, into an
+independent colony empowered to frame a government and make laws for
+itself. With this second document Williams returned to Providence in the
+autumn of 1644. Just how far it was intended to cancel the first one,
+nobody could tell, but it plainly afforded an occasion for a conflict of
+claims. [Sidenote: Turbulence of dissent in Rhode Island] [Sidenote: The
+Earl of Warwick and his Board of Commissioners]
+
+The league of the four colonies is interesting as the first American
+experiment in federation. By the articles it was agreed that each colony
+should retain full independence so far as concerned the management of
+its internal affairs, but that the confederate government should have
+entire control over all dealings with the Indians or with foreign
+powers. The administration of the league was put into the hands of
+a board of eight Federal Commissioners, two from each colony. The
+commissioners were required to be church-members in good standing. They
+could choose for themselves a president or chairman out of their own
+number, but such a president was to have no more power than the other
+members of the Board. If any measure were to come up concerning
+which the commissioners could not agree, it was to be referred for
+consideration to the legislatures or general courts of the four
+colonies. Expenses for war were to be charged to each colony in
+proportion to the number of males in each between sixteen years of
+age and sixty. A meeting of the Board might be summoned by any two
+magistrates whenever the public safety might seem to require it; but a
+regular meeting was to be held once every year.
+
+In this scheme of confederacy all power of taxation was expressly left
+to the several colonies. The scheme provided for a mere league, not for
+a federal union. The government of the Commissioners acted only upon the
+local governments, not upon individuals. The Board had thus but little
+executive power, and was hardly more than a consulting body. Another
+source of weakness in the confederacy was the overwhelming preponderance
+of Massachusetts. Of the 24,000 people in the confederation, 15,000
+belonged to Massachusetts, while the other three colonies had only about
+3,000 each. Massachusetts accordingly had to carry the heaviest burden,
+both in the furnishing of soldiers and in the payment of war expenses,
+while in the direction of affairs she had no more authority than one of
+the small colonies. As a natural consequence, Massachusetts tried
+to exert more authority than she was entitled to by the articles of
+confederation; and such conduct was not unnaturally resented by the
+small colonies, as betokening an unfair and domineering spirit. In
+spite of these drawbacks, however, the league was of great value to
+New England. On many occasions it worked well as a high court of
+jurisdiction, and it made the military strength of the colonies more
+available than it would otherwise have been. But for the interference
+of the British government, which brought it to an untimely end, the
+Confederacy might have been gradually amended so as to become enduring.
+After its downfall it was pleasantly remembered by the people of New
+England; in times of trouble their thoughts reverted to it; and the
+historian must in fairness assign it some share in preparing men's minds
+for the greater work of federation which was achieved before the end of
+the following century. [Sidenote: It was only a league, not a federal
+union]
+
+The formation of such a confederacy certainly involved something very
+like a tacit assumption of sovereignty on the part of the four colonies.
+It is worthy of note that they did not take the trouble to ask the
+permission of the home government in advance. They did as they pleased,
+and then defended their action afterward. In England the act of
+confederation was regarded with jealousy and distrust. But Edward
+Winslow, who was sent over to London to defend the colonies, pithily
+said: "If we in America should forbear to unite for offence and defence
+against a common enemy till we have leave from England, our throats
+might be all cut before the messenger would be half seas through."
+Whether such considerations would have had weight with Charles I. or not
+was now of little consequence. His power of making mischief soon came
+to an end, and from the liberal and sagacious policy of Cromwell the
+Confederacy had not much to fear. Nevertheless the fall of Charles I.
+brought up for the first time that question which a century later was
+to acquire surpassing interest,--the question as to the supremacy of
+Parliament over the colonies.
+
+Down to this time the supreme control over colonial affairs had been in
+the hands of the king and his privy council, and the Parliament had
+not disputed it. In 1624 they had grumbled at James I.'s high-handed
+suppression of the Virginia Company, but they had not gone so far as
+to call in question the king's supreme authority over the colonies. In
+1628, in a petition to Charles I. relating to the Bermudas, they had
+fully admitted this royal authority. But the fall of Charles I. for the
+moment changed all this. Among the royal powers devolved upon Parliament
+was the prerogative of superintending the affairs of the colonies. Such,
+at least, was the theory held in England, and it is not easy to see how
+any other theory could logically have been held; but the Americans never
+formally admitted it, and in practice they continued to behave toward
+Parliament very much as they had behaved toward the crown, yielding
+just as little obedience as possible. When the Earl of Warwick's
+commissioners in 1644 seized upon a royalist vessel in Boston harbour,
+the legislature of Massachusetts debated the question whether it was
+compatible with the dignity of the colony to permit such an act of
+sovereignty on the part of Parliament. It was decided to wink at the
+proceeding, on account of the strong sympathy between Massachusetts and
+the Parliament which was overthrowing the king. At the same time the
+legislature sent over to London a skilfully worded protest against
+any like exercise of power in future. In 1651 Parliament ordered
+Massachusetts to surrender the charter obtained from Charles I. and take
+out a new one from Parliament, in which the relations of the colony to
+the home government should be made the subject of fresh and more precise
+definition. To this request the colony for more than a year vouchsafed
+no answer; and finally, when it became necessary to do something,
+instead of sending back the charter, the legislature sent back a
+memorial, setting forth that the people of Massachusetts were quite
+contented with their form of government, and hoped that no change would
+be made in it. War between England and Holland, and the difficult
+political problems which beset the brief rule of Cromwell, prevented
+the question from coming to an issue, and Massachusetts was enabled to
+preserve her independent and somewhat haughty attitude. [Sidenote: Fall
+of Charles I. brings up the question as to supremacy of Parliament over
+the colonies]
+
+During the whole period of the Confederacy, however, disputes kept
+coming up which through endless crooked ramifications were apt to end
+in an appeal to the home government, and thus raise again and again the
+question as to the extent of its imperial supremacy. For our present
+purpose, it is enough to mention three of these cases: 1, the adventures
+of Samuel Gorton; 2, the Presbyterian cabal; 3, the persecution of the
+Quakers. Other cases in point are those of John Clarke and the Baptists,
+and the relations of Massachusetts to the northeastern settlements; but
+as it is not my purpose here to make a complete outline of New England
+history, the three cases enumerated will suffice.
+
+The first case shows, in a curious and instructive way, how religious
+dissensions were apt to be complicated with threats of an Indian war on
+the one hand and peril from Great Britain on the other; and as we come
+to realize the triple danger, we can perhaps make some allowances for
+the high-handed measures with which the Puritan governments sometimes
+sought to avert it. [Genesis of the persecuting spirit]
+
+As I have elsewhere tried to show, the genesis of the persecuting spirit
+is to be found in the conditions of primitive society, where "above
+all things the prime social and political necessity is social cohesion
+within the tribal limits, for unless such social cohesion be maintained,
+the very existence of the tribe is likely to be extinguished in
+bloodshed." The persecuting spirit "began to pass away after men
+had become organized into great nations, covering a vast extent of
+territory, and secured by their concentrated military strength against
+the gravest dangers of barbaric attack." [13]
+
+Now as regards these considerations, the Puritan communities in the
+New England wilderness were to some slight extent influenced by such
+conditions as used to prevail in primitive society; and this will help
+us to understand the treatment of the Antinomians and such cases as that
+with which we have now to deal.
+
+Among the supporters of Mrs. Hutchinson, after her arrival at Aquedneck,
+was a sincere and courageous, but incoherent and crotchetty man named
+Samuel Gorton. [Sidenote: Samuel Gorton]
+
+In the denunciatory language of that day he was called a "proud and
+pestilent seducer," or, as the modern newspaper would say, a "crank." It
+is well to make due allowances for the prejudice so conspicuous in the
+accounts given by his enemies, who felt obliged to justify their harsh
+treatment of him. But we have also his own writings from which to form
+an opinion as to his character and views. Lucidity, indeed, was not one
+of his strong points as a writer, and the drift of his argument is not
+always easy to decipher; but he seems to have had some points of contact
+with the Familists, a sect established in the sixteenth century in
+Holland. The Familists held that the essence of religion consists not
+in adherence to any particular creed or ritual, but in cherishing the
+spirit of divine love. The general adoption of this point of view was to
+inaugurate a third dispensation, superior to those of Moses and Christ,
+the dispensation of the Holy Ghost. The value of the Bible lay not so
+much in the literal truth of its texts as in their spiritual import;
+and by the union of believers with Christ they came to share in the
+ineffable perfection of the Godhead. There is much that is modern and
+enlightened in such views, which Gorton seems to some extent to have
+shared. He certainly set little store by ritual observances and
+maintained the equal right of laymen with clergymen to preach the
+gospel. Himself a London clothier, and thanking God that he had not been
+brought up in "the schools of human learning," he set up as a preacher
+without ordination, and styled himself "professor of the mysteries of
+Christ." He seems to have cherished that doctrine of private inspiration
+which the Puritans especially abhorred. It is not likely that he had any
+distinct comprehension of his own views, for distinctness was just what
+they lacked. [14] But they were such as in the seventeenth century could
+not fail to arouse fierce antagonism, and if it was true that wherever
+there was a government Gorton was against it, perhaps that only shows
+that wherever there was a government it was sure to be against him.
+
+In the case of such men as Gorton, however,--and the type is by no
+means an uncommon one,--their temperament usually has much more to do
+with getting them into trouble than their opinions. Gorton's temperament
+was such as to keep him always in an atmosphere of strife. Other
+heresiarchs suffered persecution in Massachusetts, but Gorton was in hot
+water everywhere. His arrival in any community was the signal for an
+immediate disturbance of the peace. His troubles began in Plymouth,
+where the wife of the pastor preferred his teachings to those of her
+husband. In 1638 he fled to Aquedneck, where his first achievement was a
+schism among Mrs. Hutchinson's followers, which ended in some staying to
+found the town of Portsmouth while others went away to found Newport.
+Presently Portsmouth found him intolerable, flogged and banished him,
+and after his departure was able to make up its quarrel with Newport.
+He next made his way with a few followers to Pawtuxet, within the
+jurisdiction of Providence, and now it is the broad-minded and gentle
+Roger Williams who complains of his "bewitching and madding poor
+Providence." The question is here suggested what could it have been
+in Gorton's teaching that enabled him thus to "bewitch" these little
+communities? We may be sure that it could not have been the element of
+modern liberalism suggested in the Familistic doctrines above cited.
+That was the feature then least likely to appeal to the minds of common
+people, and most likely to appeal to Williams. More probably such
+success as Gorton had in winning followers was due to some of the
+mystical rubbish which abounds in his pages and finds in a modern mind
+no doorway through which to enter. [Sidenote: He flees to Aquedneck and
+is banished thence]
+
+Williams disapproved of Gorton, but was true to his principles of
+toleration and would not take part in any attempt to silence him. But in
+1641 we find thirteen leading citizens of Providence, headed by William
+Arnold, [15] sending a memorial to Boston, asking for assistance and
+counsel in regard to this disturber of the peace. How was Massachusetts
+to treat such an appeal? She could not presume to meddle with the affair
+unless she could have permanent jurisdiction over Pawtuxet; otherwise
+she was a mere intruder. How strong a side-light does this little
+incident throw upon the history of the Roman republic, and of all
+relatively strong communities when confronted with the problem of
+preserving order in neighbouring states that are too weak to preserve it
+for themselves! Arnold's argument, in his appeal to Massachusetts, was
+precisely the same as that by which the latter colony excused herself
+for banishing the Antinomians. He simply says that Gorton and his
+company "are not fit persons to be received, and made members of a body
+in so weak a state as our town is in at present;" and he adds, "There is
+no state but in the first place will seek to preserve its own safety and
+peace." Whatever might be the abstract merits of Gorton's opinions, his
+conduct was politically dangerous; and accordingly the jurisdiction over
+Pawtuxet was formally conceded to Massachusetts. Thereupon that colony,
+assuming jurisdiction, summoned Gorton and his men to Boston, to prove
+their title to the lands they occupied. They of course regarded the
+summons as a flagrant usurpation of authority, and instead of obeying
+it they withdrew to Shawomet, on the western shore of Narragansett bay,
+where they bought a tract of land from the principal sachem of the
+Narragansetts, Miantonomo. The immediate rule over this land belonged to
+two inferior chiefs, who ratified the sale at the time, but six months
+afterward disavowed the ratification, on the ground that it had been
+given under duress from their overlord Miantonomo. Here was a state
+of things which might easily bring on an Indian war. The two chiefs
+appealed to Massachusetts for protection, and were accordingly summoned,
+along with Miantonomo, to a hearing at Boston. Here we see how a kind of
+English protectorate over the native tribes had begun to grow up so soon
+after the destruction of the Pequots. Such a result was inevitable.
+After hearing the arguments, the legislature decided to defend the two
+chiefs, provided they would put themselves under the jurisdiction of
+Massachusetts. This was done, while further complaints against Gorton
+came from the citizens of Providence. Gorton and his men were now
+peremptorily summoned to Boston to show cause why they should not
+surrender their land at Shawomet and to answer the charges against them.
+On receiving from Gorton a defiant reply, couched in terms which some
+thought blasphemous, the government of Massachusetts prepared to use
+force. [Sidenote: Providence protests against him] [Sidenote: He flees
+to Shawomet, where he buys land of the Indians]
+
+Meanwhile the unfortunate Miantonomo had rushed upon his doom. The
+annihilation of the Pequots had left the Mohegans and Narragansetts
+contending for the foremost place among the native tribes. Between the
+rival sachems, Uncas and Miantonomo, the hatred was deep and deadly.
+As soon as the Mohegan perceived that trouble was brewing between
+Miantonomo and the government at Boston, he improved the occasion by
+gathering a few Narragansett scalps. Miantonomo now took the war-path
+and was totally defeated by Uncas in a battle on the Great Plain in the
+present township of Norwich. Encumbered with a coat of mail which his
+friend Gorton had given him, Miantonomo was overtaken and captured. By
+ordinary Indian usage he would have been put to death with fiendish
+torments, as soon as due preparations could be made and a fit company
+assembled to gloat over his agony; but Gorton sent a messenger to Uncas,
+threatening dire vengeance if harm were done to his ally. This message
+puzzled the Mohegan chief. The appearance of a schism in the English
+counsels was more than he could quite fathom. When the affair had
+somewhat more fully developed itself, some of the Indians spoke of
+the white men as divided into two rival tribes, the Gortonoges and
+Wattaconoges. [16] Roger Williams tells us that the latter term, applied
+to the men of Boston, meant coat-wearers. Whether it is to be inferred
+that the Gortonoges went about in what in modern parlance would be
+called their "shirt-sleeves," the reader must decide. [Sidenote:
+Miantonomo and Uncas]
+
+In his perplexity Uncas took his prisoner to Hartford, and afterward,
+upon the advice of the governor and council, sent him to Boston, that
+his fate might be determined by the Federal Commissioners who were
+there holding their first regular meeting. It was now the turn of the
+commissioners to be perplexed. According to English law there was no
+good reason for putting Miantonomo to death. The question was whether
+they should interfere with the Indian custom by which his life was
+already forfeit to his captor. The magistrates already suspected the
+Narragansetts of cherishing hostile designs. To set their sachem at
+liberty, especially while the Gorton affair remained unsettled, might be
+dangerous; and it would be likely to alienate Uncas from the English. In
+their embarrassment the commissioners sought spiritual guidance. A synod
+of forty or fifty clergymen, from all parts of New England, was in
+session at Boston, and the question was referred to a committee of five
+of their number. The decision was prompt that Miantonomo must die. He
+was sent back to Hartford to be slain by Uncas, but two messengers
+accompanied him, to see that no tortures were inflicted. A select band
+of Mohegan warriors journeyed through the forest with the prisoner and
+the two Englishmen, until they came to the plain where the battle had
+been fought. Then at a signal from Uncas, the warrior walking behind
+Miantonomo silently lifted his tomahawk and sank it into the brain of
+the victim who fell dead without a groan. Uncas cut a warm slice from
+the shoulder and greedily devoured it, declaring that the flesh of
+his enemy was the sweetest of meat and gave strength to his heart.
+Miantonomo was buried there on the scene of his defeat, which has ever
+since been known as the Sachem's Plain. This was in September, 1643, and
+for years afterward, in that month, parties of Narragansetts used to
+visit the spot and with frantic gestures and hideous yells lament their
+fallen leader. A heap of stones was raised over the grave, and no
+Narragansett came near it without adding to the pile. After many a
+summer had passed and the red men had disappeared from the land, a
+Yankee farmer, with whom thrift prevailed over sentiment, cleared away
+the mound and used the stones for the foundation of his new barn. [17]
+[Sidenote: Death of Miantonomo]
+
+One cannot regard this affair as altogether creditable to the Federal
+Commissioners and their clerical advisers. One of the clearest-headed
+and most impartial students of our history observes that "if the English
+were to meddle in the matter at all, it was their clear duty to enforce
+as far as might be the principles recognized by civilized men. When they
+accepted the appeal made by Uncas they shifted the responsibility from
+the Mohegan chief to themselves." [18] The decision was doubtless based
+purely upon grounds of policy. Miantonomo was put out of the way because
+he was believed to be dangerous. In the thirst for revenge that was
+aroused among the Narragansetts there was an alternative source of
+danger, to which I shall hereafter refer. [19] It is difficult now to
+decide, as a mere question of safe policy, what the English ought to
+have done. The chance of being dragged into an Indian war, through the
+feud between Narragansetts and Mohegans, was always imminent. The policy
+which condemned Miantonomo was one of timidity, and fear is merciless.
+
+The Federal Commissioners heartily approved the conduct of Massachusetts
+toward Gorton, and adopted it in the name of the United Colonies. After
+a formal warning, which passed unheeded, a company of forty men, under
+Edward Johnson of Woburn and two other officers, was sent to Shawomet.
+Some worthy citizens of Providence essayed to play the part of
+mediators, and after some parley the Gortonites offered to submit to
+arbitration. The proposal was conveyed to Boston, and the clergy were
+again consulted. They declared it beneath the dignity of Massachusetts
+to negotiate "with a few fugitives living without law or government,"
+and they would no more compound with Gorton's "blasphemous revilings"
+than they would bargain with the Evil One. The community must be
+"purged" of such wickedness, either by repentance or by punishment. The
+ministers felt that God would hold the community responsible for Gorton
+and visit calamities upon them unless he were silenced. [20] The
+arbitration was refused, Gorton's blockhouse was besieged and captured,
+and the agitator was carried with nine of his followers to Boston, where
+they were speedily convicted of heresy and sedition. Before passing
+judgment the General Court as usual consulted with the clergy who
+recommended a sentence of death. Their advice was adopted by the
+assistants, but the deputies were more merciful, and the heretics
+were sentenced to imprisonment at the pleasure of the court. In this
+difference between the assistants and the deputies, we observe an early
+symptom of that popular revolt against the ascendancy of the clergy
+which was by and by to become so much more conspicuous and effective
+in the affair of the Quakers. Another symptom might be seen in the
+circumstance that so much sympathy was expressed for the Gortonites,
+especially by women, that after some months of imprisonment and abuse
+the heretics were banished under penalty of death. [Sidenote: Trial and
+sentence of the heretics]
+
+Gorton now went to England and laid his tale of woe before the
+parliamentary Board of Commissioners. The Earl of Warwick behaved with
+moderation. He declined to commit himself to an opinion as to the
+merits of the quarrel, but Gorton's title to Shawomet was confirmed. He
+returned to Boston with an order to the government to allow him to pass
+unmolested through Massachusetts, and hereafter to protect him in
+the possession of Shawomet. If this little commonwealth of 15,000
+inhabitants had been a nation as powerful as France, she could not have
+treated the message more haughtily. By a majority of one vote it was
+decided not to refuse so trifling a favour as a passage through the
+country for just this once; but as for protecting the new town of
+Warwick which the Gortonites proceeded to found at Shawomet, although it
+was several times threatened by the Indians, and the settlers appealed
+to the parliamentary order, that order Massachusetts flatly and doggedly
+refused to obey. [21] [Sidenote: Gorton appeals to Parliament]
+
+In the discussions of which these years were so full, "King Winthrop,"
+as his enemy Morton called him, used some very significant language. By
+a curious legal fiction of the Massachusetts charter the colonists were
+supposed to hold their land as in the manor of East Greenwich near
+London, and it was argued that they were represented in Parliament by
+the members of the county or borough which contained that manor, and
+were accordingly subject to the jurisdiction of Parliament. It was
+further argued that since the king had no absolute sovereignty
+independent of Parliament he could not by charter impart any such
+independent sovereignty to others. Winthrop did not dispute these
+points, but observed that the safety of the commonwealth was the supreme
+law, and if in the interests of that safety it should be found necessary
+to renounce the authority of Parliament, the colonists would be
+justified in doing so. [Sidenote: Winthrop's prophetic opinion] [22]
+This was essentially the same doctrine as was set forth ninety-nine
+years later by young Samuel Adams in his Commencement Oration at
+Harvard.
+
+The case of the Presbyterian cabal admits of briefer treatment than that
+of Gorton. There had now come to be many persons in Massachusetts who
+disapproved of the provision which restricted the suffrage to members of
+the Independent or Congregational churches of New England, and in 1646
+the views of these people were presented in a petition to the General
+Court. The petitioners asked "that their civil disabilities might be
+removed, and that all members of the churches of England and Scotland
+might be admitted to communion with the New England churches. If this
+could not be granted they prayed to be released from all civil burdens.
+Should the court refuse to entertain their complaint, they would be
+obliged to bring their case before Parliament." [23] The leading signers
+of this menacing petition were William Vassall, Samuel Maverick, and The
+Presbyterian cabal. Dr. Robert Child. Maverick we have already met. From
+the day when the ships of the first Puritan settlers had sailed past
+his log fortress on Noddle's Island, he had been their enemy; "a man of
+loving and curteous behaviour," says Johnson, "very ready to entertaine
+strangers, yet an enemy to the reformation in hand, being strong for the
+lordly prelatical power." Vassall was not a denizen of Massachusetts,
+but lived in Scituate, in the colony of Plymouth, where there were no
+such restrictions upon the suffrage. Child was a learned physician who
+after a good deal of roaming about the world had lately taken it into
+his head to come and see what sort of a place Massachusetts was.
+Although these names were therefore not such as to lend weight to such a
+petition, their request would seem at first sight reasonable enough.
+At a superficial glance it seems conceived in a modern spirit of
+liberalism. In reality it was nothing of the sort. In England it was
+just the critical moment of the struggle between Presbyterians and
+Independents which had come in to complicate the issues of the great
+civil war. Vassall, Child, and Maverick seem to have been the leading
+spirits in a cabal for the establishment of Presbyterianism in New
+England, and in their petition they simply took advantage of the
+discontent of the disfranchised citizens in Massachusetts in order
+to put in an entering wedge. This was thoroughly understood by the
+legislature of Massachusetts, and accordingly the petition was dismissed
+and the petitioners were roundly fined. Just as Child was about to start
+for England with his grievances, the magistrates overhauled his papers
+and discovered a petition to the parliamentary Board of Commissioners,
+suggesting that Presbyterianism should be established in New England,
+and that a viceroy or governor-general should be appointed to rule
+there. To the men of Massachusetts this last suggestion was a crowning
+horror. It seemed scarcely less than treason. The signers of this
+petition were the same who had signed the petition to the General Court.
+They were now fined still more heavily and imprisoned for six months.
+By and by they found their way, one after another, to London, while the
+colonists sent Edward Winslow, of Plymouth, as an advocate to thwart
+their schemes. Winslow was assailed by Child's brother in a spicy
+pamphlet entitled "New England's Jonas cast up at London," and replied
+after the same sort, entitling his pamphlet "New England's Salamander
+discovered." The cabal accomplished nothing because of the decisive
+defeat of Presbyterianism in England. "Pride's Purge" settled all that.
+The petition of Vassall and his friends was the occasion for the
+meeting of a synod of churches at Cambridge, in order to complete the
+organization of Congregationalism. In 1648 the work of the synod was
+embodied in the famous Cambridge Platform, which adopted the Westminster
+Confession as its creed, carefully defined the powers of the clergy, and
+declared it to be the duty of magistrates to suppress heresy. In 1649
+the General Court laid this platform before the congregations; in
+1651 it was adopted; and this event may be regarded as completing the
+theocratic organization of the Puritan commonwealth in Massachusetts.
+[Sidenote: The Cambridge Platform; deaths of Winthrop and Cotton]
+
+It was immediately preceded and followed by the deaths of the two
+foremost men in that commonwealth. John Winthrop died in 1649 and John
+Cotton in 1652. Both were men of extraordinary power. Of Winthrop it is
+enough to say that under his skilful guidance Massachusetts had been
+able to pursue the daring policy which had characterized the first
+twenty years of her history, and which in weaker hands would almost
+surely have ended in disaster. Of Cotton it may be said that he was the
+most eminent among a group of clergymen who for learning and dialectical
+skill have seldom been surpassed. Neither Winthrop nor Cotton approved
+of toleration upon principle. Cotton, in his elaborate controversy
+with Roger Williams, frankly asserted that persecution is not wrong in
+itself; it is wicked for falsehood to persecute truth, but it is the
+sacred duty of truth to persecute falsehood. This was the theologian's
+view. Winthrop's was that of a man of affairs. They had come to New
+England, he said, in order to make a society after their own model;
+all who agreed with them might come and join that society; those who
+disagreed with them might go elsewhere; there was room enough on the
+American continent. But while neither Winthrop nor Cotton understood the
+principle of religious liberty, at the same time neither of them had the
+temperament which persecutes. Both were men of genial disposition, sound
+common-sense, and exquisite tact. Under their guidance no such
+tragedy would have been possible as that which was about to leave its
+ineffaceable stain upon the annals of Massachusetts.
+
+It was most unfortunate that at this moment the places of these two men
+should have been taken by two as arrant fanatics as ever drew breath.
+For thirteen out of the fifteen years following Winthrop's death, the
+governor of Massachusetts was John Endicott, a sturdy pioneer, whose
+services to the colony had been great. He was honest and conscientious,
+but passionate, domineering, and very deficient in tact. At the same
+time Cotton's successor in position and influence was John Norton, a man
+of pungent wit, unyielding temper, and melancholy mood. He was possessed
+by a morbid fear of Satan, whose hirelings he thought were walking
+up and down over the earth in the visible semblance of heretics and
+schismatics. Under such leaders the bigotry latent in the Puritan
+commonwealth might easily break out in acts of deadly persecution.
+[Sidenote: Endicott and Norton take the lead] [Sidenote: The Quakers and
+their views]
+
+The occasion was not long in coming. Already the preaching of George Fox
+had borne fruit, and the noble sect of Quakers was an object of scorn
+and loathing to all such as had not gone so far as they toward learning
+the true lesson of Protestantism. Of all Protestant sects the Quakers
+went furthest in stripping off from Christianity its non-essential
+features of doctrine and ceremonial. Their ideal was not a theocracy
+but a separation between church and state. They would abolish all
+distinction between clergy and laity, and could not be coaxed or bullied
+into paying tithes. They also refused to render military service, or
+to take the oath of allegiance. In these ways they came at once into
+antagonism both with church and with state. In doctrine their chief
+peculiarity was the assertion of an "Inward Light" by which every
+individual is to be guided in his conduct of life. They did not believe
+that men ceased to be divinely inspired when the apostolic ages came
+to an end, but held that at all times and places the human soul may be
+enlightened by direct communion with its Heavenly Father. Such views
+involved the most absolute assertion of the right of private judgment;
+and when it is added that in the exercise of this right many Quakers
+were found to reject the dogmas of original sin and the resurrection of
+the body, to doubt the efficacy of baptism, and to call in question the
+propriety of Christians turning the Lord's Day into a Jewish Sabbath, we
+see that they had in some respects gone far on the road toward modern
+rationalism. It was not to be expected that such opinions should
+be treated by the Puritans in any other spirit than one of extreme
+abhorrence and dread. The doctrine of the "Inward Light," or of private
+inspiration, was something especially hateful to the Puritan. To the
+modern rationalist, looking at things in the dry light of history,
+it may seem that this doctrine was only the Puritan's own appeal to
+individual judgment, stated in different form; but the Puritan could not
+so regard it. To such a fanatic as Norton this inward light was but
+a reflection from the glare of the bottomless pit, this private
+inspiration was the beguiling voice of the Devil. As it led the Quakers
+to strange and novel conclusions, this inward light seemed to array
+itself in hostility to that final court of appeal for all good
+Protestants, the sacred text of the Bible. The Quakers were accordingly
+regarded as infidels who sought to deprive Protestantism of its only
+firm support. They were wrongly accused of blasphemy in their treatment
+of the Scriptures. Cotton Mather says that the Quakers were in the habit
+of alluding to the Bible as the Word of the Devil. Such charges, from
+passionate and uncritical enemies, are worthless except as they serve to
+explain the bitter prejudice with which the Quakers were regarded. They
+remind one of the silly accusation brought against Wyclif two centuries
+earlier, that he taught his disciples that God ought to obey the Devil;
+[24] and they are not altogether unlike the assumptions of some modern
+theologians who take it for granted that any writer who accepts the
+Darwinian theory must be a materialist. [Sidenote: Endicott and Norton
+take the lead] [Sidenote: The Quakers and their views]
+
+But worthless as Mather's statements are, in describing the views of
+the Quakers, they are valuable as indicating the temper in which these
+disturbers of the Puritan theocracy were regarded. In accusing them of
+rejecting the Bible and making a law unto themselves, Mather simply put
+on record a general belief which he shared. Nor can it be doubted that
+the demeanour of the Quaker enthusiasts was sometimes such as to seem
+to warrant the belief that their anarchical doctrines entailed, as a
+natural consequence, disorderly and disreputable conduct. In those
+days all manifestations of dissent were apt to be violent, and the
+persecution which they encountered was likely to call forth strange and
+unseemly vagaries. When we remember how the Quakers, in their scorn of
+earthly magistrates and princes, would hoot at the governor as he
+walked up the street; how they used to rush into church on Sundays and
+interrupt the sermon with untimely remarks; how Thomas Newhouse once
+came into the Old South Meeting-House with a glass bottle in each hand,
+and, holding them up before the astonished congregation, knocked them
+together and smashed them, with the remark, "Thus will the Lord break
+you all in pieces"; how Lydia Wardwell and Deborah Wilson ran about the
+streets in the primitive costume of Eve before the fall, and called
+their conduct "testifying before the Lord"; we can hardly wonder that
+people should have been reminded of the wretched scenes enacted at
+Munster by the Anabaptists of the preceding century. [Sidenote: Violent
+manifestations of dissent]
+
+Such incidents, however, do not afford the slightest excuse for the
+cruel treatment which the Quakers received in Boston, nor do they go
+far toward explaining it. Persecution began immediately, before the
+new-comers had a chance to behave themselves well or ill. Their mere
+coming to Boston was taken as an act of invasion. It was indeed an
+attack upon the Puritan theocratic idea. Of all the sectaries of that
+age of sects, the Quakers were the most aggressive. There were at one
+time more than four thousand of them in English jails; yet when any of
+them left England, it was less to escape persecution than to preach
+their doctrines far and wide over the earth. Their missionaries found
+their way to Paris, to Vienna; even to Rome, where they testified under
+the very roof of the Vatican. In this dauntless spirit they came to New
+England to convert its inhabitants, or at any rate to establish the
+principle that in whatever community it might please them to stay, there
+they would stay in spite of judge or hangman. At first they came to
+Barbadoes, whence two of their number, Anne Austin and Mary Fisher,
+sailed for Boston. When they landed, on a May morning in 1656, Endicott
+happened to be away from Boston, but the deputy-governor, Richard
+Bellingham, was equal to the occasion. He arrested the two women and
+locked them up in jail, where, for fear they might proclaim their
+heresies to the crowd gathered outside, the windows were boarded up.
+There was no law as yet enacted against Quakers, but a council summoned
+for the occasion pronounced their doctrines blasphemous and devilish.
+The books which the poor women had with them were seized and publicly
+burned, and the women themselves were kept in prison half-starved for
+five weeks until the ship they had come in was ready to return to
+Barbadoes. Soon after their departure Endicott came home. He found fault
+with Bellingham's conduct as too gentle; if he had been there he would
+have had the hussies flogged. [Sidenote: Anne Austin and Mary Fisher]
+
+Five years afterward Mary Fisher went to Adrianople and tried to convert
+the Grand Turk, who treated her with grave courtesy and allowed her to
+prophesy unmolested. This is one of the numerous incidents that, on a
+superficial view of history, might be cited in support of the opinion
+that there has been on the whole more tolerance in the Mussulman than in
+the Christian world. Rightly interpreted, however, the fact has no such
+implication. In Massachusetts the preaching of Quaker doctrines might
+(and did) lead to a revolution; in Turkey it was as harmless as the
+barking of dogs. Governor Endicott was afraid of Mary Fisher; Mahomet
+III. was not.
+
+No sooner had the two women been shipped from Boston than eight other
+Quakers arrived from London. They were at once arrested. While they were
+lying in jail the Federal Commissioners, then in session at Plymouth,
+recommended that laws be forthwith enacted to keep these dreaded
+heretics out of the land. Next year they stooped so far as to seek the
+aid of Rhode Island, the colony which they had refused to admit into
+their confederacy. "They sent a letter to the authorities of that
+colony, signing themselves their loving friends and neighbours, and
+beseeching them to preserve the whole body of colonies against 'such a
+pest' by banishing and excluding all Quakers, a measure to which 'the
+rule of charity did oblige them.'" Roger Williams was then president of
+Rhode Island, and in full accord with his noble spirit was the reply of
+the assembly. "We have no law amongst us whereby to punish any for only
+declaring by words their minds and understandings concerning the things
+and ways of God as to salvation and our eternal condition." As for these
+Quakers we find that where they are "most of all suffered to declare
+themselves freely and only opposed by arguments in discourse, there
+they least of all desire to come." Any breach of the civil law shall be
+punished, but the "freedom of different consciences shall be respected."
+This reply enraged the confederated colonies, and Massachusetts, as the
+strongest and most overbearing, threatened to cut off the trade of
+Rhode Island, which forthwith appealed to Cromwell for protection. The
+language of the appeal is as touching as its broad Christian spirit is
+grand. It recognizes that by stopping trade the men of Massachusetts
+will injure themselves, yet, it goes on to say, "for the safeguard of
+their religion they may seem to neglect themselves in that respect; for
+what will not men do for their God?" But whatever fortune may befall,
+"let us not be compelled to exercise any civil power over men's
+consciences." [25] [Sidenote: Noble conduct of Rhode Island]
+
+There could never, of course, be a doubt as to who drew up this state
+paper. During his last visit to England, three years before, Roger
+Williams had spent several weeks at Sir Harry Vane's country house in
+Lincolnshire, and he had also been intimately associated with Cromwell
+and Milton. The views of these great men were the most advanced of
+that age. They were coming to understand the true principle upon which
+toleration should be based. (See my Excursions of an Evolutionist, pp.
+247, 289-293.) Vane had said in Parliament, "Why should the labours of
+any be suppressed, if sober, though never so different? We now profess
+to seek God, we desire to see light!" [Sidenote: Roger Williams appeals
+to Cromwell]
+
+This Williams called a "heavenly speech." The sentiment it expressed was
+in accordance with the practical policy of Cromwell, and in the appeal
+of the president of Rhode Island to the Lord Protector one hears the
+tone with which friend speaks to friend.
+
+In thus protecting the Quakers, Williams never for a moment concealed
+his antipathy to their doctrines. The author of "George Fox digged out
+of his Burrowes," the sturdy controversialist who in his seventy-third
+year rowed himself in a boat the whole length of Narragansett bay to
+engage in a theological tournament against three Quaker champions, was
+animated by nothing less than the broadest liberalism in his bold reply
+to the Federal Commissioners in 1657. The event showed that under his
+guidance the policy of Rhode Island was not only honourable but wise.
+The four confederated colonies all proceeded to pass laws banishing
+Quakers and making it a penal offence for shipmasters to bring them to
+New England. These laws differed in severity. Those of Connecticut, in
+which we may trace the influence of the younger John Winthrop, were the
+mildest; those of Massachusetts were the most severe, and as Quakers
+kept coming all the more in spite of them, they grew harsher and
+harsher. At first the Quaker who persisted in returning was to be
+flogged and imprisoned at hard labour, next his ears were to be cut off,
+and for a third offence his tongue was to be bored with a hot iron.
+At length in 1658, the Federal Commissioners, sitting at Boston with
+Endicott as chairman, recommended capital punishment. It must be borne
+in mind that the general reluctance toward prescribing or inflicting the
+death penalty was much weaker then than now. On the statute-books there
+were not less than fifteen capital crimes, including such offences as
+idolatry, witchcraft, blasphemy, marriage within the Levitical degrees,
+"presumptuous sabbath-breaking," and cursing or smiting one's parents.
+[26] The infliction of the penalty, however, lay practically very much
+within the discretion of the court, and was generally avoided except in
+cases of murder or other heinous felony. In some of these ecclesiastical
+offences the statute seems to have served the purpose of a threat, and
+was therefore perhaps the more easily enacted. Yet none of the colonies
+except Massachusetts now adopted the suggestion of the Federal
+Commissioners and threatened the Quakers with death. [Sidenote: Laws
+passed against the Quakers]
+
+In Massachusetts the opposition was very strong indeed, and its
+character shows how wide the divergence in sentiment had already become
+between the upper stratum of society and the people in general. This
+divergence was one result of the excessive weight given to the clergy by
+the restriction of the suffrage to church members. One might almost say
+that it was not the people of Massachusetts, after all, that shed
+the blood of the Quakers; it was Endicott and the clergy. The bill
+establishing death as the penalty for returning after banishment was
+passed in the upper house without serious difficulty; but in the lower
+house it was at first defeated. Of the twenty-six deputies fifteen were
+opposed to it, but one of these fell sick and two were intimidated,
+so that finally the infamous measure was passed by a vote of thirteen
+against twelve. Probably it would not have passed but for a hopeful
+feeling that an occasion for putting it into execution would not
+be likely to arise. It was hoped that the mere threat would prove
+effective. Endicott begged the Quakers to keep away, saying earnestly
+that he did not desire their death; but the more resolute spirits
+were not deterred by fear of the gallows. In September, 1659, William
+Robinson, Marmaduke Stevenson, and Mary Dyer, who had come to Boston
+expressly to defy the cruel law, were banished. Mrs. Dyer was a lady
+of good family, wife of the secretary of Rhode Island. She had been an
+intimate friend of Mrs. Hutchinson. While she went home to her husband,
+Stevenson and Robinson went only to Salem and then faced about and came
+back to Boston. Mrs. Dyer also returned. All three felt themselves
+under divine command to resist and defy the persecutors. On the 27th of
+October they were led to the gallows on Boston Common, under escort of
+a hundred soldiers. Many people had begun to cry shame on such
+proceedings, and it was thought necessary to take precautions against a
+tumult. The victims tried to address the crowd, but their voices were
+drowned by the beating of drums. While the Rev. John Wilson railed and
+scoffed at them from the foot of the gallows the two brave men were
+hanged. The halter had been placed upon Mrs. Dyer when her son, who
+had come in all haste from Rhode Island, obtained her reprieve on
+his promise to take her away. The bodies of the two men were denied
+Christian burial and thrown uncovered into a pit. All the efforts of
+husband and son were unable to keep Mrs. Dyer at home. In the following
+spring she returned to Boston and on the first day of June was again
+taken to the gallows. At the last moment she was offered freedom if she
+would only promise to go away and stay, but she refused. "In obedience
+to the will of the Lord I came," said she, "and in his will I abide
+faithful unto death." And so she died. [Sidenote: Executions on Boston
+Common] [Sidenote: Wenlock Christison's defiance and victory]
+
+Public sentiment in Boston was now turning so strongly against the
+magistrates that they began to weaken in their purpose. But there
+was one more victim. In November, 1660, William Leddra returned from
+banishment. The case was clear enough, but he was kept in prison four
+months and every effort was made to induce him to promise to leave the
+colony, but in vain. In the following March he too was put to death. A
+few days before the execution, as Leddra was being questioned in court,
+a memorable scene occurred. Wenlock Christison was one of those who had
+been banished under penalty of death. On his return he made straight for
+the town-house, strode into the court-room, and with uplifted finger
+addressed the judges in words of authority. "I am come here to warn
+you," said he, "that ye shed no more innocent blood." He was instantly
+seized and dragged off to jail. After three months he was brought to
+trial before the Court of Assistants. The magistrates debated for more
+than a fortnight as to what should be done. The air was thick with
+mutterings of insurrection, and they had lost all heart for their
+dreadful work. Not so the savage old man who presided, frowning gloomily
+under his black skull cap. Losing his patience at last, Endicott smote
+the table with fury, upbraided the judges for their weakness, and
+declared himself so disgusted that he was ready to go back to England.
+[27] "You that will not consent, record it," he shouted, as the question
+was again put to vote, "I thank God I am not afraid to give judgment."
+Christison was condemned to death, but the sentence was never executed.
+In the interval the legislature assembled, and the law was modified. The
+martyrs had not died in vain. Their cause was victorious. A revolution
+had been effected. The Puritan ideal of a commonwealth composed of a
+united body of believers was broken down, never again to be restored.
+The principle had been admitted that the heretic might come to
+Massachusetts and stay there.
+
+It was not in a moment, however, that these results were fully realized.
+For some years longer Quakers were fined, imprisoned, and now and then
+tied to the cart's tail and whipped from one town to another. But these
+acts of persecution came to be more and more discountenanced by public
+opinion until at length they ceased.
+
+It was on the 25th of May, 1660, just one week before the martyrdom of
+Mary Dyer, that Charles II. returned to England to occupy his father's
+throne. One of the first papers laid before him was a memorial in behalf
+of the oppressed Quakers in New England. In the course of the following
+year he sent a letter to Endicott and the other New England governors,
+ordering them to suspend proceedings against the Quakers, and if any
+were then in prison, to send them to England for trial. Christison's
+victory had already been won, but the "King's Missive" was now partially
+obeyed by the release of all prisoners. As for sending anybody to
+England for trial, that was something that no New England government
+could ever be made to allow.
+
+Charles's defence of the Quakers was due, neither to liberality
+of disposition nor to any sympathy with them, but rather to his
+inclinations toward Romanism. Unlike in other respects, Quakers and
+Catholics were alike in this, that they were the only sects which the
+Protestant world in general agreed in excluding from toleration. Charles
+wished to secure toleration for Catholics, and he could not prudently
+take steps toward this end without pursuing a policy broad enough to
+diminish persecution in other directions, and from these circumstances
+the Quakers profited. At times there was something almost like a
+political alliance between Quaker and Catholic, as instanced in the
+relations between William Penn and Charles's brother, the Duke of York.
+[Sidenote: The "King's Missive"] [Sidenote: Why Charles II. interfered
+to protect the Quakers]
+
+Besides all this, Charles had good reason to feel that the governments
+of New England were assuming too many airs of sovereignty. There were
+plenty of people at hand to work upon his mind. The friends of Gorton
+and Child and Vassall were loud with their complaints. Samuel Maverick
+swore that the people of New England were all rebels, and he could prove
+it. The king was assured that the Confederacy was "a war combination,
+made by the four colonies when they had a design to throw off their
+dependence on England, and for that purpose." The enemies of the New
+England people, while dilating upon the rebellious disposition of
+Massachusetts, could also remind the king that for several years that
+colony had been coining and circulating shillings and sixpences with the
+name "Massachusetts" and a tree on one side, and the name "New England"
+with the date on the other. There was no recognition of England upon
+this coinage, which was begun in 1652 and kept up for more than thirty
+years. Such pieces of money used to be called "pine-tree shillings";
+but, so far as looks go, the tree might be anything, and an adroit
+friend of New England once gravely assured the king that it was meant
+for the royal oak in which his majesty hid himself after the battle of
+Worcester!
+
+Against the colony of New Haven the king had a special grudge. Two of
+the regicide judges, who had sat in the tribunal which condemned his
+father, escaped to New England in 1660 and were well received there.
+They were gentlemen of high position. Edward Whalley was a cousin of
+Cromwell and Hampden. He had distinguished himself at Naseby and Dunbar,
+and had risen to the rank of lieutenant-general. He had commanded at
+the capture of Worcester, where it is interesting to observe that the
+royalist commander who surrendered to him was Sir Henry Washington, own
+cousin to the grandfather of George Washington. The other regicide,
+William Goffe, as a major-general in Cromwell's army, had won such
+distinction that there were some who pointed to him as the proper person
+to succeed the Lord Protector on the death of the latter. He had married
+Whalley's daughter. Soon after the arrival of these gentlemen, a royal
+order for their arrest was sent to Boston. If they had been arrested and
+sent back to England, their severed heads would soon have been placed
+over Temple Bar. The king's detectives hotly pursued them through the
+woodland paths of New England, and they would soon have been taken but
+for the aid they got from the people. Many are the stories of their
+hairbreadth escapes. Sometimes they took refuge in a cave on a mountain
+near New Haven, sometimes they hid in friendly cellars; and once, being
+hard put to it, they skulked under a wooden bridge, while their pursuers
+on horseback galloped by overhead. After lurking about New Haven and
+Milford for two or three years, on hearing of the expected arrival
+of Colonel Nichols and his commission, they sought a more secluded
+hiding-place near Hadley, a village lately settled far up the
+Connecticut river, within the jurisdiction of Massachusetts. Here the
+avengers lost the trail, the pursuit was abandoned, and the weary
+regicides were presently forgotten. The people of New Haven had been
+especially zealous in shielding the fugitives. Mr. Davenport had not
+only harboured them in his own house, but on the Sabbath before their
+expected arrival he had preached a very bold sermon, openly advising
+his people to aid and comfort them as far as possible. [28] The colony,
+moreover, did not officially recognize the restoration of Charles II. to
+the throne until that event had been commonly known in New England for
+more than a year. For these reasons the wrath of the king was specially
+roused against New Haven, when circumstances combined to enable him at
+once to punish this disloyal colony and deal a blow at the Confederacy.
+We have seen that in restricting the suffrage to church members New
+Haven had followed the example of Massachusetts, but Connecticut had
+not; and at this time there was warm controversy between the two younger
+colonies as to the wisdom Of such a policy. As yet none of the colonies
+save Massachusetts had obtained a charter, and Connecticut was naturally
+anxious to obtain one. Whether through a complaisant spirit connected
+with this desire, or through mere accident, Connecticut had been prompt
+in acknowledging the restoration of Charles II.; and in August, 1661,
+she dispatched the younger Winthrop to England to apply for a charter.
+Winthrop was a man of winning address and of wide culture. His
+scientific tastes were a passport to the favour of the king at a time
+when the Royal Society was being founded, of which Winthrop himself was
+soon chosen a fellow. In every way the occasion was an auspicious one.
+The king looked upon the rise of the New England Confederacy with
+unfriendly eyes. Massachusetts was as yet the only member of the league
+that was really troublesome; and there seemed to be no easier way to
+weaken her than to raise up a rival power by her side, and extend to it
+such privileges as might awaken her jealousy. All the more would such
+a policy be likely to succeed if accompanied by measures of which
+Massachusetts must necessarily disapprove, and the suppression of
+New Haven would be such a measure. [Sidenote: New Haven annexed to
+Connecticut]
+
+In accordance with these views, a charter of great liberality was at
+once granted to Connecticut, and by the same instrument the colony of
+New Haven was deprived of its separate existence and annexed to its
+stronger neighbour. As if to emphasize the motives which had led to this
+display of royal favour toward Connecticut, an equally liberal charter
+was granted to Rhode Island. In the summer of 1664 Charles II. sent a
+couple of ships-of-war to Boston harbour, with 400 troops under command
+of Colonel Richard Nichols, who had been appointed, along with Samuel
+Maverick and two others as royal commissioners, to look after the
+affairs of the New World. Colonel Nichols took his ships to New
+Amsterdam, and captured that important town. After his return the
+commissioners held meetings at Boston, and for a time the Massachusetts
+charter seemed in danger. But the Puritan magistrates were shrewd, and
+months were frittered away to no purpose. Presently the Dutch made war
+upon England, and the king felt it to be unwise to irritate the people
+of Massachusetts beyond endurance. The turbulent state of English
+politics which followed still further absorbed his attention, and New
+England had another respite of several years. [Sidenote: Founding of
+Newark]
+
+In New Haven a party had grown up which was dissatisfied with its
+extreme theocratic policy and approved of the union with Connecticut.
+Davenport and his followers, the founders of the colony, were beyond
+measure disgusted. They spurned "the Christless rule" of the sister
+colony. Many of them took advantage of the recent conquest of New
+Netherland, and a strong party, led by the Rev. Abraham Pierson, of
+Branford, migrated to the banks of the Passaic in June, 1667, and laid
+the foundations of Newark. For some years to come the theocratic idea
+that had given birth to New Haven continued to live on in New Jersey. As
+for Mr. Davenport, he went to Boston and ended his days there. Cotton
+Mather, writing at a later date, when the theocratic scheme of the early
+settlers had been manifestly outgrown and superseded, says of Davenport:
+"Yet, after all, the Lord gave him to see that in this world a
+Church-State was impossible, whereinto there enters nothing which
+defiles."
+
+The theocratic policy, alike in New Haven and in Massachusetts, broke
+down largely through its inherent weakness. It divided the community,
+and created among the people a party adverse to its arrogance and
+exclusiveness. This state of things facilitated the suppression of
+New Haven by royal edict, and it made possible the victory of Wenlock
+Christison in Massachusetts. We can now see the fundamental explanation
+of the deadly hostility with which Endicott and his party regarded the
+Quakers. The latter aimed a fatal blow at the very root of the idea
+which had brought the Puritans to New England. Once admit these heretics
+as citizens, or even as tolerated sojourners, and there was an end of
+the theocratic state consisting of a united body of believers. It was a
+life-and-death struggle, in which no quarter was given; and the Quakers,
+aided by popular discontent with the theocracy, even more than by the
+intervention of the crown, won a decisive victory.
+
+As the work of planting New England took place chiefly in the eleven
+years 1629-1640, during which Charles I. contrived to reign without a
+parliament, so the prosperous period of the New England Confederacy,
+1643-1664, covers the time of the Civil War and the Commonwealth, and
+just laps on to the reign of Charles II. By the summary extinction of
+the separate existence of one of its members for the benefit of another,
+its vigour was sadly impaired. But its constitution was revised so as
+to make it a league of three states instead of four; and the Federal
+Commissioners kept on holding their meetings, though less frequently,
+until the revocation of the Massachusetts charter in 1684. During
+this period a great Indian war occurred, in the course of which this
+concentration of the military strength of New England, imperfect as it
+was, proved itself very useful. In the history of New England, from the
+restoration of the Stuarts until their final expulsion, the two most
+important facts are the military struggle of the newly founded states
+with the Indians, and their constitutional struggle against the British
+government. The troubles and dangers of 1636 were renewed on a much more
+formidable scale, but the strength of the people had waxed greatly in
+the mean time, and the new perils were boldly overcome or skilfully
+warded off; not, however, until the constitution of Massachusetts had
+been violently wrenched out of shape in the struggle, and seeds of
+conflict sown which in the following century were to bear fruit in the
+American Revolution. [Sidenote: Breaking down of the theocratic policy]
+[Sidenote: Weakening of the Confederacy]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+KING PHILIP'S WAR.
+
+
+For eight-and-thirty years after the destruction of the Pequots, the
+intercourse between the English and the Indians was to all outward
+appearance friendly. The policy pursued by the settlers was in the
+main well considered. While they had shown that they could strike with
+terrible force when blows were needed, their treatment of the natives in
+time of peace seems to have been generally just and kind. Except in the
+single case of the conquered Pequot territory, they scrupulously paid
+for every rood of ground on which they settled, and so far as possible
+they extended to the Indians the protection of the law. On these points
+we have the explicit testimony of Josiah Winslow, governor of Plymouth,
+in his report to the Federal Commissioners in May, 1676; and what
+he says about Plymouth seems to have been equally true of the other
+colonies. Says Winslow, "I think I can clearly say that before these
+present troubles broke out, the English did not possess one foot of land
+in this colony but what was fairly obtained by honest purchase of the
+Indian proprietors. Nay, because some of our people are of a covetous
+disposition, and the Indians are in their straits easily prevailed with
+to part with their lands, we first made a law that none should purchase
+or receive of gift any land of the Indians without the knowledge and
+allowance of our Court .... And if at any time they have brought
+complaints before us, they have had justice impartial and speedy, so
+that our own people have frequently complained that we erred on the
+other hand in showing them overmuch favour." The general laws of
+Massachusetts and Connecticut as well as of Plymouth bear out what
+Winslow says, and show us that as a matter of policy the colonial
+governments were fully sensible of the importance of avoiding all
+occasions for quarrel with their savage neighbours. [Sidenote: Puritans
+and Indians]
+
+There can, moreover, be little doubt that the material comfort of the
+Indians was for a time considerably improved by their dealings with the
+white men. Hitherto their want of foresight and thrift had been wont to
+involve them during the long winters in a dreadful struggle with famine.
+Now the settlers were ready to pay liberally for the skin of every
+fur-covered animal the red men could catch; and where the trade thus
+arising did not suffice to keep off famine, instances of generous
+charity were frequent. The Algonquin tribes of New England lived chiefly
+by hunting, but partly by agriculture. They raised beans and corn, and
+succotash was a dish which they contributed to the white man's table.
+They could now raise or buy English vegetables, while from dogs and
+horses, pigs and poultry, oxen and sheep, little as they could avail
+themselves of such useful animals, they nevertheless derived some
+benefit. [29] Better blankets and better knives were brought within
+their reach; and in spite of all the colonial governments could do to
+prevent it, they were to some extent enabled to supply themselves with
+muskets and rum. [Sidenote: Trade with the Indians]
+
+Besides all this trade, which, except in the article of liquor, tended
+to improve the condition of the native tribes, there was on the part of
+the earlier settlers an earnest and diligent effort to convert them
+to Christianity and give them the rudiments of a civilized education.
+Missionary work was begun in 1643 by Thomas Mayhew on the islands of
+Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. The savages at first declared they were
+not so silly as to barter thirty-seven tutelar deities for one, but
+after much preaching and many pow-wows Mayhew succeeded in persuading
+them that the Deity of the white man was mightier than all their
+_manitous._ Whether they ever got much farther than this toward a
+comprehension of the white man's religion may be doubted; but they were
+prevailed upon to let their children learn to read and write, and even
+to set up little courts, in which justice was administered according to
+some of the simplest rules of English law, and from which there lay an
+appeal to the court of Plymouth. In 1646 Massachusetts enacted that the
+elders of the churches should choose two persons each year to go and
+spread the gospel among the Indians. In 1649 Parliament established the
+Society for propagating the Gospel in New England, and presently from
+voluntary contributions the society was able to dispose of an annual
+income of £2000. Schools were set up in which agriculture was taught as
+well as religion. It was even intended that Indians should go to Harvard
+College, and a building was erected for their accommodation, but as none
+came to occupy it, the college printing-press was presently set to work
+there. One solitary Indian student afterward succeeded in climbing to
+the bachelor's degree,--Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck of the class of 1665. It
+was this one success that was marvellous, not the failure of the scheme,
+which vividly shows how difficult it was for the white man of that day
+to understand the limitations of the red man. [Sidenote: Missionary
+work: Thomas Mayhew]
+
+The greatest measure of success in converting the Indians was attained
+by that famous linguist and preacher, the apostle John Eliot. This
+remarkable man was a graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge. He had come
+to Massachusetts in 1631, and in the following year had been settled as
+teacher in the church at Roxbury of which Thomas Welde was pastor. He
+had been distinguished at the university for philological scholarship
+and for linguistic talent--two things not always found in
+connection--and now during fourteen years he devoted such time as he
+could to acquiring a complete mastery of the Algonquin dialect spoken by
+the Indians of Massachusetts bay. To the modern comparative philologist
+his work is of great value. He published not only an excellent Indian
+grammar, but a complete translation of the Bible into the Massachusetts
+language,--a monument of prodigious labour. It is one of the most
+instructive documents in existence for the student of Algonquin speech,
+though the Massachusetts tribe and its language have long been extinct,
+and there are very few scholars living who can read the book. It has
+become one of the curiosities of literature and at auction sales of
+private libraries commands an extremely high price. Yet out of this rare
+book the American public has somehow or other within the last five
+or six years contrived to pick up a word which we shall very likely
+continue to hear for some time to come. In Eliot's Bible, the word which
+means a great chief--such as Joshua, or Gideon, or Joab--is "mugwump."
+
+
+It was in 1646 that Eliot began his missionary preaching at a small
+Indian village near Watertown. President Dunster, of Harvard College,
+and Mr. Shepard, the minister at Cambridge, felt a warm interest in the
+undertaking. These worthy men seriously believed that the aborigines
+of America were the degenerate descendants of the ten lost tribes of
+Israel, and from this strange backsliding it was hoped that they might
+now be reclaimed. With rare eloquence and skill did Eliot devote himself
+to the difficult work of reaching the Indian's scanty intelligence and
+still scantier moral sense. His ministrations reached from the sands of
+Cape Cod to the rocky hillsides of Brookfield. But he soon found that
+single-handed he could achieve but little over so wide an area, and
+accordingly he adopted the policy of colonizing his converts in village
+communities near the English towns, where they might be sequestered from
+their heathen brethren and subjected to none but Christian influences.
+In these communities he hoped to train up native missionaries who might
+thence go and labour among the wild tribes until the whole lump of
+barbarism should be leavened. In pursuance of this scheme a stockaded
+village was built at Natick in 1651 Under the direction of an English
+carpenter the Indians built log-houses for themselves, and most of them
+adopted the English dress. Their simple government was administered by
+tithing-men, or "rulers of tens," chosen after methods prescribed in the
+book of Exodus. Other such communities were formed in the neighbourhoods
+of Concord and Grafton. By 1674 the number of these "praying Indians,"
+as they were called, was estimated at 4000, of whom about 1500 were in
+Eliot's villages, as many more in Martha's Vineyard, 300 in Nantucket,
+and 700 in the Plymouth colony. There seems to be no doubt that these
+Indians were really benefited both materially and morally by the change
+in their life. In theology it is not likely that they reached any higher
+view than that expressed by the Connecticut sachem Wequash who "seeing
+and beholding the mighty power of God in the English forces, how they
+fell upon the Pequots, ... from that time was convinced and persuaded
+that our God was a most dreadful God;" accordingly, says the author of
+"New England's First Fruits," "he became thoroughly reformed according
+to his light." Matters of outward observance, too, the Indians could
+understand; for we read of one of them rebuking an Englishman "for
+profaning the Lord's Day by felling of a tree." The Indian's notions of
+religion were probably confined within this narrow compass; the notions
+of some people that call themselves civilized perhaps do not extend much
+further. [Sidenote: Villages of Christian Indians]
+
+From such facts as those above cited we may infer that the early
+relations of the Puritan settlers to the Algonquin tribes of New England
+were by no means like the relations between white men and red men in
+recent times on our western plains. During Philip's War, as we shall
+see, the Puritan theory of the situation was entirely changed and our
+forefathers began to act in accordance with the frontiersman's doctrine
+that the good Indians are dead Indians. But down to that time it is
+clear that his intention was to deal honourably and gently with his
+tawny neighbour. We sometimes hear the justice and kindness of the
+Quakers in Pennsylvania alleged as an adequate reason for the success
+with which they kept clear of an Indian war. This explanation, however,
+does not seem to be adequate; it does not appear that, on the whole, the
+Puritans were less just and kind than the Quakers in their treatment of
+the red men. The true explanation is rather to be found in the relations
+between the Indian tribes toward the close of the seventeenth century.
+Early in that century the Pennsylvania region had been in the hands
+of the ferocious and powerful Susquehannocks, but in 1672, after a
+frightful struggle of twenty years, this great tribe was swept from the
+face of the earth by the resistless league of the Five Nations. When
+the Quakers came to Pennsylvania in 1682, the only Indians in that
+neighbourhood were the Delawares, who had just been terribly beaten by
+the Five Nations and forced into a treaty by which they submitted to be
+called "women," and to surrender their tomahawks. Penn's famous treaty
+was made with the Delawares as occupants of the land and also with the
+Iroquois league as overlords. [30] Now the great central fact of early
+American history, so far as the relations between white men and red
+men are concerned, is the unshaken friendship of the Iroquois for the
+English. This was the natural consequence of the deadly hostility
+between the Iroquois and the French which began with Champlain's defeat
+of the Mohawks in 1609. During the seventy-three years which intervened
+between the founding of Pennsylvania and the defeat of Braddock there
+was never a moment when the Delawares could have attacked the Quakers
+without incurring the wrath and vengeance of their overlords the Five
+Nations. This was the reason why Pennsylvania was left so long in quiet.
+No better proof could be desired than the fact that in Pontiac's war,
+after the overthrow of the French and when Indian politics had changed,
+no state suffered so much as Pennsylvania from the horrors of Indian
+warfare. [Sidenote: Why Pennsylvania was so long unmolested by the
+Indians]
+
+In New England at the time of Philip's War, the situation was very
+different from what it was between the Hudson and the Susquehanna. The
+settlers were thrown into immediate relations with several tribes whose
+mutual hostility and rivalry was such that it was simply impossible to
+keep on good terms with all at once. Such complicated questions as that
+which involved the English in responsibility for the fate of Miantonomo
+did not arise in Pennsylvania. Since the destruction of the Pequots we
+have observed the Narragansetts and Mohegans contending for the foremost
+place among New England tribes. Of the two rivals the Mohegans were
+the weaker, and therefore courted the friendship of the formidable
+palefaces. The English had no desire to take part in these barbarous
+feuds, but they could not treat the Mohegans well without incurring the
+hostility of the Narragansetts. For thirty years the feeling of the
+latter tribe toward the English had been very unfriendly and would
+doubtless have vented itself in murder but for their recollection of
+the fate of the Pequots. After the loss of their chief Miantonomo their
+attitude became so sullen and defiant that the Federal Commissioners, in
+order to be in readiness for an outbreak, collected a force of 300 men.
+At the first news of these preparations the Narragansetts, overcome with
+terror, sent a liberal tribute of wampum to Boston, and were fain to
+conclude a treaty in which they promised to behave themselves well in
+the future.
+
+It was impossible that this sort of English protectorate over the native
+tribes, which was an inevitable result of the situation, should be other
+than irksome and irritating to the Indians. They could not but see that
+the white man stood there as master, and even in the utter absence
+of provocation, this fact alone must have made them hate him. It is
+difficult, moreover, for the civilized man and the savage to understand
+each other. As a rule the one does not know what the other is thinking
+about. When Mr. Hamilton Gushing a few years ago took some of his Zuni
+friends into a hotel in Chicago, they marvelled at his entering such a
+mighty palace with so little ceremony, and their wonder was heightened
+at the promptness with which "slaves" came running at his beck and call;
+but all at once, on seeing an American eagle over one of the doorways,
+they felt that the mystery was solved. Evidently this palace was the
+communal dwelling of the Eagle Clan of palefaces, and evidently Mr.
+Gushing was a great sachem of this clan, and as such entitled to lordly
+sway there! The Zunis are not savages, but representatives of a remote
+and primitive phase of what Mr. Morgan calls the middle status of
+barbarism. The gulf between their thinking and that of white men is
+wide because there is a wide gulf between the experience of the two.
+[Sidenote: Difficulty of the situation in New England] [Sidenote: It is
+hard for the savage and the civilized man to understand one another]
+
+This illustration may help us to understand an instance in which the
+Indians of New England must inevitably have misinterpreted the actions
+of the white settlers and read them in the light of their uneasy fears
+and prejudices. I refer to the work of the apostle Eliot. His design in
+founding his villages of Christian Indians was in the highest degree
+benevolent and noble; but the heathen Indians could hardly be expected
+to see anything in it but a cunning scheme for destroying them.
+
+Eliot's converts were for the most part from the Massachusetts tribe,
+the smallest and weakest of all. The Plymouth converts came chiefly
+from the tribe next in weakness, the Pokanokets or Wampanoags. The more
+powerful tribes--Narragansetts, Nipmucks, and Mohegans--furnished very
+few converts. When they saw the white intruders gathering members of the
+weakest tribes into villages of English type, and teaching them strange
+gods while clothing them in strange garments, they probably supposed
+that the pale-faces were simply adopting these Indians into their white
+tribe as a means of increasing their military strength. At any rate,
+such a proceeding would be perfectly intelligible to the savage mind,
+whereas the nature of Eliot's design lay quite beyond its ken. As the
+Indians recovered from their supernatural dread of the English, and
+began to regard them as using human means to accomplish their ends,
+they must of course interpret their conduct in such light as savage
+experience could afford. It is one of the commonest things in the world
+for a savage tribe to absorb weak neighbours by adoption, and thus
+increase its force preparatory to a deadly assault upon other
+neighbours. When Eliot in 1657 preached to the little tribe of Podunks
+near Hartford, and asked them if they were willing to accept of Jesus
+Christ as their saviour, their old men scornfully answered No! they had
+parted with most of their land, but they were not going to become the
+white man's servants. A rebuke administered to Eliot by Uncas in 1674
+has a similar implication. When the apostle was preaching one evening in
+a village over which that sachem claimed jurisdiction, an Indian arose
+and announced himself as a deputy of Uncas. Then he said, "Uncas is not
+well pleased that the English should pass over Mohegan river to call
+_his_ Indians to pray to God." [31]
+
+Thus, no matter how benevolent the white man's intentions, he could not
+fail to be dreaded by the Indians as a powerful and ever encroaching
+enemy.
+
+Even in his efforts to keep the peace and prevent tribes from taking the
+warpath without his permission, he was interfering with the red man's
+cherished pastime of murder and pillage. The appeals to the court at
+Plymouth, the frequent summoning of sachems to Boston, to explain
+their affairs and justify themselves against accusers, must have been
+maddening in their effects upon the Indian; for there is one sound
+instinct which the savage has in common with the most progressive
+races, and that is the love of self-government that resents all outside
+interference. All things considered, it is remarkable that peace should
+have been maintained in New England from 1637 to 1675; and probably
+nothing short of the consuming vengeance wrought upon the Pequots could
+have done it. But with the lapse of time the wholesome feeling of dread
+began to fade away, and as the Indians came to use musket instead of bow
+and arrow, their fear of the English grew less, until at length their
+ferocious temper broke forth in an epidemic of fire and slaughter that
+laid waste the land. [Sidenote: It is remarkable that peace should have
+been so long preserved]
+
+Massasoit, chief sachem of the Wampanoags and steadfast ally of the
+Plymouth colonists, died in 1660, leaving two sons, Wamsutta and
+Metacom, or as the English nicknamed them, Alexander and Philip.
+Alexander succeeded to his father's position of savage dignity and
+influence, but his reign was brief. Rumours came to Plymouth that he was
+plotting mischief, and he was accordingly summoned to appear before the
+General Court of that colony and explain himself. He seems to have gone
+reluctantly, but he succeeded in satisfying the magistrates of his
+innocence of any evil designs. Whether he caught cold at Plymouth or
+drank rum as only Indians can, we do not know. At any rate, on starting
+homeward, before he had got clear of English territory, he was seized by
+a violent fever and died. The savage mind knows nothing of pneumonia or
+delirium tremens. It knows nothing of what we call natural death. To
+the savage all death means murder, for like other men he judges of the
+unknown by the known. In the Indian's experience normal death was by
+tomahawk or firebrand; abnormal death (such as we call natural)
+must come either from poison or from witchcraft. So when the honest
+chronicler Hubbard tells us that Philip suspected the Plymouth people of
+poisoning his brother, we can easily believe him. It was long, however,
+before he was ready to taste the sweets of revenge. He schemed and
+plotted in the dark. In one respect the Indian diplomatist is unlike his
+white brethren; he does not leave state-papers behind him to reward
+the diligence and gratify the curiosity of later generations; and
+accordingly it is hard to tell how far Philip was personally responsible
+for the storm which was presently to burst upon New England. [Sidenote:
+Deaths of Massasoit and Alexander] [Sidenote: Philip's designs]
+
+Whether his scheme was as comprehensive as that of Pontiac in 1763,
+whether or not it amounted to a deliberate combination of all red men
+within reach to exterminate the white men, one can hardly say with
+confidence. The figure of Philip, in the war which bears his name, does
+not stand out so prominently as the figure of Pontiac in the later
+struggle. This may be partly because Pontiac's story has been told by
+such a magician as Mr. Francis Parkman. But it is partly because the
+data are too meagre. In all probability, however, the schemes of
+Sassacus the Pequot, of Philip the Wampanoag, and of Pontiac the Ottawa,
+were substantially the same. That Philip plotted with the Narragansetts
+seems certain, and the early events of the war point clearly to a
+previous understanding with the Nipmucks. The Mohegans, on the other
+hand, gave him no assistance, but remained faithful to their white
+allies.
+
+For thirteen years had Philip been chief sachem of his tribe before the
+crisis came. Rumours of his unfriendly disposition had at intervals
+found their way to the ears of the magistrates at Plymouth, but Philip
+had succeeded in setting himself right before them. In 1670 the rumours
+were renewed, and the Plymouth men felt that it was time to strike, but
+the other colonies held them back, and a meeting was arranged between
+Philip and three Boston men at Taunton in April, 1671. There the crafty
+savage expressed humility and contrition for all past offences, and
+even consented to a treaty in which he promised that his tribe should
+surrender all their fire-arms. On the part of the English this was an
+extremely unwise measure, for while it could not possibly be enforced,
+and while it must have greatly increased the irritation of the Indians,
+it was at the same time interpretable as a symptom of fear. With ominous
+scowls and grunts some seventy muskets were given up, but this was all.
+Through the summer there was much uneasiness, and in September Philip
+was summoned to Plymouth with five of his under-sachems, and solemnly
+warned to keep the peace. The savages again behaved with humility and
+agreed to pay a yearly tribute of five wolves' heads and to do no act of
+war without express permission.
+
+For three years things seemed quiet, until late in 1674 the alarm was
+again sounded. Sausamon, a convert from the Massachusetts tribe, had
+studied a little at Harvard College, and could speak and write English
+with facility. He had at one time been employed by Philip as a sort of
+private secretary or messenger, and at other times had preached and
+taught school among the Indian converts at Natick. Sausamon now came to
+Plymouth and informed Governor Winslow that Philip was certainly engaged
+in a conspiracy that boded no good to the English. Somehow or other
+Philip contrived to find out what Sausamon had said, and presently
+coming to Plymouth loudly asseverated his innocence; but the magistrates
+warned him that if they heard any more of this sort of thing his
+arms would surely be seized. A few days after Philip had gone home,
+Sausamon's hat and gun were seen lying on the frozen surface of
+Assowamsett Pond, near Middleborough, and on cutting through the ice his
+body was found with unmistakable marks of beating and strangling. After
+some months the crime was traced to three Wampanoags, who were forthwith
+arrested, tried by a mixed jury of Indians and white men, found guilty,
+and put to death. On the way to the gallows one of them confessed
+that he had stood by while his two friends had pounded and choked the
+unfortunate Sausamon. [Sidenote: Murder of Sausamon]
+
+More alarming reports now came from Swanzey, a pretty village of some
+forty houses not far from Philip's headquarters at Mount Hope. On Sunday
+June 20, while everybody was at church, a party of Indians had stolen
+into the town and set fire to two houses. Messengers were hurried from
+Plymouth and from Boston, to demand the culprits under penalty of
+instant war. As they approached Swanzey the men from Boston saw a sight
+that filled them with horror. The road was strewn with corpses of men,
+women, and children, scorched, dismembered, and mangled with that
+devilish art of which the American Indian is the most finished master.
+The savages had sacked the village the day before, burning the houses
+and slaying the people. Within three days a small force of colonial
+troops had driven Philip from his position at Mount Hope; but while
+they were doing this a party of savages swooped upon Dartmouth, burning
+thirty houses and committing fearful atrocities. Some of their victims
+were flayed alive, or impaled on sharp stakes, or roasted over slow
+fires. Similar horrors were wrought at Middleborough and Taunton; and
+now the misery spread to Massachusetts, where on the 14th of July the
+town of Mendon was attacked by a party of Nipmucks. [Sidenote: Massacres
+at Swanzey and Dartmouth, June, 1675]
+
+At that time the beautiful highlands between Lancaster and the
+Connecticut river were still an untrodden wilderness. On their southern
+slope Worcester and Brookfield were tiny hamlets of a dozen houses each.
+Up the Connecticut valley a line of little villages, from Springfield
+to Northfield, formed the remotest frontier of the English, and their
+exposed position offered tempting opportunities to the Indians. Governor
+Leverett saw how great the danger would be if the other tribes should
+follow the example set by Philip, and Captain Edward Hutchinson was
+accordingly sent to Brookfield to negotiate with the Nipmucks. This
+officer was eldest son of the unfortunate lady whose preaching in Boston
+nearly forty years before had been the occasion of so much strife. Not
+only his mother, but all save one or two of his brothers and sisters
+--and there were not less than twelve of them--had been murdered by
+Indians on the New Netherland border in 1643; now the same cruel fate
+overtook the gallant captain. The savages agreed to hold a parley and
+appointed a time and place for the purpose, but instead of keeping tryst
+they lay in ambush and slew Hutchinson with eight of his men on their
+way to the conference. [Sidenote: Murder of Captain Hutchinson]
+
+Three days afterward Philip, who had found home too hot for him, arrived
+in the Nipmuck country, and on the night of August 2, took part in a
+fierce assault on Brookfield. Thirty or forty men, with some fifty women
+and children--all the inhabitants of the hamlet--took refuge in a large
+house, where they were besieged by 300 savages whose bullets pierced the
+wooden walls again and again. Arrows tipped with burning rags were
+shot into the air in such wise as to fall upon the roof, but they who
+crouched in the garret were watchful and well supplied with water, while
+from the overhanging windows the volleys of musketry were so brisk and
+steady that the screaming savages below could not get near enough to the
+house to set it on fire. For three days the fight was kept up, while
+every other house in the village was destroyed. By this time the Indians
+had contrived to mount some planks on barrels so as to make a kind of
+rude cart which they loaded with tow and chips. They were just about
+setting it on fire and preparing to push it against the house with long
+poles, when they were suddenly foiled by a heavy shower. That noon the
+gallant Simon Willard, ancestor of two presidents of Harvard College, a
+man who had done so much toward building up Concord and Lancaster that
+he was known as the "founder of towns," was on his way from Lancaster to
+Groton at the head of forty-seven horsemen, when he was overtaken by a
+courier with the news from Brookfield. The distance was thirty miles,
+the road scarcely fit to be called a bridle-path, and Willard's years
+were more than threescore-and-ten; but by an hour after sunset he had
+gallopped into Brookfield and routed the Indians who fled to a swamp ten
+miles distant. [Sidenote: Attack on Brookfield]
+
+The scene is now shifted to the Connecticut valley, where on the 25th of
+August Captain Lothrop defeated the savages at Hatfield. On the 1st of
+September simultaneous attacks were made upon Deerfield and Hadley, and
+among the traditions of the latter place is one of the most interesting
+of the stories of that early time. The inhabitants were all in church
+keeping a fast, when the yells of the Indians resounded. Seizing their
+guns, the men rushed out to meet the foe; but seeing the village green
+swarming on every side with the horrid savages, for a moment their
+courage gave way and a panic was imminent; when all at once a stranger
+of reverend aspect and stately form, with white beard flowing on his
+bosom, appeared among them and took command with an air of authority
+which none could gainsay. He bade them charge on the screeching rabble,
+and after a short sharp skirmish the tawny foe was put to flight. When
+the pursuers came together again, after the excitement of the rout,
+their deliverer was not to be found. In their wonder, as they knew not
+whence he came or whither he had gone, many were heard to say that
+an angel had been sent from heaven for their deliverance. It was the
+regicide William Goffe, who from his hiding-place had seen the savages
+stealing down the hillside, and sallied forth to win yet one more
+victory over the hosts of Midian ere death should come to claim him in
+his woodland retreat. Sir Walter Scott has put this pretty story into
+the mouth of Major Bridgenorth in "Peveril of the Peak," and Cooper has
+made use of it in "The Wept of Wish-ton-wish." Like many other romantic
+stories, it rests upon insufficient authority and its truth has been
+called in question. [32] But there seems to be nothing intrinsically
+improbable in the tradition; and a paramount regard for Goffe's personal
+safety would quite account for the studied silence of contemporary
+writers like Hubbard and Increase Mather. [Sidenote: The mysterious
+stranger of Hadley]
+
+This repulse did not check for a moment the activity of the Indians,
+though for a long time we hear nothing more of Philip. On the 2d
+of September they slew eight men at Northfield and on the 4th they
+surrounded and butchered Captain Beers and most of his company of
+thirty-six marching to the relief of that village. The next day but
+one, as Major Robert Treat came up the road with his 100 Connecticut
+soldiers, they found long poles planted by the wayside bearing the heads
+of their unfortunate comrades. They in turn were assaulted, but beat off
+the enemy, and brought away the people of Northfield. That village was
+abandoned, and presently Deerfield shared its fate and the people were
+crowded into Hadley. Yet worse remained to be seen. A large quantity of
+wheat had been left partly threshed at Deerfield, and on the 11th of
+September eighteen wagons were sent up with teamsters and farmers to
+finish the threshing and bring in the grain. They were escorted by
+Captain Lothrop, with his train-band of ninety picked men, known as the
+"Flower of Essex," perhaps the best drilled company in the colony. The
+threshing was done, the wagons were loaded, and the party made a night
+march southward. At seven in the morning, as they were fording a shallow
+stream in the shade of overarching woods, they were suddenly overwhelmed
+by the deadly fire of 700 ambushed Nipmucks, and only eight of them
+escaped to tell the tale. A "black and fatal" day was this, says the
+chronicler, "the saddest that ever befell New England." To this day the
+memory of the slaughter at Bloody Brook survives, and the visitor to
+South Deerfield may read the inscription over the grave in which Major
+Treat's men next day buried all the victims together. The Indians now
+began to feel their power, and on the 5th of October they attacked
+Springfield and burned thirty houses there. [Sidenote: Ambuscade at
+Bloody Brook, September 12]
+
+Things were becoming desperate. For ten weeks, from September 9 to
+November 19, the Federal Commissioners were in session daily in Boston.
+The most eminent of their number, for ability and character, was the
+younger John Winthrop, who was still governor of Connecticut. Plymouth
+was represented by its governor, Josiah Winslow, with the younger
+William Bradford; Massachusetts by William Stoughton, Simon Bradstreet,
+and Thomas Danforth. These strong men were confronted with a difficult
+problem. From Batten's journal, kept during that disastrous summer, we
+learn the state of feeling of excitement in Boston. The Puritans had
+by no means got rid of that sense of corporate responsibility which
+civilized man has inherited from prehistoric ages, and which has been
+one of the principal causes of religious persecution. This sombre
+feeling has prompted men to believe that to spare the heretic is to
+bring down the wrath of God upon the whole community; and now in Boston
+many people stoutly maintained that God had let loose the savages, with
+firebrand and tomahawk, to punish the people of New England for ceasing
+to persecute "false worshippers and especially idolatrous Quakers."
+Quaker meetings were accordingly forbidden under penalty of fine and
+imprisonment. Some harmless Indians were murdered. At Marblehead two
+were assaulted and killed by a crowd of women. There was a bitter
+feeling toward the Christian Indians, many of whom had joined their
+heathen kinsmen in burning and slaying. Daniel Gookin, superintendent of
+the "praying Indians," a gentleman of the highest character, was told
+that it would not be safe to show himself in the streets of Boston.
+Mrs. Mary Pray, of Providence, wrote a letter recommending the total
+extermination of the red men.
+
+The measures adopted by the Commissioners certainly went far toward
+carrying out Mrs. Pray's suggestion. The demeanour of the Narragansetts
+had become very threatening, and their capacity for mischief exceeded
+that of all the other tribes together. In July the Commissioners had
+made a treaty with them, but in October it became known in Boston
+that they were harbouring some of Philip's hostile Indians. When the
+Commissioners sharply called them to account for this, their sachem
+Canonchet, son of Miantonomo, promised to surrender the fugitives
+within ten days. But the ten days passed and nothing was heard from the
+Narragansetts. The victory of their brethren at Bloody Brook had worked
+upon their minds, so that they no longer thought it worth while to keep
+faith with the white men. They had overcome their timidity and were now
+ready to take part in the work of massacre. [33] The Commissioners soon
+learned of their warlike preparations and lost no time in forestalling
+them. The Narragansetts were fairly warned that if they did not at once
+fulfil their promises they must expect the utmost severities of war. A
+thousand men were enlisted for this service and put under command of
+Governor Winslow, and in December they marched against the enemy. The
+redoubtable fighter and lively chronicler Benjamin Church accompanied
+the expedition.
+
+The Indians had fortified themselves on a piece of rising ground, six
+acres in extent, in the middle of a hideous swamp impassable at most
+seasons but now in some places frozen hard enough to afford a precarious
+footing. They were surrounded by rows of tall palisades which formed a
+wall twelve feet in thickness; and the only approach to the single door
+of this stronghold was over the trunk of a felled tree some two feet in
+diameter and slippery with snow and ice. A stout block-house filled with
+sharpshooters guarded this rude bridge, which was raised some five feet
+from the ground. Within the palisaded fortress perhaps not less than
+2000 warriors, with many women and children, awaited the onset of the
+white men, for here had Canonchet gathered together nearly the whole of
+his available force. This was a military mistake. It was cooping up his
+men for slaughter. They would have been much safer if scattered about in
+the wilderness, and could have given the English much more trouble. But
+readily as they acknowledged the power of the white man, they did not
+yet understand it. One man's courage is not another's, and the Indian
+knew little or nothing of that Gothic fury of self-abandonment which
+rushes straight ahead and snatches victory from the jaws of death. His
+fortress was a strong one, and it was no longer, as in the time of the
+Pequots, a strife in which firearms were pitted against bow and arrow.
+Many of the Narragansetts were equipped with muskets and skilled in
+their use, and under such circumstances victory for the English was not
+to be lightly won. [Sidenote: Expedition against the Narragansetts]
+
+On the night of December 18 their little army slept in an open field
+at Pettyquamscott without other blanket than a "moist fleece of snow."
+Thence to the Indian fortress, situated in what is now South Kingston,
+the march was eighteen miles. The morrow was a Sunday, but Winslow
+deemed it imprudent to wait, as food had wellnigh given out. Getting up
+at five o'clock, they toiled through deep snow till they came within
+sight of the Narragansett stronghold early in the afternoon. First came
+the 527 men from Massachusetts, led by Major Appleton, of Ipswich, and
+next the 158 from Plymouth, under Major Bradford; while Major Robert
+Treat, with the 300 from Connecticut, brought up the rear. There were
+985 men in all. As the Massachusetts men rushed upon the slippery bridge
+a deadly volley from the blockhouse slew six of their captains, while
+of the rank and file there were many killed or wounded. Nothing daunted
+they pressed on with great spirit till they forced their way into the
+enclosure, but then the head of their column, overcome by sheer weight
+of numbers in the hand-to-hand fight, was pushed and tumbled out into
+the swamp. Meanwhile some of the Connecticut men had discovered a path
+across the partly frozen swamp leading to a weak spot in the rear, where
+the palisades were thin and few, as undue reliance had been placed upon
+the steep bank crowned with a thick rampart of bushes that had been
+reinforced with clods of turf. In this direction Treat swept along with
+his men in a spirited charge. Before they had reached the spot a heavy
+fire began mowing them down, but with a furious rush they came up, and
+climbing on each other's shoulders, some fought their way over the
+rampart, while others hacked sturdily with axes till such a breach was
+made that all might enter. This was effected just as the Massachusetts
+men had recovered themselves and crossed the treacherous log in a second
+charge that was successful and soon brought the entire English force
+within the enclosure. In the slaughter which filled the rest of that
+Sunday afternoon till the sun went down behind a dull gray cloud, the
+grim and wrathful Puritan, as he swung his heavy cutlass, thought of
+Saul and Agag, and spared not. The Lord had delivered up to him the
+heathen as stubble to his sword. As usual the number of the slain
+is variously estimated. Of the Indians probably not less than 1000
+perished. Some hundreds, however, with Canonchet their leader, saved
+themselves in flight, well screened by the blinding snow-flakes that
+began to fall just after sunset. Within the fortified area had been
+stored the greater part of the Indians' winter supply of corn, and the
+loss of this food was a further deadly blow. Captain Church advised
+sparing the wigwams and using them for shelter, but Winslow seems to
+have doubted the ability of his men to maintain themselves in a position
+so remote from all support. The wigwams with their tubs of corn were
+burned, and a retreat was ordered. Through snowdrifts that deepened
+every moment the weary soldiers dragged themselves along until two hours
+after midnight, when they reached the tiny village of Wickford. Nearly
+one-fourth of their number had been killed or wounded, and many of the
+latter perished before shelter was reached. Forty of these were buried
+at Wickford in the course of the next three days. Of the Connecticut men
+eighty were left upon the swamp and in the breach at the rear of the
+stronghold. Among the spoils which the victors brought away were a
+number of good muskets that had been captured by the Nipmucks in their
+assault upon Deerfield. [Sidenote: Storming of the great swamp fortress,
+December 19]
+
+This headlong overthrow of the Narragansett power completely changed the
+face of things. The question was no longer whether the red men could
+possibly succeed in making New England too hot for the white men, but
+simply how long it would take for the white men to exterminate the red
+men. The shiftless Indian was abandoning his squalid agriculture and
+subsisting on the pillage of English farms; but the resources of the
+colonies, though severely taxed, were by no means exhausted. The dusky
+warriors slaughtered in the great swamp fight could not be replaced;
+but, as Roger Williams told the Indians, there were still ten thousand
+white men who could carry muskets, and should all these be slain, he
+added, with a touch of hyperbole, the Great Father in England could send
+ten thousand more. For the moment Williams seems to have cherished a
+hope that his great influence with the savages might induce them to
+submit to terms of peace while there was yet a remnant to be saved; but
+they were now as little inclined to parley as tigers brought to bay, nor
+was the temper of the colonists a whit less deadly, though it did not
+vent itself in inflicting torture or in merely wanton orgies of cruelty.
+[Sidenote: Effect of the blow]
+
+To the modern these scenes of carnage are painful to contemplate. In the
+wholesale destruction of the Pequots, and to a less degree in that of
+the Narragansetts, the death-dealing power of the white man stands forth
+so terrible and relentless that our sympathy is for a moment called
+out for his victim. The feeling of tenderness toward the weak, almost
+unknown among savages, is one of the finest products of civilization.
+Where murderous emotions are frequently excited, it cannot thrive. Such
+advance in humanity as we have made within recent times is chiefly
+due to the fact that the horrors of war are seldom brought home to
+everybody's door. Either war is conducted on some remote frontier, or if
+armies march through a densely peopled country the conditions of
+modern warfare have made it essential to their efficiency as military
+instruments that depredation and riot should be as far as possible
+checked. Murder and pillage are comparatively infrequent, massacre
+is seldom heard of, and torture is almost or quite as extinct as
+cannibalism. The mass of citizens escape physical suffering, the angry
+emotions are so directed upon impersonal objects as to acquire a strong
+ethical value, and the intervals of strife may find individual soldiers
+of hostile armies exchanging kindly services. Members of a complex
+industrial society, without direct experience of warfare save in this
+mitigated form, have their characters wrought upon in a way that is
+distinctively modern, as they become more and more disinclined to
+violence and cruelty. European historians have noticed, with words
+of praise, the freedom from bloodthirstiness which characterizes the
+American people. Mr. Lecky has more than once remarked upon this humane
+temperament which is so characteristic of our peaceful civilization, and
+which sometimes, indeed, shows the defects of its excellence and tends
+to weaken society by making it difficult to inflict due punishment upon
+the vilest criminals. In respect of this humanity the American of the
+nineteenth century has without doubt improved very considerably upon his
+forefathers of the seventeenth. The England of Cromwell and Milton
+was not, indeed, a land of hard-hearted people as compared with their
+contemporaries. The long experience of internal peace since the War
+of the Roses had not been without its effect; and while the Tudor and
+Stuart periods had atrocities enough, we need only remember what was
+going on at the same time in France and Germany in order to realize how
+much worse it might have been. In England, as elsewhere, however, it
+was, when looked at with our eyes, a rough and brutal time. It was a day
+of dungeons, whipping-posts, and thumbscrews, when slight offenders were
+maimed and bruised and great offenders cut into pieces by sentence of
+court. The pioneers of New England had grown up familiar with such
+things; and among the townspeople of Boston and Hartford in 1675 were
+still many who in youth had listened to the awful news from Magdeburg or
+turned pale over the horrors in Piedmont upon which Milton invoked the
+wrath of Heaven. [Sidenote: Growth of humane sentiment in recent times]
+
+When civilized men are removed from the safeguards of civilization and
+placed in the wilderness amid the hideous dangers that beset human
+existence in a savage state of society, whatever barbarism lies latent
+in them is likely to find many opportunities for showing itself.
+The feelings that stir the meekest of men, as he stands among the
+smouldering embers of his homestead and gazes upon the mangled bodies
+of wife and children, are feelings that he shares with the most
+bloodthirsty savage, and the primary effect of his higher intelligence
+and greater sensitiveness is only to increase their bitterness. The
+neighbour who hears the dreadful story is quick to feel likewise, for
+the same thing may happen to him, and there is nothing so pitiless as
+fear. With the Puritan such gloomy and savage passions seemed to find
+justification in the sacred text from which he drew his rules of life.
+To suppose that one part of the Bible could be less authoritative than
+another would have been to him an incomprehensible heresy; and bound
+between the same covers that included the Sermon on the Mount were tales
+of wholesale massacre perpetrated by God's command. Evidently the
+red men were not stray children of Israel, after all, but rather
+Philistines, Canaanites, heathen, sons of Belial, firebrands of hell,
+demons whom it was no more than right to sweep from the face of the
+earth. Writing in this spirit, the chroniclers of the time were
+completely callous in their accounts of suffering and ruin inflicted
+upon Indians, and, as has elsewhere been known to happen, those who
+did not risk their own persons were more truculent in tone than the
+professional fighters. Of the narrators of the war, perhaps the fairest
+toward the Indian is the doughty Captain Church, while none is more
+bitter and cynical than the Ipswich pastor William Hubbard. [Sidenote:
+Warfare with savages likely to be truculent in character]
+
+While the overthrow of the Narragansetts changed the face of things, it
+was far from putting an end to the war. It showed that when the white
+man could find his enemy he could deal crushing blows, but the Indian
+was not always so easy to find. Before the end of January Winslow's
+little army was partially disbanded for want of food, and its three
+contingents fell back upon Stonington, Boston, and Plymouth. Early in
+February the Federal Commissioners called for a new levy of 600 men to
+assemble at Brookfield, for the Nipmucks were beginning to renew their
+incursions, and after an interval of six months the figure of Philip
+again appears for a moment upon the scene. What he had been doing, or
+where he had been, since the Brookfield fight in August, was never
+known. When in February, 1676, he re-appeared it was still in company
+with his allies the Nipmucks, in their bloody assault upon Lancaster.
+On the 10th of that month at sunrise the Indians came swarming into the
+lovely village. Danger had already been apprehended, the pastor, Joseph
+Rowlandson, the only Harvard graduate of 1652, had gone to Boston to
+solicit aid, and Captain Wadsworth's company was slowly making its
+way over the difficult roads from Marlborough, but the Indians were
+beforehand. Several houses were at once surrounded and set on fire,
+and men, women, and children began falling under the tomahawk. The
+minister's house was large and strongly built, and more than forty
+people found shelter there until at length it took fire and they were
+driven out by the flames. Only one escaped, a dozen or more were slain,
+and the rest, chiefly women and children, taken captive. The Indians
+aimed at plunder as well as destruction; for they were in sore need of
+food and blankets, as well as of powder and ball. Presently, as they saw
+Wadsworth's armed men approaching, they took to flight and got away,
+with many prisoners and a goodly store of provisions. [Sidenote: Attack
+upon Lancaster, February 10, 1676]
+
+Among the captives was Mary Rowlandson, the minister's wife, who
+afterward wrote the story of her sad experiences. The treatment of the
+prisoners varied with the caprice or the cupidity of the captors. Those
+for whom a substantial ransom might be expected fared comparatively
+well; to others death came as a welcome relief. One poor woman with a
+child in her arms was too weak to endure the arduous tramp over the icy
+hillsides, and begged to be left behind, till presently the savages
+lost their patience. They built a fire, and after a kind of demon dance
+killed mother and child with a club and threw the bodies into the
+flames. Such treatment may seem exceptionally merciful, but those modern
+observers who best know the Indian's habits say that he seldom indulges
+in torture except when he has abundance of leisure and a mind quite
+undisturbed. He is an epicure in human agony and likes to enjoy it in
+long slow sips. It is for the end of the march that the accumulation
+of horrors is reserved; the victims by the way are usually despatched
+quickly; and in the case of Mrs. Rowlandson's captors their irregular
+and circuitous march indicates that they were on the alert. Their
+movements seem to have covered much of the ground between Wachusett
+mountain and the Connecticut river. They knew that the white squaw of
+the great medicine man of an English village was worth a heavy ransom,
+and so they treated Mrs. Rowlandson unusually well. She had been
+captured when escaping from the burning house, carrying in her arms her
+little six-year-old daughter. She was stopped by a bullet that grazed
+her side and struck the child. The Indian who seized them placed the
+little girl upon a horse, and as the dreary march began she kept moaning
+"I shall die, mamma." "I went on foot after it," says the mother, "with
+sorrow that cannot be expressed. At length I took it off the horse, and
+carried it in my arms till my strength failed me, and I fell down with
+it .... After this it quickly began to snow, and when night came on they
+stopped. And now down I must sit in the snow, by a little fire, and a
+few boughs behind me, with my sick child in my lap, and calling much for
+water, being now, through the wound, fallen into a violent fever ....
+Oh, may I see the wonderful power of God that my spirit did not utterly
+sink under my affliction; still the Lord upheld me with his gracious and
+merciful spirit." The little girl soon died. For three months the weary
+and heartbroken mother was led about the country by these loathsome
+savages, of whose habits and manners she gives a vivid description. At
+first their omnivorousness astonished her. "Skunks and rattlesnakes, yea
+the very bark of trees" they esteemed as delicacies. "They would pick up
+old bones and cut them in pieces at the joints, ... then boil them and
+drink up the liquor, and then beat the great ends of them in a mortar
+and so eat them." After some weeks of starvation Mrs. Rowlandson herself
+was fain to partake of such viands. One day, having made a cap for one
+of Philip's boys, she was invited to dine with the great sachem. "I
+went," she says, "and he gave me a pancake about as big as two fingers.
+It was made of parched wheat, beaten, and fried in bear's grease; but I
+thought I never tasted pleasanter meat in my life." Early in May she was
+redeemed for 20 pounds, and went to find her husband in Boston, where
+the Old South Church society hired a house for them. [Sidenote: Mrs.
+Rowlandson's narrative]
+
+Such was the experience of a captive whose treatment was, according to
+Indian notions, hospitable. There were few who came off so well. Almost
+every week while she was led hither and thither by the savages. Mrs.
+Rowlandson heard ghastly tales of fire and slaughter. It was a busy
+winter and spring for these Nipmucks. Before February was over, their
+exploit at Lancaster was followed by a shocking massacre at Medfield.
+They sacked and destroyed the towns of Worcester, Marlborough, Mendon,
+and Groton, and even burned some houses in Weymouth, within a dozen
+miles of Boston. Murderous attacks were made upon Sudbury, Chelmsford,
+Springfield, Hatfield, Hadley, Northampton, Wrentham, Andover,
+Bridgewater, Scituate, and Middleborough. On the 18th of April Captain
+Wadsworth, with 70 men, was drawn into an ambush near Sudbury,
+surrounded by 500 Nipmucks, and killed with 50 of his men; six
+unfortunate captives were burned alive over slow fires. But Wadsworth's
+party made the enemy pay dearly for his victory; that afternoon 120
+Nipmucks bit the dust. In such wise, by killing two or three for one,
+did the English wear out and annihilate their adversaries. Just one
+month from that day Captain Turner surprised and slaughtered 300 of
+these warriors near the falls of the Connecticut river which have
+since borne his name, and this blow at last broke the strength of
+the Nipmucks. [Sidenote: Virtual exterminations of the Indians,
+February--August, 1676]
+
+Meanwhile the Narragansetts and Wampanoags had burned the towns of
+Warwick and Providence. After the wholesale ruin of the great "swamp
+fight," Canonchet had still some 600 or 700 warriors left, and with
+these, on the 26th of March, in the neighbourhood of Pawtuxet, he
+surprised a company of 50 Plymouth men under Captain Pierce and slew
+them all, but not until he had lost 140 of his best warriors. Ten days
+later Captain Denison, with his Connecticut company, defeated and
+captured Canonchet, and the proud son of Miantonomo met the same fate
+as his father. He was handed over to the Mohegans and tomahawked. The
+Narragansett sachem had shown such bravery that it seemed, says the
+chronicler Hubbard, as if "some old Roman ghost had possessed the body
+of this western pagan." But next moment this pious clergyman, as if
+ashamed of the classical eulogy just bestowed upon the hated redskin,
+alludes to him as a "damned wretch." [Sidenote: Death of Canonchet]
+
+The fall of Canonchet marked the beginning of the end. In four sharp
+fights in the last week of June, Major Talcott, of Hartford, slew
+from 300 to 400 warriors, being nearly all that were left of the
+Narragansetts; and during the month of July Captain Church patrolled the
+country about Taunton, making prisoners of the Wampanoags. Once more
+King Philip, shorn of his prestige, comes upon the scene. We have seen
+that his agency in these cruel events had been at the outset a potent
+one. Whatever else it may have been, it was at least the agency of the
+match that explodes the powder-cask. Under the conditions of that savage
+society, organized leadership was not to be looked for. In the irregular
+and disorderly series of murdering raids Philip may have been often
+present, but except for Mrs. Rowlandson's narrative we should have known
+nothing of him since the Brookfield fight.
+
+At length in July, 1676, having seen the last of his Nipmuck friends
+overwhelmed, the tattered chieftain showed himself near Bridgewater,
+with a handful of followers. In these his own hunting-grounds some of
+his former friends had become disaffected. The daring and diplomatic
+Church had made his way into the wigwam of Ashawonks, the squaw sachem
+of Saconet, near Little Compton, and having first convinced her that a
+flask of brandy might be tasted without fatal results, followed up his
+advantage and persuaded her to make an alliance with the English. Many
+Indians came in and voluntarily surrendered themselves, in order to
+obtain favourable terms, and some lent their aid in destroying their old
+sachem. Defeated at Taunton, the son of Massasoit was hunted by Church
+to his ancient lair at Bristol Neck and there besieged. His only escape
+was over the narrow isthmus of which the pursuers now took possession,
+and in this dire extremity one of Philip's men presumed to advise his
+chief that the hour for surrender had come. For his unwelcome counsel
+the sachem forthwith lifted his tomahawk and struck him dead at his
+feet. Then the brother of the slain man crept away through the bushes to
+Church's little camp, and offered to guide the white men to the morass
+where Philip lay concealed. At daybreak of August 12 the English
+stealthily advancing beat up their prey. The savages in sudden panic
+rushed from under cover, and as the sachem showed himself running at the
+top of his speed, a ball from an Indian musket pierced his heart, and
+"he fell upon his face in the mud and water, with his gun under him."
+His severed head was sent to Plymouth, where it was mounted on a pole
+and exposed aloft upon the village green, while the meeting-house
+bell summoned the townspeople to a special service of thanksgiving.
+[Sidenote: Death of Philip, August 12]
+
+It may be supposed that in such services at this time a Christian
+feeling of charity and forgiveness was not uppermost. Among the captives
+was a son of Philip, the little swarthy lad of nine years for whom Mrs.
+Rowlandson had made a cap, and the question as to what was to be done
+with him occasioned as much debate as if he had been a Jesse Pomeroy
+[34] or a Chicago anarchist. The opinions of the clergy were, of course,
+eagerly sought and freely vouchsafed. One minister somewhat doubtfully
+urged that "although a precept in Deuteronomy explicitly forbids killing
+the child for the father's sin," yet after all "the children of Saul and
+Achan perished with their parents, though too young to have shared their
+guilt." Thus curiously did this English reverence for precedent, with a
+sort of grim conscientiousness colouring its gloomy wrath, search for
+guidance among the ancient records of the children of Israel. Commenting
+upon the truculent suggestion, Increase Mather, soon to be president of
+Harvard, observed that, "though David had spared the infant Hadad, yet
+it might have been better for his people if he had been less merciful."
+These bloodthirsty counsels did not prevail, but the course that was
+adopted did not lack in harshness. Among the sachems a dozen leading
+spirits were hanged or shot, and hundreds of captives were shipped off
+to the West Indies to be sold into slavery; among these was Philip's
+little son. The rough soldier Church and the apostle Eliot were among
+the few who disapproved of this policy. Church feared it might goad such
+Indians as were still at large to acts of desperation. Eliot, in an
+earnest letter to the Federal Commissioners, observed: "To sell souls
+for money seemeth to me dangerous merchandise." But the plan of
+exporting the captives was adhered to. As slaves they were understood to
+be of little or no value, and sometimes for want of purchasers they were
+set ashore on strange coasts and abandoned. A few were even carried to
+one of the foulest of mediaeval slave-marts, Morocco, where their fate
+was doubtless wretched enough. [Sidenote: Indians sold into slavery]
+
+In spite of Church's doubts as to the wisdom of this harsh treatment,
+it did not prevent the beaten and starving savages from surrendering
+themselves in considerable numbers. To some the Federal Commissioners
+offered amnesty, and the promise was faithfully fulfilled. Among those
+who laid down arms in reliance upon it were 140 Christian Indians, with
+their leader known as James the Printer, because he had been employed at
+Cambridge in setting up the type for Eliot's Bible. Quite early in the
+war it had been discovered that these converted savages still felt the
+ties of blood to be stronger than those of creed. At the attack on
+Mendon, only three weeks after the horrors at Swanzey that ushered in
+the war, it was known that Christian Indians had behaved themselves
+quite as cruelly as their unregenerate brethren. Afterwards they made
+such a record that the jokers and punsters of the day--for such there
+were, even among those sombre Puritans--in writing about the "Praying
+Indians," spelled _praying_ with an _e_. The moral scruples of these
+savages, under the influence of their evangelical training, betrayed
+queer freaks. One of them, says Mrs. Rowlandson, would rather die than
+eat horseflesh, so narrow and scrupulous was his conscience, although it
+was as wide as the whole infernal abyss, when it came to torturing
+white Christians. The student of history may have observed similar
+inconsistencies in the theories and conduct of people more enlightened
+than these poor red men. "There was another Praying Indian," continues
+Mrs. Rowlandson, "who, when he had done all the mischief he could,
+betrayed his own father into the English's hands, thereby to purchase
+his own life; ... and there was another ... so wicked ... as to wear
+a string about his neck, strung with Christian fingers." [Sidenote:
+Conduct of the Christian Indians]
+
+Such incidents help us to comprehend the exasperation of our forefathers
+in the days of King Philip. The month which witnessed his death saw also
+the end of the war in the southern parts of New England; but, almost
+before people had time to offer thanks for the victory, there came news
+of bloodshed on the northeastern frontier. The Tarratines in Maine had
+for some time been infected with the war fever. How far they may have
+been comprehended in the schemes of Philip and Canonchet, it would be
+hard to say. They had attacked settlers on the site of Brunswick as
+early as September, 1675. About the time of Philip's death, Major
+Waldron of Dover had entrapped a party of them by an unworthy stratagem,
+and after satisfying himself that they were accomplices in that
+chieftain's scheme, sent them to Boston to be sold into slavery. A
+terrible retribution was in store for Major Waldron thirteen years
+later. For the present the hideous strife, just ended in southern New
+England, was continued on the northeastern frontier, and there was
+scarcely a village between the Kennebec and the Piscataqua but was laid
+in ashes. [Sidenote: War with the Tarratines, 1676-78]
+
+By midsummer of 1678 the Indians had been everywhere suppressed, and
+there was peace in the land. For three years, since Philip's massacre
+at Swanzey, there had been a reign of terror in New England. Within
+the boundaries of Connecticut, indeed, little or no damage had been
+inflicted, and the troops of that colony, not needed on their own soil,
+did noble service in the common cause.
+
+In Massachusetts and Plymouth, on the other hand, the destruction of
+life and property had been simply frightful. Of ninety towns, twelve had
+been utterly destroyed, while more than forty others had been the scene
+of fire and slaughter. Out of this little society nearly a thousand
+staunch men, including not few of broad culture and strong promise, had
+lost their lives, while of the scores of fair women and poor little
+children that had perished under the ruthless tomahawk, one can hardly
+give an accurate account. Hardly a family throughout the land but was
+in mourning. The war-debt of Plymouth was reckoned to exceed the total
+amount of personal property in the colony; yet although it pinched every
+household for many a year, it was paid to the uttermost farthing; nor
+in this respect were Massachusetts and Connecticut at all behind-hand.
+[Sidenote: Destructiveness of the war]
+
+But while King Philip's War wrought such fearful damage to the English,
+it was for the Indians themselves utter destruction. Most of the
+warriors were slain, and to the survivors, as we have seen, the
+conquerors showed but scant mercy. The Puritan, who conned his Bible so
+earnestly, had taken his hint from the wars of the Jews, and swept
+his New English Canaan with a broom that was pitiless and searching.
+Henceforth the red man figures no more in the history of New England,
+except as an ally of the French in bloody raids upon the frontier. In
+that capacity he does mischief enough for yet a half-century more, but
+from central and southern New England, as an element of disturbance or a
+power to be reckoned with, he disappears forever.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE TYRANNY OF ANDROS.
+
+
+The beginnings of New England were made in the full daylight of modern
+history. It was an age of town records, of registered deeds, of
+contemporary memoirs, of diplomatic correspondence, of controversial
+pamphlets, funeral sermons, political diatribes, specific instructions,
+official reports, and private letters. It was not a time in which
+mythical personages or incredible legends could flourish, and such
+things we do find in the history of New England. There was nevertheless
+a romantic side to this history, enough to envelop some of its
+characters and incidents in a glamour that may mislead the modern
+reader. This wholesale migration from the smiling fields of merry
+England to an unexplored wilderness beyond a thousand leagues of sea was
+of itself a most romantic and thrilling event, and when viewed in the
+light of its historic results it becomes clothed with sublimity. The men
+who undertook this work were not at all free from self-consciousness.
+They believed that they were doing a wonderful thing. They felt
+themselves to be instruments in accomplishing a kind of "manifest
+destiny." Their exodus was that of a chosen people who were at length
+to lay the everlasting foundations of God's kingdom upon earth. Such
+opinions, which took a strong colour from their assiduous study of the
+Old Testament, reacted and disposed them all the more to search its
+pages for illustrations and precedents, and to regard it as an oracle,
+almost as a talisman. In every propitious event they saw a special
+providence, an act of divine intervention to deliver them from the
+snares of an ever watchful Satan. This steadfast faith in an unseen
+ruler and guide was to them a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by
+night. It was of great moral value. It gave them clearness of purpose
+and concentration of strength, and contributed toward making them,
+like the children of Israel, a people of indestructible vitality and
+aggressive energy. At the same time, in the hands of the Puritan
+writers, this feeling was apt to warp their estimates of events and
+throw such a romantic haze about things as seriously to interfere with a
+true historical perspective. [Sidenote: Romantic features in the early
+history of New England]
+
+Among such writings that which perhaps best epitomizes the Puritan
+philosophy is "The Wonder-working Providence of Zion's Saviour in New
+England," by Captain Edward Johnson, one of the principal founders of
+Woburn. It is an extremely valuable history of New England from 1628 to
+1651, and every page is alive with the virile energy of that stirring
+time. With narrative, argument, and apologue, abounding in honesty
+of purpose, sublimity of trust, and grotesqueness of fancy, wherein
+touching tenderness is often alternated with sternness most grim and
+merciless, yet now and then relieved by a sudden gleam of humour,--and
+all in a style that is usually uncouth and harsh, but sometimes bursts
+forth in eloquence worthy of Bunyan,--we are told how the founders of
+New England are soldiers of Christ enlisted in a holy war, and how they
+must "march manfully on till all opposers of Christ's kingly power be
+abolished." "And as for you who are called to sound forth his silver
+trumpets, blow loud and shrill to this chiefest treble tune--for the
+armies of the great Jehovah are at hand." "He standeth not as an idle
+spectator beholding his people's ruth and their enemies' rage, but as an
+actor in all actions, to bring to naught the desires of the wicked, ...
+having also the ordering of every weapon in its first produce, guiding
+every shaft that flies, leading each bullet to his place of settling,
+and weapon to the wound it makes." To men engaged in such a crusade
+against the powers of evil, nothing could seem insignificant or trivial;
+for, as Johnson continues, in truly prophetic phrase, "the Lord Christ
+intends to achieve greater matters by this little handful than the world
+is aware of." [Sidenote: Edward Johnson]
+
+The general sentiment of the early New England writers was like that
+of the "Wonder-working Providence," though it did not always find such
+rhapsodic expression. It has left its impress upon the minds of their
+children's children down to our own time, and has affected the opinions
+held about them by other people. It has had something to do with a
+certain tacit assumption of superiority on the part of New Englanders,
+upon which the men and women of other communities have been heard
+to comment in resentful and carping tones. There has probably never
+existed, in any age or at any spot on the earth's surface, a group of
+people that did not take for granted its own preeminent excellence. Upon
+some such assumption, as upon an incontrovertible axiom, all historical
+narratives, from the chronicles of a parish to the annals of an empire,
+alike proceed. But in New England it assumed a form especially apt to
+provoke challenge. One of its unintentional effects was the setting up
+of an unreal and impossible standard by which to judge the acts and
+motives of the Puritans of the seventeenth century. We come upon
+instances of harshness and cruelty, of narrow-minded bigotry, and
+superstitious frenzy; and feel, perhaps, a little surprised that
+these men had so much in common with their contemporaries. Hence the
+interminable discussion which has been called forth by the history of
+the Puritans, in which the conclusions of the writer have generally been
+determined by circumstances of birth or creed, or perhaps of reaction
+against creed. One critic points to the Boston of 1659 or the Salem of
+1692 with such gleeful satisfaction as used to stir the heart of Thomas
+Paine when he alighted upon an inconsistency in some text of the Bible;
+while another, in the firm conviction that Puritans could do no wrong,
+plays fast and loose with arguments that might be made to justify the
+deeds of a Torquemada. [Sidenote: Acts of the Puritans often judged by a
+wrong standard]
+
+From such methods of criticism it is the duty of historians as far as
+possible to free themselves. If we consider the Puritans in the light
+of their surroundings as Englishmen of the seventeenth century and
+inaugurators of a political movement that was gradually to change for
+the better the aspect of things all over the earth, we cannot fail to
+discern the value of that sacred enthusiasm which led them to regard
+themselves as chosen soldiers of Christ. It was the spirit of the
+"Wonder-working Providence" that hurled the tyrant from his throne at
+Whitehall and prepared the way for the emancipation of modern Europe. No
+spirit less intense, no spirit nurtured in the contemplation of things
+terrestrial, could ever have done it. The political philosophy of a Vane
+or a Sidney could never have done it. The passion for liberty as felt
+by a Jefferson or an Adams, abstracted and generalized from the love
+of particular liberties, was something scarcely intelligible to the
+seventeenth century. The ideas of absolute freedom of thought and
+speech, which we breathe in from childhood, were to the men of that age
+strange and questionable. They groped and floundered among them, very
+much as modern wool growers in Ohio or iron-smelters in Pennsylvania
+flounder and grope among the elementary truths of political economy. But
+the spirit in which the Hebrew prophet rebuked and humbled an idolatrous
+king was a spirit they could comprehend. Such a spirit was sure to
+manifest itself in narrow cramping measures and in ugly acts of
+persecution; but it is none the less to the fortunate alliance of
+that fervid religious enthusiasm with the Englishman's love of
+self-government that our modern freedom owes its existence. [Sidenote:
+Spirit of the Wonder-working Providence]
+
+The history of New England under Charles II. yields abundant proof that
+political liberty is no less indebted in the New World than in the Old
+to the spirit of the "Wonder-working Providence." The theocratic ideal
+which the Puritan sought to put into practice in Massachusetts and
+Connecticut was a sacred institution in faults of the defence of
+which all his faculties were kept perpetually alert. Much as he loved
+self-government he would never have been so swift to detect and so
+stubborn to resist every slightest encroachment on the part of the crown
+had not the loss of self-government involved the imminent danger that
+the ark of the Lord might be abandoned to the worshippers of Dagon.
+It was in Massachusetts, where the theocracy was strongest, that the
+resistance to Charles II. was most dogged and did most to prepare the
+way for the work of achieving political independence a century later.
+Naturally it was in Massachusetts at the same time that the faults
+of the theocracy were most conspicuous. It was there that priestly
+authority most clearly asserted itself in such oppressive acts as are
+always witnessed when too much power is left in the hands of men whose
+primary allegiance is to a kingdom not of this world. Much as we owe to
+the theocracy for warding off the encroachments of the crown, we cannot
+be sorry that it was itself crushed in the process. It was well that
+it did not survive its day of usefulness, and that the outcome of
+the struggle was what has been aptly termed "the emancipation of
+Massachusetts." [Sidenote: Merits and faults of the theocracy]
+
+The basis of the theocratic constitution of this commonwealth was the
+provision by which the exercise of the franchise was made an incident of
+church-membership. Unless a man could take part in the Lord's Supper, as
+administered in the churches of the colony, he could not vote or
+hold office. Church and state, parish and town, were thus virtually
+identified. Here, as in some other aspects of early New England, one is
+reminded of the ancient Greek cities, where the freeman who could
+vote in the market-place or serve his turn as magistrate was the man
+qualified to perform sacrifices to the tutelar deities of the tribe;
+other men might dwell in the city but had no share in making or
+executing its laws. The limitation of civil rights by religious tests is
+indeed one of those common inheritances from the old Aryan world that
+we find again and again cropping out, even down to the exclusion of
+Catholics from the House of Commons from 1562 to 1829. The obvious
+purpose of this policy in England was self-protection; and in like
+manner the restriction of the suffrage in Massachusetts was designed
+to protect the colony against aggressive episcopacy and to maintain
+unimpaired the uniformity of purpose which had brought the settlers
+across the ocean. Under the circumstances there was something to be
+said in behalf of such a measure of self-protection, and the principle
+required but slight extension to cover such cases as the banishment of
+Roger Williams and the Antinomians. There was another side to the case,
+however. From the very outset this exclusive policy was in some ways
+a source of weakness to Massachusetts, though we have seen that the
+indirect effect was to diversify and enrich the political life of New
+England as a whole. [Sidenote: Restriction of the suffrage to church
+members]
+
+At first it led to the departure of the men who founded Connecticut,
+and thereafter the way was certainly open for those who preferred the
+Connecticut policy to go where it prevailed. Some such segregation was
+no doubt effected, but it could not be complete and thorough. Men who
+preferred Boston without the franchise to Hartford with it would remain
+in Massachusetts; and thus the elder colony soon came to possess a
+discontented class of people, always ready to join hand in glove with
+dissenters or mischief-makers, or even with emissaries of the crown. It
+afforded a suggestive commentary upon all attempts to suppress human
+nature by depriving it of a share in political life; instead of keeping
+it inside where you can try conclusions with it fairly, you thrust it
+out to plot mischief in the dark. Within twenty years from the founding
+of Boston the disfranchisement of such citizens as could not participate
+in church-communion had begun to be regarded as a serious political
+grievance. These men were obliged to pay taxes and were liable to be
+called upon for military service against the Indians; and they naturally
+felt that they ought to have a voice in the management of public
+affairs. [Sidenote: It was a source of political discontent]
+
+Besides this fundamental ground of complaint, there were derivative
+grievances. Under the influence of the clergy justice was administered
+in somewhat inquisitorial fashion, there was an uncertainty as to just
+what the law was, a strong disposition to confuse questions of law with
+questions of ethics, and great laxity in the admission and estimation of
+evidence. As early as 1639 people had begun to complain that too much
+power was rested in the discretion of the magistrate, and they clamoured
+for a code of laws; but as Winthrop says, the magistrates and ministers
+were "not very forward in this matter," for they preferred to supplement
+the common law of England by decisions based on the Old Testament rather
+than by a body of statutes. It was not until 1649, after a persistent
+struggle, that the deputies won a decisive victory over the assistants
+and secured for Massachusetts a definite code of laws. In the New Haven
+colony similar theocratic notions led the settlers to dispense with
+trial by jury because they could find no precedent for it in the laws of
+Moses. Here, as in Massachusetts, the inquisitorial administration of
+justice combined with partial disfranchisement to awaken discontent, and
+it was partly for this reason that New Haven fell so easily under the
+sway of Connecticut. [Sidenote: Inquisitorial administration of justice]
+
+In Massachusetts after 1650 the opinion rapidly gained ground that all
+baptized persons of upright and decorous lives ought to be considered,
+for practical purposes, as members of the church, and therefore entitled
+to the exercise of political rights, even though unqualified for
+participation in the Lord's Supper. This theory of church-membership,
+based on what was at that time stigmatized as the "Halfway Covenant,"
+aroused intense opposition. It was the great question of the day. In
+1657 a council was held in Boston, which approved the principle of the
+Halfway Covenant; and as this decision was far from satisfying the
+churches, a synod of all the clergymen in Massachusetts was held five
+years later, to reconsider the great question. The decision of the synod
+substantially confirmed the decision of the council, but there were some
+dissenting voices. Foremost among the dissenters, who wished to retain
+the old theocratic regime in all its strictness, was Charles Chauncey,
+the president of Harvard College, and Increase Mather agreed with him
+at the time, though he afterward saw reason to change his opinion, and
+published two tracts in favour of the Halfway Covenant. Most bitter of
+all toward the new theory of church-membership was, naturally enough,
+Mr. Davenport of New Haven. [Sidenote: The "Halfway Covenant"]
+
+This burning question was the source of angry contentions in the First
+Church of Boston. Its teacher, the learned and melancholy Norton, died
+in 1663, and four years later the aged pastor, John Wilson, followed
+him. In choosing a successor to Wilson the church decided to declare
+itself in opposition to the liberal decision of the synod, and in token
+thereof invited Davenport to come from New Haven to take charge of it.
+Davenport, who was then seventy years old, was disgusted at the recent
+annexation of his colony to Connecticut. He accepted the invitation
+and came to Boston, against the wishes of nearly half of the Boston
+congregation who did not like the illiberal principle which he
+represented. In little more than a year his ministry at Boston was ended
+by death; but the opposition to his call had already proceeded so far
+that a secession from the old church had become inevitable. In 1669
+the advocates of the Halfway Covenant organized themselves into a new
+society under the title of the "Third Church in Boston." A wooden
+meeting-house was built on a lot which had once belonged to the late
+governor Winthrop, in what was then the south part of the town, so that
+the society and its meeting-house became known as the South Church; and
+after a new church founded in Summer Street in 1717 took the name of the
+New South, the church of 1669 came to be further distinguished as the
+Old South. As this church represented a liberal idea which was growing
+in favour with the people, it soon became the most flourishing church
+in America. After sixty years its numbers had increased so that the old
+meeting-house could not contain them; and in 1729 the famous building
+which still stands was erected on the same spot,--a building with a
+grander history than any other on the American continent, unless it be
+that other plain brick building in Philadelphia where the Declaration of
+Independence was adopted and the Federal Constitution framed. [Sidenote:
+Founding of the Old South Church, 1669]
+
+The wrath of the First Church at this secession from its ranks was
+deep and bitter, and for thirteen years it refused to entertain
+ecclesiastical intercourse with the South Church. But by 1682 it had
+become apparent that the king and his friends were meditating an attack
+upon the Puritan theocracy in New England. It had even been suggested,
+in the council for the colonies, that the Church of England should be
+established in Massachusetts, and that none but duly ordained Episcopal
+clergymen should be allowed to solemnize marriages. Such alarming
+suggestions began to impress the various Puritan churches with the
+importance of uniting their forces against the common enemy; and
+accordingly in 1682 the quarrel between the two Boston societies came to
+an end. There was urgent need of all the sympathy and good feeling that
+the community could muster, whereby to cheer itself in the crisis that
+was coming. The four years from 1684 to 1688 were the darkest years in
+the history of New England. Massachusetts, though not lacking in the
+spirit, had not the power to beard the tyrant as she did eighty years
+later. Her attitude toward the Stuarts--as we have seen--had been
+sometimes openly haughty and defiant, sometimes silent and sullen, but
+always independent. At the accession of Charles II. the colonists had
+thought it worth while to send commissioners to England to confer with
+the king and avoid a quarrel. Charles promised to respect their charter,
+but insisted that in return they must take an oath of allegiance to the
+crown, must administer justice in the king's name, and must repeal their
+laws restricting the right of suffrage to church members and prohibiting
+the Episcopal form of worship. [Sidenote: Founding of the Old South
+Church, 1669] [Sidenote: Demands of Charles II.]
+
+When the people of Massachusetts received this message they consented to
+administer justice in the king's name, but all the other matters were
+referred for consideration to a committee, and so they dropped out of
+sight. When the royal commissioners came to Boston in 1664, they were
+especially instructed to ascertain whether Massachusetts had complied
+with the king's demands; but upon this point the legislature stubbornly
+withheld any definite answer, while it frittered away the time in
+trivial altercations with the royal commissioners. The war with Holland
+and the turbulent state of English politics operated for several years
+in favour of this independent attitude of the colonists, though during
+all this time their enemies at court were busy with intrigues and
+accusations. Apart from mere slanders the real grounds of complaint
+were the restriction of the suffrage, whereby members of the Church of
+England were shut out; the claims of the eastern proprietors, heirs
+of Mason and Gorges, whose territory Massachusetts had absorbed;
+the infraction of the navigation laws; and the coinage of pine-tree
+shillings. The last named measure had been forced upon the colonists by
+the scarcity of a circulating medium. Until 1661 Indian wampum had been
+a legal tender, and far into the eighteenth century it remained current
+in small transactions. "In 1693 the ferriage from New York to Brooklyn
+was eight stivers in wampum or a silver twopence." [35] As early as
+1652 Massachusetts had sought to supply the deficiency by the issue of
+shillings and sixpences. It was an affair of convenience and probably
+had no political purpose. The infraction of the navigation laws was a
+more serious matter. "Ships from France, Spain, and the Canaries traded
+directly with Boston, and brought in goods which had never paid duty in
+any English port." [36] The effect of this was to excite the jealousy
+of the merchants in London and other English cities and to deprive
+Massachusetts of the sympathy of that already numerous and powerful
+class of people. [Sidenote: Complaints against Massachusetts]
+
+In 1675, the first year of King Philip's War, the British government
+made up its mind to attend more closely to the affairs of its American
+colonies. It had got the Dutch war off its hands, and could give heed to
+other things. The general supervision of the colonies was assigned to
+a standing committee of the privy council, styled the "Lords of the
+Committee of Trade and Plantations," and henceforth familiarly known
+as the "Lords of Trade." Next year the Lords of Trade sent an agent to
+Boston, with a letter to Governor Leverett about the Mason and Gorges
+claims. Under cover of this errand the messenger was to go about and
+ascertain the sentiments which people in the Kennebec and Piscataqua
+towns, as well as in Boston, entertained for the government of
+Massachusetts. The person to whom this work was entrusted was Edward
+Randolph, a cousin of Robert Mason who inherited the property claim to
+the Piscataqua county. To these men had old John Mason bequeathed his
+deadly feud with Massachusetts, and the fourteen years which Randolph
+now spent in New England were busily devoted to sowing the seeds of
+strife. In 1678 the king appointed him collector and surveyor of customs
+at the port of Boston, with instructions to enforce the navigation laws.
+Randolph was not the man to do unpopular things in such a way as to dull
+the edge of the infliction; he took delight in adding insult to injury.
+He was at once harsh and treacherous. His one virtue was pecuniary
+integrity; he was inaccessible to bribes and did not pick and steal from
+the receipts at the custom-house. In the other relations of life he
+was disencumbered of scruples. His abilities were not great, but his
+industry was untiring, and he pursued his enemies with the tenacity of a
+sleuth-hound. As an excellent British historian observes, "he was one of
+those men who, once enlisted as partisans, lose every other feeling in
+the passion which is engendered of strife." [37] [Sidenote: The Lords of
+Trade] [Sidenote: Edward Randolph]
+
+The arrival of such a man boded no good to Massachusetts. His reception
+at the town-house was a cold one. Leverett liked neither his looks nor
+his message, and kept his peaked hat on while he read the letter; when
+he came to the signature of the king's chief secretary of state, he
+asked, with careless contempt, "Who is this Henry Coventry?" Randolph's
+choking rage found vent in a letter to the king, taking pains to remind
+him that the governor of Massachusetts had once been an officer in
+Cromwell's army. As we read this and think with what ghoulish glee the
+writer would have betrayed Colonel Goffe into the hands of the headsman,
+had any clue been given him, we can quite understand why Hubbard and
+Mather had nothing to say about the mysterious stranger at Hadley.
+Everything that Randolph could think of that would goad and irritate the
+king, he reported in full to London; his letters were specimens of that
+worst sort of lie that is based upon distorted half-truths; and his
+malicious pen but seldom lay idle.
+
+While waiting for the effects of these reports to ripen, Randolph was
+busily intriguing with some of the leading men in Boston who were
+dissatisfied with the policy of the dominant party, and under his
+careful handling a party was soon brought into existence which was ready
+to counsel submission to the royal will. Such was the birth of Toryism
+in New England. The leader of this party was Joseph Dudley, son of
+the grim verse-maker who had come over as lieutenant to Winthrop. The
+younger Dudley was graduated at Harvard in 1665, and proceeded to study
+theology, but soon turned his attention entirely to politics. In 1673 he
+was a deputy from Roxbury in the General Court; in 1675 he took part in
+the storming of the Narragansett fort; in 1677 and the three following
+years he was one of the Federal Commissioners. In character and temper
+he differed greatly from his father. Like the proverbial minister's son
+whose feet are swift toward folly, Joseph Dudley seems to have learned
+in stern bleak years of childhood to rebel against the Puritan theory of
+life. Much of the abuse that has been heaped upon him, as a renegade and
+traitor, is probably undeserved. It does not appear that he ever made
+any pretence of love for the Puritan commonwealth, and there were many
+like him who had as lief be ruled by king as by clergy. But it cannot be
+denied that his suppleness and sagacity went along with a moral nature
+that was weak and vulgar. Joseph Dudley was essentially a self-seeking
+politician and courtier, like his famous kinsman of the previous
+century, Robert, Earl of Leicester. His party in Massachusetts was
+largely made up of men who had come to the colony for commercial
+reasons, and had little or no sympathy with the objects for which it was
+founded. Among them were Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Baptists, who
+were allowed no chance for public worship, as well as many others who,
+like Gallio, cared for none of these things. Their numbers, moreover,
+must have been large, for Boston had grown to be a town of 5000
+inhabitants, the population of Massachusetts was approaching 30,000,
+and, according to Hutchinson, scarcely one grown man in five was a
+church-member qualified to vote or hold office. Such a fact speaks
+volumes as to the change which was coming over the Puritan world. No
+wonder that the clergy had begun to preach about the weeds and tares
+that were overrunning Christ's pleasant garden. No wonder that the
+spirit of revolt against the disfranchising policy of the theocracy was
+ripe. [Sidenote: Joseph Dudley]
+
+It was in 1679, when this weakness of the body politic had been duly
+studied and reported by Randolph, and when all New England was groaning
+under the bereavements and burdens entailed by Philip's war, that the
+Stuart government began its final series of assaults upon Massachusetts.
+The claims of the eastern proprietors, the heirs of Mason and Gorges,
+furnished the occasion. Since 1643 the four Piscataqua towns--Hampton,
+Exeter, Dover, and Portsmouth--had remained under the jurisdiction of
+Massachusetts. After the Restoration the Mason claim had been revived,
+and in 1677 was referred to the chief-justices North and Rainsford.
+Their decision was that Mason's claim had always been worthless as based
+on a grant in which the old Plymouth Company had exceeded its powers.
+They also decided that Massachusetts had no valid claim since the
+charter assigned her a boundary just north of the Merrimack. This
+decision left the four towns subject to none but the king, who forthwith
+in 1679 proceeded to erect them into the royal province of New
+Hampshire, with president and council appointed by the crown, and an
+assembly chosen by the people, but endowed with little authority,--a
+tricksome counterfeit of popular government. Within three years an
+arrogant and thieving ruler, Edward Cranfield, had goaded New Hampshire
+to acts of insurrection. [Sidenote: Royal province of New Hampshire]
+
+To the decisions of the chief-justices Massachusetts must needs submit.
+The Gorges claim led to more serious results. Under Cromwell's rule in
+1652--the same year in which she began coining money--Massachusetts
+had extended her sway over Maine. In 1665 Colonel Nichols and his
+commissioners, acting upon the express instructions of Charles II.,
+took it away from her. In 1668, after the commissioners had gone home,
+Massachusetts coolly took possession again. In 1677 the chief-justices
+decided that the claim of the Gorges family, being based on a grant from
+James I., was valid. Then the young Ferdinando Gorges, grandson of the
+first proprietor, offered to sell the province to the king, who had now
+taken it into his head that he would like to bestow it upon the Duke
+of Monmouth, his favourite son by Lucy Walters. Before Charles had
+responded, Governor Leverett had struck a bargain with Gorges, who ceded
+to Massachusetts all his rights over Maine for L1250 in hard cash. When
+the king heard of this transaction he was furious. He sent a letter to
+Boston, commanding the General Court to surrender the province again on
+repayment of this sum of L1250, and expressing his indignation that
+the people should thus dare to dispose of an important claim off-hand
+without consulting his wishes. In the same letter the colony was
+enjoined to put in force the royal orders of seventeen years before,
+concerning the oath of allegiance, the restriction of the suffrage, and
+the prohibition of the Episcopal form of worship. [Sidenote: The Gorges
+claim]
+
+This peremptory message reached Boston about Christmas, 1679. Leverett,
+the sturdy Ironsides, had died six months before, and his place
+was filled by Simon Bradstreet, a man of moderate powers but great
+integrity, and held in peculiar reverence as the last survivor of those
+that had been chosen to office before leaving England by the leaders of
+the great Puritan exodus. Born in a Lincolnshire village in 1603, he was
+now seventy-six years old. He had taken his degree at Emmanuel College,
+Cambridge, had served as secretary to the Earl of Warwick, and in 1629
+had been appointed member of the board of assistants for the colony
+about to be established on Massachusetts bay. In this position he had
+remained with honour for half a century, while he had also served as
+Federal Commissioner and as agent for the colony in London. His wife,
+who died in 1672, was a woman of quaint learning and quainter verses,
+which her contemporaries admired beyond measure. One of her books was
+republished in London, with the title: "The Tenth Muse, lately sprung up
+in America." John Norton once said that if Virgil could only have heard
+the seraphic poems of Anne Bradstreet, he would have thrown his heathen
+doggerel into the fire. She was sister of Joseph Dudley, and evidently
+inherited this rhyming talent, such as it was, from her father. Governor
+Bradstreet belonged to the moderate party who would have been glad to
+extend the franchise, but he did not go with his brother-in-law in
+subservience to the king. [Sidenote: Simon Bradstreet and his wife]
+
+When the General Court assembled, in May, 1680, the full number of
+eighteen assistants appeared, for the first time in the history of the
+colony, and in accordance with an expressed wish of the king. They
+were ready to yield in trifles, but not in essentials. After wearisome
+discussion, the answer to the royal letter was decided on. It stated in
+vague and unsatisfactory terms that the royal orders of 1662 either had
+been carried out already or would be in good time, while to the demand
+for the surrender of Maine no reply whatever was made, save that "they
+were heartily sorry that any actings of theirs should be displeasing
+to his Majesty." After this, when Randolph wrote home that the king's
+letters were of no more account in Massachusetts than an old London
+Gazette, he can hardly be accused of stretching the truth. Randolph kept
+busily at work, and seems to have persuaded the Bishop of London that
+if the charter could be annulled, episcopacy might be established in
+Massachusetts as in England. In February, 1682, a letter came from the
+king demanding submission and threatening legal proceedings against the
+charter. Dudley was then sent as agent to London, and with him was sent
+a Mr. Richards, of the extreme clerical party, to watch him. [Sidenote:
+Massachusetts answers the king]
+
+Meanwhile the king's position at home had been changing. He had made
+up his mind to follow his father's example and try the experiment of
+setting his people at defiance and governing without a parliament. This
+could not be done without a great supply of money. Louis XIV. had
+plenty of money, for there was no constitution in France to prevent his
+squeezing what he wanted out of the pockets of an oppressed people.
+France was thriving greatly now, for Colbert had introduced a
+comparatively free system of trade between the provinces and inaugurated
+an era of prosperity soon to be cut short by the expulsion of the
+Huguenots. Louis could get money enough for the asking, and would be
+delighted to foment civil disturbances in England, so as to tie the
+hands of the only power which at that moment could interfere with his
+seizing Alsace and Lorraine and invading Flanders. The pretty Louise de
+Keroualle Duchess of Portsmouth, with her innocent baby face and heart
+as cold as any reptile's, was the French Delilah chosen to shear the
+locks of the British Samson. By such means and from such motives a
+secret treaty was made in February, 1681, by which Louis agreed to pay
+Charles 2,000,000 livres down, and 500,000 more in each of the next two
+years, on condition that he should summon no more parliaments within
+that time. This bargain for securing the means of overthrowing the laws
+and liberties of England was, on the part of Charles II., an act no less
+reprehensible than some of those for which his father had gone to the
+block. But Charles could now afford for a while to wreak his evil will.
+He had already summoned a parliament for the 21st of March, to meet at
+Oxford within the precincts of the subservient university, and out of
+reach of the high-spirited freemen of London. He now forced a quarrel
+with the new parliament and dissolved it within a week. A joiner named
+Stephen College, who had spoken his mind too freely in the taverns at
+Oxford with regard to these proceedings, was drawn and quartered. The
+Whig leader Lord Shaftesbury was obliged to flee to Holland. In the
+absence of a parliament the only power of organized resistance to the
+king's tyranny resided in the corporate governments of the chartered
+towns. The charter of London was accordingly attacked by a writ of
+_quo warranto_, and in June, 1683, the time-serving judges declared it
+confiscated. George Jeffreys, a low drunken fellow whom Charles had made
+Lord Chief Justice, went on a circuit through the country; and, as Roger
+North says, "made all the charters, like the walls of Jericho, fall down
+before him, and returned laden with surrenders, the spoils of towns."
+At the same time a terrible blow was dealt at two of the greatest Whig
+families in England. Lord William Russell, son of the Earl of Bedford,
+and Algernon Sidney, younger son of the Earl of Leicester, two of the
+purest patriots and ablest liberal leaders of the day, were tried on a
+false charge of treason and beheaded. [Sidenote: Secret treaty between
+Charles II. and Louis XIV] [Sidenote: Shameful proceedings in England]
+
+By this quick succession of high-handed measures, the friends of law and
+liberty were for a moment disconcerted and paralyzed. In the frightful
+abasement of the courts of justice which these events so clearly showed,
+the freedom of Englishmen seemed threatened in its last stronghold. The
+doctrine of passive obedience to monarchs was preached in the pulpits
+and inculcated by the university of Oxford, which ordered the works of
+John Milton to be publicly burned. Sir Robert Filmer wrote that "not
+only in human laws, but even in divine, a thing may by the king be
+commanded contrary to law, and yet obedience to such a command is
+necessary." Charles felt so strong that in 1684 he flatly refused to
+summon a parliament.
+
+It was not long before the effects of all this were felt in New England.
+The mission of Dudley and his colleague was fruitless. They returned to
+Boston, and Randolph, who had followed them to London, now followed them
+back, armed with a writ of _quo warranto_ which he was instructed not to
+serve until he should have given Massachusetts one more chance to humble
+herself in the dust. Should she modify her constitution to please a
+tyrant or see it trampled under foot? Recent events in England served
+for a solemn warning; for the moment the Tories were silenced; perhaps
+after all, the absolute rule of a king was hardly to be preferred to the
+sway of the Puritan clergy; the day when the House of Commons sat still
+and wept seemed to have returned. A great town-meeting was held in the
+Old South Meeting-House, and the moderator requested all who were for
+surrendering the charter to hold up their hands. Not a hand was lifted,
+and out from the throng a solitary voice exclaimed, with deep-drawn
+breath, "The Lord be praised!" Then arose Increase Mather, president
+of Harvard College, and reminded them how their fathers did win this
+charter, and should they deliver it up unto the spoiler who demanded it
+"even as Ahab required Naboth's vineyard, Oh! their children would be
+bound to curse them." Such was the attitude of Massachusetts, and when
+it was known in London, the blow was struck. For technical reasons
+Randolph's writ was not served; but on the 21st of June a decree in
+chancery annulled the charter of Massachusetts. [Sidenote: Massachusetts
+refuses to surrender her charter] [Sidenote: It is annulled by degree of
+chancery, June 21, 1684]
+
+To appreciate the force of this blow we must pause for a moment and
+consider what it involved. The right to the soil of North America had
+been hitherto regarded in England, on the strength of the discoveries of
+the Cabots, as an appurtenance to the crown of Henry VII.,--as something
+which descended from father to son like the palace at Hampton Court or
+the castle at Windsor, but which the sovereign might alienate by his
+voluntary act just as he might sell or give away a piece of his royal
+domain in England. Over this vast territory it was doubtful how far
+Parliament was entitled to exercise authority, and the rights of
+Englishmen settled there had theoretically no security save in the
+provisions of the various charters by which the crown had delegated its
+authority to individual proprietors or to private companies. It was thus
+on the charter granted by Charles I. to the Company of Massachusetts Bay
+that not only the cherished political and ecclesiastical institutions
+of the colony, but even the titles of individuals to their lands and
+houses, were supposed to be founded. By the abrogation of the charter,
+all rights and immunities that had been based upon it were at once swept
+away, and every rood of the soil of Massachusetts became the personal
+property of the Stuart king, who might, if he should possess the will
+and the power, turn out all the present occupants or otherwise deal with
+them as trespassers. Such at least was the theory of Charles II., and
+to show that he meant to wreak his vengeance with no gentle hand, he
+appointed as his viceroy the brutal Percy Kirke,--a man who would have
+no scruples about hanging a few citizens without trial, should occasion
+require it. [Sidenote: Effect of annulling the charter]
+
+But in February, 1685, just as Charles seemed to be getting everything
+arranged to his mind, a stroke of apoplexy carried him off the scene,
+and his brother ascended the throne. Monmouth's rebellion, and the
+horrible cruelties that followed, kept Colonel Kirke busy in England
+through the summer, and left the new king scant leisure to think about
+America. Late in the autumn, having made up his mind that he could not
+spare such an exemplary knave as Kirke, James II. sent over Sir Edmund
+Andros. In the mean time the government of Massachusetts had been
+administered by Dudley, who showed himself willing to profit by the
+misfortunes of his country. Andros had long been one of James's
+favourites. He was the dull and dogged English officer such as one often
+meets, honest enough and faithful to his master, neither cruel nor
+rapacious, but coarse in fibre and wanting in tact. Some years
+before, when governor of New York, he had a territorial dispute with
+Connecticut, and now cherished a grudge against the people of New
+England, so that, from James's point of view, he was well fitted to be
+their governor. James wished to abolish all the local governments
+in America, and unite them, as far as possible, under a single
+administration. With Plymouth there could be no trouble; she had never
+had a charter, but had existed on sufferance from the outset. In 1687
+the charters of Rhode Island and Connecticut were rescinded, but the
+decrees were not executed in due form. In October of that year Andros
+went to Hartford, to seize the Connecticut charter but it was not
+surrendered. While Sir Edmund was bandying threats with stout Robert
+Treat, the queller of Indians and now governor of Connecticut, in the
+course of their evening conference the candles were suddenly blown out,
+and when after some scraping of tinder they were lighted again the
+document was nowhere to be found, for Captain Wadsworth had carried
+it away and hidden it in the hollow trunk of a mighty oak tree.
+Nevertheless for the moment the colony was obliged to submit to the
+tyrant. Next day the secretary John Allyn wrote "Finis" on the colonial
+records and shut up the book. Within another twelvemonth New York and
+New Jersey were added to the viceroyalty of Andros; so that all the
+northern colonies from the forests of Maine to the Delaware river were
+thus brought under the arbitrary rule of one man, who was responsible to
+no one but the king for whatever he might take it into his head to do.
+[Sidenote: Sir Edmund Andros] [Sidenote: The Charter Oak]
+
+The vexatious character of the new government was most strongly felt at
+Boston where Andros had his headquarters. Measures were at once taken
+for the erection of an Episcopal church, and meantime the royal order
+was that one of the principal meeting-houses should be seized for the
+use of the Church of England. This was an ominous beginning. In the
+eyes of the people it was much more than a mere question of disturbing
+Puritan prejudices. They had before them the experience of Scotland
+during the past ten years, the savage times of "Old Mortality," the
+times which had seen the tyrannical prelate, on the lonely moor, begging
+in vain for his life, the times of Drumclog and Bothwell Brigg, of
+Claverhouse and his flinty-hearted troopers, of helpless women tied to
+stakes on the Solway shore and drowned by inches in the rising tide.
+What had happened in one part of the world might happen in another, for
+the Stuart policy was the same. It aimed not at securing toleration but
+at asserting unchecked supremacy. Its demand for an inch was the prelude
+to its seizing an ell, and so our forefathers understood it. Sir
+Edmund's formal demand for the Old South Meeting-House was flatly
+refused, but on Good Friday, 1687, the sexton was frightened into
+opening it, and thenceforward Episcopal services were held there
+alternately with the regular services until the overthrow of Andros. The
+pastor, Samuel Willard, was son of the gallant veteran who had rescued
+the beleaguered people of Brookfield in King Philip's war. Amusing
+passages occurred between him and Sir Edmund, who relished the
+pleasantry of keeping minister and congregation waiting an hour or
+two in the street on Sundays before yielding to them the use of their
+meeting-house. More kindly memories of the unpopular governor are
+associated with the building of the first King's Chapel on the spot
+where its venerable successor now stands. The church was not finished
+until after Sir Edmund had taken his departure, but Lady Andros, who
+died in February, 1688, lies in the burying-ground hard by. Her gentle
+manners had won all hearts. For the moment, we are told, one touch of
+nature made enemies kin, and as Sir Edmund walked to the townhouse
+"many a head was bared to the bereaved husband that before had remained
+stubbornly covered to the exalted governor." [38] [Sidenote: Episcopal
+services in Boston] [Sidenote: Founding of the King's Chapel, 1689]
+
+The despotic rule of Andros was felt in more serious ways than in the
+seizing upon a meetinghouse. Arbitrary taxes were imposed, encroachments
+were made upon common lands as in older manorial times, and the writ of
+_habeas corpus_ was suspended. Dudley was appointed censor of the press,
+and nothing was allowed to be printed without his permission. All the
+public records of the late New England governments were ordered to be
+brought to Boston, whither it thus became necessary to make a tedious
+journey in order to consult them. All deeds and wills were required
+to be registered in Boston, and excessive fees were charged for the
+registry. It was proclaimed that all private titles to land were to be
+ransacked, and that whoever wished to have his title confirmed must pay
+a heavy quit-rent, which under the circumstances amounted to blackmail.
+The General Court was abolished. The power of taxation was taken from
+the town-meetings and lodged with the governor. Against this crowning
+iniquity the town of Ipswich, led by its sturdy pastor, John Wise, made
+protest. In response Mr. Wise was thrown into prison, fined £50, and
+suspended from the ministry. A notable and powerful character was this
+John Wise. One of the broadest thinkers and most lucid writers of his
+time, he seems like a forerunner of the liberal Unitarian divines of
+the nineteenth century. His "Vindication of the Government of the New
+England Churches," published in 1717, was a masterly exposition of the
+principles of civil government, and became "a text book of liberty for
+our Revolutionary fathers, containing some of the notable expressions
+that are used in the Declaration of Independence." [Sidenote: Tyranny]
+[Sidenote: John Wise of Ipswich]
+
+It was on the trial of Mr. Wise in October, 1687, that Dudley openly
+declared that the people of New England had now no further privileges
+left them than not to be sold for slaves. Such a state of things in the
+valley of the Euphrates would not have attracted comment; the peasantry
+of central Europe would have endured it until better instructed; but in
+an English community it could not last long. If James II. had remained
+upon the throne, New England would surely have soon risen in rebellion
+against Andros. But the mother country had by this time come to repent
+the fresh lease of life which she had granted to the Stuart dynasty
+after Cromwell's death. Tired of the disgraceful subservience of her
+Court to the schemes of Louis XIV., tired of fictitious plots and
+judicial murders, tired of bloody assizes and declarations of indulgence
+and all the strange devices of Stuart tyranny, England endured the
+arrogance of James but three years, and then drove him across the
+Channel, to get such consolation as he might from his French paymaster
+and patron. On the 4th of April, 1689, the youthful John Winslow brought
+to Boston the news of the landing of the Prince of Orange in England.
+For the space of two weeks there was quiet and earnest deliberation
+among the citizens, as the success of the Prince's enterprise was not
+yet regarded as assured. But all at once, on the morning of the 18th,
+the drums beat to arms, the signal-fire was lighted on Beacon Hill, a
+meeting was held at the Town-House, militia began to pour in from the
+country, and Andros, summoned to surrender, was fain to beseech Mr.
+Willard and the other ministers to intercede for him. But the ministers
+refused. Next day the Castle was surrendered, the Rose frigate riding in
+the harbour was seized and dismantled, and Andros was arrested as he was
+trying to effect his escape disguised in woman's clothes. Dudley and the
+other agents of tyranny were also imprisoned, and thus the revolution
+was accomplished. It marks the importance which the New England colonies
+were beginning to attain, that, before the Prince of Orange had fully
+secured the throne, he issued a letter instructing the people of Boston
+to preserve decorum and acquiesce yet a little longer in the government
+of Andros, until more satisfactory arrangements could be made. But
+Increase Mather, who was then in London on a mission in behalf of New
+England, judiciously prevented this letter of instructions from being
+sent. The zeal of the people outstripped the cautious policy of the
+new sovereign, and provisional governments, in accordance with the old
+charters, were at once set up in the colonies lately ruled by Andros.
+Bradstreet now in his eighty-seventh year was reinstated as governor of
+Massachusetts. Five weeks after this revolution in Boston the order to
+proclaim King William and Queen Mary was received, amid such rejoicings
+as had never before been seen in that quiet town, for it was believed
+that self-government would now be guaranteed to New England. [Sidenote:
+Fall of James II.] [Sidenote: Insurrection in Boston, and overthrow of
+Andros, April 18, 1689]
+
+This hope was at least so far realized that from the most formidable
+dangers which had threatened it, New England was henceforth secured.
+The struggle with the Stuarts was ended, and by this second revolution
+within half a century the crown had received a check from which it never
+recovered. There were troubles yet in store for England, but no more
+such outrages as the judicial murders of Russell and Sidney. New England
+had still a stern ordeal to go through, but never again was she to be
+so trodden down and insulted as in the days of Andros. The efforts of
+George III. to rule Englishmen despotically were weak as compared with
+those of the Stuarts. In his time England had waxed strong enough to
+curb the tyrant, America had waxed strong enough to defy and disown him.
+After 1689 the Puritan no longer felt that his religion was in danger,
+and there was a reasonable prospect that charters solemnly granted him
+would be held sacred. William III. was a sovereign of modern type, from
+whom freedom of thought and worship had nothing to fear. In his theology
+he agreed, as a Dutch Calvinist, more nearly with the Puritans than with
+the Church of England. At the same time he had no great liking for so
+much independence of thought and action as New England had exhibited. In
+the negotiations which now definitely settled the affairs of this part
+of the world, the intractable behaviour of Massachusetts was borne in
+mind and contrasted with the somewhat less irritating attitude of
+the smaller colonies. It happened that the decree which annulled the
+charters of Rhode Island and Connecticut had not yet been formally
+enrolled. It was accordingly treated as void, and the old charters were
+allowed to remain in force. They were so liberal that no change in
+them was needed at the time of the Revolution, so that Connecticut was
+governed under its old charter until 1818, and Rhode Island until 1842.
+[Sidenote: Effects of the Revolution of 1689]
+
+There was at this time a disposition on the part of the British
+government to unite all the northern colonies under a single
+administration. The French in Canada were fast becoming rivals to be
+feared; and the wonderful explorations of La Salle, bringing the St.
+Lawrence into political connection with the Mississippi, had at length
+foreshadowed a New France in the rear of all the English colonies,
+aiming at the control of the centre of the continent and eager to
+confine the English to the sea-board. Already the relations of position
+which led to the great Seven Years' War were beginning to shape
+themselves; and the conflict between France and England actually broke
+out in 1689, as soon as Louis XIV.'s hired servant, James II., was
+superseded by William III. as king of England and head of a Protestant
+league. [Sidenote: Need for union among all the northern colonies]
+
+In view of this new state of affairs, it was thought desirable to unite
+the northern English colonies under one head, so far as possible, in
+order to secure unity of military action. But natural prejudices had to
+be considered. The policy of James II. had aroused such bitter feeling
+in America that William must needs move with caution. Accordingly he did
+not seek to unite New York with New England, and he did not think it
+worth while to carry out the attack which James had only begun upon
+Connecticut and Rhode Island. As for New Hampshire, he seems to have
+been restrained by what in the language of modern politics would be
+called "pressure," brought to bear by certain local interests. [39]
+But in the case of the little colony founded by the Pilgrims of the
+Mayflower there was no obstacle. She was now annexed to Massachusetts,
+which also received not only Maine but even Acadia, just won from the
+French; so that, save for the short break at Portsmouth, the coast of
+Massachusetts now reached all the way from Martha's Vineyard to the Gulf
+of St. Lawrence. [Sidenote: Plymouth, Maine, and Acadia, annexed to
+Massachusetts]
+
+But along with this great territorial extension there went some
+curtailment of the political privileges of the colony. By the new
+charter of 1692 the right of the people to be governed by a legislature
+of their own choosing was expressly confirmed. The exclusive right of
+this legislature to impose taxes was also confirmed. But henceforth no
+qualification of church-membership, but only a property qualification,
+was to be required of voters; the governor was to be appointed by the
+crown instead of being elected by the people; and all laws passed by
+the legislature were to be sent to England for royal approval. These
+features of the new charter,--the extension, or if I may so call it, the
+_secularization_ of the franchise, the appointment of the governor
+by the crown, and the power of veto which the crown expressly
+reserved,--were grave restrictions upon the independence which
+Massachusetts had hitherto enjoyed. Henceforth her position was to be
+like that of the other colonies with royal governors. But her history
+did not thereby lose its interest or significance, though it became,
+like the history of most of the colonies, a dismal record of
+irrepressible bickerings between the governor appointed by the crown and
+the legislature elected by the people. In the period that began in 1692
+and ended in 1776, the movements of Massachusetts, while restricted
+and hampered, were at the same time forced into a wider orbit. She was
+brought into political sympathy with Virginia. While two generations
+of men were passing across the scene, the political problems of
+Massachusetts were assimilated to those of Virginia. In spite of all
+the other differences, great as they were, there was a likeness in the
+struggles between the popular legislature and the royal governor which
+subordinated them all. It was this similarity of experience, during
+the eighteenth century, that brought these two foremost colonies into
+cordial alliance during the struggle against George III., and thus made
+it possible to cement all the colonies together in the mighty nation
+whose very name is fraught with so high and earnest a lesson to
+mankind,--the UNITED STATES! [Sidenote: Massachusetts becomes a royal
+province]
+
+For such a far-reaching result, the temporary humiliation of
+Massachusetts was a small price to pay. But it was not until long after
+the accession of William III. that things could be seen in these grand
+outlines. With his coronation began the struggle of seventy years
+between France and England, far grander than the struggle between Rome
+and Carthage, two thousand years earlier, for primacy in the world,
+for the prerogative of determining the future career of mankind. That
+warfare, so fraught with meaning, was waged as much upon American as
+upon European ground; and while it continued, it was plainly for the
+interest of the British government to pursue a conciliatory policy
+toward its American colonies, for without their wholehearted assistance
+it could have no hope of success. As soon as the struggle was ended, and
+the French power in the colonial world finally overthrown, the perpetual
+quarrels between the popular legislatures and the royal governors led
+immediately to the Stamp Act and the other measures of the British
+government that brought about the American revolution. People sometimes
+argue about that revolution as if it had no past behind it and was
+simply the result of a discussion over abstract principles. [Sidenote:
+Seeds of the American Revolution already sown]
+
+We can now see that while the dispute involved an abstract principle of
+fundamental importance to mankind, it was at the same time for Americans
+illustrated by memories sufficiently concrete and real. James Otis
+in his prime was no further distant from the tyranny of Andros than
+middle-aged men of to-day are distant from the Missouri Compromise. The
+sons of men cast into jail along with John Wise may have stood silent in
+the moonlight on Griffin's Wharf and looked on while the contents of the
+tea-chests were hurled into Boston harbour. In the events we have here
+passed in review, it may be seen, so plainly that he who runs may read,
+how the spirit of 1776 was foreshadowed in 1689.
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.
+
+
+An interesting account of the Barons' War and the meeting of the first
+House of Commons is given in Prothero's _Simon de Montfort_, London,
+1877. For Wyclif and the Lollards, see Milman's _Latin Christianity_,
+vol. vii.
+
+The ecclesiastical history of the Tudor period may best be studied in
+the works of John Strype, to wit, _Historical Memorials_, 6 vols.;
+_Annals of the Reformation_, 7 vols.; _Lives of Cranmer, Parker,
+Whitgift, etc._, Oxford, 1812-28. See also _Burnet's History of the
+Reformation of the Church of England_, 3 vols., London, 1679-1715;
+Neal's _History of the Puritans_, London, 1793; Tulloch, _Leaders of the
+Reformation_, Boston, 1859. A vast mass of interesting information is
+to be found in _The Zurich Letters, comprising the Correspondence
+of Several English Bishops, and Others, with some of the Helvetian
+Reformers_, published by the Parker Society, 4 vols., Cambridge, Eng.,
+1845-46. Hooker's _Ecclesiastical Polity_ was published in London, 1594;
+a new edition, containing two additional books, the first complete
+edition, was published in 1622.
+
+For the general history of England in the seventeenth century, there are
+two modern works which stand far above all others,--Gardiner's _History
+of England_, 10 vols., London, 1883-84; and Masson's _Life of Milton,
+narrated in connection with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary
+History of his Time_, 6 vols., Cambridge, Eng., 1859-80. These are
+books of truly colossal erudition, and written in a spirit of judicial
+fairness. Mr. Gardiner's ten volumes cover the forty years from the
+accession of James I. to the beginning of the Civil War, 1603-1643. Mr.
+Gardiner has lately published the first two volumes of his history of
+the Civil War, and it is to be hoped that he will not stop until he
+reaches the accession of William and Mary. Indeed, such books as his
+ought never to stop. My friend and colleague, Prof. Hosmer, tells me
+that Mr. Gardiner is a lineal descendant of Cromwell and Ireton. His
+little book, _The Puritan Revolution_, in the "Epochs of History"
+series, is extremely useful, and along with it one should read Airy's
+_The English Restoration and Louis XIV_., in the same series, New York,
+1889. The best biography of Cromwell is by Mr. Allanson Picton, London,
+1882; see also Frederic Harrison's _Cromwell_, London, 1888, an
+excellent little book. Hosmer's _Young Sir Henry Vane_, Boston, 1888,
+should be read in the same connection; and one should not forget
+Carlyle's _Cromwell_. See also Tulloch, _English Puritanism and its
+Leaders_, 1861, and _Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in
+England in the Seventeenth Century_, 1872; Skeats, _History of the
+Free Churches of England_, London, 1868; Mountfield, _The Church and
+Puritans_, London, 1881. Dexter's _Congregationalism of the Last Three
+Hundred Years_, New York, 1880, is a work of monumental importance.
+
+On the history of New England the best general works are Palfrey,
+_History of New England_, 4 vols., Boston, 1858-75; and Doyle, _The
+English in America--The Puritan Colonies_, 2 vols., London, 1887. In
+point of scholarship Dr. Palfrey's work is of the highest order, and
+it is written in an interesting style. Its only shortcoming is that it
+deals somewhat too leniently with the faults of the Puritan theocracy,
+and looks at things too exclusively from a Massachusetts point of view.
+It is one of the best histories yet written in America. Mr. Doyle's work
+is admirably fair and impartial, and is based throughout upon a careful
+study of original documents. The author is a Fellow of All Souls
+College, Oxford, and has apparently made American history his specialty.
+His work on the Puritan colonies is one of a series which when completed
+will cover the whole story of English colonization in America. I have
+looked in vain in his pages for any remark or allusion indicating that
+he has ever visited America, and am therefore inclined to think that he
+has not done so. He now and then makes a slight error such as would
+not be likely to be made by a native of New England, but this is very
+seldom. The accuracy and thoroughness of its research, its judicial
+temper, and its philosophical spirit make Mr. Doyle's book in some
+respects the best that has been written about New England.
+
+Among original authorities we may begin by citing John Smith's
+_Description of New England_, 1616, and _New England's Trial_, 1622,
+contained in Arber's new edition of Smith's works, London, 1884.
+Bradford's narrative of the founding of Plymouth was for a long time
+supposed to be lost. Nathaniel Morton's _New England's Memorial_,
+published in 1669, was little more than an abridgment of it. After two
+centuries Bradford's manuscript was discovered, and an excellent edition
+by Mr. Charles Deane was published in the _Massachusetts Historical
+Collections_, 4th series, vol. iii., 1856. Edward Winslow's _Journal of
+the Proceedings of the English Plantation settled at Plymouth_, 1622,
+and _Good News from New England_, 1624, are contained, with other
+valuable materials, in Young's _Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers_,
+Boston, 1844. See also Shurtleff and Pulsifer, _Records of Plymouth_,
+12 vols., ending with the annexation of the colony to Massachusetts in
+1692; Prince's _Chronological History of New England_, ed. Drake, 1852;
+and in this connection Hunter's _Founders of New Plymouth_, London,
+1854; Steele's _Life of Brewster_, Philadelphia, 1857; Goodwin's
+_Pilgrim Republic_, Boston, 1887; Bacon's _Genesis of the New England
+Churches_, New York, 1874; Baylies's _Historical Memoir_, 1830;
+Thacher's _History of the Town of Plymouth_, 1832.
+
+Sir Ferdinando Gorges wrote a _Briefe Narration of the Originall
+Undertakings of the advancement of plantations into the parts of
+America, especially showing the beginning, progress, and continuance
+of that of New England_, London, 1658, contained in his grandson's
+collection entitled _America Painted to the Life_. Thomas Morton, of
+Merrymount, gave his own view of the situation in his _New English
+Canaan_, which has been edited for the Prince Society, with great
+learning, by C.F. Adams. Samuel Maverick also had his say in a valuable
+pamphlet entitled _A Description of New England_, which has only come
+to light since 1875 and has been edited by Mr. Deane. Maverick is, of
+course, hostile to the Puritans. See also Lechford's _Plain Dealing in
+New England_, ed. J.H. Trumbull, 1867.
+
+The earliest history of Massachusetts is by Winthrop himself, a work of
+priceless value. In 1790, nearly a century and a half after the author's
+death, it was published at Hartford. The best edition is that of 1853.
+In 1869 a valuable life of Winthrop was published by his descendant
+Robert Winthrop. Hubbard's _History of New England_ (_Mass. Hist.
+Coll._, 2d series, vols. v., vi.) is drawn largely from Winthrop and
+from Nathaniel Morton. There is much that is suggestive in William
+Wood's _New England's Prospect_, 1634, and Edward Johnson's
+_Wonder-working Providence of Zion's Saviour in New England_, 1654; the
+latter has been ably edited by W.F. Poole, Andover, 1867. The records
+of the Massachusetts government, from its founding in 1629 down to the
+overthrow of the charter in 1684, were edited by Dr. Shurtleff in 6
+vols. quarto, 1853-54; and among the documents in the British Record
+Office, published since 1855, three volumes--_Calendar of State Papers_,
+_Colonial America_, vol. i., 1574-1660; vol. v., 1661-1668; vol. vii.,
+1669--are especially useful. Of the later authorities the best is
+Hutchinson's _History of Massachusetts Bay_, the first volume of which,
+coming down to 1689, was published in Boston in 1764. The second volume,
+continuing the narrative to 1749, was published in 1767. The third
+volume, coming down to 1774, was found among the illustrious author's
+MSS. after his death, and was published in London in 1828. Hutchinson
+had access to many valuable documents since lost, and his sound judgment
+and critical acumen deserve the highest praise. In 1769 he published
+a volume of _Original Papers_, illustrating the period covered by the
+first volume of his history. Many priceless documents perished in the
+shameful sacking of his house by the Boston rioters, Aug. 26, 1765. The
+second volume of Hutchinson's _History_ was continued to 1764 by G.R.
+Minot, 2 vols., 1798, and to 1820 by Alden Bradford, 3 vols., 1822-29.
+Of recent works, the best is Barry's _History of Massachusetts_, 3
+vols., 1855-57. Many original authorities are collected in Young's
+_Chronicles of Massachusetts_, Boston, 1846. Cotton Mather's _Magnolia
+Christi Americana_, London, 1702 (reprinted in 1820 and 1853), though
+crude and uncritical, is full of interest.
+
+Many of the early Massachusetts documents relate to Maine. Of later
+books, especial mention should be made of Folsom's _History of Saco and
+Biddeford_, Saco, 1830; Willis's _History of Portland_, 2 vols., 1831-33
+(2d ed. 1865); _Memorial Volume of the Popham Celebration_, Portland,
+1862; Chamberlain's _Maine, Her Place in History_, Augusta, 1877. On New
+Hampshire the best general work is Belknap's _History of New Hampshire_,
+3 vols., Phila., 1784-92; the appendix contains many original
+documents, and others are to be found in the _New Hampshire Historical
+Collections_, 8 vols., 1824-66.
+
+The _Connecticut Colonial Records_ are edited by Dr. J.H. Trumbull,
+12 vols., 1850-82. The _Connecticut Historical Society's Collections_,
+1860-70, are of much value. The best general work is Trumbull's _History
+of Connecticut_, 2 vols., Hartford, 1797. See also Stiles's _Ancient
+Windsor_, 2 vols., 1859-63; Cothren's _Ancient Woodbury_, 3 vols.,
+1854-79. Of the Pequot War we have accounts by three of the principal
+actors. Mason's _History of the Pequod War_ is in the _Mass. Hist.
+Coll._, 2d series, vol. viii.; Underhill's _News from America_ is in the
+3d series, vol. vi.; and Lyon Gardiner's narrative is in the 3d series,
+vol. iii. In the same volume with Underhill is contained _A True
+Relation of the late Battle fought in New England between the English
+and the Pequod Savages_, by Philip Vincent, London, 1638. The _New Haven
+Colony Records_ are edited by C.J. Hoadly, 2 vols., Hartford, 1857-58.
+See also the _New Haven Historical Society's Papers_, 3 vols., 1865-80;
+Lambert's _History of New Haven_, 1838; Atwater's _History of New
+Haven_, 1881; Levermore's _Republic of New Haven_, Baltimore, 1886;
+Johnston's _Connecticut_, Boston, 1887. The best account of the Blue
+Laws is by J.H. Trumbull, _The True Blue Laws of Connecticut and New
+Haven, and the False Blue Laws invented by the Rev. Samuel Peters_,
+etc., Hartford, 1876. See also Hinman's _Blue Laws of New Haven Colony_,
+Hartford, 1838; Barber's _History and Antiquities of New Haven_, 1831;
+Peters's _History of Connecticut_, London, 1781. The story of the
+regicides is set forth in Stiles's _History of the Three Judges_ [the
+third being Colonel Dixwell], Hartford, 1794; see also the _Mather
+Papers_ in _Mass. Hist. Coll._, 4th series, vol. viii.
+
+_The Rhode Island Colonial Records_ are edited by J.R. Bartlett, 7
+vols., 1856-62. One of the best state histories ever written is that
+of S.G. Arnold, _History of the State of Rhode Island and Providence
+Plantations_, 2 vols., New York, 1859-60. Many valuable documents are
+reprinted in the _Rhode Island Historical Society's Collections_. The
+_History of New England, with particular reference to the denomination
+called Baptists_, by Rev. Isaac Backus, 3 vols., 1777-96, has much
+that is valuable relating to Rhode Island. The series of _Rhode Island
+Historical Tracts_, issued since 1878 by Mr. S.S. Rider, is of great
+merit. Biographies of Roger Williams have been written by J.D. Knowles,
+1834; by William Gammell, 1845; and by Romeo Elton, 1852. Williams's
+works have been republished by the Narragansett Club in 6 vols., 1866.
+The first volume contains the valuable _Key to the Indian Languages of
+America_, edited by Dr. Trumbull. Williams's views of religious liberty
+are set forth in his _Bloudy Tenent of Persecution_, London, 1644; to
+which John Cotton replied in _The Bloudy Tenent washed and made White in
+the Blood of the Lamb_, London, 1647; Williams's rejoinder was entitled
+_The Bloudy Tenent made yet more Bloudy through Mr. Cotton's attempt
+to Wash it White_, London, 1652. The controversy was conducted on both
+sides with a candour and courtesy rare in that age. The titles of
+Williams's other principal works, _George Fox digged out of his
+Burrowes_, Boston, 1676; _Hireling Ministry none of Christ's_, London,
+1652; and _Christenings make not Christians_, 1643; sufficiently
+indicate their character. The last-named tract was discovered in the
+British Museum by Dr. Dexter and edited by him in Rider's _Tracts_,
+No. xiv., 1881. The treatment of Roger Williams by the government
+of Massachusetts is thoroughly discussed in Dexter's _As to Roger
+Williams_, Boston, 1876. See also G.E. Ellis on "The Treatment of
+Intruders and Dissentients by the Founders of Massachusetts," in _Lowell
+Lectures_, Boston, 1869.
+
+The case of Mrs. Hutchinson is treated, from a hostile and somewhat
+truculent point of view, in Thomas Welde's pamphlet entitled _A Short
+Story of the Rise, Reign, and Ruin of Antinomians, Familists, and
+Libertines that infected the Churches of New England_, London, 1644. It
+was answered in an anonymous pamphlet entitled _Mercurius Americanus_,
+republished for the Prince Society, Boston, 1876, with prefatory notice
+by C.H. Bell. Cotton's view of the theocracy may be seen in his _Milk
+for Babes, drawn out of the Breasts of both Testaments_, London, 1646;
+_Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven_; and _Way of the Congregational
+Churches Cleared_, London, 1648. See also Thomas Hooker's _Survey of the
+Summe of Church Discipline_, London, 1648. The intolerant spirit of the
+time finds quaint and forcible expression in Nathaniel Ward's satirical
+book, _The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam_, 1647.
+
+For the Gorton controversy the best original authorities are his own
+book entitled _Simplicitie's Defence against Sevenheaded Polity_,
+London, 1646; and Winslow's answer entitled _Hypocracie Unmasked_,
+London, 1646. See also Mackie's _Life of Samuel Gorton_, Boston, 1845,
+and Brayton's _Defence of Samuel Gorton_, in Rider's _Tracts_, No. xvii.
+
+For the early history of the Quakers, see Robert Barclay's _Inner Life
+of the Religious Societies of the Commonwealth_, London, 1876,--an
+admirable book. See also _New England a Degenerate Plant_, 1659;
+Bishop's _New England judged by the Spirit of the Lord_, 1661; Sewel's
+_History of the Quakers_, 1722; Besse's _Sufferings of the Quakers_,
+1753; _The Popish Inquisition newly erected in New England_, London,
+1659; _The Secret Works of a Cruel People made Manifest_, 1659; and the
+pamphlet of the martyrs Stevenson and Robinson, entitled _A Call from
+Death to Life_, 1660. John Norton's view of the case was presented in
+his book, _The Heart of New England Rent at the Blasphemies of the
+Present Generation_, London, 1660. See also J.S. Pike's _New Puritan_,
+New York, 1879; Hallowell's _Pioneer Quakers_, Boston, 1887; and his
+_Quaker Invasion of Massachusetts_, Boston, 1883; Brooks Adams, _The
+Emancipation of Massachusetts_, Boston, 1887; Ellis, _The Puritan Age
+and Rule_, Boston, 1888.
+
+Some additional light upon the theocratic idea may be found in a
+treatise by the apostle Eliot, _The Christian Commonwealth; or, the
+Civil Polity of the Rising Kingdom of Jesus Christ_, London, 1659. An
+account of Eliot's missionary work is given in _The Day breaking, if not
+the Sun rising, of the Gospel with the Indians in New England_, London,
+1647; and _The Glorious Progress of the Gospel amongst the Indians in
+New England_, 1649. See also Shepard's _Clear Sunshine of the Gospel
+breaking forth upon the Indians_, 1648; and Whitfield's _Light appearing
+more and more towards the Perfect Day_, 1651.
+
+The principal authority for Philip's war is Hubbard's _Present State of
+New England, being a Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians_, 1677.
+Church's _Entertaining Passages relating to Philip's War_, published in
+1716, and republished in 1865, with notes by Mr. Dexter, is a charming
+book. See also Mrs. Rowlandson's _True History_, Cambridge, Mass.,
+1682; Mather's _Brief History of the War_, 1676; Drake's _Old Indian
+Chronicle_, Boston, 1836; Gookin's _Historical Collections of the
+Indians in New England_, 1674; and _Account of the Doings and Sufferings
+of the Christian Indians_, in _Archchaeologia Americana_, vol. ii.
+Batten's _Journal_ is the diary of a citizen of Boston, sent to England,
+and it now in MS. among the _Colonial Papers_. Mrs. Mary Pray's letter
+(Oct. 20, 1675) is in _Mass. Hist. Coll._, 5th series, vol. i. p. 105.
+
+The great storehouse of information for the Andros period is the _Andros
+Tracts_, 3 vols., edited for the Prince Society by W.H. Whitmore. See
+also Sewall's _Diary, Mass. Hist. Coll._, 5th series, vols. v.--viii.
+Sewall has been appropriately called the Puritan Pepys. His book is a
+mirror of the state of society in Massachusetts at the time when it was
+beginning to be felt that the old theocratic idea had been tried in the
+balance and found wanting. There is a wonderful charm in such a book. It
+makes one feel as if one had really "been there" and taken part in the
+homely scenes, full of human interest, which it so naively portrays.
+Anne Bradstreet's works have been edited by J.H. Ellis, Charlestown,
+1867.
+
+For further references and elaborate bibliographical discussions, see
+Winsor's _Narrative and Critical History of America_, vol. iii.; and his
+_Memorial History of Boston_, 4 vols., Boston, 1880. There is a good
+account of the principal New England writers of the seventeenth century,
+with illustrative extracts, in Tyler's _History of American Literature_,
+2 vols., New York, 1878. For extracts see also the first two volumes of
+Stedman and Hutchinson's _Library of American Literature_, New York,
+1888.
+
+In conclusion I would observe that town histories, though seldom written
+in a philosophical spirit and apt to be quite amorphous in structure,
+are a mine of wealth for the philosophic student of history.
+
+
+
+
+NOTES:
+
+
+[1] Milman, _Lat. Christ._ vii. 395.
+
+[2] Gardiner, _The Puritan Revolution_, p. 12.
+
+[3] Green, _History of the English People_, iii. 47.
+
+[4] Steele's _Life of Brewster,_ p. 161.
+
+[5] Gardiner, _Puritan Revolution_, p. 50.
+
+[6] It is now 204 years since a battle has been fought in England. The
+last was Sedgmoor in 1685. For four centuries, since Bosworth, in 1485,
+the English people have lived in peace in their own homes, except for
+the brief episode of the Great Rebellion, and Monmouth's slight affair.
+This long peace, unparalleled in history, has powerfully influenced the
+English and American character for good. Since the Middle Ages most
+English warfare has been warfare at a distance, and that does not
+nourish the brutal passions in the way that warfare at home does.
+An instructive result is to be seen in the mildness of temper which
+characterized the conduct of our stupendous Civil War. Nothing like it
+was ever seen before.
+
+[7] Picton's _Cromwell_, pp. 61, 67; Gardiner, _Puritan Revolution_, p.
+72.
+
+[8] Quincy, History of Harvard University, ii. 654.
+
+[9] C.F. Adams, _Sir Christopher Gardiner, Knight_, p. 31.
+
+[10] The compact drawn up in the Mayflower's cabin was not, in the
+strict sense a constitution, which is a document defining and limiting
+the functions of government. Magna Charta partook of the nature of
+a written constitution, as far as it went, but it did not create a
+government.
+
+[11] See Johnston's Connecticut, p. 321, a very brilliant book.
+
+[12] See the passionate exclamation of Endicott, below, p. 190.
+
+[13] Excursions of an Evolutionist: pp. 250, 255.
+
+[14] A glimmer of light upon Gorton may be got from reading the
+title-page of one of his books: "AN INCORRUPTIBLE KEY, composed of the
+CX PSALME, wherewith you may open the Rest of the Holy Scriptures;
+Turning itself only according to the Composure and Art of that Lock, of
+the Closure and Secresie of that great Mystery of God manifest in the
+Flesh, but justified only by the Spirit, which it evidently openeth
+and revealeth, out of Fall and Resurrection, Sin and Righteousness,
+Ascension and Descension, Height and Depth, First and Last, Beginning
+and Ending, Flesh and Spirit, Wisdome and Foolishnesse, Strength
+and Weakness, Mortality and Immortality, Jew and Gentile, Light and
+Darknesse, Unity and Multiplication, Fruitfulness and Barrenness, Curse
+and Blessing, Man and Woman, Kingdom and Priesthood, Heaven and Earth,
+Allsufficiency and Deficiency, God and Man. And out of every Unity made
+up of twaine, it openeth that great two-leafed Gate, which is the sole
+Entrie into the City of God, of New Jerusalem, _into which none but the
+King of glory can enter_; and as that Porter openeth the Doore of the
+Sheepfold, _by which whosoever entreth is the Shepheard of the Sheep_;
+See Isa. 45. 1. Psal. 24. 7, 8, 9, 10. John 10. 1, 2, 3; Or, (according
+to the Signification of the Word translated _Psalme_,) it is a
+Pruning-Knife, to lop off from the Church of Christ all superfluous
+Twigs _of earthly and carnal Commandments_, Leviticall Services or
+Ministery, and fading and vanishing Priests, or Ministers, who are taken
+away and cease, and are not established and confirmed by Death, as
+holding no Correspondency with the princely Dignity, Office, and
+Ministry of our _Melchisedek_, who is the only Minister and Ministry of
+the Sanctuary, and of that true Tabernacle which the Lord pitcht, and
+not Man. For it supplants the Old Man, and implants the New; abrogates
+the Old Testament or Covenant, and confirms the New, unto a thousand
+Generations, or in Generations forever. By Samuel Gorton, _Gent._,
+and at the time of penning hereof, in the Place of Judicature (upon
+Aquethneck, alias Road Island) of Providence Plantations in the
+Nanhyganset Bay, New England. Printed in the Yeere 1647."
+
+[15] Father of Benedict Arnold, afterward governor of Rhode Island, and
+owner of the stone windmill (apparently copied from one in Chesterton,
+Warwickshire) which was formerly supposed by some antiquarians to be a
+vestige of the Northmen. Governor Benedict Arnold was great-grandfather
+of the traitor.
+
+[16] _Gorton, Simplicitie's Defence against Seven-headed Policy_, p. 88.
+
+[17] De Forest, _History of the Indians of Connecticut_, Hartford, 1850,
+p. 198.
+
+[18] Doyle, _Puritan Colonies_, i. 324.
+
+[19] See below, p. 222, note.
+
+[20] See my _Excursions of an Evolutionist,_ pp. 239-242, 250-255,
+286-289.
+
+[21] Gorton's life at Warwick, after all these troubles, seems to have
+been quiet and happy. He died in 1677 at a great age. In 1771 Dr. Ezra
+Stiles visited, in Providence, his last surviving disciple, born in
+1691. This old man said that Gorton wrote in heaven, and none can
+understand his books except those who live in heaven while on earth.
+
+[22] Doyle, _Puritan Colonies_,: i. 369.
+
+[23] Doyle, i.: 372.
+
+[24] Milman, _Latin Christianity_, vii. 390.
+
+[25] Doyle, ii. 133, 134; Rhode Island Records, i. 377, 378.
+
+[26] Colonial Laws of Massachusetts, pp. 14-16; Levermore's Republic of
+New Haven, p. 153.
+
+[27] See my remarks above, p. 145.
+
+[28] The daring passage in the sermon is thus given in Bacon's
+_Historical Discourses_, New Haven, 1838: "Withhold not countenance,
+entertainment, and protection from the people of God--whom men may call
+fools and fanatics--if any such come to you from other countries,
+as from France or England, or any other place. Be not forgetful to
+entertain strangers. Remember those that are in bonds, as bound with
+them. The Lord required this of Moab, saying, 'Make thy shadow as the
+night in the midst of the noonday; hide the outcasts; bewray not him
+that wandereth. Let mine outcasts dwell with thee, Moab; be thou a
+covert to them from the face of the spoiler.' Is it objected--'But so I
+may expose myself to be spoiled or troubled'? He, therefore, to remove
+this objection, addeth, 'For the extortioner is at an end, the spoiler
+ceaseth, the oppressors are consumed out of the land.' While we are
+attending to our duty in owning and harbouring Christ's witnesses, God
+will be providing for their and our safety, by destroying those that
+would destroy his people."
+
+[29] Palfrey, _History of New England,_ in. 138-140.
+
+[30] See Parkman, _Conspiracy of Pontiac_, i. 80-85.
+
+[31] De Forest, _History of the Indians of Connecticut,_ pp. 252, 257.
+
+[32] The story rests chiefly upon the statements of Hutchinson, an
+extremely careful and judicious writer, and not in the least what
+the French call a _gobemouche_. Goffe kept a diary which came into
+Hutchinson's possession, and was one of the priceless manuscripts that
+perished in the infamous sacking of his house by the Boston mob of
+August 26, 1765. What light that diary might have thrown upon the matter
+can never be known. Hutchinson was born in 1711, only thirty-six years
+after the event, so that his testimony is not so very far removed from
+that of a contemporary. Whalley seems to have died in Hadley shortly
+before 1675, and Goffe deemed it prudent to leave that neighbourhood in
+1676. His letters to Increase Mather are dated from "Ebenezer," i. e.,
+wherever in his roamings he set up his Ebenezer. One of these letters,
+dated September 8, 1676, shows that his Ebenezer was then set up in
+Hartford, where probably he died about 1679 In 1676 the arrival of
+Edward Randolph (see below, p. 256) renewed the peril of the regicide
+judge, and his sudden removal from his skilfully contrived hiding-place
+at Hadley might possibly have been due to his having exposed himself
+to recognition in the Indian fight. Possibly even the supernatural
+explanation might have been started, with a touch of Yankee humour, as
+a blind. The silence of Mather and Hubbard was no more remarkable than
+some of the other ingenious incidents which had so long served to
+conceal the existence of this sturdy and crafty man. The reasons for
+doubting the story are best stated by Mr. George Sheldon of Deerfield,
+in _Hist.-Genealogical Register_, October, 1874.
+
+[33] If Philip was half the diplomatist that he is represented in
+tradition, he never would have gone into such a war without assurance of
+Narragansett help. Canonchet was a far more powerful sachem than Philip,
+and played a more conspicuous part in the war. May we not suppose that
+Canonchet's desire to avenge his father's death was one of the principal
+incentives to the war; that Philip's attack upon Swanzey was a premature
+explosion; and that Canonchet then watched the course of events for a
+while before making up his mind whether to abandon Philip or support
+him?
+
+[34] A wretched little werewolf who some few years ago, being then a lad
+of fourteen or fifteen years, most cruelly murdered two or three
+young children, just to amuse himself with their dying agonies. The
+misdirected "humanitarianism," which in our country makes every murderer
+an object of popular sympathy, prevailed to save this creature from
+the gallows. Massachusetts has lately witnessed a similar instance of
+misplaced clemency in the case of a vile woman who had poisoned eight or
+ten persons, including some of her own children, in order to profit
+by their life insurance. Such instances help to explain the prolonged
+vitality of "Judge Lynch," and sometimes almost make one regret the days
+in old England when William Probert, after escaping in 1824 as "king's
+evidence," from the Thurtell affair, got caught and hanged within a
+twelvemonth for horse-stealing. Any one who wishes to study the results
+of allowing criminality to survive and propagate itself should read
+Dugdale's The Jukes; Hereditary Crime, New York, 1877.
+
+[35] Weeden, _Indian Money as a Factor in New England Civilization_,
+Johns Hopkins University Studies, II. viii., ix. p. 30.
+
+[36] Doyle, ii. 253.
+
+[37] Doyle, _Puritan Colonies_, ii. 254.
+
+[38] The quotation is from an unpublished letter of Rev. Robert
+Ratcliffe to the Bishop of London, cited in an able article in the
+_Boston Herald_, January 4, 1888. I have not seen the letter.
+
+[39] Doyle, _Puritan Colonies_, ii. 379, 380.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Beginnings of New England, by John Fiske
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12767 ***
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+    <title>
+      The Beginnings of New England, by John Fiske
+    </title>
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+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12767 ***</div>
+
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW ENGLAND
+    </h1>
+    <h3>
+      Or The Puritan Theocracy In Its Relations To Civil And Religious Liberty
+    </h3>
+    <h2>
+      By John Fiske
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      1892
+    </h3>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        "The Lord Christ intends to achieve greater matters by this little
+        handful than the world is aware of." EDWARD JOHNSON, <i>Wonder-Working
+        Providence of Zion's Saviour in New England</i> 1654
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      To
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      MY DEAR CLASSMATES,
+    </h3>
+    <h3>
+      BENJAMIN THOMPSON FROTHINGHAM,
+    </h3>
+    <h3>
+      WILLIAM AUGUSTUS WHITE,
+    </h3>
+    <h3>
+      AND
+    </h3>
+    <h3>
+      FREDERIC CROMWELL,
+    </h3>
+    <h3>
+      I DEDICATE THIS BOOK.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_PREF" id="link2H_PREF"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PREFACE.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      This book contains the substance of the lectures originally given at the
+      Washington University, St. Louis, in May, 1887, in the course of my annual
+      visit to that institution as University Professor of American History. The
+      lectures were repeated in the following month of June at Portland, Oregon,
+      and since then either the whole course, or one or more of the lectures,
+      have been given in Boston, Newton, Milton, Chelsea, New Bedford, Lowell,
+      Worcester, Springfield, and Pittsfield, Mass.; Farmington, Middletown, and
+      Stamford, Conn.; New York, Brooklyn, and Tarrytown, N.Y.; Philadelphia and
+      Ogontz, Pa.; Wilmington, Del.; Chicago, 111.; San Francisco and Oakland,
+      Cal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this sketch of the circumstances which attended the settlement of New
+      England, I have purposely omitted many details which in a formal history
+      of that period would need to be included. It has been my aim to give the
+      outline of such a narrative as to indicate the principles at work in the
+      history of New England down to the Revolution of 1689. When I was writing
+      the lectures I had just been reading, with much interest, the work of my
+      former pupil, Mr. Brooks Adams, entitled "The Emancipation of
+      Massachusetts."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the specific conclusions set forth in that book I found myself often
+      agreeing, but it seemed to me that the general aspect of the case would be
+      considerably modified and perhaps somewhat more adequately presented by
+      enlarging the field of view. In forming historical judgments a great deal
+      depends upon our perspective. Out of the very imperfect human nature which
+      is so slowly and painfully casting off the original sin of its inheritance
+      from primeval savagery, it is scarcely possible in any age to get a result
+      which will look quite satisfactory to the men of a riper and more
+      enlightened age. Fortunately we can learn something from the stumblings of
+      our forefathers, and a good many things seem quite clear to us to-day
+      which two centuries ago were only beginning to be dimly discerned by a few
+      of the keenest and boldest spirits. The faults of the Puritan theocracy,
+      which found its most complete development in Massachusetts, are so glaring
+      that it is idle to seek to palliate them or to explain them away. But if
+      we would really understand what was going on in the Puritan world of the
+      seventeenth century, and how a better state of things has grown out of it,
+      we must endeavour to distinguish and define the elements of wholesome
+      strength in that theocracy no less than its elements of crudity and
+      weakness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first chapter, on "The Roman Idea and the English Idea," contains a
+      somewhat more developed statement of the points briefly indicated in the
+      thirteenth section (pp. 85-95) of "The Destiny of Man." As all of the
+      present book, except the first chapter, was written here under the shadow
+      of the Washington University, I take pleasure in dating it from this
+      charming and hospitable city where I have passed some of the most
+      delightful hours of my life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      St. Louis, April 15, 1889.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <b>CONTENTS</b>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_PREF"> PREFACE. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_TOC"> DETAILED CONTENTS. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW ENGLAND. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER I. &mdash; THE ROMAN IDEA AND THE ENGLISH
+      IDEA. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER II. &mdash; THE PURITAN EXODUS. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER III. &mdash; THE PLANTING OF NEW ENGLAND.
+      </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER IV. &mdash; THE NEW ENGLAND CONFEDERACY.
+      </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER V. &mdash; KING PHILIP'S WAR. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER VI. &mdash; THE TYRANNY OF ANDROS. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0010"> BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_NOTE"> NOTES: </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_TOC" id="link2H_TOC"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      DETAILED CONTENTS CONTENTS.
+    </h2>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        CHAPTER I. <br /> THE ROMAN IDEA AND THE ENGLISH IDEA. <br /> When did the
+        Roman Empire come to an end? ... 1-3 <br /> Meaning of Odovakar's work
+        ... 3 <br /> The Holy Roman Empire ... 4, 5 <br /> Gradual shifting of
+        primacy from the men who spoke Latin, and their <br /> descendants, to
+        the men who speak English ... 6-8 <br /> Political history is the history
+        of nation-making ... 8, 9 <br /> The ORIENTAL method of nation-making; <i>conquest
+        without incorporation</i> <br /> ... 9 <br /> Illustrations from eastern
+        despotisms ... 10 <br /> And from the Moors in Spain ... 11 <br /> The
+        ROMAN method of nation-making; <i>conquest with incorporation, but <br />
+        without representation</i> ... 12 <br /> Its slow development ... 13
+        <br /> Vices in the Roman system. ... 14 <br /> Its fundamental defect ...
+        15 <br /> It knew nothing of political power delegated by the people to
+        <br /> representatives ... 16 <br /> And therefore the expansion of its
+        dominion ended in a centralized <br /> Despotism ... 16 <br /> Which
+        entailed the danger that human life might come to stagnate in <br />
+        Europe, as it had done in Asia ... 17 <br /> The danger was warded off by
+        the Germanic invasions, which, however, <br /> threatened to undo the
+        work which the Empire had done in organizing <br /> European society ...
+        17 <br /> But such disintegration was prevented by the sway which the
+        Roman Church <br /> had come to exercise over the European mind ... 18
+        <br /> The wonderful thirteenth century ... 19 <br /> The ENGLISH method
+        of nation-making; <i>incorporation with representation</i> <br /> ... 20
+        <br /> Pacific tendencies of federalism ... 21 <br /> Failure of Greek
+        attempts at federation ... 22 <br /> Fallacy of the notion that republics
+        must be small ... 23 <br /> "It is not the business of a government to
+        support its people, but of <br /> the people to support their government"
+        ... 24 <br /> Teutonic March-meetings and representative assemblies ...
+        25 <br /> Peculiarity of the Teutonic conquest of Britain ... 26, 27
+        <br /> Survival and development of the Teutonic representative assembly
+        in <br /> England ... 28 <br /> Primitive Teutonic institutions less
+        modified in England than in Germany <br /> ... 29 <br /> Some effects of
+        the Norman conquest of England ... 30 <br /> The Barons' War and the
+        first House of Commons ... 31 <br /> Eternal vigilance is the price of
+        liberty ... 32 <br /> Conflict between Roman Idea and English Idea begins
+        to become clearly <br /> visible in the thirteenth century ... 33 <br />
+        Decline of mediaeval Empire and Church with the growth of modern <br />
+        nationalities ... 34 <br /> Overthrow of feudalism, and increasing power
+        of the crown ... 35 <br /> Formidable strength of the Roman Idea ... 36
+        <br /> Had it not been for the Puritans, political liberty would probably
+        have <br /> disappeared from the world ... 37 <br /> Beginnings of
+        Protestantism in the thirteenth century ... 38 <br /> The Cathari, or
+        Puritans of the Eastern Empire ... 39 <br /> The Albigenses ... 40 <br />
+        Effects of persecution; its feebleness in England ... 41 <br /> Wyclif
+        and the Lollards ... 42 <br /> Political character of Henry VIII.'s
+        revolt against Rome ... 43 <br /> The yeoman Hugh Latimer ... 44 <br />
+        The moment of Cromwell's triumph was the most critical moment in history
+        <br /> ... 45 <br /> Contrast with France; fate of the Huguenots ... 46,
+        47 <br /> Victory of the English Idea ... 48 <br /> Significance of the
+        Puritan Exodus ... 49 <br /> CHAPTER II. <br /> THE PURITAN EXODUS. <br />
+        Influence of Puritanism upon modern Europe ... 50, 51 <br /> Work of the
+        Lollards ... 52 <br /> They made the Bible the first truly popular
+        literature in England ... <br /> 53, 54 <br /> The English version of the
+        Bible ... 54, 55 <br /> Secret of Henry VIII.'s swift success in his
+        revolt against Rome ... 56 <br /> Effects of the persecution under Mary
+        ... 57 <br /> Calvin's theology in its political bearings ... 58, 59
+        <br /> Elizabeth's policy and its effects ... 60, 61 <br /> Puritan
+        sea-rovers ... 61 <br /> Geographical distribution of Puritanism in
+        England; it was strongest in <br /> the eastern counties ... 62 <br />
+        Preponderance of East Anglia in the Puritan exodus ... 63 <br /> Familiar
+        features of East Anglia to the visitor from New England ... 64 <br />
+        Puritanism was not intentionally allied with liberalism ... 65 <br />
+        Robert Brown and the Separatists ... 66 <br /> Persecution of the
+        Separatists ... 67 <br /> Recantation of Brown; it was reserved for
+        William Brewster to take the <br /> lead in the Puritan exodus ... 68
+        <br /> James Stuart, and his encounter with Andrew Melville ... 69 <br />
+        What James intended to do when he became King of England ... 70 <br />
+        His view of the political situation, as declared in the conference at
+        <br /> Hampton Court ... 71 <br /> The congregation of Separatists at
+        Scrooby ... 72 <br /> The flight to Holland, and settlement at Leyden in
+        1609 ... 73 <br /> Systematic legal toleration in Holland ... 74 <br />
+        Why the Pilgrims did not stay there; they wished to keep up their <br />
+        distinct organization and found a state ... 74 <br /> And to do this they
+        must cross the ocean, because European territory was <br /> all
+        preoccupied ... 75 <br /> The London and Plymouth companies ... 75 <br />
+        First explorations of the New England coast; Bartholomew Gosnold (1602),
+        <br /> and George Weymouth (1605) ... 76 <br /> The Popham colony (1607)
+        ... 77 <br /> Captain John Smith gives to New England its name (1614) ...
+        78 <br /> The Pilgrims at Leyden decide to make a settlement near the
+        Delaware <br /> river ... 79 <br /> How King James regarded the enterprise
+        ... 80 <br /> Voyage of the Mayflower; she goes astray and takes the
+        Pilgrims to Cape <br /> Cod bay ... 81 <br /> Founding of the Plymouth
+        colony (1620) ... 82, 83 <br /> Why the Indians did not molest the
+        settlers ... 84, 85 <br /> The chief interest of this beginning of the
+        Puritan exodus lies not so <br /> much in what it achieved as in what it
+        suggested ... 86, 87 <br /> CHAPTER III. <br /> THE PLANTING OF NEW
+        ENGLAND. <br /> Sir Ferdinando Gorges and the Council for New England ...
+        88, 89 <br /> Wessagusset and Merrymount ... 90, 91 <br /> The Dorchester
+        adventurers ... 92 <br /> John White wishes to raise a bulwark against
+        the Kingdom of Antichrist <br /> ... 93 <br /> And John Endicott
+        undertakes the work of building it ... 94 <br /> Conflicting grants sow
+        seeds of trouble; the Gorges and Mason claims ... <br /> 94, 95 <br />
+        Endicott's arrival in New England, and the founding of Salem ... 95
+        <br /> The Company of Massachusetts Bay; Francis Higginson takes a
+        powerful <br /> reinforcement to Salem ... 96 <br /> The development of
+        John White's enterprise into the Company of <br /> Massachusetts Bay
+        coincided with the first four years of the reign of <br /> Charles I ...
+        97 <br /> Extraordinary scene in the House of Commons (June 5, 1628) ...
+        98, 99 <br /> The King turns Parliament out of doors (March 2, 1629) ...
+        100 <br /> Desperate nature of the crisis ... 100, 101 <br /> The meeting
+        at Cambridge (Aug. 26, 1629), and decision to transfer the <br /> charter
+        of the Massachusetts Bay Company, and the government established <br />
+        under it, to New England ... 102 <br /> Leaders of the great migration;
+        John Winthrop ... 102 <br /> And Thomas Dudley ... 103 <br /> Founding of
+        Massachusetts; the schemes of Gorges overwhelmed ... 104 <br />
+        Beginnings of American constitutional history; the question as to <br />
+        self-government raised at Watertown ... 105 <br /> Representative system
+        established ... 106 <br /> Bicameral assembly; story of the stray pig ...
+        107 <br /> Ecclesiastical polity; the triumph of Separatism ... 108 <br />
+        Restriction of the suffrage to members of the Puritan congregational
+        <br /> churches ... 109 <br /> Founding of Harvard College ... 110 <br />
+        Threefold danger to the New England settlers in 1636:&mdash; <br /> 1.
+        From the King, who prepares to attack the charter, but is foiled by
+        <br /> dissensions at home ... 111-113 <br /> 2. From religious
+        dissensions; Roger Williams ... 114-116 <br /> Henry Vane and Anne
+        Hutchinson ... 116-119 <br /> Beginnings of New Hampshire and Rhode
+        Island ... 119-120 <br /> 3. From the Indians; the Pequot supremacy ...
+        121 <br /> First movements into the Connecticut valley, and disputes with
+        the Dutch <br /> settlers of New Amsterdam ... 122, 123 <br /> Restriction
+        of the suffrage leads to disaffection in Massachusetts; <br /> profoundly
+        interesting opinions of Winthrop and Hooker ... 123, 124 <br />
+        Connecticut pioneers and their hardships ... 125 <br /> Thomas Hooker,
+        and the founding of Connecticut ... 120 <br /> The Fundamental Orders of
+        Connecticut (Jan 14, 1639); the first written <br /> constitution that
+        created a government ... 127 <br /> Relations of Connecticut to the
+        genesis of the Federal Union ... 128 <br /> Origin of the Pequot War;
+        Sassacus tries to unite the Indian tribes in a <br /> crusade against the
+        English ... 129, 130 <br /> The schemes of Sassacus are foiled by Roger
+        Williams ... 130 <br /> The Pequots take the war path alone ... 131 <br />
+        And are exterminated ... 132-134 <br /> John Davenport, and the founding
+        of New Haven ... 135 <br /> New Haven legislation, and legend of the
+        "Blue Laws" ... 136 <br /> With the meeting of the Long Parliament, in
+        1640, the Puritan exodus <br /> comes to its end ... 137 <br /> What might
+        have been ... 138, 391 <br /> CHAPTER IV. &mdash; THE NEW ENGLAND
+        CONFEDERACY. <br /> The Puritan exodus was purely and exclusively English
+        ... 140 <br /> And the settlers were all thrifty and prosperous; chiefly
+        country <br /> squires and yeomanry of the best and sturdiest type ...
+        141, 142 <br /> In all history there has been no other instance of
+        colonization so <br /> exclusively effected by picked and chosen men ...
+        143 <br /> What, then, was the principle of selection? The migration was
+        not <br /> intended to promote what we call religious liberty ... 144,
+        145 <br /> Theocratic ideal of the Puritans ... 146 <br /> The impulse
+        which sought to realize itself in the Puritan ideal was an <br /> ethical
+        impulse ... 147 <br /> In interpreting Scripture, the Puritan appealed to
+        his Reason ... 148, <br /> 149 <br /> Value of such perpetual theological
+        discussion as was carried on in <br /> early New England ... 150, 151
+        <br /> Comparison with the history of Scotland ... 152 <br /> Bearing of
+        these considerations upon the history of the New England <br />
+        confederacy ... 153 <br /> The existence of so many colonies (Plymouth,
+        Massachusetts, Connecticut, <br /> New Haven, Rhode Island, the
+        Piscataqua towns, etc.) was due to <br /> differences of opinion on
+        questions in which men's religious ideas were <br /> involved ... 154
+        <br /> And this multiplication of colonies led to a notable and
+        significant <br /> attempt at confederation ... 155 <br /> Turbulence of
+        dissent in Rhode Island ... 156 <br /> The Earl of Warwick, and his Board
+        of Commissioners ... 157 <br /> Constitution of the Confederacy ... 158
+        <br /> It was only a league, not a federal union ... 159 <br /> Its
+        formation involved a tacit assumption of sovereignty ... 160 <br /> The
+        fall of Charles I. brought up, for a moment, the question as to the
+        <br /> supremacy of Parliament over the colonies ... 161 <br /> Some
+        interesting questions ... 162 <br /> Genesis of the persecuting spirit
+        ... 163 <br /> Samuel Gorton and his opinions ... 163-165 <br /> He flees
+        to Aquedneck and is banished thence ... 166 <br /> Providence protests
+        against him ... 167 <br /> He flees to Shawomet, where he buys land of
+        the Indians ... 168 <br /> Miantonomo and Uncas ... 169, 170 <br /> Death
+        of Miantonomo ... 171 <br /> Edward Johnson leads an expedition against
+        Shawomet ... 172 <br /> Trial and sentence of the heretics ... 173 <br />
+        Winthrop declares himself in a prophetic opinion ... 174 <br /> The
+        Presbyterian cabal ... 175-177 <br /> The Cambridge Platform; deaths of
+        Winthrop and Cotton ... 177 <br /> Views of Winthrop and Cotton as to
+        toleration in matters of Religion ... <br /> 178 <br /> After their death,
+        the leadership in Massachusetts was in the hands of <br /> Endicott and
+        Norton ... 179 <br /> The Quakers; their opinions and behavior ...
+        179-181 <br /> Violent manifestations of dissent ... 182 <br /> Anne
+        Austin and Mary Fisher; how they were received in Boston ... 183 <br />
+        The confederated colonies seek to expel the Quakers; noble attitude of
+        <br /> Rhode Island ... 184 <br /> Roger Williams appeals to his friend,
+        Oliver Cromwell ... 185 <br /> The "heavenly speech" of Sir Harry Vane
+        ... 185 <br /> Laws passed against the Quakers ... 186 <br /> How the
+        death penalty was regarded at that time in New England ... 187 <br />
+        Executions of Quakers on Boston Common ... 188, 189 <br /> Wenlock
+        Christison's defiance and victory ... 189, 190 <br /> The "King's
+        Missive" ... 191 <br /> Why Charles II. interfered to protect the Quakers
+        ... 191 <br /> His hostile feeling toward the New England governments ...
+        192 <br /> The regicide judges, Goffe and Whalley ... 193, 194 <br /> New
+        Haven annexed to Connecticut ... 194, 195 <br /> Abraham Pierson, and the
+        founding of Newark ... 196 <br /> Breaking-down of the theocratic policy
+        ... 197 <br /> Weakening of the Confederacy ... 198 <br /> CHAPTER V.
+        &mdash; KING PHILIP'S WAR. <br /> Relations between the Puritan settlers
+        and the Indians ... 199 <br /> Trade with the Indians ... 200 <br />
+        Missionary work; Thomas Mayhew ... 201 <br /> John Eliot and his
+        translation of the Bible ... 202 <br /> His preaching to the Indians ...
+        203 <br /> His villages of Christian Indians ... 204 <br /> The Puritan's
+        intention was to deal gently and honourably with the red <br /> men ...
+        205 <br /> Why Pennsylvania was so long unmolested by the Indians ...
+        205, 206 <br /> Difficulty of the situation in New England ... 207 <br />
+        It is hard for the savage and the civilized man to understand one <br />
+        another ... 208 <br /> How Eliot's designs must inevitably have been
+        misinterpreted by the <br /> Indians ... 209 <br /> It is remarkable that
+        peace should have been so long preserved ... 210 <br /> Deaths of
+        Massasoit and his son Alexander ... 211 <br /> Very little is known about
+        the nature of Philip's designs ... 212 <br /> The meeting at Taunton ...
+        213 <br /> Sausamon informs against Philip ... 213 <br /> And is murdered
+        ... 214 <br /> Massacres at Swanzey and Dartmouth ... 214 <br /> Murder of
+        Captain Hutchinson ... 215 <br /> Attack on Brookfield, which is relieved
+        by Simon Willard ... 216 <br /> Fighting in the Connecticut valley; the
+        mysterious stranger at Hadley <br /> ... 217, 218 <br /> Ambuscade at
+        Bloody Brook ... 219 <br /> Popular excitement in Boston ... 220 <br />
+        The Narragansetts prepare to take the war-path ... 221 <br /> And
+        Governor Winslow leads an army against them ... 222, 223 <br /> Storming
+        of the great swamp fortress ... 224 <br /> Slaughter of the Indians ...
+        225 <br /> Effect of the blow ... 226 <br /> Growth of the humane
+        sentiment in recent times, due to the fact that the <br /> horrors of war
+        are seldom brought home to everybody's door ... 227, 228 <br /> Warfare
+        with savages is likely to be truculent in character ... 229 <br /> Attack
+        upon Lancaster ... 230 <br /> Mrs. Rowlandson's narrative ... 231-233
+        <br /> Virtual extermination of the Indians (February to August, 1676)
+        ... 233, <br /> 234 <br /> Death of Canonchet ... 234 <br /> Philip pursued
+        by Captain Church ... 235 <br /> Death of Philip ... 236 <br /> Indians
+        sold into slavery ... 237 <br /> Conduct of the Christian Indians ... 238
+        <br /> War with the Tarratines ... 239 <br /> Frightful destruction of
+        life and property ... 240 <br /> Henceforth the red man figures no more
+        in the history of New England, <br /> except in frontier raids under
+        French guidance ... 241 <br /> CHAPTER VI. <br /> THE TYRANNY OF ANDROS.
+        <br /> Romantic features in the early history of New England ... 242
+        <br /> Captain Edward Johnson, of Woburn, and his book on "The
+        Wonder-working <br /> Providence of Zion's Saviour in New England" ...
+        243,244 <br /> Acts of the Puritans often judged by an unreal and
+        impossible standard <br /> ... 245 <br /> Spirit of the "Wonder-working
+        Providence" ... 246 <br /> Merits and faults of the Puritan theocracy ...
+        247 <br /> Restriction of the suffrage to church members ... 248 <br /> It
+        was a source of political discontent ... 249 <br /> Inquisitorial
+        administration of justice ... 250 <br /> The "Half way Covenant" ... 251
+        <br /> Founding of the Old South church ... 252 <br /> Unfriendly
+        relations between Charles II and Massachusetts ... 253 <br /> Complaints
+        against Massachusetts ... 254 <br /> The Lords of Trade ... 255 <br />
+        Arrival of Edward Randolph in Boston ... 256 <br /> Joseph Dudley and the
+        beginnings of Toryism in New England ... 257, 258 <br /> Charles II.
+        erects the four Piscataqua towns into the royal province of <br /> New
+        Hampshire ... 259 <br /> And quarrels with Massachusetts over the
+        settlement of the Gorges claim <br /> to the Maine district ... 260 <br />
+        Simon Bradstreet and his verse-making wife ... 261 <br /> Massachusetts
+        answers the king's peremptory message ... 262 <br /> Secret treaty
+        between Charles II. and Louis XIV ... 263 <br /> Shameful proceedings in
+        England ... 264 <br /> Massachusetts refuses to surrender her charter;
+        and accordingly it is <br /> annulled by decree of chancery, June 21,
+        1684 ... 265 <br /> Effect of annulling the charter ... 266 <br /> Death
+        of Charles II, accession of James II., and appointment of Sir <br />
+        Edmund Andros as viceroy over New England, with despotic powers ... 267
+        <br /> The charter oak ... 268 <br /> Episcopal services in Boston ...
+        268, 269 <br /> Founding of the King's Chapel ... 269 <br /> The tyranny
+        ... 270 <br /> John Wise of Ipswich ... 271 <br /> Fall of James II ...
+        271 <br /> Insurrection in Boston, and overthrow of Andros ... 272 <br />
+        Effects of the Revolution of 1689 ... 273 <br /> Need for union among all
+        the northern colonies ... 274 <br /> Plymouth, Maine, and Acadia annexed
+        to Massachusetts ... 275 <br /> Which becomes a royal province ... 276
+        <br /> And is thus brought into political sympathy with Virginia ... 276
+        <br /> The seeds of the American Revolution were already sown, and the
+        spirit <br /> of 1776 was foreshadowed in 1689 ... 277, 278 <br />
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW ENGLAND.
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER I. &mdash; THE ROMAN IDEA AND THE ENGLISH IDEA.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It used to be the fashion of historians, looking superficially at the
+      facts presented in chronicles and tables of dates, without analyzing and
+      comparing vast groups of facts distributed through centuries, or even
+      suspecting the need for such analysis and comparison, to assign the date
+      476 A.D. as the moment at which the Roman Empire came to an end. It was in
+      that year that the soldier of fortune, Odovakar, commander of the Herulian
+      mercenaries in Italy, sent the handsome boy Romulus, son of Orestes,
+      better known as "little Augustus," from his imperial throne to the
+      splendid villa of Lucullus near Naples, and gave him a yearly pension of
+      $35,000 [6,000 solidi] to console him for the loss of a world. As 324
+      years elapsed before another emperor was crowned at Rome, and as the
+      political headship of Europe after that happy restoration remained upon
+      the German soil to which the events of the eighth century had shifted it,
+      nothing could seem more natural than the habit which historians once had,
+      of saying that the mighty career of Rome had ended, as it had begun, with
+      a Romulus. Sometimes the date 476 was even set up as a great landmark
+      dividing modern from ancient history. For those, however, who took such a
+      view, it was impossible to see the events of the Middle Ages in their true
+      relations to what went before and what came after. It was impossible to
+      understand what went on in Italy in the sixth century, or to explain the
+      position of that great Roman power which had its centre on the Bosphorus,
+      which in the code of Justinian left us our grandest monument of Roman law,
+      and which for a thousand years was the staunch bulwark of Europe against
+      the successive aggressions of Persian, Saracen, and Turk. It was equally
+      impossible to understand the rise of the Papal power, the all-important
+      politics of the great Saxon and Swabian emperors, the relations of
+      mediaeval England to the Continental powers, or the marvellously
+      interesting growth of the modern European system of nationalities.
+      [[Sidenote: When did the Roman Empire come to an end?]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Since the middle of the nineteenth century the study of history has
+      undergone changes no less sweeping than those which have in the same time
+      affected the study of the physical sciences. Vast groups of facts
+      distributed through various ages and countries have been subjected to
+      comparison and analysis, with the result that they have not only thrown
+      fresh light upon one another, but have in many cases enabled us to recover
+      historic points of view that had long been buried in oblivion. Such an
+      instance was furnished about twenty-five years ago by Dr. Bryce's
+      epoch-making work on the Holy Roman Empire. Since then historians still
+      recognize the importance of the date 476 as that which left the Bishop of
+      Rome the dominant personage in Italy, and marked the shifting of the
+      political centre of gravity from the Palatine to the Lateran. This was one
+      of those subtle changes which escape notice until after some of their
+      effects have attracted attention. The most important effect, in this
+      instance, realized after three centuries, was not the overthrow of Roman
+      power in the West, but its indefinite extension and expansion. The men of
+      476 not only had no idea that they were entering upon a new era, but least
+      of all did they dream that the Roman Empire had come to an end, or was
+      ever likely to. Its cities might be pillaged, its provinces overrun, but
+      the supreme imperial power itself was something without which the men of
+      those days could not imagine the world as existing. It must have its
+      divinely ordained representative in one place if not in another. If the
+      throne in Italy was vacant, it was no more than had happened before; there
+      was still a throne at Constantinople, and to its occupant Zeno the Roman
+      Senate sent a message, saying that one emperor was enough for both ends of
+      the earth, and begging him to confer upon the gallant Odovakar the title
+      of patrician, and entrust the affairs of Italy to his care. So when
+      Sicambrian Chlodwig set up his Merovingian kingdom in northern Gaul, he
+      was glad to array himself in the robe of a Roman consul, and obtain from
+      the eastern emperor a formal ratification of his rule.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      [Transcriber's note: page missing in original.] still survives in
+      political methods and habits of thought that will yet be long in dying
+      out. With great political systems, as with typical forms of organic life,
+      the processes of development and of extinction are exceedingly slow, and
+      it is seldom that the stages can be sharply marked by dates. The processes
+      which have gradually shifted the seat of empire until the prominent part
+      played nineteen centuries ago by Rome and Alexandria, on opposite sides of
+      the Mediterranean, has been at length assumed by London and New York, on
+      opposite sides of the Atlantic, form a most interesting subject of study.
+      But to understand them, one must do much more than merely catalogue the
+      facts of political history; one must acquire a knowledge of the drifts and
+      tendencies of human thought and feeling and action from the earliest ages
+      to the times in which we live. In covering so wide a field we cannot of
+      course expect to obtain anything like complete results. In order to make a
+      statement simple enough to be generally intelligible, it is necessary to
+      pass over many circumstances and many considerations that might in one way
+      and another qualify what we have to say. Nevertheless it is quite possible
+      for us to discern, in their bold general outlines, some historic truths of
+      supreme importance. In contemplating the salient features of the change
+      which has now for a long time been making the world more English and less
+      Roman, we shall find not only intellectual pleasure and profit but
+      practical guidance. For in order to understand this slow but mighty
+      change, we must look a little into that process of nation-making which has
+      been going on since prehistoric ages and is going on here among us to-day,
+      and from the recorded experience of men in times long past we may gather
+      lessons of infinite value for ourselves and for our children's children.
+      As in all the achievements of mankind it is only after much weary
+      experiment and many a heart-sickening failure that success is attained, so
+      has it been especially with nation-making. Skill in the political art is
+      the fruit of ages of intellectual and moral discipline; and just as
+      picture-writing had to come before printing and canoes before steamboats,
+      so the cruder political methods had to be tried and found wanting, amid
+      the tears and groans of unnumbered generations, before methods less crude
+      could be put into operation. In the historic survey upon which we are now
+      to enter, we shall see that the Roman Empire represented a crude method of
+      nation-making which began with a masterful career of triumph over earlier
+      and cruder methods, but has now for several centuries been giving way
+      before a more potent and satisfactory method. And just as the merest
+      glance at the history of Europe shows us Germanic peoples wresting the
+      supremacy from Rome, so in this deeper study we shall discover a grand and
+      far-reaching Teutonic Idea of political life overthrowing and supplanting
+      the Roman Idea. Our attention will be drawn toward England as the
+      battle-ground and the seventeenth century as the critical moment of the
+      struggle; we shall see in Puritanism the tremendous militant force that
+      determined the issue; and when our perspective has thus become properly
+      adjusted, we shall begin to realize for the first time how truly wonderful
+      was the age that witnessed the Beginnings of New England. We have long had
+      before our minds the colossal figure of Roman Julius as "the foremost man
+      of all this world," but as the seventeenth century recedes into the past
+      the figure of English Oliver begins to loom up as perhaps even more
+      colossal. In order to see these world-events in their true perspective,
+      and to make perfectly clear the manner in which we are to estimate them,
+      we must go a long distance away from them. We must even go back, as nearly
+      as may be, to the beginning of things. [[Sidenote: Gradual shifting of
+      primacy from the men who spoke Latin, and their descendants, to the men
+      who speak English]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If we look back for a moment to the primitive stages of society, we may
+      picture to ourselves the surface of the earth sparsely and scantily
+      covered with wandering tribes of savages, rude in morals and manners,
+      narrow and monotonous in experience, sustaining life very much as lower
+      animals sustain it, by gathering wild fruits or slaying wild game, and
+      waging chronic warfare alike with powerful beasts and with rival tribes of
+      men. [[Sidenote: Political history is the history of nation-making]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the widest sense the subject of political history is the description of
+      the processes by which, under favourable circumstances, innumerable such
+      primitive tribes have become welded together into mighty nations, with
+      elevated standards of morals and manners, with wide and varied experience,
+      sustaining life and ministering to human happiness by elaborate arts and
+      sciences, and putting a curb upon warfare by limiting its scope,
+      diminishing its cruelty, and interrupting it by intervals of peace. The
+      story, as laid before us in the records of three thousand years, is
+      fascinating and absorbing in its human interest for those who content
+      themselves with the study of its countless personal incidents, and neglect
+      its profound philosophical lessons. But for those who study it in the
+      scientific spirit, the human interest of its details becomes still more
+      intensely fascinating and absorbing. Battles and coronations, poems and
+      inventions, migrations and martyrdoms, acquire new meanings and awaken new
+      emotions as we begin to discern their bearings upon the solemn work of
+      ages that is slowly winning for humanity a richer and more perfect life.
+      By such meditation upon men's thoughts and deeds is the understanding
+      purified, till we become better able to comprehend our relations to the
+      world and the duty that lies upon each of us to shape his conduct rightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the welding together of primitive shifting tribes into stable and
+      powerful nations, we can seem to discern three different methods that have
+      been followed at different times and places, with widely different
+      results. In all cases the fusion has been effected by war, but it has gone
+      on in three broadly contrasted ways. The first of these methods, which has
+      been followed from time immemorial in the Oriental world, may be roughly
+      described as <i>conquest without incorporation.</i> A tribe grows to
+      national dimensions by conquering and annexing its neighbours, without
+      admitting them to a share in its political life. Probably there is always
+      at first some incorporation, or even perhaps some crude germ of federative
+      alliance; but this goes very little way,&mdash;only far enough to fuse
+      together a few closely related tribes, agreeing in speech and habits, into
+      a single great tribe that can overwhelm its neighbours. In early society
+      this sort of incorporation cannot go far without being stopped by some
+      impassable barrier of language or religion. After reaching that point, the
+      conquering tribe simply annexes its neighbours and makes them its slaves.
+      It becomes a superior caste, ruling over vanquished peoples, whom it
+      oppresses with frightful cruelty, while living on the fruits of their toil
+      in what has been aptly termed Oriental luxury. Such has been the origin of
+      many eastern despotisms, in the valleys of the Nile and Euphrates, and
+      elsewhere. Such a political structure admits of a very considerable
+      development of material civilization, in which gorgeous palaces and
+      artistic temples may be built, and perhaps even literature and scholarship
+      rewarded, with money wrung from millions of toiling wretches. There is
+      that sort of brutal strength in it, that it may endure for many long ages,
+      until it comes into collision with some higher civilization. Then it is
+      likely to end in sudden collapse, because the fighting quality of the
+      people has been destroyed. Populations that have lived for centuries in
+      fear of impalement or crucifixion, and have known no other destination for
+      the products of their labour than the clutches of the omnipresent
+      tax-gatherer, are not likely to furnish good soldiers. A handful of
+      freemen will scatter them like sheep, as the Greeks did twenty-three
+      centuries ago at Kynaxa, as the English did the other day at Tel el-Kebir.
+      On the other hand, where the manliness of the vanquished people is not
+      crushed, the sway of the conquerors who cannot enter into political union
+      with them is likely to be cast off, as in the case of the Moors in Spain.
+      There was a civilization in many respects admirable. It was eminent for
+      industry, science, art, and poetry; its annals are full of romantic
+      interest; it was in some respects superior to the Christian system which
+      supplanted it; in many ways it contributed largely to the progress of the
+      human race; and it was free from some of the worst vices of Oriental
+      civilizations. Yet because of the fundamental defect that between the
+      Christian Spaniard and his Mussulman conqueror there could be no political
+      fusion, this brilliant civilization was doomed. During eight centuries of
+      more or less extensive rule in the Spanish peninsula, the Moor was from
+      first to last an alien, just as after four centuries the Turk is still an
+      alien in the Balkan peninsula. The natural result was a struggle that
+      lasted age after age till it ended in the utter extermination of one of
+      the parties, and left behind it a legacy of hatred and persecution that
+      has made the history of modern Spain a dismal record of shame and
+      disaster. [[Sidenote: The Oriental method of nation-making]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this first method of nation-making, then, which we may call the
+      Oriental method, one now sees but little to commend. It was better than
+      savagery, and for a long time no more efficient method was possible, but
+      the leading peoples of the world have long since outgrown it; and although
+      the resulting form of political government is the oldest we know and is
+      not yet extinct, it nevertheless has not the elements of permanence.
+      Sooner or later it will disappear, as savagery is disappearing, as the
+      rudest types of inchoate human society have disappeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The second method by which nations have been made may be called the Roman
+      method; and we may briefly describe it as <i>conquest with incorporation,
+      but without representation</i>. The secret of Rome's wonderful strength
+      lay in the fact that she incorporated the vanquished peoples into her own
+      body politic. In the early time there was a fusion of tribes going on in
+      Latium, which, if it had gone no further, would have been similar to the
+      early fusion of Ionic tribes in Attika or of Iranian tribes in Media. But
+      whereas everywhere else this political fusion soon stopped, in the Roman
+      world it went on. One after another Italian tribes and Italian towns were
+      not merely overcome but admitted to a share in the political rights and
+      privileges of the victors. By the time this had gone on until the whole
+      Italian peninsula was consolidated under the headship of Rome, the result
+      was a power incomparably greater than any other that the world had yet
+      seen. Never before had so many people been brought under one government
+      without making slaves of most of them. Liberty had existed before, whether
+      in barbaric tribes or in Greek cities. Union had existed before, in
+      Assyrian or Persian despotisms. Now liberty and union were for the first
+      time joined together, with consequences enduring and stupendous. The whole
+      Mediterranean world was brought under one government; ancient barriers of
+      religion, speech, and custom were overthrown in every direction; and
+      innumerable barbarian tribes, from the Alps to the wilds of northern
+      Britain, from the Bay of Biscay to the Carpathian mountains, were more or
+      less completely transformed into Roman citizens, protected by Roman law,
+      and sharing in the material and spiritual benefits of Roman civilization.
+      Gradually the whole vast structure became permeated by Hellenic and Jewish
+      thought, and thus were laid the lasting foundations of modern society, of
+      a common Christendom, furnished with a common stock of ideas concerning
+      man's relation to God and the world, and acknowledging a common standard
+      of right and wrong. This was a prodigious work, which raised human life to
+      a much higher plane than that which it had formerly occupied, and endless
+      gratitude is due to the thousands of steadfast men who in one way or
+      another devoted their lives to its accomplishment. [[Sidenote: The Roman
+      method of nation-making]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This Roman method of nation-making had nevertheless its fatal
+      shortcomings, and it was only very slowly, moreover, that it wrought out
+      its own best results. It was but gradually that the rights and privileges
+      of Roman citizenship were extended over the whole Roman world, and in the
+      mean time there were numerous instances where conquered provinces seemed
+      destined to no better fate than had awaited the victims of Egyptian or
+      Assyrian conquest. The rapacity and cruelty of Caius Verres could hardly
+      have been outdone by the worst of Persian satraps; but there was a
+      difference. A moral sense and political sense had been awakened which
+      could see both the wickedness and the folly of such conduct. The voice of
+      a Cicero sounded with trumpet tones against the oppressor, who was brought
+      to trial and exiled for deeds which under the Oriental system, from the
+      days of Artaxerxes to those of the Grand Turk, would scarcely have called
+      forth a reproving word. It was by slow degrees that the Roman came to
+      understand the virtues of his own method, and learned to apply it
+      consistently until the people of all parts of the empire were, in theory
+      at least, equal before the law. In theory, I say, for in point of fact
+      there was enough of viciousness in the Roman system to prevent it from
+      achieving permanent success. Historians have been fond of showing how the
+      vitality of the whole system was impaired by wholesale slave-labour, by
+      the false political economy which taxes all for the benefit of a few, by
+      the debauching view of civil office which regards it as private perquisite
+      and not as public trust, and&mdash;worst of all, perhaps&mdash;by the
+      communistic practice of feeding an idle proletariat out of the imperial
+      treasury. The names of these deadly social evils are not unfamiliar to
+      American ears. Even of the last we have heard ominous whispers in the
+      shape of bills to promote mendicancy under the specious guise of fostering
+      education or rewarding military services. And is it not a striking
+      illustration of the slowness with which mankind learns the plainest
+      rudiments of wisdom and of justice, that only in the full light of the
+      nineteenth century, and at the cost of a terrible war, should the most
+      intelligent people on earth have got rid of a system of labour devised in
+      the crudest ages of antiquity and fraught with misery to the employed,
+      degradation to the employers, and loss to everybody? [[Sidenote: Its slow
+      development]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These evils, we see, in one shape or another, have existed almost
+      everywhere; and the vice of the Roman system did not consist in the fact
+      that under it they were fully developed, but in the fact that it had no
+      adequate means of overcoming them. Unless helped by something supplied
+      from outside the Roman world, civilization must have succumbed to these
+      evils, the progress of mankind must have been stopped. What was needed was
+      the introduction of a fierce spirit of personal liberty and local
+      self-government. The essential vice of the Roman system was that it had
+      been unable to avoid weakening the spirit of personal independence and
+      crushing out local self-government among the peoples to whom it had been
+      applied. It owed its wonderful success to joining Liberty with Union, but
+      as it went on it found itself compelled gradually to sacrifice Liberty to
+      Union, strengthening the hands of the central government and enlarging its
+      functions more and more, until by and by the political life of the several
+      parts had so far died away that, under the pressure of attack from
+      without, the Union fell to pieces and the whole political system had to be
+      slowly and painfully reconstructed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now if we ask why the Roman government found itself thus obliged to
+      sacrifice personal liberty and local independence to the paramount
+      necessity of holding the empire together, the answer will point us to the
+      essential and fundamental vice of the Roman method of nation-making. It
+      lacked the principle of representation. The old Roman world knew nothing
+      of representative assemblies. [[Sidenote: It knew nothing of
+      representation]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Its senates were assemblies of notables, constituting in the main an
+      aristocracy of men who had held high office; its popular assemblies were
+      primary assemblies,&mdash;town-meetings. There was no notion of such a
+      thing as political power delegated by the people to representatives who
+      were to wield it away from home and out of sight of their constituents.
+      The Roman's only notion of delegated power was that of authority delegated
+      by the government to its generals and prefects who discharged at a
+      distance its military and civil functions. When, therefore, the Roman
+      popular government, originally adapted to a single city, had come to
+      extend itself over a large part of the world, it lacked the one
+      institution by means of which government could be carried on over so vast
+      an area without degenerating into despotism. [[Sidenote: And therefore
+      ended in despotism]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even could the device of representation have occurred to the mind of some
+      statesman trained in Roman methods, it would probably have made no
+      difference. Nobody would have known how to use it. You cannot invent an
+      institution as you would invent a plough. Such a notion as that of
+      representative government must needs start from small beginnings and grow
+      in men's minds until it should become part and parcel of their mental
+      habits. For the want of it the home government at Rome became more and
+      more unmanageable until it fell into the hands of the army, while at the
+      same time the administration of the empire became more and more
+      centralized; the people of its various provinces, even while their social
+      condition was in some respects improved, had less and less voice in the
+      management of their local affairs, and thus the spirit of personal
+      independence was gradually weakened. This centralization was greatly
+      intensified by the perpetual danger of invasion on the northern and
+      eastern frontiers, all the way from the Rhine to the Euphrates. Do what it
+      would, the government must become more and more a military despotism, must
+      revert toward the Oriental type. The period extending from the third
+      century before Christ to the third century after was a period of
+      extraordinary intellectual expansion and moral awakening; but when we
+      observe the governmental changes introduced under the emperor Diocletian
+      at the very end of this period, we realize how serious had been the
+      political retrogression, how grave the danger that the stream of human
+      life might come to stagnate in Europe, as it had long since stagnated in
+      Asia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two mighty agents, cooperating in their opposite ways to prevent any such
+      disaster, were already entering upon the scene. The first was the
+      colonization of the empire by Germanic tribes already far advanced beyond
+      savagery, already somewhat tinctured with Roman civilization, yet at the
+      same time endowed with an intense spirit of personal and local
+      independence. With this wholesome spirit they were about to refresh and
+      revivify the empire, but at the risk of undoing its work of political
+      organization and reducing it to barbarism. The second was the
+      establishment of the Roman church, an institution capable of holding
+      European society together in spite of a political disintegration that was
+      widespread and long-continued. While wave after wave of Germanic
+      colonization poured over romanized Europe, breaking down old
+      boundary-lines and working sudden and astonishing changes on the map,
+      setting up in every quarter baronies, dukedoms, and kingdoms fermenting
+      with vigorous political life; while for twenty generations this salutary
+      but wild and dangerous work was going on, there was never a moment when
+      the imperial sway of Rome was quite set aside and forgotten, there was
+      never a time when union of some sort was not maintained through the
+      dominion which the church had established over the European mind. When we
+      duly consider this great fact in its relations to what went before and
+      what came after, it is hard to find words fit to express the debt of
+      gratitude which modern civilization owes to the Roman Catholic church.
+      When we think of all the work, big with promise of the future, that went
+      on in those centuries which modern writers in their ignorance used once to
+      set apart and stigmatize as the "Dark Ages"; when we consider how the
+      seeds of what is noblest in modern life were then painfully sown upon the
+      soil which imperial Rome had prepared; when we think of the various work
+      of a Gregory, a Benedict, a Boniface, an Alfred, a Charlemagne; we feel
+      that there is a sense in which the most brilliant achievements of pagan
+      antiquity are dwarfed in comparison with these. Until quite lately,
+      indeed, the student of history has had his attention too narrowly confined
+      to the ages that have been preeminent for literature and art&mdash;the
+      so-called classical ages&mdash;and thus his sense of historical
+      perspective has been impaired. When Mr. Freeman uses Gregory of Tours as a
+      text-book, he shows that he realizes how an epoch may be none the less
+      portentous though it has not had a Tacitus to describe it, and certainly
+      no part of history is more full of human interest than the troubled period
+      in which the powerful streams of Teutonic life pouring into Roman Europe
+      were curbed in their destructiveness and guided to noble ends by the
+      Catholic church. Out of the interaction between these two mighty agents
+      has come the political system of the modern world. The moment when this
+      interaction might have seemed on the point of reaching a complete and
+      harmonious result was the glorious thirteenth century, the culminating
+      moment of the Holy Roman Empire. Then, as in the times of Caesar or
+      Trajan, there might have seemed to be a union among civilized men, in
+      which the separate life of individuals and localities was not submerged.
+      In that golden age alike of feudal system, of empire, and of church, there
+      were to be seen the greatest monarchs, in fullest sympathy with their
+      peoples, that Christendom has known,&mdash;an Edward I., a St. Louis, a
+      Frederick II. Then when in the pontificates of Innocent III. and his
+      successors the Roman church reached its apogee, the religious yearnings of
+      men sought expression in the sublimest architecture the world has seen.
+      Then Aquinas summed up in his profound speculations the substance of
+      Catholic theology, and while the morning twilight of modern science might
+      be discerned in the treatises of Roger Bacon, while wandering minstrelsy
+      revealed the treasures of modern speech, soon to be wrought under the
+      hands of Dante and Chaucer into forms of exquisite beauty, the sacred
+      fervour of the apostolic ages found itself renewed in the tender and
+      mystic piety of St. Francis of Assisi. It was a wonderful time, but after
+      all less memorable as the culmination of mediaeval empire and mediaeval
+      church than as the dawning of the new era in which we live to-day, and in
+      which the development of human society proceeds in accordance with more
+      potent methods than those devised by the genius of pagan or Christian
+      Rome. [[Sidenote: The German invaders and the Roman church] [[Sidenote:
+      The wonderful thirteenth century]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the origin of these more potent methods we must look back to the early
+      ages of the Teutonic people; for their development and application on a
+      grand scale we must look chiefly to the history of that most Teutonic of
+      peoples in its institutions, though perhaps not more than half-Teutonic in
+      blood, the English, with their descendants in the New World. The third
+      method of nation-making may be called the Teutonic or preeminently the
+      English method. It differs from the Oriental and Roman methods which we
+      have been considering in a feature of most profound significance; it
+      contains the principle of representation. For this reason, though like all
+      nation-making it was in its early stages attended with war and conquest,
+      it nevertheless does not necessarily require war and conquest in order to
+      be put into operation. Of the other two methods war was an essential part.
+      In the typical Oriental nation, such as Assyria or Persia, we see a
+      conquering tribe holding down a number of vanquished peoples, and treating
+      them like slaves: here the nation is very imperfectly made, and its
+      government is subject to sudden and violent changes. In the Roman empire
+      we see a conquering people hold sway over a number of vanquished peoples,
+      but instead of treating them like slaves, it gradually makes them its
+      equals before the law; here the resulting political body is much more
+      nearly a nation, and its government is much more stable. A Lydian of the
+      fifth century before Christ felt no sense of allegiance to the Persian
+      master who simply robbed and abused him; but the Gaul of the fifth century
+      after Christ was proud of the name of Roman and ready to fight for the
+      empire of which he was a citizen. We have seen, nevertheless, that for
+      want of representation the Roman method failed when applied to an immense
+      territory, and the government tended to become more and more despotic, to
+      revert toward the Oriental type. Now of the English or Teutonic method, I
+      say, war is not an essential part; for where representative government is
+      once established, it is possible for a great nation to be formed by the
+      peaceful coalescence of neighbouring states, or by their union into a
+      federal body. An instance of the former was the coalescence of England and
+      Scotland effected early in the eighteenth century after ages of mutual
+      hostility; for instances of the latter we have Switzerland and the United
+      States. Now federalism, though its rise and establishment may be
+      incidentally accompanied by warfare, is nevertheless in spirit pacific.
+      Conquest in the Oriental sense is quite incompatible with it; conquest in
+      the Roman sense is hardly less so. At the close of our Civil War there
+      were now and then zealous people to be found who thought that the southern
+      states ought to be treated as conquered territory, governed by prefects
+      sent from Washington, and held down by military force for a generation or
+      so. Let us hope that there are few to-day who can fail to see that such a
+      course would have been fraught with almost as much danger as the secession
+      movement itself. At least it would have been a hasty confession, quite
+      uncalled for and quite untrue, that American federalism had thus far
+      proved itself incompetent,&mdash;that we had indeed preserved our national
+      unity, but only at the frightful cost of sinking to a lower plane of
+      national life. [[Sidenote: The English method of nation-making]
+      [[Sidenote: Pacific tendencies of federalism]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But federalism, with its pacific implications, was not an invention of the
+      Teutonic mind. The idea was familiar to the city communities of ancient
+      Greece, which, along with their intense love of self-government, felt the
+      need of combined action for warding off external attack. In their Achaian
+      and Aitolian leagues the Greeks made brilliant attempts toward founding a
+      nation upon some higher principle than that of mere conquest, and the
+      history of these attempts is exceedingly interesting and instructive. They
+      failed for lack of the principle of representation, which was practically
+      unknown to the world until introduced by the Teutonic colonizers of the
+      Roman empire. Until the idea of power delegated by the people had become
+      familiar to men's minds in its practical bearings, it was impossible to
+      create a great nation without crushing out the political life in some of
+      its parts. Some centre of power was sure to absorb all the political life,
+      and grow at the expense of the outlying parts, until the result was a
+      centralized despotism. Hence it came to be one of the commonplace
+      assumptions of political writers that republics must be small, that free
+      government is practicable only in a confined area, and that the only
+      strong and durable government, capable of maintaining order throughout a
+      vast territory, is some form of absolute monarchy. [[Sidenote: Fallacy of
+      the notion that republics must be small]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was quite natural that people should formerly have held this opinion,
+      and it is indeed not yet quite obsolete, but its fallaciousness will
+      become more and more apparent as American history is better understood.
+      Our experience has now so far widened that we can see that despotism is
+      not the strongest but wellnigh the weakest form of government; that
+      centralized administrations, like that of the Roman empire, have fallen to
+      pieces, not because of too much but because of too little freedom; and
+      that the only perdurable government must be that which succeeds in
+      achieving national unity on a grand scale, without weakening the sense of
+      personal and local independence. For in the body politic this spirit of
+      freedom is as the red corpuscles in the blood; it carries the life with
+      it. It makes the difference between a society of self-respecting men and
+      women and a society of puppets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Your nation may have art, poetry, and science, all the refinements of
+      civilized life, all the comforts and safeguards that human ingenuity can
+      devise; but if it lose this spirit of personal and local independence, it
+      is doomed and deserves its doom. As President Cleveland has well said, it
+      is not the business of a government to support its people, but of the
+      people to support their government; and once to lose sight of this vital
+      truth is as dangerous as to trifle with some stealthy narcotic poison. Of
+      the two opposite perils which have perpetually threatened the welfare of
+      political society&mdash;anarchy on the one hand, loss of self-government
+      on the other&mdash;Jefferson was right in maintaining that the latter is
+      really the more to be dreaded because its beginnings are so terribly
+      insidious. Many will understand what is meant by a threat of secession,
+      where few take heed of the baneful principle involved in a Texas
+      Seed-bill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That the American people are still fairly alive to the importance of these
+      considerations, is due to the weary ages of struggle in which our
+      forefathers have manfully contended for the right of self-government. From
+      the days of Arminius and Civilis in the wilds of lower Germany to the days
+      of Franklin and Jefferson in Independence Hall, we have been engaged in
+      this struggle, not without some toughening of our political fibre, not
+      without some refining of our moral sense. Not among our English
+      forefathers only, but among all the peoples of mediaeval and modern Europe
+      has the struggle gone on, with various and instructive results. In all
+      parts of romanized Europe invaded and colonized by Teutonic tribes,
+      self-government attempted to spring up. What may have been the origin of
+      the idea of representation we do not know; like most origins, it seems
+      lost in the prehistoric darkness. Wherever we find Teutonic tribes
+      settling down over a wide area, we find them holding their primary
+      assemblies, usually their annual March-meetings, like those in which Mr.
+      Hosea Biglow and others like him have figured. Everywhere, too, we find
+      some attempt at representative assemblies, based on the principle of the
+      three estates, clergy, nobles, and commons. But nowhere save in England
+      does the representative principle become firmly established, at first in
+      county-meetings, afterward in a national parliament limiting the powers of
+      the national monarch as the primary tribal assembly had limited the powers
+      of the tribal chief. It is for this reason that we must call the method of
+      nation-making by means of a representative assembly the English method.
+      While the idea of representation was perhaps the common property of the
+      Teutonic tribes, it was only in England that it was successfully put into
+      practice and became the dominant political idea. We may therefore agree
+      with Dr. Stubbs that in its political development England is the most
+      Teutonic of all European countries,&mdash;the country which in becoming a
+      great nation has most fully preserved the local independence so
+      characteristic of the ancient Germans. The reasons for this are
+      complicated, and to try to assign them all would needlessly encumber our
+      exposition. But there is one that is apparent and extremely instructive.
+      There is sometimes a great advantage in being able to plant political
+      institutions in a virgin soil, where they run no risk of being modified or
+      perhaps metamorphosed through contact with rival institutions. In America
+      the Teutonic idea has been worked out even more completely than in
+      Britain; and so far as institutions are concerned, our English forefathers
+      settled here as in an empty country. They were not obliged to modify their
+      political ideas so as to bring them into harmony with those of the
+      Indians; the disparity in civilization was so great that the Indians were
+      simply thrust aside, along with the wolves and buffaloes. [[Sidenote:
+      Teutonic March-meetings and representative assemblies]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This illustration will help us to understand the peculiar features of the
+      Teutonic settlement of Britain. Whether the English invaders really slew
+      all the romanized Kelts who dwelt in the island, except those who found
+      refuge in the mountains of Cumberland, Wales, and Cornwall, or fled across
+      the channel to Brittany, we need not seek to decide. It is enough to point
+      out one respect in which the Teutonic conquest was immeasurably more
+      complete in Britain than in any other part of the empire. Everywhere else
+      the tribes who settled upon Roman soil&mdash;the Goths, Vandals, Suevi,
+      and Burgundians&mdash;were christianized, and so to some extent romanized,
+      before they came to take possession. Even the more distant Franks had been
+      converted to Christianity before they had completed their conquest of
+      Gaul. Everywhere except in Britain, therefore, the conquerors had already
+      imbibed Roman ideas, and the authority of Rome was in a certain sense
+      acknowledged. There was no break in the continuity of political events. In
+      Britain, on the other hand, there was a complete break, so that while on
+      the continent the fifth and sixth centuries are seen in the full midday
+      light of history, in Britain they have lapsed into the twilight of
+      half-legendary tradition. The Saxon and English tribes, coming from the
+      remote wilds of northern Germany, whither Roman missionaries had not yet
+      penetrated, still worshipped Thor and Wodan; and their conquest of Britain
+      was effected with such deadly thoroughness that Christianity was destroyed
+      there, or lingered only in sequestered nooks. A land once christianized
+      thus actually fell back into paganism, so that the work of converting it
+      to Christianity had to be done over again. From the landing of heathen
+      Hengest on the isle of Thanet to the landing of Augustine and his monks on
+      the same spot, one hundred and forty-eight years elapsed, during which
+      English institutions found time to take deep root in British soil with
+      scarcely more interference, as to essential points, than in American soil
+      twelve centuries afterward. [[Sidenote: Peculiarity of the Teutonic
+      conquest of Britain]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The century and a half between 449 and 597 is therefore one of the most
+      important epochs in the history of the people that speak the English
+      language. Before settling in Britain our forefathers had been tribes in
+      the upper stages of barbarism; now they began the process of coalescence
+      into a nation in which the principle of self-government should be retained
+      and developed. The township and its town-meeting we find there, as later
+      in New England. The county-meeting we also find, while the county is a
+      little state in itself and not a mere administrative district. And in this
+      county-meeting we may observe a singular feature, something never seen
+      before in the world, something destined to work out vaster political
+      results than Caesar ever dreamed of. This county-meeting is not a primary
+      assembly; all the freemen from all the townships cannot leave their homes
+      and their daily business to attend it. Nor is it merely an assembly of
+      notables, attended by the most important men of the neighbourhood. It is a
+      representative assembly, attended by select men from each township. We may
+      see in it the germ of the British parliament and of the American congress,
+      as indeed of all modern legislative bodies, for it is a most suggestive
+      commentary upon what we are saying that in all other countries which have
+      legislatures, they have been copied, within quite recent times, from
+      English or American models. We can seldom if ever fix a date for the
+      beginning of anything, and we can by no means fix a date for the beginning
+      of representative assemblies in England. We can only say that where we
+      first find traces of county organization, we find traces of
+      representation. Clearly, if the English conquerors of Britain had left the
+      framework of Roman institutions standing there, as it remained standing in
+      Gaul, there would have been great danger of this principle of
+      representation not surviving. It would most likely have been crushed in
+      its callow infancy. The conquerors would insensibly have fallen into the
+      Roman way of doing things, as they did in Gaul. [[Sidenote: Survival and
+      development of Teutonic representative assembly in England]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the start, then, we find the English nationality growing up under
+      very different conditions from those which obtained in other parts of
+      Europe. So far as institutions are concerned, Teutonism was less modified
+      in England than in the German fatherland itself, For the gradual conquest
+      and Christianization of Germany which began with Charles the Great, and
+      went on until in the thirteenth century the frontier had advanced eastward
+      to the Vistula, entailed to a certain extent the romanization of Germany.
+      For a thousand years after Charles the Great, the political head of
+      Germany was also the political head of the Holy Roman Empire, and the
+      civil and criminal code by which the daily life of the modern German
+      citizen is regulated is based upon the jurisprudence of Rome. Nothing,
+      perhaps, could illustrate more forcibly than this sheer contrast the
+      peculiarly Teutonic character of English civilization. Between the eighth
+      and the eleventh centuries, when the formation of English nationality was
+      approaching completion, it received a fresh and powerful infusion of
+      Teutonism in the swarms of heathen Northmen or Danes who occupied the
+      eastern coasts, struggled long for the supremacy, and gradually becoming
+      christianized, for a moment succeeded in seizing the crown. Of the
+      invasion of partially romanized Northmen from Normandy which followed soon
+      after, and which has so profoundly affected English society and English
+      speech, we need notice here but two conspicuous features. First, it
+      increased the power of the crown and the clergy, brought all England more
+      than ever under one law, and strengthened the feeling of nationality. It
+      thus made England a formidable military power, while at the same time it
+      brought her into closer relations with continental Europe than she had
+      held since the fourth century. Secondly, by superposing a new feudal
+      nobility as the upper stratum of society, it transformed the Old-English
+      thanehood into the finest middle-class of rural gentry and yeomanry that
+      has ever existed in any country; a point of especial interest to
+      Americans, since it was in this stratum of society that the two most
+      powerful streams of English migration to America&mdash;the Virginia stream
+      and the New England stream&mdash;alike had their source. [[Sidenote:
+      Primitive Teutonic institutions less modified in England than in Germany]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By the thirteenth century the increasing power and pretensions of the
+      crown, as the unification of English nationality went on, brought about a
+      result unlike anything known on the continent of Europe; it brought about
+      a resistless coalition between the great nobles, the rural gentry and
+      yeomanry, and the burghers of the towns, for the purpose of curbing
+      royalty, arresting the progress of centralization, and setting up
+      representative government on a truly national scale. This grand result was
+      partly due to peculiar circumstances which had their origin in the Norman
+      conquest; but it was largely due to the political habits generated by long
+      experience of local representative assemblies,&mdash;habits which made it
+      comparatively easy for different classes of society to find their voice
+      and use it for the attainment of ends in common. On the continent of
+      Europe the encroaching sovereign had to contend with here and there an
+      arrogant vassal, here and there a high-spirited and rebellious town; in
+      England, in this first great crisis of popular government, he found
+      himself confronted by a united people. The fruits of the grand combination
+      were <i>first</i>, the wresting of Magna Charta from King John in 1215,
+      and <i>secondly</i>, the meeting of the first House of Commons in 1265.
+      Four years of civil war were required to secure these noble results. The
+      Barons' War, of the years 1263 to 1267, was an event of the same order of
+      importance as the Great Rebellion of the seventeenth century and the
+      American Revolution; and among the founders of that political freedom
+      which is enjoyed to-day by all English-speaking people, the name of Simon
+      de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, deserves a place in our grateful
+      remembrance beside the names of Cromwell and Washington. Simon's great
+      victory at Lewes in 1264 must rank with Naseby and Yorktown. The work
+      begun by his House of Commons was the same work that has continued to go
+      on without essential interruption down to the days of Cleveland and
+      Gladstone. The fundamental principle of political freedom is "no taxation
+      without representation"; you must not take a farthing of my money without
+      consulting my wishes as to the use that shall be made of it. Only when
+      this principle of justice was first practically recognized, did government
+      begin to divorce itself from the primitive bestial barbaric system of
+      tyranny and plunder, and to ally itself with the forces that in the
+      fulness of time are to bring peace on earth and good will to men. Of all
+      dates in history, therefore, there is none more fit to be commemorated
+      than 1265; for in that year there was first asserted and applied at
+      Westminster, on a national scale, that fundamental principle of "no
+      taxation without representation," that innermost kernel of the English
+      Idea, which the Stamp Act Congress defended at New York exactly five
+      hundred years afterward. When we think of these dates, by the way, we
+      realize the import of the saying that in the sight of the Lord a thousand
+      years are but as a day, and we feel that the work of the Lord cannot be
+      done by the listless or the slothful. So much time and so much strife by
+      sea and land has it taken to secure beyond peradventure the boon to
+      mankind for which Earl Simon gave up his noble life on the field of
+      Evesham! Nor without unremitting watchfulness can we be sure that the day
+      of peril is yet past. From kings, indeed, we have no more to fear; they
+      have come to be as spooks and bogies of the nursery. But the gravest
+      dangers are those which present themselves in new forms, against which
+      people's minds have not yet been fortified with traditional sentiments and
+      phrases. The inherited predatory tendency of men to seize upon the fruits
+      of other people's labour is still very strong, and while we have nothing
+      more to fear from kings, we may yet have trouble enough from commercial
+      monopolies and favoured industries, marching to the polls their hordes of
+      bribed retainers. Well indeed has it been said that eternal vigilance is
+      the price of liberty. God never meant that in this fair but treacherous
+      world in which He has placed us we should earn our salvation without
+      steadfast labour. [Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To return to Earl Simon, we see that it was just in that wonderful
+      thirteenth century, when the Roman idea of government might seem to have
+      been attaining its richest and most fruitful development, that the richer
+      and more fruitful English idea first became incarnate in the political
+      constitution of a great and rapidly growing nation. It was not long before
+      the struggle between the Roman Idea and the English Idea, clothed in
+      various forms, became the dominating issue in European history. We have
+      now to observe the rise of modern nationalities, as new centres of
+      political life, out of the various provinces of the Roman world. In the
+      course of this development the Teutonic representative assembly is at
+      first everywhere discernible, in some form or other, as in the Spanish
+      Cortes or the States-General of France, but on the continent it generally
+      dies out. Only in such nooks as Switzerland and the Netherlands does it
+      survive. In the great nations it succumbs before the encroachments of the
+      crown. The comparatively novel Teutonic idea of power delegated by the
+      people to their representatives had not become deeply enough rooted in the
+      political soil of the continent; and accordingly we find it more and more
+      disused and at length almost forgotten, while the old and deeply rooted
+      Roman idea of power delegated by the governing body to its lieutenants and
+      prefects usurps its place. Let us observe some of the most striking
+      features of this growth of modern nationalities. [[Sidenote: Conflict
+      between Roman Idea and English Idea begins to become clearly visible in
+      the thirteenth century]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The reader of medieval history cannot fail to be impressed with the
+      suddenness with which the culmination of the Holy Roman Empire, in the
+      thirteenth century, was followed by a swift decline. The imperial position
+      of the Hapsburgs was far less splendid than that of the Hohenstauffen; it
+      rapidly became more German and less European, until by and by people began
+      to forget what the empire originally meant. The change which came over the
+      papacy was even more remarkable. The grandchildren of the men who had
+      witnessed the spectacle of a king of France and a king of England humbled
+      at the feet of Innocent III., the children of the men who had found the
+      gigantic powers of a Frederick II. unequal to the task of curbing the
+      papacy, now beheld the successors of St. Peter carried away to Avignon,
+      there to be kept for seventy years under the supervision of the kings of
+      France. Henceforth the glory of the papacy in its political aspect was to
+      be but the faint shadow of that with which it had shone before. This
+      sudden change in its position showed that the medieval dream of a
+      world-empire was passing away, and that new powers were coming uppermost
+      in the shape of modern nationalities with their national sovereigns. So
+      long as these nationalities were in the weakness of their early formation,
+      it was possible for pope and emperor to assert, and sometimes to come near
+      maintaining, universal supremacy. But the time was now at hand when kings
+      could assert their independence of the pope, while the emperor was fast
+      sinking to be merely one among kings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As modern kingdoms thus grew at the expense of empire and papacy above, so
+      they also grew at the expense of feudal dukedoms, earldoms, and baronies
+      below. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were as fatal to feudalism
+      as to world-empire and world-church. A series of wars occurring at this
+      time were especially remarkable for the wholesale slaughter of the feudal
+      nobility, whether on the field or under the headsman's axe. This was a
+      conspicuous feature of the feuds of the Trastamare in Spain, of the
+      English invasions of France, followed by the quarrel between Burgundians
+      and Armagnacs, and of the great war of the Roses in England. So
+      thorough-going was the butchery in England, for example, that only
+      twenty-nine lay peers could be found to sit in the first parliament of
+      Henry VII in 1485. The old nobility was almost annihilated, both in person
+      and in property; for along with the slaughter there went wholesale
+      confiscation, and this added greatly to the disposable wealth of the
+      crown. The case was essentially similar in France and Spain. In all three
+      countries the beginning of the sixteenth century saw the power of the
+      crown increased and increasing. Its vast accessions of wealth made it more
+      independent of legislative assemblies, and at the same time enabled it to
+      make the baronage more subservient in character by filling up the vacant
+      places with new creations of its own. Through the turbulent history of the
+      next two centuries, we see the royal power aiming at unchecked supremacy
+      and in the principal instances attaining it except in England. Absolute
+      despotism was reached first in Spain, under Philip II.; in France it was
+      reached a century later, under Louis XIV.; and at about the same time in
+      the hereditary estates of Austria; while over all the Italian and German
+      soil of the disorganized empire, except among the glaciers of Switzerland
+      and the dykes of the Netherlands, the play of political forces had set up
+      a host of petty tyrannies which aped the morals and manners of the great
+      autocrats at Paris and Madrid and Vienna. [[Sidenote: Increasing power of
+      the crown]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As we look back over this growth of modern monarchy, we cannot but be
+      struck with the immense practical difficulty of creating a strong
+      nationality without sacrificing self-government. Powerful, indeed, is the
+      tendency toward over-centralization, toward stagnation, toward political
+      death. Powerful is the tendency to revert to the Roman, if not to the
+      Oriental method. As often as we reflect upon the general state of things
+      at the end of the seventeenth century&mdash;the dreadful ignorance and
+      misery which prevailed among most of the people of continental Europe, and
+      apparently without hope of remedy&mdash;so often must we be impressed anew
+      with the stupendous significance of the part played by self-governing
+      England in overcoming dangers which have threatened the very existence of
+      modern civilization. It is not too much to say that in the seventeenth
+      century the entire political future of mankind was staked upon the
+      questions that were at issue in England. To keep the sacred flame of
+      liberty alive required such a rare and wonderful concurrence of conditions
+      that, had our forefathers then succumbed in the strife, it is hard to
+      imagine how or where the failure could have been repaired. Some of these
+      conditions we have already considered; let us now observe one of the most
+      important of all. Let us note the part played by that most tremendous of
+      social forces, religious sentiment, in its relation to the political
+      circumstances which we have passed in review. If we ask why it was that
+      among modern nations absolute despotism was soonest and most completely
+      established in Spain, we find it instructive to observe that the
+      circumstances under which the Spanish monarchy grew up, during centuries
+      of deadly struggle with the Mussulman, were such as to enlist the
+      religious sentiment on the side of despotic methods in church and state.
+      It becomes interesting, then, to observe by contrast how it was that in
+      England the dominant religious sentiment came to be enlisted on the side
+      of political freedom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In such an inquiry we have nothing to do with the truth or falsity of any
+      system of doctrines, whether Catholic or Protestant. The legitimate
+      purposes of the historian do not require him to intrude upon the province
+      of the theologian. Our business is to trace the sequence of political
+      cause and effect. Nor shall we get much help from crude sweeping
+      statements which set forth Catholicism as invariably the enemy and
+      Protestantism as invariably the ally of human liberty. The Catholic has a
+      right to be offended at statements which would involve a Hildebrand or a
+      St. Francis in the same historical judgment with a Sigismund or a
+      Torquemada. The character of ecclesiastical as of all other institutions
+      has varied with the character of the men who have worked them and the
+      varying needs of the times and places in which they have been worked; and
+      our intense feeling of the gratitude we owe to English Puritanism need in
+      nowise diminish the enthusiasm with which we praise the glorious work of
+      the mediaeval church. It is the duty of the historian to learn how to
+      limit and qualify his words of blame or approval; for so curiously is
+      human nature compounded of strength and weakness that the best of human
+      institutions are likely to be infected with some germs of vice or folly.
+      [[Sidenote: Beginnings of Protestantism in the thirteenth century]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of no human institution is this more true than of the great medieval
+      church of Gregory and Innocent when viewed in the light of its claims to
+      unlimited temporal and spiritual sovereignty. In striking down the
+      headship of the emperors, it would have reduced Europe to a sort of
+      Oriental caliphate, had it not been checked by the rising spirit of
+      nationality already referred to. But there was another and even mightier
+      agency coming in to curb its undue pretensions to absolute sovereignty.
+      That same thirteenth century which witnessed the culmination of its power
+      witnessed also the first bold and determined manifestation of the
+      Protestant temper of revolt against spiritual despotism. It was long
+      before this that the earliest Protestant heresy had percolated into
+      Europe, having its source, like so many other heresies, in that eastern
+      world where the stimulating thought of the Greeks busied itself with the
+      ancient theologies of Asia. From Armenia in the eighth century came the
+      Manichaean sect of Paulicians into Thrace, and for twenty generations
+      played a considerable part in the history of the Eastern Empire. In the
+      Bulgarian tongue they were known as Bogomilians, or men constant in
+      prayer. In Greek they were called Cathari, or "Puritans." They accepted
+      the New Testament, but set little store by the Old; they laughed at
+      transubstantiation, denied any mystical efficiency to baptism, frowned
+      upon image-worship as no better than idolatry, despised the intercession
+      of saints, and condemned the worship of the Virgin Mary. As for the symbol
+      of the cross, they scornfully asked, "If any man slew the son of a king
+      with a bit of wood, how could this piece of wood be dear to the king?"
+      Their ecclesiastical government was in the main presbyterian, and in
+      politics they showed a decided leaning toward democracy. They wore long
+      faces, looked askance at frivolous amusements, and were terribly in
+      earnest. Of the more obscure pages of mediaeval history, none are fuller
+      of interest than those in which we decipher the westward progress of these
+      sturdy heretics through the Balkan peninsula into Italy, and thence into
+      southern France, where toward the end of the twelfth century we find their
+      ideas coming to full blossom in the great Albigensian heresy. It was no
+      light affair to assault the church in the days of Innocent III. The
+      terrible crusade against the Albigenses, beginning in 1207, was the joint
+      work of the most powerful of popes and one of the most powerful of French
+      kings. On the part of Innocent it was the stamping out of a revolt that
+      threatened the very existence of the Catholic hierarchy; on the part of
+      Philip Augustus it was the suppression of those too independent vassals
+      the Counts of Toulouse, and the decisive subjection of the southern
+      provinces to the government at Paris. Nowhere in European history do we
+      read a more frightful story than that which tells of the blazing fires
+      which consumed thousand after thousand of the most intelligent and thrifty
+      people in France. It was now that the Holy Inquisition came into
+      existence, and after forty years of slaughter these Albigensian Cathari or
+      Puritans seemed exterminated. The practice of burning heretics, first
+      enacted by statute in Aragon in 1197, was adopted in most parts of Europe
+      during the thirteenth century, but in England not until the beginning of
+      the fifteenth. The Inquisition was never established in England. Edward
+      II. attempted to introduce it in 1311 for the purpose of suppressing the
+      Templars, but his utter failure showed that the instinct of
+      self-government was too strong in the English people to tolerate the
+      entrusting of so much power over men's lives to agents of the papacy.
+      Mediaeval England was ignorant and bigoted enough, but under a
+      representative government which so strongly permeated society, it was
+      impossible to set the machinery of repression to work with such deadly
+      thoroughness as it worked under the guidance of Roman methods. When we
+      read the history of persecution in England, the story in itself is
+      dreadful enough; but when we compare it with the horrors enacted in other
+      countries, we arrive at some startling results. During the two centuries
+      of English persecution, from Henry IV. to James I., some 400 persons were
+      burned at the stake, and three-fourths of these cases occurred in 1555-57,
+      the last three years of Mary Tudor. Now in a single province of Spain, in
+      the single year 1482, about 2000 persons were burned. The lowest estimates
+      of the number slain for heresy in the Netherlands in the course of the
+      sixteenth century place it at 75,000. Very likely such figures are in many
+      cases grossly exaggerated. But after making due allowance for this, the
+      contrast is sufficiently impressive. In England the persecution of
+      heretics was feeble and spasmodic, and only at one moment rose to anything
+      like the appalling vigour which ordinarily characterized it in countries
+      where the Inquisition was firmly established. Now among the victims of
+      religious persecution must necessarily be found an unusual proportion of
+      men and women more independent than the average in their thinking, and
+      more bold than the average in uttering their thoughts. The Inquisition was
+      a diabolical winnowing machine for removing from society the most flexible
+      minds and the stoutest hearts; and among every people in which it was
+      established for a length of time it wrought serious damage to the national
+      character. It ruined the fair promise of Spain, and inflicted incalculable
+      detriment upon the fortunes of France. No nation could afford to deprive
+      itself of such a valuable element in its political life as was furnished
+      in the thirteenth century by the intelligent and sturdy Cathari of
+      southern Gaul. [[Sidenote: The Cathari, or Puritans of the Eastern Empire]
+      [[Sidenote: The Albigenses] [[Sidenote: Effects of persecution; its
+      feebleness in England]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The spirit of revolt against the hierarchy, though broken and repressed
+      thus terribly by the measures of Innocent III., continued to live on
+      obscurely in sequestered spots, in the mountains of Savoy, and Bosnia, and
+      Bohemia, ready on occasion to spring into fresh and vigorous life. In the
+      following century Protestant ideas were rapidly germinating in England,
+      alike in baron's castle, in yeoman's farmstead, in citizen's shop, in the
+      cloistered walks of the monastery. Henry Knighton, writing in the time of
+      Richard II., declares, with the exaggeration of impatience, that every
+      second man you met was a Lollard, or "babbler," for such was the nickname
+      given to these free-thinkers, of whom the most eminent was John Wyclif,
+      professor at Oxford, and rector of Lutterworth, greatest scholar of the
+      age. [[Sidenote: Wyclif and the Lollards]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The career of this man is a striking commentary upon the difference
+      between England and continental Europe in the Middle Ages. Wyclif denied
+      transubstantiation, disapproved of auricular confession, opposed the
+      payment of Peter's pence, taught that kings should not be subject to
+      prelates, translated the Bible into English and circulated it among the
+      people, and even denounced the reigning pope as Antichrist; yet he was not
+      put to death, because there was as yet no act of parliament for the
+      burning of heretics, and in England things must be done according to the
+      laws which the people had made. <a href="#linknote-1" name="linknoteref-1"
+      id="linknoteref-1"><small>1</small></a> Pope Gregory XI. issued five bulls
+      against him, addressed to the king, the archbishop of Canterbury, and the
+      university of Oxford; but their dictatorial tone offended the national
+      feeling, and no heed was paid to them. Seventeen years after Wyclif's
+      death, the statute for burning heretics was passed, and the persecution of
+      Lollards began. It was feeble and ineffectual, however. Lollardism was
+      never trampled out in England as Catharism was trampled out in France.
+      Tracts of Wyclif and passages from his translation of the Bible were
+      copied by hand and secretly passed about to be read on Sundays in the
+      manor-house, or by the cottage fireside after the day's toil was over. The
+      work went on quietly, but not the less effectively, until when the papal
+      authority was defied by Henry VIII., it soon became apparent that England
+      was half-Protestant already. It then appeared also that in this
+      Reformation there were two forces cooperating,&mdash;the sentiment of
+      national independence which would not brook dictation from Rome, and the
+      Puritan sentiment of revolt against the hierarchy in general. The first
+      sentiment had found expression again and again in refusals to pay tribute
+      to Rome, in defiance of papal bulls, and in the famous statutes of <i>praemunire</i>,
+      which made it a criminal offence to acknowledge any authority in England
+      higher than the crown. The revolt of Henry VIII. was simply the carrying
+      out of these acts of Edward I. and Edward III. to their logical
+      conclusion. It completed the detachment of England from the Holy Roman
+      Empire, and made her free of all the world. Its intent was political
+      rather than religious. Henry, who wrote against Martin Luther, was far
+      from wishing to make England a Protestant country. Elizabeth, who differed
+      from her father in not caring a straw for theology, was by temperament and
+      policy conservative. Yet England could not cease to be Papist without
+      ceasing in some measure to be Catholic; nor could she in that day carry on
+      war against Spain without becoming a leading champion of Protestantism.
+      The changes in creed and ritual wrought by the government during this
+      period were cautious and skilful; and the resulting church of England,
+      with its long line of learned and liberal divines, has played a noble part
+      in history. [[Sidenote: Political character of Henry VIII's revolt against
+      Rome]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But along with this moderate Protestantism espoused by the English
+      government, as consequent upon the assertion of English national
+      independence, there grew up the fierce uncompromising democratic
+      Protestantism of which the persecuted Lollards had sown the seeds. This
+      was not the work of government. [[Sidenote: The yeoman, Hugh Latimer]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By the side of Henry VIII. stands the sublime figure of Hugh Latimer, most
+      dauntless of preachers, the one man before whose stern rebuke the
+      headstrong and masterful Tudor monarch quailed. It was Latimer that
+      renewed the work of Wyclif. and in his life as well as in his martyrdom,&mdash;to
+      use his own words of good cheer uttered while the fagots were kindling
+      around him,&mdash;lighted "such a candle in England as by God's grace
+      shall never be put out." This indomitable man belonged to that
+      middle-class of self-governing, self-respecting yeomanry that has been the
+      glory of free England and free America. He was one of the sturdy race that
+      overthrew French chivalry at Crecy and twice drove the soldiery of a
+      tyrant down the slope of Bunker Hill. In boyhood he worked on his father's
+      farm and helped his mother to milk the thirty kine; he practised archery
+      on the village green, studied in the village school, went to Cambridge,
+      and became the foremost preacher of Christendom. Now the most thorough and
+      radical work of the English Reformation was done by this class of men of
+      which Latimer was the type. It was work that was national in its scope,
+      arousing to fervent heat the strong religious and moral sentiment of the
+      people, and hence it soon quite outran the cautious and conservative
+      policy of the government, and tended to introduce changes extremely
+      distasteful to those who wished to keep England as nearly Catholic as was
+      consistent with independence of the pope. Hence before the end of
+      Elizabeth's reign, we find the crown set almost as strongly against
+      Puritanism as against Romanism. Hence, too, when under Elizabeth's
+      successors the great decisive struggle between despotism and liberty was
+      inaugurated, we find all the tremendous force of this newly awakened
+      religious enthusiasm cooperating with the English love of self-government
+      and carrying it under Cromwell to victory. From this fortunate alliance of
+      religious and political forces has come all the noble and fruitful work of
+      the last two centuries in which men of English speech have been labouring
+      for the political regeneration of mankind. But for this alliance of
+      forces, it is quite possible that the fateful seventeenth century might
+      have seen despotism triumphant in England as on the continent of Europe,
+      and the progress of civilization indefinitely arrested. [[Sidenote: The
+      moment of Cromwell's triumph was the most critical moment in history]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In illustration of this possibility, observe what happened in France at
+      the very time when the victorious English tendencies were shaping
+      themselves in the reign of Elizabeth. In France there was a strong
+      Protestant movement, but it had no such independent middle-class to
+      support it as that which existed in England; nor had it been able to
+      profit by such indispensable preliminary work as that which Wyclif had
+      done; the horrible slaughter of the Albigenses had deprived France of the
+      very people who might have played a part in some way analogous to that of
+      the Lollards. Consequently the Protestant movement in France failed to
+      become a national movement. Against the wretched Henry III who would have
+      temporized with it, and the gallant Henry IV who honestly espoused it, the
+      oppressed peasantry and townsmen made common cause by enlisting under the
+      banner of the ultra-Catholic Guises. The mass of the people saw nothing in
+      Protestantism but an idea favoured by the aristocracy and which they could
+      not comprehend. Hence the great king who would have been glad to make
+      France a Protestant country could only obtain his crown by renouncing his
+      religion, while seeking to protect it by his memorable Edict of Nantes.
+      But what a generous despot could grant, a bigoted despot might revoke; and
+      before another century had elapsed, the good work done by Henry IV. was
+      undone by Louis XIV., the Edict of Nantes was set aside, the process of
+      casting out the most valuable political element in the community was
+      carried to completion, and seven percent of the population of France was
+      driven away and added to the Protestant populations of northern Germany
+      and England and America. The gain to these countries and the damage to
+      France was far greater than the mere figures would imply; for in
+      determining the character of a community a hundred selected men and women
+      are more potent than a thousand men and women taken at random. Thus while
+      the Reformation in France reinforced to some extent the noble army of
+      freemen, its triumphs were not to be the triumphs of Frenchmen, but of the
+      race which has known how to enlist under its banner the forces that fight
+      for free thought, free speech, and self-government, and all that these
+      phrases imply. [[Sidenote: Contrast with France; fate of the Huguenots]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In view of these facts we may see how tremendous was the question at stake
+      with the Puritans of the seventeenth century. Everywhere else the Roman
+      idea seemed to have conquered or to be conquering, while they seemed to be
+      left as the forlorn hope of the human race. But from the very day when
+      Oliver Cromwell reached forth his mighty arm to stop the persecutions in
+      Savoy, the victorious English idea began to change the face of things. The
+      next century saw William Pitt allied with Frederick of Prussia to save the
+      work of the Reformation in central Europe and set in motion the train of
+      events that were at last to make the people of the Teutonic fatherland a
+      nation. At that same moment the keenest minds in France were awaking to
+      the fact that in their immediate neighbourhood, separated from them only
+      by a few miles of salt water, was a country where people were equal in the
+      eye of the law. It was the ideas of Locke and Milton, of Vane and Sidney,
+      that, when transplanted into French soil, produced that violent but
+      salutary Revolution which has given fresh life to the European world. And
+      contemporaneously with all this, the American nation came upon the scene,
+      equipped as no other nation had ever been, for the task of combining
+      sovereignty with liberty, indestructible union of the whole with
+      indestructible life in the parts. The English idea has thus come to be
+      more than national, it has become imperial. It has come to rule, and it
+      has come to stay. [[Sidenote: Victory of the English Idea]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We are now in a position to answer the question when the Roman Empire came
+      to an end, in so far as it can be answered at all. It did not come to its
+      end at the hands of an Odovakar in the year 476, or of a Mahomet II in
+      1453, or of a Napoleon in 1806. It has been coming to its end as the Roman
+      idea of nation-making has been at length decisively overcome by the
+      English idea. For such a fact it is impossible to assign a date, because
+      it is not an event but a stage in the endless procession of events. But we
+      can point to landmarks on the way. Of movements significant and prophetic
+      there have been many. The whole course of the Protestant reformation, from
+      the thirteenth century to the nineteenth, is coincident with the transfer
+      of the world's political centre of gravity from the Tiber and the Rhine to
+      the Thames and the Mississippi. The whole career of the men who speak
+      English has within this period been the most potent agency in this
+      transfer. In these gigantic processes of evolution we cannot mark
+      beginnings or endings by years, hardly even by centuries. But among the
+      significant events which prophesied the final triumph of the English over
+      the Roman idea, perhaps the most significant&mdash;the one which marks
+      most incisively the dawning of a new era&mdash;was the migration of
+      English Puritans across the Atlantic Ocean, to repeat in a new environment
+      and on a far grander scale the work which their forefathers had wrought in
+      Britain. The voyage of the Mayflower was not in itself the greatest event
+      in this migration; but it serves to mark the era, and it is only when we
+      study it in the mood awakened by the general considerations here set forth
+      that we can properly estimate the historic importance of the great Puritan
+      Exodus. [[Sidenote: Significance of the Puritan Exodus]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER II. &mdash; THE PURITAN EXODUS.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In the preceding chapter I endeavoured to set forth and illustrate some of
+      the chief causes which have shifted the world's political centre of
+      gravity from the Mediterranean and the Rhine to the Atlantic and the
+      Mississippi; from the men who spoke Latin to the men who speak English. In
+      the course of the exposition we began to catch glimpses of the wonderful
+      significance of the fact that&mdash;among the people who had first
+      suggested the true solution of the difficult problem of making a powerful
+      nation without sacrificing local self-government&mdash;when the supreme
+      day of trial came, the dominant religious sentiment was arrayed on the
+      side of political freedom and against political despotism. If we consider
+      merely the territorial area which it covered, or the numbers of men slain
+      in its battles, the war of the English parliament against Charles I. seems
+      a trivial affair when contrasted with the gigantic but comparatively
+      insignificant work of barbarians like Jinghis or Tamerlane. But if we
+      consider the moral and political issues involved, and the influence of the
+      struggle upon the future welfare of mankind, we soon come to see that
+      there never was a conflict of more world-wide importance than that from
+      which Oliver Cromwell came out victorious. It shattered the monarchical
+      power in England at a time when monarchical power was bearing down all
+      opposition in the other great countries of Europe. It decided that
+      government by the people and for the people should not then perish from
+      the earth. It placed free England in a position of such moral advantage
+      that within another century the English Idea of political life was able to
+      react most powerfully upon continental Europe. It was the study of English
+      institutions by such men as Montesquieu and Turgot, Voltaire and Rousseau,
+      that gave shape and direction to the French Revolution. That violent but
+      wholesome clearing of the air, that tremendous political and moral
+      awakening, which ushered in the nineteenth century in Europe, had its
+      sources in the spirit which animated the preaching of Latimer, the song of
+      Milton, the solemn imagery of Bunyan, the political treatises of Locke and
+      Sidney, the political measures of Hampden and Pym. The noblest type of
+      modern European statesmanship, as represented by Mazzini and Stein, is the
+      spiritual offspring of seventeenth-century Puritanism. To speak of Naseby
+      and Marston Moor as merely English victories would be as absurd as to
+      restrict the significance of Gettysburg to the state of Pennsylvania. If
+      ever there were men who laid down their lives in the cause of all mankind,
+      it was those grim old Ironsides whose watchwords were texts from Holy
+      Writ, whose battle-cries were hymns of praise. [[Sidenote: Influence of
+      Puritanism upon modern Europe]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was to this unwonted alliance of intense religious enthusiasm with the
+      instinct of self-government and the spirit of personal independence that
+      the preservation of English freedom was due. When James I. ascended the
+      English throne, the forces which prepared the Puritan revolt had been
+      slowly and quietly gathering strength among the people for at least two
+      centuries. The work which Wyclif had begun in the fourteenth century had
+      continued to go on in spite of occasional spasmodic attempts to destroy it
+      with the aid of the statute passed in 1401 for the burning of heretics.
+      The Lollards can hardly be said at any time to have constituted a sect,
+      marked off from the established church by the possession of a system of
+      doctrines held in common. The name by which they were known was a nickname
+      which might cover almost any amount of diversity in opinion, like the
+      modern epithets "free-thinker" and "agnostic." The feature which
+      characterized the Lollards in common was a bold spirit of inquiry which
+      led them, in spite of persecution, to read Wyclif's English Bible and call
+      in question such dogmas and rites of the church as did not seem to find
+      warrant in the sacred text. Clad in long robes of coarse red wool,
+      barefoot, with pilgrim's staff in hand, the Lollard preachers fared to and
+      fro among the quaint Gothic towns and shaded hamlets, setting forth the
+      word of God wherever they could find listeners, now in the parish church
+      or under the vaulted roof of the cathedral, now in the churchyard or
+      market-place, or on some green hillside. During the fifteenth century
+      persecution did much to check this open preaching, but passages from
+      Wyclif's tracts and texts from the Bible were copied by hand and passed
+      about among tradesmen and artisans, yeomen and plough-boys, to be pondered
+      over and talked about and learned by heart. It was a new revelation to the
+      English people, this discovery of the Bible. Christ and his disciples
+      seemed to come very near when the beautiful story of the gospels was first
+      read in the familiar speech of every-day life. Heretofore they might well
+      have seemed remote and unreal, just as the school-boy hardly realizes that
+      the Cato and Cassius over whom he puzzles in his Latin lessons were once
+      living men like his father and neighbours, and not mere nominatives
+      governing a verb, or ablatives of means or instrument. Now it became
+      possible for the layman to contrast the pure teachings of Christ with the
+      doctrines and demeanour of the priests and monks to whom the spiritual
+      guidance of Englishmen had been entrusted. Strong and self-respecting men
+      and women, accustomed to manage their own affairs, could not but be
+      profoundly affected by the contrast. [[Sidenote: Work of the Lollards]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While they were thus led more and more to appeal to the Bible as the
+      divine standard of right living and right thinking, at the same time they
+      found in the sacred volume the treasures of a most original and noble
+      literature unrolled before them; stirring history and romantic legend,
+      cosmical theories and priestly injunctions, profound metaphysics and pithy
+      proverbs, psalms of unrivalled grandeur and pastorals of exquisite
+      loveliness, parables fraught with solemn meaning, the mournful wisdom of
+      the preacher, the exultant faith of the apostle, the matchless eloquence
+      of Job and Isaiah, the apocalyptic ecstasy of St. John. At a time when
+      there was as yet no English literature for the common people, this untold
+      wealth of Hebrew literature was implanted in the English mind as in a
+      virgin soil. Great consequences have flowed from the fact that the first
+      truly popular literature in England&mdash;the first which stirred the
+      hearts of all classes of people, and filled their minds with ideal
+      pictures and their every-day speech with apt and telling phrases&mdash;
+      was the literature comprised within the Bible. The superiority of the
+      common English version of the Bible, made in the reign of James I., over
+      all other versions, is a fact generally admitted by competent critics. The
+      sonorous Latin of the Vulgate is very grand, but in sublimity of fervour
+      as in the unconscious simplicity of strength it is surpassed by the
+      English version, which is scarcely if at all inferior to the original,
+      while it remains to-day, and will long remain, the noblest monument of
+      English speech. The reason for this is obvious. The common English version
+      of the Bible was made by men who were not aiming at literary effect, but
+      simply gave natural expression to the feelings which for several
+      generations had clustered around the sacred text. They spoke with the
+      voice of a people, which is more than the voice of the most highly gifted
+      man. They spoke with the voice of a people to whom the Bible had come to
+      mean all that it meant to the men who wrote it. To the Englishmen who
+      listened to Latimer, to the Scotchmen who listened to Knox, the Bible more
+      than filled the place which in modern times is filled by poem and essay,
+      by novel and newspaper and scientific treatise. To its pages they went for
+      daily instruction and comfort, with its strange Semitic names they
+      baptized their children, upon its precepts, too often misunderstood and
+      misapplied, they sought to build up a rule of life that might raise them
+      above the crude and unsatisfying world into which they were born.
+      [[Sidenote: The English version of the Bible]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would be wrong to accredit all this awakening of spiritual life in
+      England to Wyclif and the Lollards, for it was only after the Bible, in
+      the translations of Tyndall and Coverdale, had been made free to the whole
+      English people in the reign of Edward VI. that its significance began to
+      be apparent; and it was only a century later, in the time of Cromwell and
+      Milton, that its full fruition was reached. It was with the Lollards,
+      however, that the spiritual awakening began and was continued until its
+      effects, when they came, were marked by surprising maturity and
+      suddenness. Because the Lollards were not a clearly defined sect, it was
+      hard to trace the manifold ramifications of their work. During the
+      terrible Wars of the Roses, contemporary chroniclers had little or nothing
+      to say about the labours of these humble men, which seemed of less
+      importance than now, when we read them in the light of their world-wide
+      results. From this silence some modern historians have carelessly inferred
+      that the nascent Protestantism of the Lollards had been extinguished by
+      persecution under the Lancastrian kings, and was in nowise continuous with
+      modern English Protestantism. Nothing could be more erroneous. The extent
+      to which the Lollard leaven had permeated all classes of English society
+      was first clearly revealed when Henry VIII. made his domestic affairs the
+      occasion for a revolt against the Papacy. Despot and brute as he was in
+      many ways, Henry had some characteristics which enabled him to get on well
+      with his people. He not only represented the sentiment of national
+      independence, but he had a truly English reverence for the forms of law.
+      In his worst acts he relied upon the support of his Parliament, which he
+      might in various ways cajole or pack, but could not really enslave. In his
+      quarrel with Rome he could have achieved but little, had he not happened
+      to strike a chord of feeling to which the English people, trained by this
+      slow and subtle work of the Lollards, responded quickly and with a
+      vehemence upon which he had not reckoned. As if by magic, the fabric of
+      Romanism was broken to pieces in England, monasteries were suppressed and
+      their abbots hanged, the authority of the Pope was swept away, and there
+      was no powerful party, like that of the Guises in France to make such
+      sweeping measures the occasion for civil war. The whole secret of Henry's
+      swift success lay in the fact that the English people were already more
+      than half Protestant in temper, and needed only an occasion for declaring
+      themselves. Hence, as soon as Catholic Henry died, his youthful son found
+      himself seated on the throne of a Protestant nation. The terrible but
+      feeble persecution which followed under Mary did much to strengthen the
+      extreme Protestant sentiment by allying it with the outraged feeling of
+      national independence. The bloody work of the grand-daughter of Ferdinand
+      and Isabella, the doting wife of Philip II., was rightly felt to be
+      Spanish work; and never, perhaps, did England feel such a sense of relief
+      as on the auspicious day which welcomed to the throne the great Elizabeth,
+      an Englishwoman in every fibre, and whose mother withal was the daughter
+      of a plain country gentleman. But the Marian persecution not only
+      increased the strength of the extreme Protestant sentiment, but indirectly
+      it supplied it with that Calvinistic theology which was to make it
+      indomitable. Of the hundreds of ministers and laymen who fled from England
+      in 1555 and the two following years, a great part found their way to
+      Geneva, and thus came under the immediate personal influence of that man
+      of iron who taught the very doctrines for which their souls were craving,
+      and who was then at the zenith of his power. [[Sidenote: Secret of Henry
+      VIII.'s swift success in his revolt against Rome] [[Sidenote: Effects of
+      the persecution under Mary]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among all the great benefactors of mankind the figure of Calvin is perhaps
+      the least attractive. He was, so to speak, the constitutional lawyer of
+      the Reformation, with vision as clear, with head as cool, with soul as
+      dry, as any old solicitor in rusty black that ever dwelt in chambers in
+      Lincoln's Inn. His sternness was that of the judge who dooms a criminal to
+      the gallows. His theology had much in it that is in striking harmony with
+      modern scientific philosophy, and much in it, too, that the descendants of
+      his Puritan converts have learned to loathe as sheer diabolism. It is hard
+      for us to forgive the man who burned Michael Servetus, even though it was
+      the custom of the time to do such things and the tender-hearted
+      Melanchthon found nothing to blame in it. It is not easy to speak of
+      Calvin with enthusiasm, as it comes natural to speak of the genial,
+      whole-souled, many-sided, mirth-and-song-loving Luther. Nevertheless it
+      would be hard to overrate the debt which mankind owe to Calvin. The
+      spiritual father of Coligny, of William the Silent, and of Cromwell must
+      occupy a foremost rank among the champions of modern democracy. Perhaps
+      not one of the mediaeval popes was more despotic in temper than Calvin;
+      but it is not the less true that the promulgation of his theology was one
+      of the longest steps that mankind have taken toward personal freedom.
+      Calvinism left the individual man alone in the presence of his God. His
+      salvation could not be wrought by priestly ritual, but only by the grace
+      of God abounding in his soul; and wretched creature that he felt himself
+      to be, through the intense moral awakening of which this stern theology
+      was in part the expression, his soul was nevertheless of infinite value,
+      and the possession of it was the subject of an everlasting struggle
+      between the powers of heaven and the powers of hell. In presence of the
+      awful responsibility of life, all distinctions of rank and fortune
+      vanished; prince and pauper were alike the helpless creatures of Jehovah
+      and suppliants for his grace. Calvin did not originate these doctrines; in
+      announcing them he was but setting forth, as he said, the Institutes of
+      the Christian religion; but in emphasizing this aspect of Christianity, in
+      engraving it upon men's minds with that keen-edged logic which he used
+      with such unrivalled skill, Calvin made them feel, as it had perhaps never
+      been felt before, the dignity and importance of the individual human soul.
+      It was a religion fit to inspire men who were to be called upon to fight
+      for freedom, whether in the marshes of the Netherlands or on the moors of
+      Scotland. In a church, moreover, based upon such a theology there was no
+      room for prelacy. Each single church tended to become an independent
+      congregation of worshippers, constituting one of the most effective
+      schools that has ever existed for training men in local self-government.
+      [[Sidenote: Calvin's theology in its political bearings]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When, therefore, upon the news of Elizabeth's accession to the throne, the
+      Protestant refugees made their way back to England, they came as
+      Calvinistic Puritans. Their stay upon the Continent had been short, but it
+      had been just enough to put the finishing touch upon the work that had
+      been going on since the days of Wyclif. Upon such men and their theories
+      Elizabeth could not look with favour. With all her father's despotic
+      temper, Elizabeth possessed her mother's fine tact, and she represented so
+      grandly the feeling of the nation in its life-and-death-struggle with
+      Spain and the pope, that never perhaps in English history has the crown
+      wielded so much real power as during the five-and-forty years of her
+      wonderful reign.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day Elizabeth asked a lady of the court how she contrived to retain
+      her husband's affection. The lady replied that "she had confidence in her
+      husband's understanding and courage, well founded on her own steadfastness
+      not to offend or thwart, but to cherish and obey, whereby she did persuade
+      her husband of her own affection, and in so doing did command his." "Go
+      to, go to, mistress," cried the queen, "You are wisely bent, I find. After
+      such sort do I keep the good will of all my husbands, my good people; for
+      if they did not rest assured of some special love towards them, they would
+      not readily yield me such good obedience." <a href="#linknote-2"
+      name="linknoteref-2" id="linknoteref-2"><small>2</small></a> Such a theory
+      of government might work well in the hands of an Elizabeth, and in the
+      circumstances in which England was then placed; but it could hardly be
+      worked by a successor. The seeds of revolt were already sown. The
+      disposition to curb the sovereign was growing and would surely assert
+      itself as soon as it should have some person less loved and respected than
+      Elizabeth to deal with. The queen in some measure foresaw this, and in the
+      dogged independence and uncompromising enthusiasm of the Puritans she
+      recognized the rock on which the monarchy might dash itself into pieces.
+      She therefore hated the Puritans, and persecuted them zealously with one
+      hand, while circumstances forced her in spite of herself to aid and abet
+      them with the other. She could not maintain herself against Spain without
+      helping the Dutch and the Huguenots; but every soldier she sent across the
+      channel came back, if he came at all, with his head full of the doctrines
+      of Calvin; and these stalwart converts were reinforced by the refugees
+      from France and the Netherlands who came flocking into English towns to
+      set up their thrifty shops and hold prayer-meetings in their humble
+      chapels. To guard the kingdom against the intrigues of Philip and the
+      Guises and the Queen of Scots, it was necessary to choose the most zealous
+      Protestants for the most responsible positions, and such men were more
+      than likely to be Calvinists and Puritans. Elizabeth's great ministers,
+      Burleigh, Walsingham, and Nicholas Bacon, were inclined toward Puritanism;
+      and so were the naval heroes who won the most fruitful victories of that
+      century, by shattering the maritime power of Spain and thus opening the
+      way for Englishmen to colonize North America. If we would realize the
+      dangers that would have beset the Mayflower and her successors but for the
+      preparatory work of these immortal sailors, we must remember the dreadful
+      fate of Ribault and his Huguenot followers in Florida, twenty-three years
+      before that most happy and glorious event, the destruction of the Spanish
+      Armada. But not even the devoted men and women who held their
+      prayer-meetings in the Mayflower's cabin were more constant in prayer or
+      more assiduous in reading the Bible than the dauntless rovers, Drake and
+      Hawkins, Gilbert and Cavendish. In the church itself, too, the Puritan
+      spirit grew until in 1575-83 it seized upon Grindal, archbishop of
+      Canterbury, who incurred the queen's disfavour by refusing to meddle with
+      the troublesome reformers or to suppress their prophesyings. By the end of
+      the century the majority of country gentlemen and of wealthy merchants in
+      the towns had become Puritans, and the new views had made great headway in
+      both universities, while at Cambridge they had become dominant.
+      [[Sidenote: Elizabeth's policy, and its effects] [[Sidenote: Puritan
+      Sea-rovers]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This allusion to the universities may serve to introduce the very
+      interesting topic of the geographical distribution of Puritanism in
+      England. No one can study the history of the two universities without
+      being impressed with the greater conservatism of Oxford, and the greater
+      hospitality of Cambridge toward new ideas. Possibly the explanation may
+      have some connection with the situation of Cambridge upon the East Anglian
+      border. The eastern counties of England have often been remarked as rife
+      in heresy and independency. For many generations the coast region between
+      the Thames and the Humber was a veritable <i>litus haereticum.</i>
+      Longland, bishop of Lincoln in 1520, reported Lollardism as especially
+      vigorous and obstinate in his diocese, where more than two hundred
+      heretics were once brought before him in the course of a single
+      visitation. It was in Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, and among
+      the fens of Ely, Cambridge, and Huntingdon, that Puritanism was strongest
+      at the end of the sixteenth century. It was as member and leading spirit
+      of the Eastern Counties Association that Oliver Cromwell began his
+      military career; and in so far as there was anything sectional in the
+      struggle between Charles I. and the Long Parliament, it was a struggle
+      which ended in the victory of east over west. East Anglia was from first
+      to last the one region in which the supremacy of Parliament was
+      unquestionable and impregnable, even after the strength of its population
+      had been diminished by sending some thousands of picked men and women to
+      America. While every one of the forty counties of England was represented
+      in the great Puritan exodus, the East Anglian counties contributed to it
+      far more than all the rest. Perhaps it would not be far out of the way to
+      say that two-thirds of the American people who can trace their ancestry to
+      New England might follow it back to the East Anglian shires of the
+      mother-country; one-sixth might follow it to those southwestern countries&mdash;Devonshire,
+      Dorset, and Somerset&mdash;which so long were foremost in maritime
+      enterprise; one-sixth to other parts of England. I would not insist upon
+      the exactness of such figures, in a matter where only a rough
+      approximation is possible; but I do not think they overstate the East
+      Anglian preponderance. It was not by accident that the earliest counties
+      of Massachusetts were called Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, or that Boston
+      in Lincolnshire gave its name to the chief city of New England. The native
+      of Connecticut or Massachusetts who wanders about rural England to-day
+      finds no part of it so homelike as the cosy villages and smiling fields
+      and quaint market towns as he fares leisurely and in not too straight a
+      line from Ipswich toward Hull. Countless little unobtrusive features
+      remind him of home. The very names on the sign-boards over the sleepy
+      shops have an unwontedly familiar look. In many instances the homestead
+      which his forefathers left, when they followed Winthrop or Hooker to
+      America, is still to be found, well-kept and comfortable; the ancient
+      manor-house built of massive unhewn stone, yet in other respects much like
+      the New England farmhouse, with its long sloping roof and gable end toward
+      the road, its staircase with twisted balusters running across the shallow
+      entry-way, its low ceilings with their sturdy oaken beams, its spacious
+      chimneys, and its narrow casements from which one might have looked out
+      upon the anxious march of Edward IV. from Ravenspur to the field of
+      victory at Barnet in days when America was unknown. Hard by, in the little
+      parish church which has stood for perhaps a thousand years, plain enough
+      and bleak enough to suit the taste of the sternest Puritan, one may read
+      upon the cold pavement one's own name and the names of one's friends and
+      neighbours in startling proximity, somewhat worn and effaced by the
+      countless feet that have trodden there. And yonder on the village green
+      one comes with bated breath upon the simple inscription which tells of
+      some humble hero who on that spot in the evil reign of Mary suffered death
+      by fire. Pursuing thus our interesting journey, we may come at last to the
+      quiet villages of Austerfield and Scrooby, on opposite banks of the river
+      Idle, and just at the corner of the three shires of Lincoln, York, and
+      Nottingham. It was from this point that the Puritan exodus to America was
+      begun. [[Sidenote: Puritanism was strongest in the eastern counties]
+      [[Sidenote: Preponderance of East Anglia in the Puritan exodus]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not, however, in the main stream of Puritanism, but in one of its
+      obscure rivulets that this world-famous movement originated. During the
+      reign of Elizabeth it was not the purpose of the Puritans to separate
+      themselves from the established church of which the sovereign was the
+      head, but to remain within it and reform it according to their own
+      notions. For a time they were partially successful in this work,
+      especially in simplifying the ritual and in giving a Calvinistic tinge to
+      the doctrines. In doing this they showed no conscious tendency toward
+      freedom of thought, but rather a bigotry quite as intense as that which
+      animated the system against which they were fighting. The most advanced
+      liberalism of Elizabeth's time was not to be found among the Puritans, but
+      in the magnificent treatise on "Ecclesiastical Polity" by the churchman
+      Richard Hooker. But the liberalism of this great writer, like that of
+      Erasmus a century earlier, was not militant enough to meet the sterner
+      demands of the time. It could not then ally itself with the democratic
+      spirit, as Puritanism did. It has been well said that while Luther was the
+      prophet of the Reformation that has been, Erasmus was the prophet of the
+      Reformation that is to come, and so it was to some extent with the
+      Puritans and Hooker. The Puritan fight against the hierarchy was a
+      political necessity of the time, something without which no real and
+      thorough reformation could then be effected. In her antipathy to this
+      democratic movement, Elizabeth vexed and tormented the Puritans as far as
+      she deemed it prudent; and in the conservative temper of the people she
+      found enough support to prevent their transforming the church as they
+      would have liked to do. Among the Puritans themselves, indeed, there was
+      no definite agreement on this point. Some would have stopped short with
+      Presbyterianism, while others held that "new presbyter was but old priest
+      writ large," and so pressed on to Independency. It was early in
+      Elizabeth's reign that the zeal of these extreme brethren, inflamed by
+      persecution, gave rise to the sect of Separatists, who flatly denied the
+      royal supremacy over ecclesiastical affairs, and asserted the right to set
+      up churches of their own, with pastors and elders and rules of discipline,
+      independent of queen or bishop. [[Sidenote: Puritanism was not
+      intentionally allied with liberalism]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1567 the first congregation of this sort, consisting of about a hundred
+      persons assembled in a hall in Anchor Lane in London, was forcibly broken
+      up and thirty-one of the number were sent to jail and kept there for
+      nearly a year. By 1576 the Separatists had come to be recognized as a
+      sect, under the lead of Robert Brown, a man of high social position,
+      related to the great Lord Burleigh. Brown fled to Holland, where he
+      preached to a congregation of English exiles, and wrote books which were
+      smuggled into England and privately circulated there, much to the disgust,
+      not only of the queen, but of all parties, Puritans as well as High
+      Churchmen. The great majority of Puritans, whose aim was not to leave the
+      church, but to stay in it and control it, looked with dread and
+      disapproval upon these extremists who seemed likely to endanger their
+      success by forcing them into deadly opposition to the crown. Just as in
+      the years which ushered in our late Civil War, the opponents of the
+      Republicans sought to throw discredit upon them by confusing them with the
+      little sect of Abolitionists; and just as the Republicans, in resenting
+      the imputation, went so far as to frown upon the Abolitionists, so that in
+      December, 1860, men who had just voted for Mr. Lincoln were ready to join
+      in breaking up "John Brown meetings" in Boston; so it was with religious
+      parties in the reign of Elizabeth. The opponents of the Puritans pointed
+      to the Separatists, and cried, "See whither your anarchical doctrines are
+      leading!" and in their eagerness to clear themselves of this insinuation,
+      the leading Puritans were as severe upon the Separatists as anybody. It is
+      worthy of note that in both instances the imputation, so warmly resented,
+      was true. Under the pressure of actual hostilities the Republicans did
+      become Abolitionists, and in like manner, when in England it came to
+      downright warfare the Puritans became Separatists. But meanwhile it fared
+      ill with the little sect which everybody hated and despised. Their
+      meetings were broken up by mobs. In an old pamphlet describing a "tumult
+      in Fleet Street, raised by the disorderly preachment, pratings, and
+      prattlings of a swarm of Separatists," one reads such sentences as the
+      following: "At length they catcht one of them alone, but they kickt him so
+      vehemently as if they meant to beat him into a jelly. It is ambiguous
+      whether they have kil'd him or no, but for a certainty they did knock him
+      about as if they meant to pull him to pieces. I confesse it had been no
+      matter if they had beaten the whole tribe in the like manner." For their
+      leaders the penalty was more serious. The denial of the queen's
+      ecclesiastical supremacy could be treated as high treason, and two of
+      Brown's friends, convicted of circulating his books, were sent to the
+      gallows. In spite of these dangers Brown returned to England in 1585.
+      William the Silent had lately been murdered, and heresy in Holland was not
+      yet safe from the long arm of the Spaniard. Brown trusted in Lord
+      Burleigh's ability to protect him, but in 1588, finding himself in
+      imminent danger, he suddenly recanted and accepted a comfortable living
+      under the bishops who had just condemned him. His followers were already
+      known as Brownists; henceforth their enemies took pains to call them so
+      and twit them with holding doctrines too weak for making martyrs.
+      [[Sidenote: Robert Brown and the Separatists]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The flimsiness of Brown's moral texture prevented him from becoming the
+      leader in the Puritan exodus to New England. That honour was reserved for
+      William Brewster, son of a country gentleman who had for many years been
+      postmaster at Scrooby. The office was then one of high responsibility and
+      influence. After taking his degree at Cambridge, Brewster became private
+      secretary to Sir William Davison, whom he accompanied on his mission to
+      the Netherlands. When Davison's public career came to an end in 1587,
+      Brewster returned to Scrooby, and soon afterward succeeded his father as
+      postmaster, in which position he remained until 1607. During the interval
+      Elizabeth died, and James Stuart came from Scotland to take her place on
+      the throne. [[Sidenote: William Brewster]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The feelings with which the late queen had regarded Puritanism were mild
+      compared with the sentiments entertained by her successor. For some years
+      he had been getting worsted in his struggle with the Presbyterians of the
+      northern kingdom. His vindictive memory treasured up the day when a mighty
+      Puritan preacher had in public twitched him by the sleeve and called him
+      "God's silly vassal." "I tell you, sir," said Andrew Melville on that
+      occasion, "there are two kings and two kingdoms in Scotland. There is
+      Christ Jesus the King, and his kingdom the Kirk, whose subject James VI.
+      is, and of whose kingdom not a king, nor a lord, nor a head, but a member.
+      And they whom Christ hath called to watch over his kirk and govern his
+      spiritual kingdom have sufficient power and authority so to do both
+      together and severally." In this bold and masterful speech we have the
+      whole political philosophy of Puritanism, as in a nutshell. Under the
+      guise of theocratic fanaticism, and in words as arrogant as ever fell from
+      priestly lips, there was couched the assertion of the popular will against
+      despotic privilege. Melville could say such things to the king's face and
+      walk away unharmed, because there stood behind him a people fully aroused
+      to the conviction that there is an eternal law of God, which kings no less
+      than scullions must obey. <a href="#linknote-3" name="linknoteref-3"
+      id="linknoteref-3"><small>3</small></a> Melville knew this full well, and
+      so did James know it in the bitterness of his heart. He would have no such
+      mischievous work in England. He despised Elizabeth's grand national policy
+      which his narrow intellect could not comprehend. He could see that in
+      fighting Spain and aiding Dutchmen and Huguenots she was strengthening the
+      very spirit that sought to pull monarchy down. In spite of her faults,
+      which were neither few nor small, the patriotism of that fearless woman
+      was superior to any personal ambition. It was quite otherwise with James.
+      He was by no means fearless, and he cared more for James Stuart than for
+      either England or Scotland. He had an overweening opinion of his skill in
+      kingcraft. In coming to Westminster it was his policy to use his newly
+      acquired power to break down the Puritan party in both kingdoms and to
+      fasten episcopacy upon Scotland. In pursuing this policy he took no heed
+      of English national sentiment, but was quite ready to defy and insult it,
+      even to the point of making&mdash;before children who remembered the
+      Armada had yet reached middle age&mdash;an alliance with the hated
+      Spaniard. In such wise James succeeded in arraying against the monarchical
+      principle the strongest forces of English life,&mdash;the sentiment of
+      nationality, the sentiment of personal freedom, and the uncompromising
+      religious fervour of Calvinism; and out of this invincible combination of
+      forces has been wrought the nobler and happier state of society in which
+      we live to-day. [[Sidenote: James Stuart and Andrew Melville]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Scarcely ten months had James been king of England when he invited the
+      leading Puritan clergymen to meet himself and the bishops in a conference
+      at Hampton Court, as he wished to learn what changes they would like to
+      make in the government and ritual of the church. In the course of the
+      discussion he lost his temper and stormed, as was his wont. [[Sidenote:
+      King James's view of the political situation]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The mention of the word "presbytery" lashed him into fury. "A Scottish
+      presbytery," he cried, "agreeth as well with a monarchy as God and the
+      Devil. Then Jack and Tom and Will and Dick shall meet, and at their
+      pleasures censure me and my council and all our proceedings .... Stay, I
+      pray you, for one seven years, before you demand that from me, and if then
+      you find me pursy and fat, and my windpipes stuffed, I will perhaps
+      hearken to you .... Until you find that I grow lazy, let that alone." One
+      of the bishops declared that in this significant tirade his Majesty spoke
+      by special inspiration from Heaven! The Puritans saw that their only hope
+      lay in resistance. If any doubt remained, it was dispelled by the vicious
+      threat with which the king broke up the conference. "I will <i>make</i>
+      them conform," said he, "or I will harry them out of the land."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These words made a profound sensation in England, as well they might, for
+      they heralded the struggle which within half a century was to deliver up
+      James's son to the executioner. The Parliament of 1604 met in angrier mood
+      than any Parliament which had assembled at Westminster since the
+      dethronement of Richard II. Among the churches non-conformity began more
+      decidedly to assume the form of secession. The key-note of the conflict
+      was struck at Scrooby. Staunch Puritan as he was, Brewster had not
+      hitherto favoured the extreme measures of the Separatists. Now he withdrew
+      from the church, and gathered together a company of men and women who met
+      on Sundays for divine service in his own drawing-room at Scrooby Manor. In
+      organizing this independent Congregationalist society, Brewster was
+      powerfully aided by John Robinson, a native of Lincolnshire. Robinson was
+      then thirty years of age, and had taken his master's degree at Cambridge
+      in 1600. He was a man of great learning and rare sweetness of temper, and
+      was moreover distinguished for a broad and tolerant habit of mind too
+      seldom found among the Puritans of that day. Friendly and unfriendly
+      writers alike bear witness to his spirit of Christian charity and the
+      comparatively slight value which he attached to orthodoxy in points of
+      doctrine; and we can hardly be wrong in supposing that the comparatively
+      tolerant behaviour of the Plymouth colonists, whereby they were contrasted
+      with the settlers of Massachusetts, was in some measure due to the abiding
+      influence of the teachings of this admirable man. Another important member
+      of the Scrooby congregation was William Bradford, of the neighbouring
+      village of Austerfield, then a lad of seventeen years, but already
+      remarkable for maturity of intelligence and weight of character. Afterward
+      governor of Plymouth for nearly thirty years, he became the historian of
+      his colony; and to his picturesque chronicle, written in pure and vigorous
+      English, we are indebted for most that we know of the migration that
+      started from Scrooby and ended in Plymouth. [[Sidenote: The congregation
+      of Separatists at Scrooby]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in 1606&mdash;two years after King James's truculent threat&mdash;that
+      this independent church of Scrooby was organized. Another year had not
+      elapsed before its members had suffered so much at the hands of officers
+      of the law, that they began to think of following the example of former
+      heretics and escaping to Holland. After an unsuccessful attempt in the
+      autumn of 1607, they at length succeeded a few months later in
+      accomplishing their flight to Amsterdam, where they hoped to find a home.
+      But here they found the English exiles who had preceded them so fiercely
+      involved in doctrinal controversies, that they decided to go further in
+      search of peace and quiet. This decision, which we may ascribe to
+      Robinson's wise counsels, served to keep the society of Pilgrims from
+      getting divided and scattered. They reached Leyden in 1609, just as the
+      Spanish government had sullenly abandoned the hopeless task of conquering
+      the Dutch, and had granted to Holland the Twelve Years Truce. During
+      eleven of these twelve years the Pilgrims remained in Leyden, supporting
+      themselves by various occupations, while their numbers increased from 300
+      to more than 1000. Brewster opened a publishing house, devoted mainly to
+      the issue of theological books. Robinson accepted a professorship in the
+      university, and engaged in the defence of Calvinism against the attacks of
+      Episcopius, the successor of Arminius. The youthful Bradford devoted
+      himself to the study of languages,&mdash;Dutch, French, Latin, Greek, and
+      finally Hebrew; wishing, as he said, to "see with his own eyes the ancient
+      oracles of God in all their native beauty." During their sojourn in Leyden
+      the Pilgrims were introduced to a strange and novel spectacle,&mdash;the
+      systematic legal toleration of all persons, whether Catholic or
+      Protestant, who called themselves followers of Christ. Not that there was
+      not plenty of intolerance in spirit, but the policy inaugurated by the
+      idolized William the Silent held it in check by law. All persons who came
+      to Holland, and led decorous lives there, were protected in their opinions
+      and customs. By contemporary writers in other countries this eccentric
+      behaviour of the Dutch government was treated with unspeakable scorn. "All
+      strange religions flock thither," says one; it is "a common harbour of all
+      heresies," a "cage of unclean birds," says another; "the great mingle
+      mangle of religion," says a third. <a href="#linknote-4"
+      name="linknoteref-4" id="linknoteref-4"><small>4</small></a> In spite of
+      the relief from persecution, however, the Pilgrims were not fully
+      satisfied with their new home. The expiration of the truce with Spain
+      might prove that this relief was only temporary; and at any rate, complete
+      toleration did not fill the measure of their wants. Had they come to
+      Holland as scattered bands of refugees, they might have been absorbed into
+      the Dutch population, as Huguenot refugees have been absorbed in Germany,
+      England, and America. But they had come as an organized community, and
+      absorption into a foreign nation was something to be dreaded. They wished
+      to preserve their English speech and English traditions, keep up their
+      organization, and find some favoured spot where they might lay the
+      corner-stone of a great Christian state. The spirit of nationality was
+      strong in them; the spirit of self-government was strong in them; and the
+      only thing which could satisfy these feelings was such a migration as had
+      not been seen since ancient times, a migration like that of Phokaians to
+      Massilia or Tyrians to Carthage. [[Sidenote: The flight to Holland]
+      [[Sidenote: Why the Pilgrims did not stay there]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was too late in the world's history to carry out such a scheme upon
+      European soil. Every acre of territory there was appropriated. The only
+      favourable outlook was upon the Atlantic coast of America, where English
+      cruisers had now successfully disputed the pretensions of Spain, and where
+      after forty years of disappointment and disaster a flourishing colony had
+      at length been founded in Virginia. The colonization of the North American
+      coast had now become part of the avowed policy of the British government.
+      In 1606 a great joint-stock company was formed for the establishment of
+      two colonies in America. The branch which was to take charge of the
+      proposed southern colony had its headquarters in London; the management of
+      the northern branch was at Plymouth in Devonshire. Hence the two branches
+      are commonly spoken of as the London and Plymouth companies. The former
+      was also called the Virginia Company, and the latter the North Virginia
+      Company, as the name of Virginia was then loosely applied to the entire
+      Atlantic coast north of Florida. The London Company had jurisdiction from
+      34 degrees to 38 degrees north latitude; the Plymouth Company had
+      jurisdiction from 45 degrees down to 41 degrees; the intervening
+      territory, between 38 degrees and 41 degrees was to go to whichever
+      company should first plant a self-supporting colony. The local government
+      of each colony was to be entrusted to a council resident in America and
+      nominated by the king; while general supervision over both colonies was to
+      be exercised by a council resident in England. [[Sidenote: The London and
+      Plymouth companies]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In pursuance of this general plan, though with some variations in detail,
+      the settlement of Jamestown had been begun in 1607, and its success was
+      now beginning to seem assured. On the other hand all the attempts which
+      had been made to the north of the fortieth parallel had failed miserably.
+      As early as 1602 Bartholomew Gosnold, with 32 men, had landed on the
+      headland which they named Cape Cod from the fish found thereabouts in
+      great numbers. This was the first English name given to any spot in that
+      part of America, and so far as known these were the first Englishmen that
+      ever set foot there. They went on and gave names to Martha's Vineyard and
+      the Elizabeth Islands in Buzzard's Bay; and on Cuttyhunk they built some
+      huts with the intention of remaining, but after a month's experience they
+      changed their mind and went back to England. Gosnold's story interested
+      other captains, and on Easter Sunday, 1605, George Weymouth set sail for
+      North Virginia, as it was called. He found Cape Cod and coasted northward
+      as far as the Kennebec river, up which he sailed for many miles. Weymouth
+      kidnapped five Indians and carried them to England, that they might learn
+      the language and acquire a wholesome respect for the arts of civilization
+      and the resistless power of white men. His glowing accounts of the
+      spacious harbours, the abundance of fish and game, the noble trees, the
+      luxuriant herbage, and the balmy climate, aroused general interest in
+      England, and doubtless had some influence upon the formation, in the
+      following year, of the great joint-stock company just described. The
+      leading spirit of the Plymouth Company was Sir John Popham, chief-justice
+      of England, and he was not disposed to let his friends of the southern
+      branch excel him in promptness. Within three months after the founding of
+      Jamestown, a party of 120 colonists, led by the judge's kinsman George
+      Popham, landed at the mouth of the Kennebec, and proceeded to build a rude
+      village of some fifty cabins, with storehouse, chapel, and block-house.
+      When they landed in August they doubtless shared Weymouth's opinion of the
+      climate. These Englishmen had heard of warm countries like Italy and cold
+      countries like Russia; harsh experience soon taught them that there are
+      climates in which the summer of Naples may alternate with the winter of
+      Moscow. The president and many others fell sick and died. News came of the
+      death of Sir John Popham in England, and presently the weary and
+      disappointed settlers abandoned their enterprise and returned to their old
+      homes. Their failure spread abroad in England the opinion that North
+      Virginia was uninhabitable by reason of the cold, and no further attempts
+      were made upon that coast until in 1614 it was visited by Captain John
+      Smith. [[Sidenote: First exploration of the New England coast]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The romantic career of this gallant and garrulous hero did not end with
+      his departure from the infant colony at Jamestown. By a curious destiny
+      his fame is associated with the beginnings of both the southern and the
+      northern portions of the United States. To Virginia Smith may be said to
+      have given its very existence as a commonwealth; to New England he gave
+      its name. In 1614 he came over with two ships to North Virginia, explored
+      its coast minutely from the Penobscot river to Cape Cod, and thinking it a
+      country of such extent and importance as to deserve a name of its own,
+      rechristened it New England. On returning home he made a very good map of
+      the coast and dotted it with English names suggested by Prince Charles. Of
+      these names Cape Elizabeth, Cape Ann, Charles River, and Plymouth still
+      remain where Smith placed them. In 1615 Smith again set sail for the New
+      World, this time with a view to planting a colony under the auspices of
+      the Plymouth Company, but his talent for strange adventures had not
+      deserted him. He was taken prisoner by a French fleet, carried hither and
+      thither on a long cruise, and finally set ashore at Rochelle, whence,
+      without a penny in his pocket, he contrived to make his way back to
+      England. Perhaps Smith's life of hardship may have made him prematurely
+      old. After all his wild and varied experience he was now only in his
+      thirty-seventh year, but he does not seem to have gone on any more
+      voyages. The remaining sixteen years of his life were spent quietly in
+      England in writing books, publishing maps, and otherwise stimulating the
+      public interest in the colonization of the New World. But as for the rocky
+      coast of New England, which he had explored and named, he declared that he
+      was not so simple as to suppose that any other motive than riches would
+      "ever erect there a commonwealth or draw company from their ease and
+      humours at home, to stay in New England." [[Sidenote: John Smith]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this opinion, however, the bold explorer was mistaken. Of all
+      migrations of peoples the settlement of New England is preeminently the
+      one in which the almighty dollar played the smallest part, however
+      important it may since have become as a motive power. It was left for
+      religious enthusiasm to achieve what commercial enterprise had failed to
+      accomplish. By the summer of 1617 the Pilgrim society at Leyden had
+      decided to send a detachment of its most vigorous members to lay the
+      foundations of a Puritan state in America. There had been much discussion
+      as to the fittest site for such a colony. Many were in favour of Guiana,
+      which Sir Walter Raleigh had described in such glowing colours; but it was
+      thought that the tropical climate would be ill-suited to northern men of
+      industrious and thrifty habit, and the situation, moreover, was
+      dangerously exposed to the Spaniards. Half a century had scarcely elapsed
+      since the wholesale massacre of Huguenots in Florida. Virginia was then
+      talked of, but Episcopal ideas had already taken root there. New England,
+      on the other hand, was considered too cold. Popham's experience was not
+      encouraging. But the country about the Delaware river afforded an
+      opportunity for erecting an independent colony under the jurisdiction of
+      the London Company, and this seemed the best course to pursue. Sir Edwin
+      Sandys, the leading spirit in the London Company, was favourably inclined
+      toward Puritans, and through him negotiations were begun. Capital to the
+      amount of £7000 was furnished by seventy merchant adventurers in England,
+      and the earnings of the settlers were to be thrown into a common stock
+      until these subscribers should have been remunerated. A grant of land was
+      obtained from the London Company, and the king was asked to protect the
+      emigrants by a charter, but this was refused. James, however, made no
+      objections to their going, herein showing himself less of a bigot than
+      Louis XIV. in later days, who would not suffer a Huguenot to set foot in
+      Canada, though France was teeming with Huguenots who would have been glad
+      enough to go. When James inquired how the colonists expected to support
+      themselves, some one answered, most likely by fishing. "Very good," quoth
+      the king, "it was the Apostles' own calling." He declared that no one
+      should molest them so long as they behaved themselves properly. From this
+      unwonted urbanity it would appear that James anticipated no trouble from
+      the new colony. A few Puritans in America could not do much to annoy him,
+      and there was of course a fair chance of their perishing, as so many other
+      colonizers had perished. [[Sidenote: The Pilgrims at Leyden decide to make
+      a settlement near the Delaware river]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The congregation at Leyden did not think it wise to cut loose from Holland
+      until they should have secured a foothold in America. It was but an
+      advance guard that started out from Delft haven late in July, 1620, in the
+      rickety ship Speedwell, with Brewster and Bradford, and sturdy Miles
+      Standish, a trained soldier whose aid was welcome, though he does not seem
+      to have belonged to the congregation. Robinson remained at Leyden, and
+      never came to America. After a brief stop at Southampton, where they met
+      the Mayflower with friends from London, the Pilgrims again set sail in the
+      two ships. The Speedwell sprang a leak, and they stopped at Dartmouth for
+      repairs. Again they started, and had put three hundred miles of salt water
+      between themselves and Land's End, when the Speedwell leaked so badly that
+      they were forced to return. When they dropped anchor at Plymouth in
+      Devonshire, about twenty were left on shore, and the remainder, exactly
+      one hundred in number, crowded into the Mayflower and on the 6th of
+      September started once more to cross the Atlantic. The capacity of the
+      little ship was 180 tons, and her strength was but slight. In a fierce
+      storm in mid-ocean a mainbeam amidships was wrenched and cracked, and but
+      for a huge iron screw which one of the passengers had brought from Delft,
+      they might have gone to the bottom. The foul weather prevented any
+      accurate calculation of latitude and longitude, and they were so far out
+      in their reckoning that when they caught sight of land on the 9th of
+      November, it was to Cape Cod that they had come. Their patent gave them no
+      authority to settle here, as it was beyond the jurisdiction of the London
+      Company. They turned their prow southward, but encountering perilous
+      shoals and a stiff headwind they desisted and sought shelter in Cape Cod
+      bay. On the 11th they decided to find some place of abode in this
+      neighbourhood, anticipating no difficulty in getting a patent from the
+      Plymouth Company, which was anxious to obtain settlers. For five weeks
+      they stayed in the ship while little parties were exploring the coast and
+      deciding upon the best site for a town. It was purely a coincidence that
+      the spot which they chose had already received from John Smith the name of
+      Plymouth, the beautiful port in Devonshire from which the Mayflower had
+      sailed. [[Sidenote: Founding of Plymouth]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was not much to remind them of home in the snow-covered coast on
+      which they landed. They had hoped to get their rude houses built before
+      the winter should set in, but the many delays and mishaps had served to
+      bring them ashore in the coldest season. When the long winter came to an
+      end, fifty-one of the hundred Pilgrims had died,&mdash;a mortality even
+      greater than that before which the Popham colony had succumbed. But
+      Brewster spoke truth when he said, "It is not with us as with men whom
+      small things can discourage or small discontentments cause to wish
+      themselves at home again." At one time the living were scarcely able to
+      bury the dead; only Brewster, Standish, and five other hardy ones were
+      well enough to get about. At first they were crowded under a single roof,
+      and as glimpses were caught of dusky savages skulking among the trees, a
+      platform was built on the nearest hill and a few cannon were placed there
+      in such wise as to command the neighbouring valleys and plains. By the end
+      of the first summer the platform had grown to a fortress, down from which
+      to the harbour led a village street with seven houses finished and others
+      going up. Twenty-six acres had been cleared, and a plentiful harvest
+      gathered in; venison, wild fowl, and fish were easy to obtain. When
+      provisions and fuel had been laid in for the ensuing winter, Governor
+      Bradford appointed a day of Thanksgiving. Town-meetings had already been
+      held, and a few laws passed. The history of New England had begun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This had evidently been a busy summer for the forty-nine survivors. On the
+      9th of November, the anniversary of the day on which they had sighted
+      land, a ship was descried in the offing. She was the Fortune, bringing
+      some fifty more of the Leyden company. It was a welcome reinforcement, but
+      it diminished the rations of food that could be served during the winter,
+      for the Fortune was not well supplied. When she set sail for England, she
+      carried a little cargo of beaver-skins and choice wood for wainscoting to
+      the value of L500 sterling, as a first instalment of the sum due to the
+      merchant adventurers. But this cargo never reached England, for the
+      Fortune was overhauled by a French cruiser and robbed of everything worth
+      carrying away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For two years more it was an anxious and difficult time for the new
+      colony. By 1624 its success may be said to have become assured. That the
+      Indians in the neighbourhood had not taken advantage of the distress of
+      the settlers in that first winter, and massacred every one of them, was
+      due to a remarkable circumstance. Early in 1617 a frightful pestilence had
+      swept over New England and slain, it is thought, more than half the Indian
+      population between the Penobscot river and Narragansett bay. Many of the
+      Indians were inclined to attribute this calamity to the murder of two or
+      three white fishermen the year before. They had not got over the
+      superstitious dread with which the first sight of white men had inspired
+      them, and now they believed that the strangers held the demon of the
+      plague at their disposal and had let him loose upon the red men in revenge
+      for the murders they had committed. This wholesome delusion kept their
+      tomahawks quiet for a while. When they saw the Englishmen establishing
+      themselves at Plymouth, they at first held a powwow in the forest, at
+      which the new-comers were cursed with all the elaborate ingenuity that the
+      sorcery of the medicine-men could summon for so momentous an occasion; but
+      it was deemed best to refrain from merely human methods of attack. It was
+      not until the end of the first winter that any of them mustered courage to
+      visit the palefaces. Then an Indian named Samoset, who had learned a
+      little English from fishermen and for his own part was inclined to be
+      friendly, came one day into the village with words of welcome. He was so
+      kindly treated that presently Massasoit, principal sachem of the
+      Wampanoags, who dwelt between Narragansett and Cape Cod bays, came with a
+      score of painted and feathered warriors and squatting on a green rug and
+      cushions in the governor's log-house smoked the pipe of peace, while
+      Standish with half-a-dozen musketeers stood quietly by. An offensive and
+      defensive alliance was then and there made between King Massasoit and King
+      James, and the treaty was faithfully kept for half a century. Some time
+      afterward, when Massasoit had fallen sick and lay at death's door, his
+      life was saved by Edward Winslow, who came to his wigwam and skilfully
+      nursed him. Henceforth the Wampanoag thought well of the Pilgrim. The
+      powerful Narragansetts, who dwelt on the farther side of the bay, felt
+      differently, and thought it worth while to try the effect of a threat. A
+      little while after the Fortune had brought its reinforcement, the
+      Narragansett sachem Canonicus sent a messenger to Plymouth with a bundle
+      of newly-made arrows wrapped in a snake-skin. The messenger threw it in at
+      the governor's door and made off with unseemly haste. Bradford understood
+      this as a challenge, and in this he was confirmed by a friendly Wampanoag.
+      The Narragansetts could muster 2000 warriors, for whom forty or fifty
+      Englishmen, even with firearms, were hardly a fair match; but it would not
+      do to show fear. Bradford stuffed the snake-skin with powder and bullets,
+      and sent it back to Canonicus, telling him that if he wanted war he might
+      come whenever he liked and get his fill of it. When the sachem saw what
+      the skin contained, he was afraid to touch it or have it about, and
+      medicine-men, handling it no doubt gingerly enough, carried it out of his
+      territory. [[Sidenote: Why the colony was not attacked by the Indians]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a fortunate miscalculation that brought the Pilgrims to New
+      England. Had they ventured upon the lands between the Hudson and the
+      Delaware, they would probably have fared worse. They would soon have come
+      into collision with the Dutch, and not far from that neighbourhood dwelt
+      the Susquehannocks, at that time one of the most powerful and ferocious
+      tribes on the continent. For the present the new-comers were less likely
+      to be molested in the Wampanoag country than anywhere else. In the course
+      of the year 1621 they obtained their grant from the Plymouth Company. This
+      grant was not made to them directly but to the joint-stock company of
+      merchant adventurers with whom they were associated. But the alliance
+      between the Pilgrims and these London merchants was not altogether
+      comfortable; there was too much divergence between their aims. In 1627 the
+      settlers, wishing to be entirely independent, bought up all the stock and
+      paid for it by instalments from the fruits of their labour. By 1633 they
+      had paid every penny, and become the undisputed owners of the country they
+      had occupied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such was the humble beginning of that great Puritan exodus from England to
+      America which had so much to do with founding and peopling the United
+      States. These Pilgrims of the Mayflower were but the pioneers of a mighty
+      host. Historically their enterprise is interesting not so much for what it
+      achieved as for what it suggested. Of itself the Plymouth colony could
+      hardly have become a wealthy and powerful state. Its growth was extremely
+      slow. After ten years its numbers were but three hundred. In 1643, when
+      the exodus had come to an end, and the New England Confederacy was formed,
+      the population of Plymouth was but three thousand. In an established
+      community, indeed, such a rate of increase would be rapid, but it was not
+      sufficient to raise in New England a power which could overcome Indians
+      and Dutchmen and Frenchmen, and assert its will in opposition to the
+      crown. It is when we view the founding of Plymouth in relation to what
+      came afterward, that it assumes the importance which belongs to the
+      beginning of a new era.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We have thus seen how it was that the political aspirations of James I.
+      toward absolute sovereignty resulted in the beginnings of the Puritan
+      exodus to America. In the next chapter we shall see how the still more
+      arbitrary policy of his ill-fated son all at once gave new dimensions to
+      that exodus and resulted in the speedy planting of a high-spirited and
+      powerful New England.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER III. &mdash; THE PLANTING OF NEW ENGLAND.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When Captain George Weymouth in the summer of 1605 sailed into the harbour
+      of Plymouth in Devonshire, with his five kidnapped savages and his glowing
+      accounts of the country since known as New England, the garrison of that
+      fortified seaport was commanded by Sir Ferdinando Gorges. The Christian
+      name of this person now strikes us as rather odd, but in those days it was
+      not so uncommon in England, and it does not necessarily indicate a Spanish
+      or Italian ancestry for its bearer. Gorges was a man of considerable
+      ability, but not of high character. On the downfall of his old patron the
+      Earl of Essex he had contrived to save his own fortunes by a course of
+      treachery and ingratitude. He had served in the Dutch war against Spain,
+      and since 1596 had been military governor of Plymouth. The sight of
+      Weymouth's Indians and the recital of his explorations awakened the
+      interest of Gorges in the colonization of North America. He became one of
+      the most active members of the Plymouth, or North Virginia, Company
+      established in the following year. It was he who took the leading part in
+      fitting out the two ships with which John Smith started on his
+      unsuccessful expedition in 1615. In the following years he continued to
+      send out voyages of exploration, became largely interested in the
+      fisheries, and at length in 1620 succeeded in obtaining a new patent for
+      the Plymouth Company, by which it was made independent of the London
+      Company, its old yoke-fellow and rival. This new document created a
+      corporation of forty patentees who, sitting in council as directors of
+      their enterprise, were known as the Council for New England. The president
+      of this council was King James's unpopular favourite the Duke of
+      Buckingham, and its most prominent members were the earls of Pembroke and
+      Lenox, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, and Shakespeare's friend the Earl of
+      Southampton. This council was empowered to legislate for its American
+      territory, to exercise martial law there and expel all intruders, and to
+      exercise a monopoly of trade within the limits of the patent. Such
+      extensive powers, entrusted to a company of which Buckingham was the head,
+      excited popular indignation, and in the great struggle against monopolies
+      which was then going on, the Plymouth Company did not fail to serve as a
+      target for attacks. It started, however, with too little capital to enter
+      upon schemes involving immediate outlay, and began almost from the first
+      to seek to increase its income by letting or selling portions of its
+      territory, which extended from the latitude of Philadelphia to that of
+      Quebec, thus encroaching upon regions where Holland and France were
+      already gaining a foothold. It was from this company that the merchant
+      adventurers associated with the Mayflower Pilgrims obtained their new
+      patent in the summer of 1621, and for the next fifteen years all settlers
+      in New England based their claims to the soil upon territorial rights
+      conveyed to them by the Plymouth Company. The grants, however, were often
+      ignorantly and sometimes unscrupulously made, and their limits were so
+      ill-defined that much quarrelling ensued. [[Sidenote: Sir Ferdinando
+      Gorges, and the Council for New England]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the years immediately following the voyage of the Mayflower,
+      several attempts at settlement were made about the shores of Massachusetts
+      bay. One of the merchant adventurers, Thomas Weston, took it into his head
+      in 1622 to separate from his partners and send out a colony of seventy men
+      on his own account. These men made a settlement at Wessagusset, some
+      twenty-five miles north of Plymouth. They were a disorderly, thriftless
+      rabble, picked up from the London streets, and soon got into trouble with
+      the Indians; after a year they were glad to get back to England as best
+      they could, and in this the Plymouth settlers willingly aided them. In
+      June of that same year 1622 there arrived on the scene a picturesque but
+      ill understood personage, Thomas Morton, "of Clifford's Inn, Gent.," as he
+      tells on the title-page of his quaint and delightful book, the "New
+      English Canaan." Bradford disparagingly says that he "had been a kind of
+      petie-fogger of Furnifell's Inn"; but the churchman Samuel Maverick
+      declares that he was a "gentleman of good qualitie." He was an agent of
+      Sir Ferdinando Gorges, and came with some thirty followers to make the
+      beginnings of a royalist and Episcopal settlement in the Massachusetts
+      bay. He was naturally regarded with ill favour by the Pilgrims as well as
+      by the later Puritan settlers, and their accounts of him will probably
+      bear taking with a grain or two of salt. [[Sidenote: Wessagusset and
+      Merrymount]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1625 there came one Captain Wollaston, with a gang of indented white
+      servants, and established himself on the site of the present town of
+      Quincy. Finding this system of industry ill suited to northern
+      agriculture, he carried most of his men off to Virginia, where he sold
+      them. Morton took possession of the site of the settlement, which he
+      called Merrymount. There, according to Bradford, he set up a "schoole of
+      athisme," and his men did quaff strong waters and comport themselves "as
+      if they had anew revived and celebrated the feasts of ye Roman Goddes
+      Flora, or the beastly practices of ye madd Bachanalians." Charges of
+      atheism have been freely hurled about in all ages. In Morton's case the
+      accusation seems to have been based upon the fact that he used the Book of
+      Common Prayer. His men so far maintained the ancient customs of merry
+      England as to plant a Maypole eighty feet high, about which they frolicked
+      with the redskins, while furthermore they taught them the use of firearms
+      and sold them muskets and rum. This was positively dangerous, and in the
+      summer of 1628 the settlers at Merrymount were dispersed by Miles
+      Standish. Morton was sent to England, but returned the next year, and
+      presently again repaired to Merrymount.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By this time other settlements were dotted about the coast. There were a
+      few scattered cottages or cabins at Nantasket and at the mouth of the
+      Piscataqua, while Samuel Maverick had fortified himself on Noddle's
+      Island, and William Blackstone already lived upon the Shawmut peninsula,
+      since called Boston. These two gentlemen were no friends to the Puritans;
+      they were churchmen and representatives of Sir Ferdinando Gorges.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The case was very different with another of these earliest settlements,
+      which deserves especial mention as coming directly in the line of
+      causation which led to the founding of Massachusetts by Puritans. For some
+      years past the Dorchester adventurers&mdash;a small company of merchants
+      in the shire town of Dorset&mdash;had been sending vessels to catch fish
+      off the New England coast. In 1623 these men conceived the idea of
+      planting a small village as a fishing station, and setting up a church and
+      preacher therein, for the spiritual solace of the fishermen and sailors.
+      In pursuance of this scheme a small party occupied Cape Ann, where after
+      two years they got into trouble with the men of Plymouth. Several grants
+      and assignments had made it doubtful where the ownership lay, and although
+      this place was not near their own town, the men of Plymouth claimed it.
+      The dispute was amicably arranged by Roger Conant, an independent settler
+      who had withdrawn from Plymouth because he did not fully sympathize with
+      the Separatist views of the people there. The next step was for the
+      Dorchester adventurers to appoint Conant as their manager, and the next
+      was for them to abandon their enterprise, dissolve their partnership, and
+      leave the remnant of the little colony to shift for itself. The settlers
+      retained their tools and cattle, and Conant found for them a new and safer
+      situation at Naumkeag, on the site of the present Salem. So far little
+      seemed to have been accomplished; one more seemed added to the list of
+      failures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the excellent John White, the Puritan rector of Trinity Church in
+      Dorchester, had meditated carefully about these things. He saw that many
+      attempts at colonization had failed because they made use of unfit
+      instruments, "a multitude of rude ungovernable persons, the very scum of
+      the land." So Virginia had failed in its first years, and only succeeded
+      when settled by worthy and industrious people under a strong government.
+      The example of Plymouth, as contrasted with Wessagusset, taught a similar
+      lesson. We desire, said White, "to raise a bulwark against the kingdom of
+      Antichrist." Learn wisdom, my countrymen, from the ruin which has befallen
+      the Protestants at Rochelle and in the Palatinate; learn "to avoid the
+      plague while it is foreseen, and not to tarry as they did till it overtook
+      them." The Puritan party in England was numerous and powerful, but the day
+      of strife was not far off and none might foretell its issue. Clearly it
+      was well to establish a strong and secure retreat in the New World, in
+      case of disaster in the Old. What had been done at Plymouth by a few men
+      of humble means might be done on a much greater scale by an association of
+      leading Puritans, including men of wealth and wide social influence. Such
+      arguments were urged in timely pamphlets, of one of which White is
+      supposed to have been the author. The matter was discussed in London, and
+      inquiry was made whether fit men could be found "to engage their persons
+      in the voyage." "It fell out that among others they lighted at last on
+      Master Endicott, a man well known to divers persons of good note, who
+      manifested much willingness to accept of the offer as soon as it was
+      tendered." All were thereby much encouraged, the schemes of White took
+      definite shape, and on the 19th of March, 1628, a tract of land was
+      obtained from the Council for New England, consisting of all the territory
+      included between three miles north of the Merrimack and three miles south
+      of the Charles in one direction, and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in
+      the other. [[Sidenote: John White and his noble scheme]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This liberal grant was made at a time when people still supposed the
+      Pacific coast to be not far west of Henry Hudson's river. The territory
+      was granted to an association of six gentlemen, only one of whom&mdash;John
+      Endicott&mdash;figures conspicuously in the history of New England. The
+      grant was made in the usual reckless style, and conflicted with various
+      patents which had been issued before. In 1622 Gorges and John Mason had
+      obtained a grant of all the land between the rivers Kennebec and
+      Merrimack, and the new grant encroached somewhat upon this. The difficulty
+      seems to have been temporarily adjusted by some sort of compromise which
+      restricted the new grant to the Merrimack, for in 1629 we find Mason's
+      title confirmed to the region between that river and the Piscataqua, while
+      later on Gorges appears as proprietor of the territory between the
+      Piscataqua and the Kennebec. A more serious difficulty was the claim of
+      Robert Gorges, son of Sir Ferdinando. That young man had in 1623 obtained
+      a grant of some 300 square miles in Massachusetts, and had gone to look
+      after it, but had soon returned discouraged to England and shortly
+      afterward died. But his claim devolved upon his surviving brother, John
+      Gorges, and Sir Ferdinando, in consenting to the grant to Endicott and his
+      friends, expressly reserved the rights of his sons. No such reservation,
+      however, was mentioned in the Massachusetts charter, and the colonists
+      never paid the slightest heed to it. In these conflicting claims were sown
+      seeds of trouble which bore fruit for more than half a century. In such
+      cases actual possession is apt to make nine points in the law, and
+      accordingly Endicott was sent over, as soon as possible, with sixty
+      persons, to reinforce the party at Naumkeag and supersede Conant as its
+      leader. On Endicott's arrival in September, 1628, the settlers were at
+      first inclined to dispute his authority, but they were soon conciliated,
+      and in token of this amicable adjustment the place was called by the
+      Hebrew name of Salem, or "peace." [[Sidenote: Conflicting grants sow seeds
+      of trouble] [[Sidenote: John Endicot and the founding of Salem]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile Mr. White and the partners in England were pushing things
+      vigorously. Their scheme took a wider scope. They were determined to
+      establish something more than a trading company. From Charles I. it was
+      sometimes easy to get promises because he felt himself under no obligation
+      to keep them. In March, 1629, a royal charter was granted, creating a
+      corporation, under the legal style of the Governor and Company of
+      Massachusetts Bay in New England. The affairs of this corporate body were
+      to be managed by a governor, deputy-governor, and a council of eighteen
+      assistants, to be elected annually by the company. They were empowered to
+      make such laws as they liked for their settlers, provided they did not
+      contravene the laws of England,&mdash;a proviso susceptible of much
+      latitude of interpretation. The place where the company was to hold its
+      meetings was not mentioned in the charter. The law-officers of the crown
+      at first tried to insert a condition that the government must reside in
+      England, but the grantees with skilful argument succeeding in preventing
+      this. Nothing was said in the charter about religious liberty, for a
+      twofold reason: the crown would not have granted it, and it was not what
+      the grantees wanted; such a provision would have been liable to hamper
+      them seriously in carrying out their scheme. They preferred to keep in
+      their own hands the question as to how much or how little religious
+      liberty they should claim or allow. Six small ships were presently fitted
+      out, and upon them were embarked 300 men, 80 women, and 26 children, with
+      140 head of cattle, 40 goats, and abundance of arms, ammunition, and
+      tools. The principal leader of this company was Francis Higginson, of St.
+      John's College, Cambridge, rector of a church in Leicestershire, who had
+      been deprived of his living for non-conformity. With him were associated
+      two other ministers, also graduates of Cambridge. All three were members
+      of the council. By the arrival of this company at Salem, Endicott now
+      became governor of a colony larger than any yet started in New England,&mdash;larger
+      than Plymouth after its growth of nearly nine years. [[Sidenote: The
+      Company of Massachusetts Bay]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The time was at length ripe for that great Puritan exodus of which the
+      voyage of the Mayflower had been the premonitory symptom. The grand crisis
+      for the Puritans had come, the moment when decisive action could no longer
+      be deferred. It was not by accident that the rapid development of John
+      White's enterprise into the Company of Massachusetts Bay coincided exactly
+      with the first four years of the reign of Charles I. They were years well
+      fitted to bring such a scheme to quick maturity. The character of Charles
+      was such as to exacerbate the evils of his father's reign. James could
+      leave some things alone in the comfortable hope that all would by and by
+      come out right, but Charles was not satisfied without meddling everywhere.
+      Both father and son cherished some good intentions; both were sincere
+      believers in their narrow theory of kingcraft. For wrong-headed obstinacy,
+      utter want of tact, and bottomless perfidy, there was little to choose
+      between them. The humorous epitaph of the grandson "whose word no man
+      relies on" might have served for them all. But of this unhappy family
+      Charles I. was eminently the dreamer. He lived in a world of his own, and
+      was slow in rendering thought into action; and this made him rely upon the
+      quick-witted but unwise and unscrupulous Buckingham, <a href="#linknote-5"
+      name="linknoteref-5" id="linknoteref-5"><small>5</small></a> who was silly
+      enough to make feeble attempts at unpopular warfare without consulting
+      Parliament. During each of Charles's first four years there was an angry
+      session of Parliament, in which, through the unwillingness of the popular
+      leaders to resort to violence, the king's policy seemed able to hold its
+      ground. Despite all protest the king persisted in levying strange taxes
+      and was to some extent able to collect them. Men who refused to pay
+      enforced loans were thrown into jail and the writ of <i>habeas corpus</i>
+      was denied them. Meanwhile the treatment of Puritans became more and more
+      vexatious. It was clear enough that Charles meant to become an absolute
+      monarch, like Louis XIII., but Parliament began by throwing all the blame
+      upon the unpopular minister and seeking to impeach him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the 5th of June, 1628, the House of Commons presented the most
+      extraordinary spectacle, perhaps in all its history. The famous Petition
+      of Right had been Passed by both Houses, and the royal answer had just
+      been received. Its tone was that of gracious assent, but it omitted the
+      necessary legal formalities, and the Commons well knew what this meant.
+      They were to be tricked with sweet words, and the petition was not to
+      acquire the force of a statute. How was it possible to deal with such a
+      slippery creature? There was but one way of saving the dignity of the
+      throne without sacrificing the liberty of the people, and that was to hold
+      the king's ministers responsible to Parliament, in anticipation of modern
+      methods. It was accordingly proposed to impeach the Duke of Buckingham
+      before the House of Lords. The Speaker now "brought an imperious message
+      from the king, ... warning them ... that he would not tolerate any
+      aspersion upon his ministers." Nothing daunted by this, Sir John Eliot
+      arose to lead the debate, when the Speaker called him to order in view of
+      the king's message. "Amid a deadly stillness" Eliot sat down and burst
+      into tears. For a moment the House was overcome with despair. Deprived of
+      all constitutional methods of redress, they suddenly saw yawning before
+      them the direful alternative&mdash;slavery or civil war. Since the day of
+      Bosworth a hundred and fifty years had passed without fighting worthy of
+      mention on English soil, such an era of peace as had hardly ever before
+      been seen on the earth; now half the nation was to be pitted against the
+      other half, families were to be divided against themselves, as in the
+      dreadful days of the Roses, and with what consequences no one could
+      foresee. "Let us sit in silence," quoth Sir Dudley Digges, "we are
+      miserable, we know not what to do!" Nay, cried Sir Nathaniel Rich, "we <i>must</i>
+      now speak, or forever hold our peace." Then did grim Mr. Prynne and Sir
+      Edward Coke mingle their words with sobs, while there were few dry eyes in
+      the House. Presently they found their voices, and used them in a way that
+      wrung from the startled king his formal assent to the Petition of Right.
+      [[Sidenote: Remarkable scene in the House of Commons]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is something strangely pathetic and historically significant <a
+      href="#linknote-6" name="linknoteref-6" id="linknoteref-6"><small>6</small></a>
+      in the emotion of these stern, fearless men. The scene was no less
+      striking on the 2d of the following March, when, "amid the cries and
+      entreaties of the Speaker held down in his chair by force," while the
+      Usher of the Black Rod was knocking loudly at the bolted door, and the
+      tramp of the king's soldiers was heard in the courtyard, Eliot's clear
+      voice rang out the defiance that whoever advised the levy of tonnage and
+      poundage without a grant from Parliament, or whoever voluntarily paid
+      those duties, was to be counted an enemy to the kingdom and a betrayer of
+      its liberties. As shouts of "Aye, aye," resounded on every side, "the
+      doors were flung open, and the members poured forth in a throng." The
+      noble Eliot went to end his days in the Tower, and for eleven years no
+      Parliament sat again in England. <a href="#linknote-7" name="linknoteref-7"
+      id="linknoteref-7"><small>7</small></a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in one and the same week that Charles I. thus began his experiment
+      of governing without a Parliament, and that he granted a charter to the
+      Company of Massachusetts Bay. He was very far, as we shall see, from
+      realizing the import of what he was doing. To the Puritan leaders it was
+      evident that a great struggle was at hand. Affairs at home might well seem
+      desperate, and the news from abroad was not encouraging. It was only four
+      months since the surrender of Rochelle had ended the existence of the
+      Huguenots as an armed political party. They had now sunk into the
+      melancholy condition of a tolerated sect which may at any moment cease to
+      be tolerated. In Germany the terrible Thirty Years War had just reached
+      the darkest moment for the Protestants. Fifteen months were yet to pass
+      before the immortal Gustavus was to cross the Baltic and give to the
+      sorely harassed cause of liberty a fresh lease of life. The news of the
+      cruel Edict of Restitution in this same fateful month of March, 1629,
+      could not but give the English Puritans great concern. Everywhere in
+      Europe the champions of human freedom seemed worsted. They might well
+      think that never had the prospect looked so dismal; and never before, as
+      never since, did the venture of a wholesale migration to the New World so
+      strongly recommend itself as the only feasible escape from a situation
+      that was fast becoming intolerable. Such were the anxious thoughts of the
+      leading Puritans in the spring of 1629, and in face of so grave a problem
+      different minds came naturally to different conclusions. Some were for
+      staying in England to fight it out to the bitter end; some were for
+      crossing the ocean to create a new England in the wilderness. Either task
+      was arduous enough, and not to be achieved without steadfast and sober
+      heroism. [[Sidenote: Desperate nature of the crisis]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the 26th of August twelve gentlemen, among the most eminent in the
+      Puritan party, held a meeting at Cambridge, and resolved to lead a
+      migration to New England, provided the charter of the Massachusetts Bay
+      Company and the government established under it could be transferred to
+      that country. On examination it appeared that no legal obstacle stood in
+      the way. Accordingly such of the old officers as did not wish to take part
+      in the emigration resigned their places, which were forthwith filled by
+      these new leaders. For governor the choice fell upon John Winthrop, a
+      wealthy gentleman from Groton in Suffolk, who was henceforth to occupy the
+      foremost place among the founders of New England. Winthrop was at this
+      time forty-one years of age, having been born in the memorable year of the
+      Armada. He was a man of remarkable strength and beauty of character, grave
+      and modest, intelligent and scholarlike, intensely religious and endowed
+      with a moral sensitiveness that was almost morbid, yet liberal withal in
+      his opinions and charitable in disposition. When his life shall have been
+      adequately written, as it never has been, he will be recognized as one of
+      the very noblest figures in American history. From early youth he had that
+      same power of winning confidence and commanding respect for which
+      Washington was so remarkable; and when he was selected as the Moses of the
+      great Puritan exodus, there was a wide-spread feeling that extraordinary
+      results were likely to come of such an enterprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In marked contrast to Winthrop stands the figure of the man associated
+      with him as deputy-governor. Thomas Dudley came of an ancient family, the
+      history of which, alike in the old and in the new England, has not been
+      altogether creditable. He represented the elder branch of that Norman
+      family, to the younger branch of which belonged the unfortunate husband of
+      Lady Jane Grey and the unscrupulous husband of Amy Robsart. There was,
+      however, very little likeness to Elizabeth's gay lover in grim Thomas
+      Dudley. His Puritanism was bleak and stern, and for Christian charity he
+      was not eminent. He had a foible for making verses, and at his death there
+      was found in his pocket a poem of his, containing a quatrain wherein the
+      intolerance of that age is neatly summed up:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Let men of God in courts and churches watch O'er such as do a Toleration
+      hatch, Lest that ill egg bring forth a cockatrice To poison all with
+      heresy and vice."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such was the spirit of most of the Puritans of that day, but in the
+      manifestation of it there were great differences, and here was the strong
+      contrast between Dudley and Winthrop,&mdash;a contrast which shows itself
+      in their portraits. In that of Dudley we see the typical narrow-minded,
+      strait-laced Calvinist for whom it is so much easier to entertain respect
+      than affection. In that of Winthrop we see a face expressive of what was
+      finest in the age of Elizabeth,&mdash;the face of a spiritual brother of
+      Raleigh and Bacon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The accession of two men so important as Winthrop and Dudley served to
+      bring matters speedily to a crisis. Their embarkation in April, 1630, was
+      the signal for a general movement on the part of the English Puritans.
+      Before Christmas of that year seventeen ships had come to New England,
+      bringing more than 1000 passengers. This huge wave of immigration quite
+      overwhelmed and bore away the few links of possession by which Gorges had
+      thus far kept his hold upon the country. In January, 1629, John Gorges had
+      tried to assert the validity of his late brother's claim by executing
+      conveyances covering portions of it. One of these was to John Oldham, a
+      man who had been harshly treated at Plymouth, and might be supposed very
+      ready to defend his rights against settlers of the Puritan company. Gorges
+      further maintained that he retained possession of the country through the
+      presence of his brother's tenants, Blackstone, Maverick, Walford, and
+      others on the shores of the bay. In June, 1629, Endicott had responded by
+      sending forward some fifty persons from Salem to begin the settlement of
+      Charlestown. Shortly before Winthrop's departure from England, Gorges had
+      sent that singular personage Sir Christopher Gardiner to look after his
+      interests in the New World, and there he was presently found established
+      near the mouth of the Neponset river, in company with "a comly yonge woman
+      whom he caled his cousin." But these few claimants were now at once lost
+      in the human tide which poured over Charlestown, Boston, Newtown,
+      Watertown, Roxbury, and Dorchester. The settlement at Merrymount was again
+      dispersed, and Morton sent back to London; Gardiner fled to the coast of
+      Maine and thence sailed for England in 1632. The Puritans had indeed
+      occupied the country in force.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here on the very threshold we are confronted by facts which show that not
+      a mere colonial plantation, but a definite and organized state was in
+      process of formation. The emigration was not like that of Jamestown or of
+      Plymouth. It sufficed at once to make the beginnings of half a dozen
+      towns, and the question as to self-government immediately sprang up. Early
+      in 1631 a tax of £60 was assessed upon the settlements, in order to pay
+      for building frontier fortifications at Newtown. This incident was in
+      itself of small dimensions, as incidents in newly founded states are apt
+      to be. But in its historic import it may serve to connect the England of
+      John Hampden with the New England of Samuel Adams. The inhabitants of
+      Watertown at first declined to pay this tax, which was assessed by the
+      Board of Assistants, on the ground that English freemen cannot rightfully
+      be taxed save by their own consent. This protest led to a change in the
+      constitution of the infant colony, and here, at once, we are introduced to
+      the beginnings of American constitutional history. At first it was thought
+      that public business could be transacted by a primary assembly of all the
+      freemen in the colony meeting four times in the year; but the number of
+      freemen increased so fast that this was almost at once (in October, 1630)
+      found to be impracticable. The right of choosing the governor and making
+      the laws was then left to the Board of Assistants; and in May, 1631, it
+      was further decided that the assistants need not be chosen afresh every
+      year, but might keep their seats during good behaviour or until ousted by
+      special vote of the freemen. If the settlers of Massachusetts had been
+      ancient Greeks or Romans, this would have been about as far as they could
+      go in the matter; the choice would have been between a primary assembly
+      and an assembly of notables. It is curious to see Englishmen passing from
+      one of these alternatives to the other. But it was only for a moment. The
+      protest of the Watertown men came in time to check these proceedings,
+      which began to have a decidedly oligarchical look. To settle the immediate
+      question of the tax, two deputies were sent from each settlement to advise
+      with the Board of Assistants; while the power of choosing each year the
+      governor and assistants was resumed by the freemen. Two years later, in
+      order to reserve to the freemen the power of making laws without
+      interfering too much with the ordinary business of life, the colonists
+      fell back upon the old English rural plan of electing deputies or
+      representatives to a general court. [[Sidenote: The question as to
+      self-government raised at Watertown]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At first the deputies sat in the same chamber with the assistants, but at
+      length in 1644 they were formed into a second chamber with increased
+      powers, and the way in which this important constitutional change came
+      about is worth remembering, as an illustration of the smallness of the
+      state which so soon was to play a great part in history. As Winthrop puts
+      it, "there fell out a great business upon a very small occasion." To a
+      certain Captain Keayne, of Boston, a rich man deemed to be hard and
+      overbearing toward the poor, there was brought a stray pig, whereof he
+      gave due public notice through the town-crier, yet none came to claim it
+      till after he had killed a pig of his own which he kept in the same stye
+      with the stray. A year having passed by, a poor woman named Sherman came
+      to see the stray and to decide if it were one that she had lost. Not
+      recognizing it as hers, she forthwith laid claim to the slaughtered pig.
+      The case was brought before the elders of the church of Boston, who
+      decided that the woman was mistaken. Mrs. Sherman then accused the captain
+      of theft, and brought the case before a jury, which exonerated the
+      defendant with £3 costs. The captain then sued Mrs. Sherman for defamation
+      of character and got a verdict for £40 damages, a round sum indeed to
+      assess upon the poor woman. But long before this it had appeared that she
+      had many partisans and supporters; it had become a political question, in
+      which the popular protest against aristocracy was implicated. Not yet
+      browbeaten, the warlike Mrs. Sherman appealed to the General Court. The
+      length of the hearing shows the importance which was attached to the case.
+      After seven days of discussion, the vote was taken. Seven assistants and
+      eight deputies approved the former decisions, two assistants and fifteen
+      deputies condemned them, while seven deputies refrained from voting. In
+      other words, Captain Keayne has a decided majority among the more
+      aristocratic assistants, while Mrs. Sherman seemed to prevail with the
+      more democratic deputies. Regarding the result as the vote of a single
+      body, the woman had a plurality of two; regarding it as the vote of a
+      double body, her cause had prevailed in the lower house, but was lost by
+      the veto of the upper. No decision was reached at the time, but after a
+      year of discussion the legislature was permanently separated into two
+      houses, each with a veto power upon the other; and this was felt to be a
+      victory for the assistants. As for the ecclesiastical polity of the new
+      colony, it had begun to take shape immediately upon the arrival of
+      Endicott's party at Salem. The clergymen, Samuel Skelton and Francis
+      Higginson, consecrated each other, and a church covenant and confession of
+      faith were drawn up by Higginson. Thirty persons joining in this covenant
+      constituted the first church in the colony; and several brethren appointed
+      by this church proceeded formally to ordain the two ministers by the
+      laying on of hands. In such simple wise was the first Congregational
+      church in Massachusetts founded. The simple fact of removal from England
+      converted all the Puritan emigrants into Separatists, as Robinson had
+      already predicted. Some, however, were not yet quite prepared for so
+      radical a measure. These proceedings gave umbrage to two of the Salem
+      party, who attempted forthwith to set up a separate church in conformity
+      with episcopal models. A very important question was thus raised at once,
+      but it was not allowed to disturb the peace of the colony. Endicott was a
+      man of summary methods. He immediately sent the two malcontents back to
+      England; and thus the colonial church not only seceded from the national
+      establishment, but the principle was virtually laid down that the
+      Episcopal form of worship would not be tolerated in the colony. For the
+      present such a step was to be regarded as a measure of self-defence on the
+      part of the colonists. Episcopacy to them meant actual and practical
+      tyranny&mdash;the very thing they had crossed the ocean expressly to get
+      away from&mdash;and it was hardly to be supposed that they would encourage
+      the growth of it in their new home. One or two surpliced priests,
+      conducting worship in accordance with the Book of Common Prayer, might in
+      themselves be excellent members of society; but behind the surpliced
+      priest the colonist saw the intolerance of Laud and the despotism of the
+      Court of High Commission. In 1631 a still more searching measure of
+      self-protection was adopted. It was decided that "no man shall be admitted
+      to the freedom of this body politic, but such as are members of some of
+      the churches within the limits of the same." Into the merits of this
+      measure as illustrating the theocratic ideal of society which the Puritans
+      sought to realize in New England, we shall inquire hereafter. At present
+      we must note that, as a measure of self-protection, this decree was
+      intended to keep out of the new community all emissaries of Strafford and
+      Laud, as well as such persons as Morton and Gardiner and other agents of
+      Sir Ferdinando Gorges.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By the year 1634 the scheme of the Massachusetts Company had so far
+      prospered that nearly 4000 Englishmen had come over, and some twenty
+      villages on or near the shores of the bay had been founded. The building
+      of permanent houses, roads, fences, and bridges had begun to go on quite
+      briskly; farms were beginning to yield a return for the labour of the
+      husbandman; lumber, furs, and salted fish were beginning to be sent to
+      England in exchange for manufactured articles; 4000 goats and 1500 head of
+      cattle grazed in the pastures, and swine innumerable rooted in the
+      clearings and helped to make ready the land for the ploughman. Political
+      meetings were held, justice was administered by magistrates after old
+      English precedents, and church services were performed by a score of
+      clergymen, nearly all graduates of Cambridge, though one or two had their
+      degrees from Oxford, and nearly all of whom had held livings in the Church
+      of England. The most distinguished of these clergymen, John Cotton, in his
+      younger days a Fellow and Tutor of Emmanuel College, had for more than
+      twenty years been rector of St. Botolph's, when he left the most
+      magnificent parish church in England to hold service in the first rude
+      meeting-house of the new Boston. From Emmanuel College came also Thomas
+      Hooker and John Harvard. Besides these clergymen, so many of the leading
+      persons concerned in the emigration were university men that it was not
+      long before a university began to seem indispensable to the colony. In
+      1636 the General Court appropriated £400 toward the establishment of a
+      college at Newtown. In 1638 John Harvard, dying childless, bequeathed his
+      library and the half of his estate to the new college, which the Court
+      forthwith ordered to be called by his name; while in honour of the mother
+      university the name of the town was changed to Cambridge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It has been said that the assembly which decreed the establishment of
+      Harvard College was "the first body in which the people, by their
+      representatives, ever gave their own money to found a place of education."
+      <a href="#linknote-8" name="linknoteref-8" id="linknoteref-8"><small>8</small></a>
+      The act was a memorable one if we have regard to all the circumstances of
+      the year in which it was done. On every side danger was in the air.
+      Threatened at once with an Indian war, with the enmity of the home
+      government, and with grave dissensions among themselves, the year 1636 was
+      a trying one indeed for the little community of Puritans, and their
+      founding a college by public taxation just at this time is a striking
+      illustration of their unalterable purpose to realize, in this new home,
+      their ideal of an educated Christian society. [[Sidenote: Threefold danger
+      in the year 1636]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That the government of Charles I. should view with a hostile eye the
+      growth of a Puritan state in New England is not at all surprising. (1.
+      From the king, who prepares to attack the infant colony but is fueled by
+      dissensions at home.) The only fit ground for wonder would seem to be that
+      Charles should have been willing at the outset to grant a charter to the
+      able and influential Puritans who organized the Company of Massachusetts
+      Bay. Probably, however, the king thought at first that it would relieve
+      him at home if a few dozen of the Puritan leaders could be allowed to
+      concentrate their minds upon a project of colonization in America. It
+      might divert attention for a moment from his own despotic schemes. Very
+      likely the scheme would prove a failure and the Massachusetts colony incur
+      a fate like that of Roanoke Island; and at all events the wealth of the
+      Puritans might better be sunk in a remote and perilous enterprise than
+      employed at home in organizing resistance to the crown. Such, very likely,
+      may have been the king's motive in granting the Massachusetts charter two
+      days after turning his Parliament out of doors. But the events of the last
+      half-dozen years had come to present the case in a new light. The young
+      colony was not languishing. It was full of sturdy life; it had wrought
+      mischief to the schemes of Gorges; and what was more, it had begun to take
+      unheard-of liberties with things ecclesiastical and political. Its example
+      was getting to be a dangerous one. It was evidently worth while to put a
+      strong curb upon Massachusetts. Any promise made to his subjects Charles
+      regarded as a promise made under duress which he was quite justified in
+      breaking whenever it suited his purpose to do so. Enemies of Massachusetts
+      were busy in England. Schismatics from Salem and revellers from Merrymount
+      were ready with their tales of woe, and now Gorges and Mason were
+      vigorously pressing their territorial claims. They bargained with the
+      king. In February, 1635, the moribund Council for New England surrendered
+      its charter and all its corporate rights in America, on condition that the
+      king should disregard all the various grants by which these rights had
+      from time to time been alienated, and should divide up the territory of
+      New England in severalty among the members of the Council. In pursuance of
+      this scheme Gorges and Mason, together with half a dozen noblemen, were
+      allowed to parcel out New England among themselves as they should see fit.
+      In this way the influence of the Marquis of Hamilton, with the Earls of
+      Arundel, Surrey, Carlisle, and Stirling, might be actively enlisted
+      against the Massachusetts Company. A writ of <i>quo warranto</i> was
+      brought against it; and it was proposed to send Sir Ferdinando to govern
+      New England with viceregal powers like those afterward exercised by
+      Andros.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a moment the danger seemed alarming; but, as Winthrop says, "the Lord
+      frustrated their design." It was noted as a special providence that the
+      ship in which Gorges was to sail was hardly off the stocks when it fell to
+      pieces. Then the most indefatigable enemy of the colony, John Mason,
+      suddenly died. The king issued his famous writ of ship-money and set all
+      England by the ears; and, to crown all, the attempt to read the Episcopal
+      liturgy at St. Giles's church in Edinburgh led straight to the Solemn
+      League and Covenant. Amid the first mutterings of the Great Rebellion the
+      proceedings against Massachusetts were dropped, and the unheeded colony
+      went on thriving in its independent course. Possibly too some locks at
+      Whitehall may have been turned with golden keys, <a href="#linknote-9"
+      name="linknoteref-9" id="linknoteref-9"><small>9</small></a> for the
+      company was rich, and the king was ever open to such arguments. But when
+      the news of his evil designs had first reached Boston the people of the
+      infant colony showed no readiness to yield to intimidation. In their
+      measures there was a decided smack of what was to be realized a hundred
+      and forty years later. Orders were immediately issued for fortifying
+      Castle Island in the harbour and the heights at Charlestown and
+      Dorchester. Militia companies were put in training, and a beacon was set
+      up on the highest hill in Boston, to give prompt notice to all the
+      surrounding country of any approaching enemy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While the ill will of the home government thus kept the colonists in a
+      state of alarm, there were causes of strife at work at their very doors,
+      of which they were fain to rid themselves as soon as possible. Among all
+      the Puritans who came to New England there is no more interesting figure
+      than the learned, quick-witted pugnacious Welshman, Roger Williams. He was
+      over-fond of logical subtleties and delighted in controversy. There was
+      scarcely any subject about which he did not wrangle, from the sinfulness
+      of persecution to the propriety of women wearing veils in church. Yet,
+      with all this love of controversy, there has perhaps never lived a more
+      gentle and kindly soul. Within five years from the settlement of
+      Massachusetts this young preacher had announced the true principles of
+      religious liberty with a clearness of insight quite remarkable in that
+      age. Roger Williams had been aided in securing an education by the great
+      lawyer Sir Edward Coke, and had lately taken his degree at Pembroke
+      College, Cambridge; but the boldness with which he declared his opinions
+      had aroused the hostility of Laud, and in 1631 he had come over to
+      Plymouth, whence he removed two years later to Salem, and became pastor of
+      the church there. The views of Williams, if logically carried out,
+      involved the entire separation of church from state, the equal protection
+      of all forms of religious faith, the repeal of all laws compelling
+      attendance on public worship, the abolition of tithes and of all forced
+      contributions to the support of religion. Such views are to-day quite
+      generally adopted by the more civilized portions of the Protestant world;
+      but it is needless to say that they were not the views of the seventeenth
+      century, in Massachusetts or elsewhere. For declaring such opinions as
+      these on the continent of Europe, anywhere except in Holland, a man like
+      Williams would in that age have run great risk of being burned at the
+      stake. In England, under the energetic misgovernment of Laud, he would
+      very likely have had to stand in the pillory with his ears cropped, or
+      perhaps, like Bunyan and Baxter, would have been sent to jail. In
+      Massachusetts such views were naturally enough regarded as anarchical, but
+      in Williams's case they were further complicated by grave political
+      imprudence. He wrote a pamphlet in which he denied the right of the
+      colonists to the lands which they held in New England under the king's
+      grant. He held that the soil belonged to the Indians, that the settlers
+      could only obtain a valid title to it by purchase from them, and that the
+      acceptance of a patent from a mere intruder, like the king, was a sin
+      requiring public repentance. This doctrine was sure to be regarded in
+      England as an attack upon the king's supremacy over Massachusetts, and at
+      the same time an incident occurred in Salem which made it all the more
+      unfortunate. The royal colours under which the little companies of militia
+      marched were emblazoned with the red cross of St. George. The
+      uncompromising Endicott loathed this emblem as tainted with Popery, and
+      one day he publicly defaced the flag of the Salem company by cutting out
+      the cross. The enemies of Massachusetts misinterpreted this act as a
+      defiance aimed at the royal authority, and they attributed it to the
+      teachings of Williams. In view of the king's unfriendliness these were
+      dangerous proceedings. Endicott was summoned before the General Court at
+      Boston, where he was publicly reprimanded and declared incapable of
+      holding office for a year. A few months afterward, in January, 1636,
+      Williams was ordered by the General Court to come to Boston and embark in
+      a ship that was about to set sail for England. But he escaped into the
+      forest, and made his way through the snow to the wigwam of Massasoit. He
+      was a rare linguist, and had learned to talk fluently in the language of
+      the Indians, and now he passed the winter in trying to instill into their
+      ferocious hearts something of the gentleness of Christianity. In the
+      spring he was privately notified by Winthrop that if he were to steer his
+      course to Narragansett bay he would be secure from molestation; and such
+      was the beginning of the settlement of Providence. [[Sidenote: From
+      religious dissensions; Roger Williams]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Shortly before the departure of Williams, there came to Boston one of the
+      greatest Puritan statesmen of that heroic age, the younger Henry Vane. It
+      is pleasant to remember that the man and Anne who did so much to overthrow
+      the tyranny of Strafford, who brought the military strength of Scotland to
+      the aid of the hard-pressed Parliament, who administered the navy with
+      which Blake won his astonishing victories, who dared even withstand
+      Cromwell at the height of his power when his measures became too violent,&mdash;it
+      is pleasant to remember that this admirable man was once the chief
+      magistrate of an American commonwealth. It is pleasant for a Harvard man
+      to remember that as such he presided over the assembly that founded our
+      first university. Thorough republican and enthusiastic lover of liberty,
+      he was spiritually akin to Jefferson and to Samuel Adams. Like Williams he
+      was a friend to toleration, and like Williams he found Massachusetts an
+      uncomfortable home. In 1636 he was only twenty-four years of age, "young
+      in years," and perhaps not yet "in sage counsel old." He was chosen
+      governor for that year, and his administration was stormy. Among those
+      persons who had followed Mr. Cotton from Lincolnshire was Mrs. Anne
+      Hutchinson, a very bright and capable lady, if perhaps somewhat impulsive
+      and indiscreet. She had brought over with her, says Winthrop, "two
+      dangerous errors: first, that the person of the Holy Ghost dwells in a
+      justified person; second, that no sanctification can help to evidence to
+      us our justification." Into the merits of such abstruse doctrines it is
+      not necessary for the historian to enter. One can hardly repress a smile
+      as one reflects how early in the history of Boston some of its
+      characteristic social features were developed. It is curious to read of
+      lectures there in 1636, lectures by a lady, and transcendentalist lectures
+      withal! Never did lectures in Boston arouse greater excitement than Mrs.
+      Hutchinson's. Many of her hearers forsook the teachings of the regular
+      ministers, to follow her. [[Sidenote: Henry Vane and Anne Hutchinson]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was very effectively supported by her brother-in-law, Mr. Wheelwright,
+      an eloquent preacher, and for a while she seemed to be carrying everything
+      before her. She won her old minister Mr. Cotton, she won the stout soldier
+      Captain Underhill, she won Governor Vane himself; while she incurred the
+      deadly hatred of such men as Dudley and Cotton's associate John Wilson.
+      The church at Boston was divided into two hostile camps. The sensible
+      Winthrop marvelled at hearing men distinguished "by being under a covenant
+      of grace or a covenant of works, as in other countries between Protestants
+      and Papists," and he ventured to doubt whether any man could really tell
+      what the difference was. The theological strife went on until it
+      threatened to breed civil disaffection among the followers of Mrs.
+      Hutchinson. A peculiar bitterness was given to the affair, from the fact
+      that she professed to be endowed with the spirit of prophecy and taught
+      her partisans that it was their duty to follow the biddings of a
+      supernatural light; and there was nothing which the orthodox Puritan so
+      steadfastly abhorred as the anarchical pretence of living by the aid of a
+      supernatural light. In a strong and complex society the teachings of Mrs.
+      Hutchinson would have awakened but a languid speculative interest, or
+      perhaps would have passed by unheeded. In the simple society of
+      Massachusetts in 1636, physically weak and as yet struggling for very
+      existence, the practical effect of such teachings may well have been
+      deemed politically dangerous. When things came to such a pass that the
+      forces of the colony were mustered for an Indian campaign and the men of
+      Boston were ready to shirk the service because they suspected their
+      chaplain to be "under a covenant of works," it was naturally thought to be
+      high time to put Mrs. Hutchinson down. In the spring of 1637 Winthrop was
+      elected governor, and in August Vane returned to England. His father had
+      at that moment more influence with the king than any other person except
+      Strafford, and the young man had indiscreetly hinted at an appeal to the
+      home government for the protection of the Antinomians, as Mrs.
+      Hutchinson's followers were called. But an appeal from America to England
+      was something which Massachusetts would no more tolerate in the days of
+      Winthrop than in the days of Hancock and Adams. Soon after Vane's
+      departure, Mrs. Hutchinson and her friends were ordered to leave the
+      colony. It was doubtless an odious act of persecution, yet of all such
+      acts which stain the history of Massachusetts in the seventeenth century,
+      it is just the one for which the plea of political necessity may really be
+      to some extent accepted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We now begin to see how the spreading of the New England colonization, and
+      the founding of distinct communities, was hastened by these differences of
+      opinion on theological questions or on questions concerning the relations
+      between church and state. Of Mrs. Hutchinson's friends and adherents, some
+      went northward, and founded the towns of Exeter and Hampton. Some time
+      before Portsmouth and Dover had been settled by followers of Mason and
+      Gorges. In 1641 these towns were added to the domain of Massachusetts, and
+      so the matter stood until 1679, when we shall see Charles II. marking them
+      off as a separate province, under a royal government. Such were the
+      beginnings of New Hampshire. Mrs. Hutchinson herself, however, with the
+      rest of her adherents, bought the island of Aquedneck from the Indians,
+      and settlements were made at Portsmouth and Newport. After a quarter of a
+      century of turbulence, these settlements coalesced with Williams's colony
+      at Providence, and thus was formed the state of Rhode Island. After her
+      husband's death in 1642, Mrs. Hutchinson left Aquedneck and settled upon
+      some land to the west of Stamford and supposed to be within the territory
+      of the New Netherlands. There in the following year she was cruelly
+      murdered by Indians, together with nearly all her children and servants,
+      sixteen victims in all. One of her descendants was the illustrious Thomas
+      Hutchinson, the first great American historian, and last royal governor of
+      Massachusetts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the dangers arising from the ill-will of the crown, and from these
+      theological quarrels, there was added the danger of a general attack by
+      the savages. Down to this time, since the landing of the Pilgrims at
+      Plymouth, the settlers of New England had been in no way molested by the
+      natives. Massasoit's treaty with the Pilgrims was scrupulously observed on
+      both sides, and kept the Wampanoags quiet for fifty-four years. The
+      somewhat smaller tribe which took its name from the <i>Massawachusett</i>,
+      or Great Hill, of Milton, kept on friendly terms with the settlers about
+      Boston, because these red men coveted the powerful aid of the white
+      strangers in case of war with their hereditary foes the Tarratines, who
+      dwelt in the Piscataqua country. It was only when the English began to
+      leave these coast regions and press into the interior that trouble arose.
+      The western shores of Narragansett bay were possessed by the numerous and
+      warlike tribe of that name, which held in partial subjection the Nyantics
+      near Point Judith. To the west of these, and about the Thames river, dwelt
+      the still more formidable Pequots, a tribe which for bravery and ferocity
+      asserted a preeminence in New England not unlike that which the Iroquois
+      league of the Mohawk valley was fast winning over all North America east
+      of the Mississippi. North of the Pequots, the squalid villages of the
+      Nipmucks were scattered over the beautiful highlands that stretch in long
+      ridges from Quinsigamond to Nichewaug, and beyond toward blue Monadnock.
+      Westward, in the lower Connecticut valley, lived the Mohegans, a small but
+      valiant tribe, now for some time held tributary to their Pequot cousins,
+      and very restive under the yoke. The thickly wooded mountain ranges
+      between the Connecticut and the Hudson had few human inhabitants. These
+      hundred miles of crag and forest were a bulwark none too wide or strong
+      against the incursions of the terrible Mohawks, whose name sent a shiver
+      of fear throughout savage New England, and whose forbearance the Nipmucks
+      and Mohegans were fain to ensure by a yearly payment of blackmail. Each
+      summer there came two Mohawk elders, secure in the dread that Iroquois
+      prowess had everywhere inspired; and up and down the Connecticut valley
+      they seized the tribute of weapons and wampum, and proclaimed the last
+      harsh edict issued from the savage council at Onondaga. The scowls that
+      greeted their unwelcome visits were doubtless nowhere fiercer than among
+      the Mohegans, thus ground down between Mohawk and Pequot as between the
+      upper and the nether millstone. [[Sidenote: From the Indians: the Pequot
+      supremacy]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among the various points in which civilized man surpasses the savage none
+      is more conspicuous than the military brute force which in the highest
+      civilization is always latent though comparatively seldom exerted. The
+      sudden intrusion of English warfare into the Indian world of the
+      seventeenth century may well have seemed to the red men a supernatural
+      visitation, like the hurricane or the earthquake. The uncompromising
+      vigour with which the founders of Massachusetts carried on their work was
+      viewed in some quarters with a dissatisfaction which soon thrust the
+      English migration into the very heart of the Indian country.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first movement, however, was directed against the encroachments of the
+      New Netherlands. In October, 1634, some men of Plymouth, led by William
+      Holmes, sailed up the Connecticut river, and, after bandying threats with
+      a party of Dutch who had built a rude fort on the site of Hartford, passed
+      on and fortified themselves on the site of Windsor. Next year Governor Van
+      Twiller sent a company of seventy men to drive away these intruders, but
+      after reconnoitring the situation the Dutchmen thought it best not to make
+      an attack. Their little stronghold at Hartford remained unmolested by the
+      English, and, in order to secure the communication between this advanced
+      outpost and New Amsterdam, Van Twiller decided to build another fort at
+      the mouth of the river, but this time the English were beforehand. Rumours
+      of Dutch designs may have reached the ears of Lord Say and Sele and Lord
+      Brooke&mdash;"fanatic Brooke," as Scott calls him in "Marmion"&mdash;who
+      had obtained from the Council for New England a grant of territory on the
+      shores of the Sound. These noblemen chose as their agent the younger John
+      Winthrop, son of the Massachusetts governor, and this new-comer arrived
+      upon the scene just in time to drive away Van Twiller's vessel and build
+      an English fort which in honour of his two patrons he called "Say-Brooke."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Had it not been for seeds of discontent already sown in Massachusetts, the
+      English hold upon the Connecticut valley might perhaps have been for a few
+      years confined to these two military outposts at Windsor and Saybrook. But
+      there were people in Massachusetts who did not look with favour upon the
+      aristocratic and theocratic features in its polity. The provision that
+      none but church-members should vote or hold office was by no means
+      unanimously approved. We see it in the course of another generation
+      putting altogether too much temporal power into the hands of the clergy,
+      and we can trace the growth of the opposition to it until in the reign of
+      Charles II. it becomes a dangerous source of weakness to Massachusetts. At
+      the outset the opposition seems to have been strongest in Dorchester,
+      Newtown, and Watertown. When the Board of Assistants undertook to secure
+      for themselves permanency of tenure, together with the power of choosing
+      the governor and making the laws, these three towns sent deputies to
+      Boston to inspect the charter and see if it authorized any such stretch of
+      power. They were foremost in insisting that representatives chosen by the
+      towns must have a share in the general government. Men who held such
+      opinions were naturally unwilling to increase the political weight of the
+      clergy, who, during these early disputes and indeed until the downfall of
+      the charter, were inclined to take aristocratic views and to sympathize
+      with the Board of Assistants. Cotton declared that democracy was no fit
+      government either for church or for commonwealth, and the majority of the
+      ministers agreed with him. Chief among those who did not was the learned
+      and eloquent Thomas Hooker, pastor of the church at Newtown. When
+      Winthrop, in a letter to Hooker, defended the restriction of the suffrage
+      on the ground that "the best part is always the least, and of that best
+      part the wiser part is always the lesser;" Hooker replied that "in matters
+      which concern the common good, a general council, chosen by all, to
+      transact businesses which concern all, I conceive most suitable to rule
+      and most safe for relief of the whole." It is interesting to meet, on the
+      very threshold of American history, with such a lucid statement of the
+      strongly contrasted views which a hundred and fifty years later were to be
+      represented on a national scale by Hamilton and Jefferson. There were many
+      in Newtown who took Hooker's view of the matter; and there, as also in
+      Watertown and Dorchester, which in 1633 took the initiative in framing
+      town governments with selectmen, a strong disposition was shown to evade
+      the restrictions upon the suffrage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While such things were talked about in the summer of 1633 the adventurous
+      John Oldham was making his way through the forest and over the mountains
+      into the Connecticut valley, and when he returned to the coast his glowing
+      accounts set some people to thinking. Two years afterward a few pioneers
+      from Dorchester pushed through the wilderness as far as the Plymouth men's
+      fort at Windsor, while a party from Watertown went farther and came to a
+      halt upon the site of Wethersfield. A larger party, bringing cattle and
+      such goods as they could carry, set out in the autumn and succeeded in
+      reaching Windsor. Their winter supplies were sent around by water to meet
+      them, but early in November the ships had barely passed the Saybrook fort
+      when they found the river blocked with ice and were obliged to return to
+      Boston. The sufferings of the pioneers, thus cut off from the world, were
+      dreadful. Their cattle perished, and they were reduced to a diet of acorns
+      and ground-nuts. Some seventy of them, walking on the frozen river to
+      Saybrook, were so fortunate as to find a crazy little sloop jammed in the
+      ice. They succeeded in cutting her adrift, and steered themselves back to
+      Boston. Others surmounted greater obstacles in struggling back through the
+      snow over the region which the Pullman car now traverses, regardless of
+      seasons, in three hours. A few grim heroes, the nameless founders of a
+      noble commonwealth, stayed on the spot and defied starvation. In the next
+      June, 1636, the Newtown congregation, a hundred or more in number, led by
+      their sturdy pastor, and bringing with them 160 head of cattle, made the
+      pilgrimage to the Connecticut valley. Women and children took part in this
+      pleasant summer journey; Mrs. Hooker, the pastor's wife, being too ill to
+      walk, was carried on a litter. Thus, in the memorable year in which our
+      great university was born, did Cambridge become, in the true Greek sense
+      of a much-abused word, the <i>metropolis</i> or "mother town" of Hartford.
+      The migration at once became strong in numbers. During the past
+      twelvemonth a score of ships had brought from England to Massachusetts
+      more than 3000 souls, and so great an accession made further movement
+      easy. Hooker's pilgrims were soon followed by the Dorchester and Watertown
+      congregations, and by the next May 800 people were living in Windsor,
+      Hartford, and Wethersfield. As we read of these movements, not of
+      individuals, but of organic communities, united in allegiance to a church
+      and its pastor, and fervid with the instinct of self-government, we seem
+      to see Greek history renewed, but with centuries of added political
+      training. For one year a board of commissioners from Massachusetts
+      governed the new towns, but at the end of that time the towns chose
+      representatives and held a General Court at Hartford, and thus the
+      separate existence of Connecticut was begun. As for Springfield, which was
+      settled about the same time by a party from Roxbury, it remained for some
+      years doubtful to which state it belonged. At the opening session of the
+      General Court, May 31,1638, Mr. Hooker preached a sermon of wonderful
+      power, in which he maintained that "the foundation of authority is laid in
+      the free consent of the people," "that the choice of public magistrates
+      belongs unto the people by God's own allowance," and that "they who have
+      power to appoint officers and magistrates have the right also to set the
+      bounds and limitations of the power and place unto which they call them."
+      On the 14th of January, 1639, all the freemen of the three towns assembled
+      at Hartford and adopted a written constitution in which the hand of the
+      great preacher is clearly discernible. It is worthy of note that this
+      document contains none of the conventional references to a "dread
+      sovereign" or a "gracious king," nor the slightest allusion to the British
+      or any other government outside of Connecticut itself, nor does it
+      prescribe any condition of church-membership for the right of suffrage. It
+      was the first written constitution known to history, that created a
+      government, <a href="#linknote-10" name="linknoteref-10"
+      id="linknoteref-10"><small>10</small></a> and it marked the beginnings of
+      American democracy, of which Thomas Hooker deserves more than any other
+      man to be called the father. The government of the United States today is
+      in lineal descent more nearly related to that of Connecticut than to that
+      of any of the other thirteen colonies. The most noteworthy feature of the
+      Connecticut republic was that it was a federation of independent towns,
+      and that all attributes of sovereignty not expressly granted to the
+      General Court remained, as of original right, in the towns. Moreover,
+      while the governor and council were chosen by a majority vote of the whole
+      people, and by a suffrage that was almost universal, there was for each
+      township an equality of representation in the assembly. <a
+      href="#linknote-11" name="linknoteref-11" id="linknoteref-11"><small>11</small></a>
+      This little federal republic was allowed to develop peacefully and
+      normally; its constitution was not violently wrenched out of shape like
+      that of Massachusetts at the end of the seventeenth century. It silently
+      grew till it became the strongest political structure on the continent, as
+      was illustrated in the remarkable military energy and the unshaken
+      financial credit of Connecticut during the Revolutionary War; and in the
+      chief crisis of the Federal Convention of 1787 Connecticut, with her
+      compromise which secured equal state representation in one branch of the
+      national government and popular representation in the other, played the
+      controlling part. [[Sidenote: Connecticut Pioneers] [[Sidenote: The first
+      written constitution]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before the little federation of towns had framed its government, it had
+      its Indian question to dispose of. Three years before the migration led by
+      Hooker, a crew of eight traders, while making their way up the river to
+      the Dutch station on the site of Hartford, had been murdered by a party of
+      Indians subject to Sassacus, chief sachem of the Pequots. Negotiations
+      concerning this outrage had gone on between Sassacus and the government at
+      Boston, and the Pequots had promised to deliver up the murderers, but had
+      neglected to do so. In the summer of 1636 some Indians on Block Island
+      subject to the Narragansetts murdered the pioneer John Oldham, who was
+      sailing on the Sound, and captured his little vessel. At this, says
+      Underhill, "God stirred up the hearts" of Governor Vane and the rest of
+      the magistrates. They were determined to make an end of the Indian
+      question and show the savages that such things would not be endured. First
+      an embassy was sent to Canonicus and his nephew Miantonomo, chief sachems
+      of the Narragansetts, who hastened to disclaim all responsibility for the
+      murder, and to throw the blame entirely upon the Indians of the island.
+      Vane then sent out three vessels under command of Endicott, who ravaged
+      Block Island, burning wigwams, sinking canoes, and slaying dogs, for the
+      men had taken to the woods. Endicott then crossed to the mainland to
+      reckon with the Pequots. He demanded the surrender of the murderers, with
+      a thousand fathoms of wampum for damages; and not getting a satisfactory
+      answer, he attacked the Indians, killed a score of them, seized their ripe
+      corn, and burned and spoiled what he could. But such reprisals served only
+      to enrage the red men. Lyon Gardiner, commander of the Saybrook fort,
+      complained to Endicott: "You come hither to raise these wasps about my
+      ears; then you will take wing and flee away." The immediate effect was to
+      incite Sassacus to do his utmost to compass the ruin of the English. The
+      superstitious awe with which the white men were at first regarded had been
+      somewhat lessened by familiar contact with them, as in Aesop's fable of
+      the fox and the lion. The resources of Indian diplomacy were exhausted in
+      the attempt to unite the Narragansett warriors with the Pequots in a grand
+      crusade against the white men. Such a combination could hardly have been
+      as formidable as that which was effected forty years afterward in King
+      Philip's war; for the savages had not as yet become accustomed to
+      firearms, and the English settlements did not present so many points
+      exposed to attack; but there is no doubt that it might have wrought
+      fearful havoc. We can, at any rate, find no difficulty in comprehending
+      the manifold perplexity of the Massachusetts men at this time, threatened
+      as they were at once by an Indian crusade, by the machinations of a
+      faithless king, and by a bitter theological quarrel at home, in this
+      eventful year when they laid aside part of their incomes to establish
+      Harvard College. [[Sidenote: Origin of the Pequot War]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The schemes of Sassacus were unsuccessful. The hereditary enmity of the
+      Narragansetts toward their Pequot rivals was too strong to be lightly
+      overcome. Roger Williams, taking advantage of this feeling, so worked upon
+      the minds of the Narragansett chiefs that in the autumn of 1636 they sent
+      an embassy to Boston and made a treaty of alliance with the English. The
+      Pequots were thus left to fight out their own quarrel; and had they still
+      been separated from the English by the distance between Boston and the
+      Thames river, the feud might very likely have smouldered until the drift
+      of events had given a different shape to it. But as the English had in
+      this very year thrown out their advanced posts into the lower Connecticut
+      valley, there was clearly no issue from the situation save in deadly war.
+      All through the winter of 1636-37 the Connecticut towns were kept in a
+      state of alarm by the savages. Men going to their work were killed and
+      horribly mangled. A Wethersfield man was kidnapped and roasted alive.
+      Emboldened by the success of this feat, the Pequots attacked Wethersfield,
+      massacred ten people, and carried away two girls. [[Sidenote: Sassacus is
+      foiled by Roger Williams] [[Sidenote: The Pequots take the warpath alone]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Wrought up to desperation by these atrocities, the Connecticut men
+      appealed to Massachusetts and Plymouth for aid, and put into service
+      ninety of their own number, under command of John Mason, an excellent and
+      sturdy officer who had won golden opinions from Sir Thomas Fairfax, under
+      whom he had served in the Netherlands. It took time to get men from
+      Boston, and all that Massachusetts contributed to the enterprise at its
+      beginning was that eccentric daredevil John Underhill, with a force of
+      twenty men. Seventy friendly Mohegans, under their chief Uncas, eager to
+      see vengeance wrought upon their Pequot oppressors, accompanied the
+      expedition. From the fort at Saybrook this little company set sail on the
+      twentieth of May, 1637, and landed in brilliant moonlight near Point
+      Judith, where they were reinforced by four hundred Narragansetts and
+      Nyantics. From this point they turned westward toward the stronghold of
+      the Pequots, near the place where the town of Stonington now stands. As
+      they approached the dreaded spot the courage of the Indian allies gave
+      out, and they slunk behind, declaring that Sassacus was a god whom it was
+      useless to think of attacking. The force with which Mason and Underhill
+      advanced to the fray consisted of just seventy-seven Englishmen. Their
+      task was to assault and carry an entrenched fort or walled village
+      containing seven hundred Pequots. The fort was a circle of two or three
+      acres in area, girdled by a palisade of sturdy sapling-trunks, set firm
+      and deep into the ground, the narrow interstices between them serving as
+      loopholes wherefrom to reconnoitre any one passing by and to shoot at
+      assailants. At opposite sides of this stronghold were two openings barely
+      large enough to let any one go through. Within this enclosure were the
+      crowded wigwams. The attack was skilfully managed, and was a complete
+      surprise. A little before daybreak Mason, with sixteen men, occupied one
+      of the doors, while Underhill made sure of the other. The Indians in panic
+      sought first one outlet and then the other, and were ruthlessly shot down,
+      whichever way they turned. A few succeeded in breaking loose, but these
+      were caught and tomahawked by the Indian allies, who, though afraid to
+      take the risks of the fight, were ready enough to help slay the fugitives.
+      The English threw firebrands among the wigwams, and soon the whole village
+      was in a light blaze, and most of the savages suffered the horrible death
+      which they were so fond of inflicting upon their captives. Of the seven
+      hundred Pequots in the stronghold, but five got away with their lives. All
+      this bloody work had been done in less than an hour, and of the English
+      there had been two killed and sixteen wounded. It was the end of the
+      Pequot nation. Of the remnant which had not been included in this
+      wholesale slaughter, most were soon afterwards destroyed piecemeal in a
+      running fight which extended as far westward as the site of Fairfield.
+      Sassacus fled across the Hudson river to the Mohawks, who slew him and
+      sent his scalp to Boston, as a peace-offering to the English. The few
+      survivors were divided between the Mohegans and Narragansetts and adopted
+      into those tribes. Truly the work was done with Cromwellian thoroughness.
+      The tribe which had lorded it so fiercely over the New England forests was
+      all at once wiped out of existence. So terrible a vengeance the Indians
+      had never heard of. If the name of Pequot had hitherto been a name of
+      terror, so now did the Englishmen win the inheritance of that deadly
+      prestige. Not for eight-and-thirty years after the destruction of the
+      Pequots, not until a generation of red men had grown up that knew not
+      Underhill and Mason, did the Indian of New England dare again to lift his
+      hand against the white man. [[Sidenote: And are exterminated]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such scenes of wholesale slaughter are not pleasant reading in this milder
+      age. But our forefathers felt that the wars of Canaan afforded a sound
+      precedent for such cases; and, indeed, if we remember what the soldiers of
+      Tilly and Wallenstein were doing at this very time in Germany, we shall
+      realize that the work of Mason and Underhill would not have been felt by
+      any one in that age to merit censure or stand in need of excuses. As a
+      matter of practical policy the annihilation of the Pequots can be
+      condemned only by those who read history so incorrectly as to suppose that
+      savages, whose business is to torture and slay, can always be dealt with
+      according to the methods in use between civilized peoples. A mighty
+      nation, like the United States, is in honour bound to treat the red man
+      with scrupulous justice and refrain from cruelty in punishing his
+      delinquencies. But if the founders of Connecticut, in confronting a danger
+      which threatened their very existence, struck with savage fierceness, we
+      cannot blame them. The world is so made that it is only in that way that
+      the higher races have been able to preserve themselves and carry on their
+      progressive work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The overthrow of the Pequots was a cardinal event in the planting of New
+      England. It removed the chief obstacle to the colonization of the
+      Connecticut coast, and brought the inland settlements into such unimpeded
+      communication with those on tide-water as to prepare the way for the
+      formation of the New England confederacy. Its first fruits were seen in
+      the direction taken by the next wave of migration, which ended the Puritan
+      exodus from England to America. About a month after the storming of the
+      palisaded village there arrived in Boston a company of wealthy London
+      merchants, with their families. The most prominent among them, Theophilus
+      Eaton, was a member of the Company of Massachusetts Bay. Their pastor,
+      John Davenport, was an eloquent preacher and a man of power. He was a
+      graduate of Oxford, and in 1624 had been chosen vicar of St. Stephen's
+      parish, in Coleman street, London. When he heard that Cotton and Hooker
+      were about to sail for America, he sought earnestly to turn them from what
+      he deemed the error of their ways, but instead he became converted himself
+      and soon incurred the especial enmity of Laud, so that it became necessary
+      for him to flee to Amsterdam. In 1636 he returned to England, and in
+      concert with Eaton organized a scheme of emigration that included men from
+      Yorkshire, Hertfordshire, and Kent. The leaders arrived in Boston in the
+      midst of the Antinomian disputes, and although Davenport won admiration
+      for his skill in battling with heresy, he may perhaps have deemed it
+      preferable to lead his flock to some new spot in the wilderness where such
+      warfare might not be required. The merchants desired a fine harbour and
+      good commercial situation, and the reports of the men who returned from
+      hunting the Pequots told them of just such a spot at Quinnipiack on Long
+      Island Sound. Here they could carry out their plan of putting into
+      practice a theocratic ideal even more rigid than that which obtained in
+      Massachusetts, and arrange their civil as well as ecclesiastical affairs
+      in accordance with rules to be obtained from a minute study of the
+      Scriptures. [[Sidenote: The colony of New Haven]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the spring of 1638 the town of New Haven was accordingly founded. The
+      next year a swarm from this new town settled Milford, while another party,
+      freshly arrived from England, made the beginnings of Guilford. In 1640
+      Stamford was added to the group, and in 1643 the four towns were united
+      into the republic of New Haven, to which Southold, on Long Island, and
+      Branford were afterwards added. As being a confederation of independent
+      towns, New Haven resembled Connecticut. In other respects the differences
+      between the two reflected the differences between Davenport and Hooker;
+      the latter was what would now be called more radical than Winthrop or
+      Cotton, the former was more conservative. In the New Haven colony none but
+      church-members could vote, and this measure at the outset disfranchised
+      more than half the settlers in New Haven town, nearly half in Guilford,
+      and less than one fifth in Milford. This result was practically less
+      democratic than in Massachusetts where it was some time before the
+      disfranchisement attained such dimensions. The power of the clergy reached
+      its extreme point in New Haven, where each of the towns was governed by
+      seven ecclesiastical officers known as "pillars of the church." These
+      magistrates served as judges, and trial by jury was dispensed with,
+      because no authority could be found for it in the laws of Moses. The
+      legislation was quaint enough, though the famous "Blue Laws" of New Haven,
+      which have been made the theme of so many jests at the expense of our
+      forefathers, never really existed. The story of the Blue Laws was first
+      published in 1781 by the Rev. Samuel Peters, a Tory refugee in London, who
+      took delight in horrifying our British cousins with tales of wholesale
+      tarring and feathering done by the patriots of the Revolution. In point of
+      strict veracity Dr. Peters reminds one of Baron Munchausen; he declares
+      that the river at Bellows Falls flows so fast as to float iron crowbars,
+      and he gravely describes sundry animals who were evidently cousins to the
+      Jabberwok. The most famous passage of his pretended code is that which
+      enacts that "no woman shall kiss her child on the Sabbath," and that "no
+      one shall play on any instrument of music except the drum, trumpet, or
+      jewsharp." [[Sidenote: Legend of the "Blue Laws"]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the Long Parliament met in 1640, the Puritan exodus to New England
+      came to an end. During the twenty years which had elapsed since the voyage
+      of the Mayflower, the population had grown to 26,000 souls. Of this number
+      scarcely 500 had arrived before 1629. It is a striking fact, since it
+      expresses a causal relation and not a mere coincidence, that the eleven
+      years, 1629-1640, during which Charles I. governed England without a
+      parliament, were the same eleven years that witnessed the planting of New
+      England. For more than a century after this there was no considerable
+      migration to this part of North America. Puritan England now found
+      employment for all its energies and all its enthusiasm at home. The
+      struggle with the king and the efforts toward reorganization under
+      Cromwell were to occupy it for another score of years, and then, by the
+      time of the Restoration the youthful creative energy of Puritanism had
+      spent itself. The influence of this great movement was indeed destined to
+      grow wider and deeper with the progress of civilization, but after 1660
+      its creative work began to run in new channels and assume different forms.
+      [[Sidenote: End of the Puritan exodus]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is curious to reflect what might have been the result, to America and
+      to the world, had things in England gone differently between 1620 and
+      1660. Had the policy of James and Charles been less formidable, the
+      Puritan exodus might never have occurred, and the Virginian type of
+      society, varied perhaps by a strong Dutch infusion, might have become
+      supreme in America. The western continent would have lost in richness and
+      variety of life, and it is not likely that Europe would have made a
+      corresponding gain, for the moral effect of the challenge, the struggle,
+      and the overthrow of monarchy in England was a stimulus sorely needed by
+      neighbouring peoples. It is not always by avoiding the evil, it is rather
+      by grappling with it and conquering it that character is strengthened and
+      life enriched, and there is no better example of this than the history of
+      England in the seventeenth century.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the other hand, if the Stuart despotism had triumphed in England, the
+      Puritan exodus would doubtless have been swelled to huge dimensions. New
+      England would have gained strength so quickly that much less irritation
+      than she actually suffered between 1664 and 1689 would probably have
+      goaded her into rebellion. The war of independence might have been waged a
+      century sooner than it was. It is not easy to point to any especial
+      advantage that could have come to America from this; one is rather
+      inclined to think of the peculiarly valuable political training of the
+      eighteenth century that would have been lost. Such surmises are for the
+      most part idle. But as concerns Europe, it is plain to be seen, for
+      reasons stated in my first chapter, that the decisive victory of Charles
+      I. would have been a calamity of the first magnitude. It would have been
+      like the Greeks losing Marathon or the Saracens winning Tours, supposing
+      the worst consequences ever imagined in those hypothetical cases to have
+      been realized. Or taking a more contracted view, we can see how England,
+      robbed of her Puritan element, might still have waxed in strength, as
+      France has done in spite of losing the Huguenots; but she could not have
+      taken the proud position that she has come to occupy as mother of nations.
+      Her preeminence since Cromwell's time has been chiefly due to her
+      unrivalled power of planting self-supporting colonies, and that power has
+      had its roots in English self-government. It is the vitality of the
+      English Idea that is making the language of Cromwell and Washington
+      dominant in the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IV. &mdash; THE NEW ENGLAND CONFEDERACY.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The Puritan exodus to New England, which came to an end about 1640, was
+      purely and exclusively English. There was nothing in it that came from the
+      continent of Europe, nothing that was either Irish or Scotch, very little
+      that was Welsh. As Palfrey says, the population of 26,000 that had been
+      planted in New England by 1640 "thenceforward continued to multiply on its
+      own soil for a century and a half, in remarkable seclusion from other
+      communities." During the whole of this period New England received but few
+      immigrants; and it was not until after the Revolutionary War that its
+      people had fairly started on their westward march into the state of New
+      York and beyond, until now, after yet another century, we find some of
+      their descendants dwelling in a homelike Salem and a Portland of charming
+      beauty on the Pacific coast. Three times between the meeting of the Long
+      Parliament and the meeting of the Continental Congress did the New England
+      colonies receive a slight infusion of non-English blood. In 1652, after
+      his victories at Dunbar and Worcester, Cromwell sent 270 of his Scottish
+      prisoners to Boston, where the descendants of some of them still dwell.
+      After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, 150 families of
+      Huguenots came to Massachusetts. And finally in 1719, 120 Presbyterian
+      families came over from the north of Ireland, and settled at Londonderry
+      in New Hampshire, and elsewhere. In view of these facts it may be said
+      that there is not a county in England of which the population is more
+      purely English than the population of New England at the end of the
+      eighteenth century. From long and careful research, Mr. Savage, the
+      highest authority on this subject, concludes that more than 98 in 100 of
+      the New England people at that time could trace their origin to England in
+      the narrowest sense, excluding even Wales. As already observed, every
+      English shire contributed something to the emigration, but there was a
+      marked preponderance of people from the East Anglian counties. [[Sidenote:
+      The exodus was purely English]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The population of New England was nearly as homogeneous in social
+      condition as it was in blood. The emigration was preeminent for its
+      respectability. Like the best part of the emigration to Virginia, it
+      consisted largely of country squires and yeomen. The men who followed
+      Winthrop were thrifty and prosperous in their old homes from which their
+      devotion to an idea made them voluntary exiles. They attached so much
+      importance to regular industry and decorous behaviour that for a long time
+      the needy and shiftless people who usually make trouble in new colonies
+      were not tolerated among them. Hence the early history of New England is
+      remarkably free from those scenes of violence and disorder which have so
+      often made hideous the first years of new communities. Of negro slaves
+      there were very few, and these were employed wholly in domestic service;
+      there were not enough of them to affect the industrial life of New England
+      or to be worth mentioning as a class. Neither were there many of the
+      wretched people, kidnapped from the jails and slums of English sea-ports,
+      such as in those early days when negro labour was scarce, were sent by
+      ship-loads to Virginia, to become the progenitors of the "white trash."
+      There were a few indented white servants, usually of the class known as
+      "redemptioners," or immigrants who voluntarily bound themselves to service
+      for a stated time in order to defray the cost of their voyage from Europe.
+      At a later time there were many of these "redemptioners" in the middle
+      colonies, but in New England they were very few; and as no stigma of
+      servitude was attached to manual labour, they were apt at the end of their
+      terms of service to become independent farmers; thus they ceased to be
+      recognizable as a distinct class of society. Nevertheless the common
+      statement that no traces of the "mean white" are to be found in New
+      England is perhaps somewhat too sweeping. Interspersed among those
+      respectable and tidy mountain villages, once full of such vigorous life,
+      one sometimes comes upon little isolated groups of wretched hovels whose
+      local reputation is sufficiently indicated by such terse epithets as
+      "Hardscrabble" or "Hell-huddle." Their denizens may in many instances be
+      the degenerate offspring of a sound New England stock, but they sometimes
+      show strong points of resemblance to that "white trash" which has come to
+      be a recognizable strain of the English race; and one cannot help
+      suspecting that while the New England colonies made every effort to keep
+      out such riff raff, it may nevertheless have now and then crept in.
+      However this may be, it cannot be said that this element ever formed a
+      noticeable feature in the life of colonial New England. As regards their
+      social derivation, the settlers of New England were homogeneous in
+      character to a remarkable degree, and they were drawn from the sturdiest
+      part of the English stock. In all history there has been no other instance
+      of colonization so exclusively effected by picked and chosen men. The
+      colonists knew this, and were proud of it, as well they might be. It was
+      the simple truth that was spoken by William Stoughton when he said, in his
+      election sermon of 1688: "God sifted a whole nation, that He might send
+      choice grain into the wilderness." [[Sidenote: Respectable character of
+      the emigration]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This matter comes to have more than a local interest, when we reflect that
+      the 26,000 New Englanders of 1640 have in two hundred and fifty years
+      increased to something like 15,000,000. From these men have come at least
+      one-fourth of the present population of the United States. Striking as
+      this fact may seem, it is perhaps less striking than the fact of the
+      original migration when duly considered. In these times, when great
+      steamers sail every day from European ports, bringing immigrants to a
+      country not less advanced in material civilization than the country which
+      they leave, the daily arrival of a thousand new citizens has come to be a
+      commonplace event. But in the seventeenth century the transfer of more
+      than twenty thousand well-to-do people within twenty years from their
+      comfortable homes in England to the American wilderness was by no means a
+      commonplace event. It reminds one of the migrations of ancient peoples,
+      and in the quaint thought of our forefathers it was aptly likened to the
+      exodus of Israel from the Egyptian house of bondage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this migration a principle of selection was at work which insured an
+      extraordinary uniformity of character and of purpose among the settlers.
+      To this uniformity of purpose, combined with complete homogeneity of race,
+      is due the preponderance early acquired by New England in the history of
+      the American people. In view of this, it is worth while to inquire what
+      were the real aims of the settlers of New England. What was the common
+      purpose which brought these men together in their resolve to create for
+      themselves new homes in the wilderness?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is a point concerning which there has been a great deal of popular
+      misapprehension, and there has been no end of nonsense talked about it. It
+      has been customary first to assume that the Puritan migration was
+      undertaken in the interests of religious liberty, and then to upbraid the
+      Puritans for forgetting all about religious liberty as soon as people came
+      among them who disagreed with their opinions. But this view of the case is
+      not supported by history. It is quite true that the Puritans were
+      chargeable with gross intolerance; but it is not true that in this they
+      were guilty of inconsistency. The notion that they came to New England for
+      the purpose of establishing religious liberty, in any sense in which we
+      should understand such a phrase, is entirely incorrect. It is neither more
+      nor less than a bit of popular legend. If we mean by the phrase "religious
+      liberty" a state of things in which opposite or contradictory opinions on
+      questions of religion shall exist side by side in the same community, and
+      in which everybody shall decide for himself how far he will conform to the
+      customary religious observances, nothing could have been further from
+      their thoughts. There is nothing they would have regarded with more
+      genuine abhorrence. If they could have been forewarned by a prophetic
+      voice of the general freedom&mdash;or, as they would have termed it,
+      license&mdash;of thought and behaviour which prevails in this country
+      to-day, they would very likely have abandoned their enterprise in despair.
+      <a href="#linknote-12" name="linknoteref-12" id="linknoteref-12"><small>12</small></a>
+      The philosophic student of history often has occasion to see how God is
+      wiser than man. In other words, he is often brought to realize how
+      fortunate it is that the leaders in great historic events cannot foresee
+      the remote results of the labours to which they have zealously consecrated
+      their lives. It is part of the irony of human destiny that the end we
+      really accomplish by striving with might and main is apt to be something
+      quite different from the end we dreamed of as we started on our arduous
+      labour. So it was with the Puritan settlers of New England. The religious
+      liberty that we enjoy to-day is largely the consequence of their work; but
+      it is a consequence that was unforeseen, while the direct and conscious
+      aim of their labours was something that has never been realized, and
+      probably never will be. [[Sidenote: The migration was not intended to
+      promote what we call religious liberty]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The aim of Winthrop and his friends in coming to Massachusetts was the
+      construction of a theocratic state which should be to Christians, under
+      the New Testament dispensation, all that the theocracy of Moses and Joshua
+      and Samuel had been to the Jews in Old Testament days. They should be to
+      all intents and purposes freed from the jurisdiction of the Stuart king,
+      and so far as possible the text of the Holy Scriptures should be their
+      guide both in weighty matters of general legislation and in the shaping of
+      the smallest details of daily life. In such a scheme there was no room for
+      religious liberty as we understand it. No doubt the text of the Scriptures
+      may be interpreted in many ways, but among these men there was a
+      substantial agreement as to the important points, and nothing could have
+      been further from their thoughts than to found a colony which should
+      afford a field for new experiments in the art of right living. The state
+      they were to found was to consist of a united body of believers;
+      citizenship itself was to be co-extensive with church-membership; and in
+      such a state there was apparently no more room for heretics than there was
+      in Rome or Madrid. This was the idea which drew Winthrop and his followers
+      from England at a time when&mdash;as events were soon to show&mdash;they
+      might have stayed there and defied persecution with less trouble than it
+      cost them to cross the ocean and found a new state. [[Sidenote: Theocratic
+      ideal of the Puritans]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such an ideal as this, considered by itself and apart from the concrete
+      acts in which it was historically manifested, may seem like the merest
+      fanaticism. But we cannot dismiss in this summary way a movement which has
+      been at the source of so much that is great in American history: mere
+      fanaticism has never produced such substantial results. Mere fanaticism is
+      sure to aim at changing the constitution of human society in some
+      essential point, to undo the work of evolution, and offer in some
+      indistinctly apprehended fashion to remodel human life. But in these
+      respects the Puritans were intensely conservative. The impulse by which
+      they were animated was a profoundly ethical impulse&mdash;the desire to
+      lead godly lives, and to drive out sin from the community&mdash;the same
+      ethical impulse which animates the glowing pages of Hebrew poets and
+      prophets, and which has given to the history and literature of Israel
+      their commanding influence in the world. The Greek, says Matthew Arnold,
+      held that the perfection of happiness was to have one's thoughts hit the
+      mark; but the Hebrew held that it was to serve the Lord day and night. It
+      was a touch of this inspiration that the Puritan caught from his earnest
+      and reverent study of the sacred text, and that served to justify and
+      intensify his yearning for a better life, and to give it the character of
+      a grand and holy ideal. Yet with all this religious enthusiasm, the
+      Puritan was in every fibre a practical Englishman with his full share of
+      plain common-sense. He avoided the error of mediaeval anchorites and
+      mystics in setting an exaggerated value upon otherworldliness. In his
+      desire to win a crown of glory hereafter he did not forget that the
+      present life has its simple duties, in the exact performance of which the
+      welfare of society mainly consists. He likewise avoided the error of
+      modern radicals who would remodel the fundamental institutions of property
+      and of the family, and thus disturb the very groundwork of our ethical
+      ideals. The Puritan's ethical conception of society was simply that which
+      has grown up in the natural course of historical evolution, and which in
+      its essential points is therefore intelligible to all men, and approved by
+      the common-sense of men, however various may be the terminology&mdash;whether
+      theological or scientific&mdash;in which it is expounded. For these
+      reasons there was nothing essentially fanatical or impracticable in the
+      Puritan scheme: in substance it was something that great bodies of men
+      could at once put into practice, while its quaint and peculiar form was
+      something that could be easily and naturally outgrown and set aside.
+      [[Sidenote: The impulse which sought to realize itself in the Puritan
+      ideal was an ethical impulse]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet another point in which the Puritan scheme of a theocratic society was
+      rational and not fanatical was its method of interpreting the Scriptures.
+      That method was essentially rationalistic in two ways. First, the Puritan
+      laid no claim to the possession of any peculiar inspiration or divine
+      light whereby he might be aided in ascertaining the meaning of the sacred
+      text; but he used his reason just as he would in any matter of business,
+      and he sought to convince, and expected to be convinced, by rational
+      argument, and by nothing else. Secondly, it followed from this denial of
+      any peculiar inspiration that there was no room in the Puritan
+      commonwealth for anything like a priestly class, and that every individual
+      must hold his own opinions at his own personal risk. The consequences of
+      this rationalistic spirit have been very far-reaching. In the conviction
+      that religious opinion must be consonant with reason, and that religious
+      truth must be brought home to each individual by rational argument, we may
+      find one of the chief causes of that peculiarly conservative yet flexible
+      intelligence which has enabled the Puritan countries to take the lead in
+      the civilized world of today. Free discussion of theological questions,
+      when conducted with earnestness and reverence, and within certain
+      generally acknowledged limits, was never discountenanced in New England.
+      On the contrary, there has never been a society in the world in which
+      theological problems have been so seriously and persistently discussed as
+      in New England in the colonial period. The long sermons of the clergymen
+      were usually learned and elaborate arguments of doctrinal points,
+      bristling with quotations from the Bible, or from famous books of
+      controversial divinity, and in the long winter evenings the questions thus
+      raised afforded the occasion for lively debate in every household. The
+      clergy were, as a rule, men of learning, able to read both Old and New
+      Testaments in the original languages, and familiar with the best that had
+      been talked and written, among Protestants at least, on theological
+      subjects. They were also, for the most part, men of lofty character, and
+      they were held in high social esteem on account of their character and
+      scholarship, as well as on account of their clerical position. But in
+      spite of the reverence in which they were commonly held, it would have
+      been a thing quite unheard of for one of these pastors to urge an opinion
+      from the pulpit on the sole ground of his personal authority or his
+      superior knowledge of Scriptural exegesis. The hearers, too, were quick to
+      detect novelties or variations in doctrine; and while there was perhaps no
+      more than the ordinary human unwillingness to listen to a new thought
+      merely because of its newness, it was above all things needful that the
+      orthodox soundness of every new suggestion should be thoroughly and
+      severely tested. This intense interest in doctrinal theology was part and
+      parcel of the whole theory of New England life; because, as I have said,
+      it was taken for granted that each individual must hold his own opinions
+      at his own personal risk in the world to come. Such perpetual discussion,
+      conducted, under such a stimulus, afforded in itself no mean school of
+      intellectual training. Viewed in relation to the subsequent mental
+      activity of New England, it may be said to have occupied a position
+      somewhat similar to that which the polemics of the medieval schoolmen
+      occupied in relation to the European thought of the Renaissance, and of
+      the age of Hobbes and Descartes. At the same time the Puritan theory of
+      life lay at the bottom of the whole system of popular education in New
+      England. According to that theory, it was absolutely essential that every
+      one should be taught from early childhood how to read and understand the
+      Bible. So much instruction as this was assumed to be a sacred duty which
+      the community owed to every child born within its jurisdiction. In
+      ignorance, the Puritans maintained, lay the principal strength of popery
+      in religion as well as of despotism in politics; and so, to the best of
+      their lights, they cultivated knowledge with might and main. But in this
+      energetic diffusion of knowledge they were unwittingly preparing the
+      complete and irreparable destruction of the theocratic ideal of society
+      which they had sought to realize by crossing the ocean and settling in New
+      England. This universal education, and this perpetual discussion of
+      theological questions, were no more compatible with rigid adherence to the
+      Calvinistic system than with submission to the absolute rule of Rome. The
+      inevitable result was the liberal and enlightened Protestantism which is
+      characteristic of the best American society at the present day, and which
+      is continually growing more liberal as it grows more enlightened&mdash;a
+      Protestantism which, in the natural course of development, is coming to
+      realize the noble ideal of Roger Williams, but from the very thought of
+      which such men as Winthrop and Cotton and Endicott would have shrunk with
+      dismay. [[Sidenote: In interpreting Scripture, the Puritan appealed to his
+      reason] [[Sidenote: Value of theological discussion]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this connection it is interesting to note the similarity between the
+      experience of the Puritans in New England and in Scotland with respect to
+      the influence of their religious theory of life upon general education.
+      Nowhere has Puritanism, with its keen intelligence and its iron tenacity
+      of purpose, played a greater part than it has played in the history of
+      Scotland. And one need not fear contradiction in saying that no other
+      people in modern times, in proportion to their numbers, have achieved so
+      much in all departments of human activity as the people of Scotland have
+      achieved. It would be superfluous to mention the preeminence of Scotland
+      in the industrial arts since the days of James Watt, or to recount the
+      glorious names in philosophy, in history, in poetry and romance, and in
+      every department of science, which since the middle of the eighteenth
+      century have made the country of Burns and Scott, of Hume and Adam Smith,
+      of Black and Hunter and Hutton and Lyell, illustrious for all future time.
+      Now this period of magnificent intellectual fruition in Scotland was
+      preceded by a period of Calvinistic orthodoxy quite as rigorous as that of
+      New England. The ministers of the Scotch Kirk in the seventeenth century
+      cherished a theocratic ideal of society not unlike that which the
+      colonists of New England aimed at realizing. There was the same austerity,
+      the same intolerance, the same narrowness of interests, in Scotland that
+      there was in New England. Mr. Buckle, in the book which thirty years ago
+      seemed so great and stimulating, gave us a graphic picture of this state
+      of society, and the only thing which he could find to say about it, as the
+      result of his elaborate survey, was that the spirit of the Scotch Kirk was
+      as thoroughly hostile to human progress as the spirit of the Spanish
+      Inquisition! If this were really so, it would be difficult indeed to
+      account for the period of brilliant mental activity which immediately
+      followed. But in reality the Puritan theory of life led to general
+      education in Scotland as it did in New England, and for precisely the same
+      reasons, while the effects of theological discussion in breaking down the
+      old Calvinistic exclusiveness have been illustrated in the history of
+      Edinburgh as well as in the history of Boston. [[Sidenote: Comparison with
+      the case of Scotland]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is well for us to bear in mind the foregoing considerations as we deal
+      with the history of the short-lived New England Confederacy. The story is
+      full of instances of an intolerant and domineering spirit, especially on
+      the part of Massachusetts, and now and then this spirit breaks forth in
+      ugly acts of persecution. In considering these facts, it is well to
+      remember that we are observing the workings of a system which contained
+      within itself a curative principle; and it is further interesting to
+      observe how political circumstances contributed to modify the Puritan
+      ideal, gradually breaking down the old theocratic exclusiveness and
+      strengthening the spirit of religious liberty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Scarcely had the first New England colonies been established when it was
+      found desirable to unite them into some kind of a confederation. It is
+      worthy of note that the separate existence of so many colonies was at the
+      outset largely the result of religious differences. The uniformity of
+      purpose, great as it was, fell far short of completeness. [[Sidenote:
+      Existence of so many colonies due to slight religious differences]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Could all have agreed, or had there been religious toleration in the
+      modern sense, there was still room enough for all in Massachusetts; and a
+      compact settlement would have been in much less danger from the Indians.
+      But in the founding of Connecticut the theocratic idea had less weight,
+      and in the founding of New Haven it had more weight, than in
+      Massachusetts. The existence of Rhode Island was based upon that principle
+      of full toleration which the three colonies just mentioned alike abhorred,
+      and its first settlers were people banished from Massachusetts. With
+      regard to toleration Plymouth occupied a middle ground; without admitting
+      the principles of Williams, the people of that colony were still fairly
+      tolerant in practice. Of the four towns of New Hampshire, two had been
+      founded by Antinomians driven from Boston, and two by Episcopal friends of
+      Mason and Gorges. It was impossible that neighbouring communities,
+      characterized by such differences of opinion, but otherwise homogeneous in
+      race and in social condition, should fail to react upon one another and to
+      liberalize one another. Still more was this true when they attempted to
+      enter into a political union. When, for example, Massachusetts in 1641-43
+      annexed the New Hampshire townships, she was of necessity obliged to relax
+      in their case her policy of insisting upon religious conformity as a test
+      of citizenship. So in forming the New England Confederacy, there were some
+      matters of dispute that had to be passed over by mutual consent or
+      connivance. [[Sidenote: It led to a notable attempt at federation]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The same causes which had spread the English settlements over so wide a
+      territory now led, as an indirect result, to their partial union into a
+      confederacy. The immediate consequence of the westward movement had been
+      an Indian war. Several savage tribes were now interspersed between the
+      settlements, so that it became desirable that the military force should be
+      brought, as far as possible, under one management. The colony of New
+      Netherlands, moreover, had begun to assume importance, and the settlements
+      west of the Connecticut river had already occasioned hard words between
+      Dutch and English, which might at any moment be followed by blows. In the
+      French colonies at the north, with their extensive Indian alliances under
+      Jesuit guidance, the Puritans saw a rival power which was likely in course
+      of time to prove troublesome. With a view to more efficient self-defence,
+      therefore, in 1643 the four colonies of Massachusetts, Plymouth,
+      Connecticut, and New Haven formed themselves into a league, under the
+      style of "The United Colonies of New England." These four little states
+      now contained thirty-nine towns, with an aggregate population of 24,000.
+      To the northeast of Massachusetts, which now extended to the Piscataqua, a
+      small colony had at length been constituted under a proprietary charter
+      somewhat similar to that held by the Calverts in Maryland. Of this new
+      province or palatinate of Maine the aged Sir Ferdinando Gorges was Lord
+      Proprietary, and he had undertaken not only to establish the Church of
+      England there, but also to introduce usages of feudal jurisdiction like
+      those remaining in the old country. Such a community was not likely to
+      join the Confederacy; apart from other reasons, its proprietary
+      constitution and the feud between the Puritans and Gorges would have been
+      sufficient obstacles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for Rhode Island, on the other hand, it was regarded with strong
+      dislike by the other colonies. It was a curious and noteworthy consequence
+      of the circumstances under which this little state was founded that for a
+      long time it became the refuge of all the fanatical and turbulent people
+      who could not submit to the strict and orderly governments of Connecticut
+      or Massachusetts. All extremes met on Narragansett bay. There were not
+      only sensible advocates of religious liberty, but theocrats as well who
+      saw flaws in the theocracy of other Puritans. The English world was then
+      in a state of theological fermentation. People who fancied themselves
+      favoured with direct revelations from Heaven; people who thought it right
+      to keep the seventh day of the week as a Sabbath instead of the first day;
+      people who cherished a special predilection for the Apocalypse and the
+      Book of Daniel; people with queer views about property and government;
+      people who advocated either too little marriage or too much marriage; all
+      such eccentric characters as are apt to come to the surface in periods of
+      religious excitement found in Rhode Island a favoured spot where they
+      could prophesy without let or hindrance. But the immediate practical
+      result of so much discordance in opinion was the impossibility of founding
+      a strong and well-ordered government. The early history of Rhode Island
+      was marked by enough of turbulence to suggest the question whether, after
+      all, at the bottom of the Puritan's refusal to recognize the doctrine of
+      private inspiration, or to tolerate indiscriminately all sorts of
+      opinions, there may not have been a grain of shrewd political sense not
+      ill adapted to the social condition of the seventeenth century. In 1644
+      and again in 1648 the Narragansett settlers asked leave to join the
+      Confederacy; but the request was refused on the ground that they had no
+      stable government of their own. They were offered the alternative of
+      voluntary annexation either to Massachusetts or to Plymouth, or of staying
+      out in the cold; and they chose the latter course. Early in 1643 they had
+      sent Roger Williams over to England to obtain a charter for Rhode Island.
+      In that year Parliament created a Board of Commissioners, with the Earl of
+      Warwick at its head, for the superintendence of colonial affairs; and
+      nothing could better illustrate the loose and reckless manner in which
+      American questions were treated in England than the first proceedings of
+      this board. It gave an early instance of British carelessness in matters
+      of American geography. In December, 1643, it granted to Massachusetts all
+      the territory on the mainland of Narragansett bay; and in the following
+      March it incorporated the townships of Newport and Portsmouth, which stood
+      on the island, together with Providence, which stood on the mainland, into
+      an independent colony empowered to frame a government and make laws for
+      itself. With this second document Williams returned to Providence in the
+      autumn of 1644. Just how far it was intended to cancel the first one,
+      nobody could tell, but it plainly afforded an occasion for a conflict of
+      claims. [[Sidenote: Turbulence of dissent in Rhode Island] [[Sidenote: The
+      Earl of Warwick and his Board of Commissioners]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The league of the four colonies is interesting as the first American
+      experiment in federation. By the articles it was agreed that each colony
+      should retain full independence so far as concerned the management of its
+      internal affairs, but that the confederate government should have entire
+      control over all dealings with the Indians or with foreign powers. The
+      administration of the league was put into the hands of a board of eight
+      Federal Commissioners, two from each colony. The commissioners were
+      required to be church-members in good standing. They could choose for
+      themselves a president or chairman out of their own number, but such a
+      president was to have no more power than the other members of the Board.
+      If any measure were to come up concerning which the commissioners could
+      not agree, it was to be referred for consideration to the legislatures or
+      general courts of the four colonies. Expenses for war were to be charged
+      to each colony in proportion to the number of males in each between
+      sixteen years of age and sixty. A meeting of the Board might be summoned
+      by any two magistrates whenever the public safety might seem to require
+      it; but a regular meeting was to be held once every year.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this scheme of confederacy all power of taxation was expressly left to
+      the several colonies. The scheme provided for a mere league, not for a
+      federal union. The government of the Commissioners acted only upon the
+      local governments, not upon individuals. The Board had thus but little
+      executive power, and was hardly more than a consulting body. Another
+      source of weakness in the confederacy was the overwhelming preponderance
+      of Massachusetts. Of the 24,000 people in the confederation, 15,000
+      belonged to Massachusetts, while the other three colonies had only about
+      3,000 each. Massachusetts accordingly had to carry the heaviest burden,
+      both in the furnishing of soldiers and in the payment of war expenses,
+      while in the direction of affairs she had no more authority than one of
+      the small colonies. As a natural consequence, Massachusetts tried to exert
+      more authority than she was entitled to by the articles of confederation;
+      and such conduct was not unnaturally resented by the small colonies, as
+      betokening an unfair and domineering spirit. In spite of these drawbacks,
+      however, the league was of great value to New England. On many occasions
+      it worked well as a high court of jurisdiction, and it made the military
+      strength of the colonies more available than it would otherwise have been.
+      But for the interference of the British government, which brought it to an
+      untimely end, the Confederacy might have been gradually amended so as to
+      become enduring. After its downfall it was pleasantly remembered by the
+      people of New England; in times of trouble their thoughts reverted to it;
+      and the historian must in fairness assign it some share in preparing men's
+      minds for the greater work of federation which was achieved before the end
+      of the following century. [[Sidenote: It was only a league, not a federal
+      union]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The formation of such a confederacy certainly involved something very like
+      a tacit assumption of sovereignty on the part of the four colonies. It is
+      worthy of note that they did not take the trouble to ask the permission of
+      the home government in advance. They did as they pleased, and then
+      defended their action afterward. In England the act of confederation was
+      regarded with jealousy and distrust. But Edward Winslow, who was sent over
+      to London to defend the colonies, pithily said: "If we in America should
+      forbear to unite for offence and defence against a common enemy till we
+      have leave from England, our throats might be all cut before the messenger
+      would be half seas through." Whether such considerations would have had
+      weight with Charles I. or not was now of little consequence. His power of
+      making mischief soon came to an end, and from the liberal and sagacious
+      policy of Cromwell the Confederacy had not much to fear. Nevertheless the
+      fall of Charles I. brought up for the first time that question which a
+      century later was to acquire surpassing interest,&mdash;the question as to
+      the supremacy of Parliament over the colonies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Down to this time the supreme control over colonial affairs had been in
+      the hands of the king and his privy council, and the Parliament had not
+      disputed it. In 1624 they had grumbled at James I.'s high-handed
+      suppression of the Virginia Company, but they had not gone so far as to
+      call in question the king's supreme authority over the colonies. In 1628,
+      in a petition to Charles I. relating to the Bermudas, they had fully
+      admitted this royal authority. But the fall of Charles I. for the moment
+      changed all this. Among the royal powers devolved upon Parliament was the
+      prerogative of superintending the affairs of the colonies. Such, at least,
+      was the theory held in England, and it is not easy to see how any other
+      theory could logically have been held; but the Americans never formally
+      admitted it, and in practice they continued to behave toward Parliament
+      very much as they had behaved toward the crown, yielding just as little
+      obedience as possible. When the Earl of Warwick's commissioners in 1644
+      seized upon a royalist vessel in Boston harbour, the legislature of
+      Massachusetts debated the question whether it was compatible with the
+      dignity of the colony to permit such an act of sovereignty on the part of
+      Parliament. It was decided to wink at the proceeding, on account of the
+      strong sympathy between Massachusetts and the Parliament which was
+      overthrowing the king. At the same time the legislature sent over to
+      London a skilfully worded protest against any like exercise of power in
+      future. In 1651 Parliament ordered Massachusetts to surrender the charter
+      obtained from Charles I. and take out a new one from Parliament, in which
+      the relations of the colony to the home government should be made the
+      subject of fresh and more precise definition. To this request the colony
+      for more than a year vouchsafed no answer; and finally, when it became
+      necessary to do something, instead of sending back the charter, the
+      legislature sent back a memorial, setting forth that the people of
+      Massachusetts were quite contented with their form of government, and
+      hoped that no change would be made in it. War between England and Holland,
+      and the difficult political problems which beset the brief rule of
+      Cromwell, prevented the question from coming to an issue, and
+      Massachusetts was enabled to preserve her independent and somewhat haughty
+      attitude. [[Sidenote: Fall of Charles I. brings up the question as to
+      supremacy of Parliament over the colonies]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the whole period of the Confederacy, however, disputes kept coming
+      up which through endless crooked ramifications were apt to end in an
+      appeal to the home government, and thus raise again and again the question
+      as to the extent of its imperial supremacy. For our present purpose, it is
+      enough to mention three of these cases: 1, the adventures of Samuel
+      Gorton; 2, the Presbyterian cabal; 3, the persecution of the Quakers.
+      Other cases in point are those of John Clarke and the Baptists, and the
+      relations of Massachusetts to the northeastern settlements; but as it is
+      not my purpose here to make a complete outline of New England history, the
+      three cases enumerated will suffice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first case shows, in a curious and instructive way, how religious
+      dissensions were apt to be complicated with threats of an Indian war on
+      the one hand and peril from Great Britain on the other; and as we come to
+      realize the triple danger, we can perhaps make some allowances for the
+      high-handed measures with which the Puritan governments sometimes sought
+      to avert it. [Genesis of the persecuting spirit]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I have elsewhere tried to show, the genesis of the persecuting spirit
+      is to be found in the conditions of primitive society, where "above all
+      things the prime social and political necessity is social cohesion within
+      the tribal limits, for unless such social cohesion be maintained, the very
+      existence of the tribe is likely to be extinguished in bloodshed." The
+      persecuting spirit "began to pass away after men had become organized into
+      great nations, covering a vast extent of territory, and secured by their
+      concentrated military strength against the gravest dangers of barbaric
+      attack." <a href="#linknote-13" name="linknoteref-13" id="linknoteref-13"><small>13</small></a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now as regards these considerations, the Puritan communities in the New
+      England wilderness were to some slight extent influenced by such
+      conditions as used to prevail in primitive society; and this will help us
+      to understand the treatment of the Antinomians and such cases as that with
+      which we have now to deal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among the supporters of Mrs. Hutchinson, after her arrival at Aquedneck,
+      was a sincere and courageous, but incoherent and crotchetty man named
+      Samuel Gorton. [[Sidenote: Samuel Gorton]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the denunciatory language of that day he was called a "proud and
+      pestilent seducer," or, as the modern newspaper would say, a "crank." It
+      is well to make due allowances for the prejudice so conspicuous in the
+      accounts given by his enemies, who felt obliged to justify their harsh
+      treatment of him. But we have also his own writings from which to form an
+      opinion as to his character and views. Lucidity, indeed, was not one of
+      his strong points as a writer, and the drift of his argument is not always
+      easy to decipher; but he seems to have had some points of contact with the
+      Familists, a sect established in the sixteenth century in Holland. The
+      Familists held that the essence of religion consists not in adherence to
+      any particular creed or ritual, but in cherishing the spirit of divine
+      love. The general adoption of this point of view was to inaugurate a third
+      dispensation, superior to those of Moses and Christ, the dispensation of
+      the Holy Ghost. The value of the Bible lay not so much in the literal
+      truth of its texts as in their spiritual import; and by the union of
+      believers with Christ they came to share in the ineffable perfection of
+      the Godhead. There is much that is modern and enlightened in such views,
+      which Gorton seems to some extent to have shared. He certainly set little
+      store by ritual observances and maintained the equal right of laymen with
+      clergymen to preach the gospel. Himself a London clothier, and thanking
+      God that he had not been brought up in "the schools of human learning," he
+      set up as a preacher without ordination, and styled himself "professor of
+      the mysteries of Christ." He seems to have cherished that doctrine of
+      private inspiration which the Puritans especially abhorred. It is not
+      likely that he had any distinct comprehension of his own views, for
+      distinctness was just what they lacked. <a href="#linknote-14"
+      name="linknoteref-14" id="linknoteref-14"><small>14</small></a> But they
+      were such as in the seventeenth century could not fail to arouse fierce
+      antagonism, and if it was true that wherever there was a government Gorton
+      was against it, perhaps that only shows that wherever there was a
+      government it was sure to be against him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the case of such men as Gorton, however,&mdash;and the type is by no
+      means an uncommon one,&mdash;their temperament usually has much more to do
+      with getting them into trouble than their opinions. Gorton's temperament
+      was such as to keep him always in an atmosphere of strife. Other
+      heresiarchs suffered persecution in Massachusetts, but Gorton was in hot
+      water everywhere. His arrival in any community was the signal for an
+      immediate disturbance of the peace. His troubles began in Plymouth, where
+      the wife of the pastor preferred his teachings to those of her husband. In
+      1638 he fled to Aquedneck, where his first achievement was a schism among
+      Mrs. Hutchinson's followers, which ended in some staying to found the town
+      of Portsmouth while others went away to found Newport. Presently
+      Portsmouth found him intolerable, flogged and banished him, and after his
+      departure was able to make up its quarrel with Newport. He next made his
+      way with a few followers to Pawtuxet, within the jurisdiction of
+      Providence, and now it is the broad-minded and gentle Roger Williams who
+      complains of his "bewitching and madding poor Providence." The question is
+      here suggested what could it have been in Gorton's teaching that enabled
+      him thus to "bewitch" these little communities? We may be sure that it
+      could not have been the element of modern liberalism suggested in the
+      Familistic doctrines above cited. That was the feature then least likely
+      to appeal to the minds of common people, and most likely to appeal to
+      Williams. More probably such success as Gorton had in winning followers
+      was due to some of the mystical rubbish which abounds in his pages and
+      finds in a modern mind no doorway through which to enter. [[Sidenote: He
+      flees to Aquedneck and is banished thence]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Williams disapproved of Gorton, but was true to his principles of
+      toleration and would not take part in any attempt to silence him. But in
+      1641 we find thirteen leading citizens of Providence, headed by William
+      Arnold, <a href="#linknote-15" name="linknoteref-15" id="linknoteref-15"><small>15</small></a>
+      sending a memorial to Boston, asking for assistance and counsel in regard
+      to this disturber of the peace. How was Massachusetts to treat such an
+      appeal? She could not presume to meddle with the affair unless she could
+      have permanent jurisdiction over Pawtuxet; otherwise she was a mere
+      intruder. How strong a side-light does this little incident throw upon the
+      history of the Roman republic, and of all relatively strong communities
+      when confronted with the problem of preserving order in neighbouring
+      states that are too weak to preserve it for themselves! Arnold's argument,
+      in his appeal to Massachusetts, was precisely the same as that by which
+      the latter colony excused herself for banishing the Antinomians. He simply
+      says that Gorton and his company "are not fit persons to be received, and
+      made members of a body in so weak a state as our town is in at present;"
+      and he adds, "There is no state but in the first place will seek to
+      preserve its own safety and peace." Whatever might be the abstract merits
+      of Gorton's opinions, his conduct was politically dangerous; and
+      accordingly the jurisdiction over Pawtuxet was formally conceded to
+      Massachusetts. Thereupon that colony, assuming jurisdiction, summoned
+      Gorton and his men to Boston, to prove their title to the lands they
+      occupied. They of course regarded the summons as a flagrant usurpation of
+      authority, and instead of obeying it they withdrew to Shawomet, on the
+      western shore of Narragansett bay, where they bought a tract of land from
+      the principal sachem of the Narragansetts, Miantonomo. The immediate rule
+      over this land belonged to two inferior chiefs, who ratified the sale at
+      the time, but six months afterward disavowed the ratification, on the
+      ground that it had been given under duress from their overlord Miantonomo.
+      Here was a state of things which might easily bring on an Indian war. The
+      two chiefs appealed to Massachusetts for protection, and were accordingly
+      summoned, along with Miantonomo, to a hearing at Boston. Here we see how a
+      kind of English protectorate over the native tribes had begun to grow up
+      so soon after the destruction of the Pequots. Such a result was
+      inevitable. After hearing the arguments, the legislature decided to defend
+      the two chiefs, provided they would put themselves under the jurisdiction
+      of Massachusetts. This was done, while further complaints against Gorton
+      came from the citizens of Providence. Gorton and his men were now
+      peremptorily summoned to Boston to show cause why they should not
+      surrender their land at Shawomet and to answer the charges against them.
+      On receiving from Gorton a defiant reply, couched in terms which some
+      thought blasphemous, the government of Massachusetts prepared to use
+      force. [[Sidenote: Providence protests against him] [[Sidenote: He flees
+      to Shawomet, where he buys land of the Indians]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile the unfortunate Miantonomo had rushed upon his doom. The
+      annihilation of the Pequots had left the Mohegans and Narragansetts
+      contending for the foremost place among the native tribes. Between the
+      rival sachems, Uncas and Miantonomo, the hatred was deep and deadly. As
+      soon as the Mohegan perceived that trouble was brewing between Miantonomo
+      and the government at Boston, he improved the occasion by gathering a few
+      Narragansett scalps. Miantonomo now took the war-path and was totally
+      defeated by Uncas in a battle on the Great Plain in the present township
+      of Norwich. Encumbered with a coat of mail which his friend Gorton had
+      given him, Miantonomo was overtaken and captured. By ordinary Indian usage
+      he would have been put to death with fiendish torments, as soon as due
+      preparations could be made and a fit company assembled to gloat over his
+      agony; but Gorton sent a messenger to Uncas, threatening dire vengeance if
+      harm were done to his ally. This message puzzled the Mohegan chief. The
+      appearance of a schism in the English counsels was more than he could
+      quite fathom. When the affair had somewhat more fully developed itself,
+      some of the Indians spoke of the white men as divided into two rival
+      tribes, the Gortonoges and Wattaconoges. <a href="#linknote-16"
+      name="linknoteref-16" id="linknoteref-16"><small>16</small></a> Roger
+      Williams tells us that the latter term, applied to the men of Boston,
+      meant coat-wearers. Whether it is to be inferred that the Gortonoges went
+      about in what in modern parlance would be called their "shirt-sleeves,"
+      the reader must decide. [[Sidenote: Miantonomo and Uncas]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his perplexity Uncas took his prisoner to Hartford, and afterward, upon
+      the advice of the governor and council, sent him to Boston, that his fate
+      might be determined by the Federal Commissioners who were there holding
+      their first regular meeting. It was now the turn of the commissioners to
+      be perplexed. According to English law there was no good reason for
+      putting Miantonomo to death. The question was whether they should
+      interfere with the Indian custom by which his life was already forfeit to
+      his captor. The magistrates already suspected the Narragansetts of
+      cherishing hostile designs. To set their sachem at liberty, especially
+      while the Gorton affair remained unsettled, might be dangerous; and it
+      would be likely to alienate Uncas from the English. In their embarrassment
+      the commissioners sought spiritual guidance. A synod of forty or fifty
+      clergymen, from all parts of New England, was in session at Boston, and
+      the question was referred to a committee of five of their number. The
+      decision was prompt that Miantonomo must die. He was sent back to Hartford
+      to be slain by Uncas, but two messengers accompanied him, to see that no
+      tortures were inflicted. A select band of Mohegan warriors journeyed
+      through the forest with the prisoner and the two Englishmen, until they
+      came to the plain where the battle had been fought. Then at a signal from
+      Uncas, the warrior walking behind Miantonomo silently lifted his tomahawk
+      and sank it into the brain of the victim who fell dead without a groan.
+      Uncas cut a warm slice from the shoulder and greedily devoured it,
+      declaring that the flesh of his enemy was the sweetest of meat and gave
+      strength to his heart. Miantonomo was buried there on the scene of his
+      defeat, which has ever since been known as the Sachem's Plain. This was in
+      September, 1643, and for years afterward, in that month, parties of
+      Narragansetts used to visit the spot and with frantic gestures and hideous
+      yells lament their fallen leader. A heap of stones was raised over the
+      grave, and no Narragansett came near it without adding to the pile. After
+      many a summer had passed and the red men had disappeared from the land, a
+      Yankee farmer, with whom thrift prevailed over sentiment, cleared away the
+      mound and used the stones for the foundation of his new barn. <a
+      href="#linknote-17" name="linknoteref-17" id="linknoteref-17"><small>17</small></a>
+      [[Sidenote: Death of Miantonomo]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One cannot regard this affair as altogether creditable to the Federal
+      Commissioners and their clerical advisers. One of the clearest-headed and
+      most impartial students of our history observes that "if the English were
+      to meddle in the matter at all, it was their clear duty to enforce as far
+      as might be the principles recognized by civilized men. When they accepted
+      the appeal made by Uncas they shifted the responsibility from the Mohegan
+      chief to themselves." <a href="#linknote-18" name="linknoteref-18"
+      id="linknoteref-18"><small>18</small></a> The decision was doubtless based
+      purely upon grounds of policy. Miantonomo was put out of the way because
+      he was believed to be dangerous. In the thirst for revenge that was
+      aroused among the Narragansetts there was an alternative source of danger,
+      to which I shall hereafter refer. <a href="#linknote-19"
+      name="linknoteref-19" id="linknoteref-19"><small>19</small></a> It is
+      difficult now to decide, as a mere question of safe policy, what the
+      English ought to have done. The chance of being dragged into an Indian
+      war, through the feud between Narragansetts and Mohegans, was always
+      imminent. The policy which condemned Miantonomo was one of timidity, and
+      fear is merciless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Federal Commissioners heartily approved the conduct of Massachusetts
+      toward Gorton, and adopted it in the name of the United Colonies. After a
+      formal warning, which passed unheeded, a company of forty men, under
+      Edward Johnson of Woburn and two other officers, was sent to Shawomet.
+      Some worthy citizens of Providence essayed to play the part of mediators,
+      and after some parley the Gortonites offered to submit to arbitration. The
+      proposal was conveyed to Boston, and the clergy were again consulted. They
+      declared it beneath the dignity of Massachusetts to negotiate "with a few
+      fugitives living without law or government," and they would no more
+      compound with Gorton's "blasphemous revilings" than they would bargain
+      with the Evil One. The community must be "purged" of such wickedness,
+      either by repentance or by punishment. The ministers felt that God would
+      hold the community responsible for Gorton and visit calamities upon them
+      unless he were silenced. <a href="#linknote-20" name="linknoteref-20"
+      id="linknoteref-20"><small>20</small></a> The arbitration was refused,
+      Gorton's blockhouse was besieged and captured, and the agitator was
+      carried with nine of his followers to Boston, where they were speedily
+      convicted of heresy and sedition. Before passing judgment the General
+      Court as usual consulted with the clergy who recommended a sentence of
+      death. Their advice was adopted by the assistants, but the deputies were
+      more merciful, and the heretics were sentenced to imprisonment at the
+      pleasure of the court. In this difference between the assistants and the
+      deputies, we observe an early symptom of that popular revolt against the
+      ascendancy of the clergy which was by and by to become so much more
+      conspicuous and effective in the affair of the Quakers. Another symptom
+      might be seen in the circumstance that so much sympathy was expressed for
+      the Gortonites, especially by women, that after some months of
+      imprisonment and abuse the heretics were banished under penalty of death.
+      [[Sidenote: Trial and sentence of the heretics]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gorton now went to England and laid his tale of woe before the
+      parliamentary Board of Commissioners. The Earl of Warwick behaved with
+      moderation. He declined to commit himself to an opinion as to the merits
+      of the quarrel, but Gorton's title to Shawomet was confirmed. He returned
+      to Boston with an order to the government to allow him to pass unmolested
+      through Massachusetts, and hereafter to protect him in the possession of
+      Shawomet. If this little commonwealth of 15,000 inhabitants had been a
+      nation as powerful as France, she could not have treated the message more
+      haughtily. By a majority of one vote it was decided not to refuse so
+      trifling a favour as a passage through the country for just this once; but
+      as for protecting the new town of Warwick which the Gortonites proceeded
+      to found at Shawomet, although it was several times threatened by the
+      Indians, and the settlers appealed to the parliamentary order, that order
+      Massachusetts flatly and doggedly refused to obey. <a href="#linknote-21"
+      name="linknoteref-21" id="linknoteref-21"><small>21</small></a>
+      [[Sidenote: Gorton appeals to Parliament]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the discussions of which these years were so full, "King Winthrop," as
+      his enemy Morton called him, used some very significant language. By a
+      curious legal fiction of the Massachusetts charter the colonists were
+      supposed to hold their land as in the manor of East Greenwich near London,
+      and it was argued that they were represented in Parliament by the members
+      of the county or borough which contained that manor, and were accordingly
+      subject to the jurisdiction of Parliament. It was further argued that
+      since the king had no absolute sovereignty independent of Parliament he
+      could not by charter impart any such independent sovereignty to others.
+      Winthrop did not dispute these points, but observed that the safety of the
+      commonwealth was the supreme law, and if in the interests of that safety
+      it should be found necessary to renounce the authority of Parliament, the
+      colonists would be justified in doing so. [[Sidenote: Winthrop's prophetic
+      opinion] <a href="#linknote-22" name="linknoteref-22" id="linknoteref-22"><small>22</small></a>
+      This was essentially the same doctrine as was set forth ninety-nine years
+      later by young Samuel Adams in his Commencement Oration at Harvard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The case of the Presbyterian cabal admits of briefer treatment than that
+      of Gorton. There had now come to be many persons in Massachusetts who
+      disapproved of the provision which restricted the suffrage to members of
+      the Independent or Congregational churches of New England, and in 1646 the
+      views of these people were presented in a petition to the General Court.
+      The petitioners asked "that their civil disabilities might be removed, and
+      that all members of the churches of England and Scotland might be admitted
+      to communion with the New England churches. If this could not be granted
+      they prayed to be released from all civil burdens. Should the court refuse
+      to entertain their complaint, they would be obliged to bring their case
+      before Parliament." <a href="#linknote-23" name="linknoteref-23"
+      id="linknoteref-23"><small>23</small></a> The leading signers of this
+      menacing petition were William Vassall, Samuel Maverick, and The
+      Presbyterian cabal. Dr. Robert Child. Maverick we have already met. From
+      the day when the ships of the first Puritan settlers had sailed past his
+      log fortress on Noddle's Island, he had been their enemy; "a man of loving
+      and curteous behaviour," says Johnson, "very ready to entertaine
+      strangers, yet an enemy to the reformation in hand, being strong for the
+      lordly prelatical power." Vassall was not a denizen of Massachusetts, but
+      lived in Scituate, in the colony of Plymouth, where there were no such
+      restrictions upon the suffrage. Child was a learned physician who after a
+      good deal of roaming about the world had lately taken it into his head to
+      come and see what sort of a place Massachusetts was. Although these names
+      were therefore not such as to lend weight to such a petition, their
+      request would seem at first sight reasonable enough. At a superficial
+      glance it seems conceived in a modern spirit of liberalism. In reality it
+      was nothing of the sort. In England it was just the critical moment of the
+      struggle between Presbyterians and Independents which had come in to
+      complicate the issues of the great civil war. Vassall, Child, and Maverick
+      seem to have been the leading spirits in a cabal for the establishment of
+      Presbyterianism in New England, and in their petition they simply took
+      advantage of the discontent of the disfranchised citizens in Massachusetts
+      in order to put in an entering wedge. This was thoroughly understood by
+      the legislature of Massachusetts, and accordingly the petition was
+      dismissed and the petitioners were roundly fined. Just as Child was about
+      to start for England with his grievances, the magistrates overhauled his
+      papers and discovered a petition to the parliamentary Board of
+      Commissioners, suggesting that Presbyterianism should be established in
+      New England, and that a viceroy or governor-general should be appointed to
+      rule there. To the men of Massachusetts this last suggestion was a
+      crowning horror. It seemed scarcely less than treason. The signers of this
+      petition were the same who had signed the petition to the General Court.
+      They were now fined still more heavily and imprisoned for six months. By
+      and by they found their way, one after another, to London, while the
+      colonists sent Edward Winslow, of Plymouth, as an advocate to thwart their
+      schemes. Winslow was assailed by Child's brother in a spicy pamphlet
+      entitled "New England's Jonas cast up at London," and replied after the
+      same sort, entitling his pamphlet "New England's Salamander discovered."
+      The cabal accomplished nothing because of the decisive defeat of
+      Presbyterianism in England. "Pride's Purge" settled all that. The petition
+      of Vassall and his friends was the occasion for the meeting of a synod of
+      churches at Cambridge, in order to complete the organization of
+      Congregationalism. In 1648 the work of the synod was embodied in the
+      famous Cambridge Platform, which adopted the Westminster Confession as its
+      creed, carefully defined the powers of the clergy, and declared it to be
+      the duty of magistrates to suppress heresy. In 1649 the General Court laid
+      this platform before the congregations; in 1651 it was adopted; and this
+      event may be regarded as completing the theocratic organization of the
+      Puritan commonwealth in Massachusetts. [[Sidenote: The Cambridge Platform;
+      deaths of Winthrop and Cotton]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was immediately preceded and followed by the deaths of the two foremost
+      men in that commonwealth. John Winthrop died in 1649 and John Cotton in
+      1652. Both were men of extraordinary power. Of Winthrop it is enough to
+      say that under his skilful guidance Massachusetts had been able to pursue
+      the daring policy which had characterized the first twenty years of her
+      history, and which in weaker hands would almost surely have ended in
+      disaster. Of Cotton it may be said that he was the most eminent among a
+      group of clergymen who for learning and dialectical skill have seldom been
+      surpassed. Neither Winthrop nor Cotton approved of toleration upon
+      principle. Cotton, in his elaborate controversy with Roger Williams,
+      frankly asserted that persecution is not wrong in itself; it is wicked for
+      falsehood to persecute truth, but it is the sacred duty of truth to
+      persecute falsehood. This was the theologian's view. Winthrop's was that
+      of a man of affairs. They had come to New England, he said, in order to
+      make a society after their own model; all who agreed with them might come
+      and join that society; those who disagreed with them might go elsewhere;
+      there was room enough on the American continent. But while neither
+      Winthrop nor Cotton understood the principle of religious liberty, at the
+      same time neither of them had the temperament which persecutes. Both were
+      men of genial disposition, sound common-sense, and exquisite tact. Under
+      their guidance no such tragedy would have been possible as that which was
+      about to leave its ineffaceable stain upon the annals of Massachusetts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was most unfortunate that at this moment the places of these two men
+      should have been taken by two as arrant fanatics as ever drew breath. For
+      thirteen out of the fifteen years following Winthrop's death, the governor
+      of Massachusetts was John Endicott, a sturdy pioneer, whose services to
+      the colony had been great. He was honest and conscientious, but
+      passionate, domineering, and very deficient in tact. At the same time
+      Cotton's successor in position and influence was John Norton, a man of
+      pungent wit, unyielding temper, and melancholy mood. He was possessed by a
+      morbid fear of Satan, whose hirelings he thought were walking up and down
+      over the earth in the visible semblance of heretics and schismatics. Under
+      such leaders the bigotry latent in the Puritan commonwealth might easily
+      break out in acts of deadly persecution. [[Sidenote: Endicott and Norton
+      take the lead] [[Sidenote: The Quakers and their views]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The occasion was not long in coming. Already the preaching of George Fox
+      had borne fruit, and the noble sect of Quakers was an object of scorn and
+      loathing to all such as had not gone so far as they toward learning the
+      true lesson of Protestantism. Of all Protestant sects the Quakers went
+      furthest in stripping off from Christianity its non-essential features of
+      doctrine and ceremonial. Their ideal was not a theocracy but a separation
+      between church and state. They would abolish all distinction between
+      clergy and laity, and could not be coaxed or bullied into paying tithes.
+      They also refused to render military service, or to take the oath of
+      allegiance. In these ways they came at once into antagonism both with
+      church and with state. In doctrine their chief peculiarity was the
+      assertion of an "Inward Light" by which every individual is to be guided
+      in his conduct of life. They did not believe that men ceased to be
+      divinely inspired when the apostolic ages came to an end, but held that at
+      all times and places the human soul may be enlightened by direct communion
+      with its Heavenly Father. Such views involved the most absolute assertion
+      of the right of private judgment; and when it is added that in the
+      exercise of this right many Quakers were found to reject the dogmas of
+      original sin and the resurrection of the body, to doubt the efficacy of
+      baptism, and to call in question the propriety of Christians turning the
+      Lord's Day into a Jewish Sabbath, we see that they had in some respects
+      gone far on the road toward modern rationalism. It was not to be expected
+      that such opinions should be treated by the Puritans in any other spirit
+      than one of extreme abhorrence and dread. The doctrine of the "Inward
+      Light," or of private inspiration, was something especially hateful to the
+      Puritan. To the modern rationalist, looking at things in the dry light of
+      history, it may seem that this doctrine was only the Puritan's own appeal
+      to individual judgment, stated in different form; but the Puritan could
+      not so regard it. To such a fanatic as Norton this inward light was but a
+      reflection from the glare of the bottomless pit, this private inspiration
+      was the beguiling voice of the Devil. As it led the Quakers to strange and
+      novel conclusions, this inward light seemed to array itself in hostility
+      to that final court of appeal for all good Protestants, the sacred text of
+      the Bible. The Quakers were accordingly regarded as infidels who sought to
+      deprive Protestantism of its only firm support. They were wrongly accused
+      of blasphemy in their treatment of the Scriptures. Cotton Mather says that
+      the Quakers were in the habit of alluding to the Bible as the Word of the
+      Devil. Such charges, from passionate and uncritical enemies, are worthless
+      except as they serve to explain the bitter prejudice with which the
+      Quakers were regarded. They remind one of the silly accusation brought
+      against Wyclif two centuries earlier, that he taught his disciples that
+      God ought to obey the Devil; <a href="#linknote-24" name="linknoteref-24"
+      id="linknoteref-24"><small>24</small></a> and they are not altogether
+      unlike the assumptions of some modern theologians who take it for granted
+      that any writer who accepts the Darwinian theory must be a materialist.
+      [[Sidenote: Endicott and Norton take the lead] [[Sidenote: The Quakers and
+      their views]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But worthless as Mather's statements are, in describing the views of the
+      Quakers, they are valuable as indicating the temper in which these
+      disturbers of the Puritan theocracy were regarded. In accusing them of
+      rejecting the Bible and making a law unto themselves, Mather simply put on
+      record a general belief which he shared. Nor can it be doubted that the
+      demeanour of the Quaker enthusiasts was sometimes such as to seem to
+      warrant the belief that their anarchical doctrines entailed, as a natural
+      consequence, disorderly and disreputable conduct. In those days all
+      manifestations of dissent were apt to be violent, and the persecution
+      which they encountered was likely to call forth strange and unseemly
+      vagaries. When we remember how the Quakers, in their scorn of earthly
+      magistrates and princes, would hoot at the governor as he walked up the
+      street; how they used to rush into church on Sundays and interrupt the
+      sermon with untimely remarks; how Thomas Newhouse once came into the Old
+      South Meeting-House with a glass bottle in each hand, and, holding them up
+      before the astonished congregation, knocked them together and smashed
+      them, with the remark, "Thus will the Lord break you all in pieces"; how
+      Lydia Wardwell and Deborah Wilson ran about the streets in the primitive
+      costume of Eve before the fall, and called their conduct "testifying
+      before the Lord"; we can hardly wonder that people should have been
+      reminded of the wretched scenes enacted at Munster by the Anabaptists of
+      the preceding century. [[Sidenote: Violent manifestations of dissent]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such incidents, however, do not afford the slightest excuse for the cruel
+      treatment which the Quakers received in Boston, nor do they go far toward
+      explaining it. Persecution began immediately, before the new-comers had a
+      chance to behave themselves well or ill. Their mere coming to Boston was
+      taken as an act of invasion. It was indeed an attack upon the Puritan
+      theocratic idea. Of all the sectaries of that age of sects, the Quakers
+      were the most aggressive. There were at one time more than four thousand
+      of them in English jails; yet when any of them left England, it was less
+      to escape persecution than to preach their doctrines far and wide over the
+      earth. Their missionaries found their way to Paris, to Vienna; even to
+      Rome, where they testified under the very roof of the Vatican. In this
+      dauntless spirit they came to New England to convert its inhabitants, or
+      at any rate to establish the principle that in whatever community it might
+      please them to stay, there they would stay in spite of judge or hangman.
+      At first they came to Barbadoes, whence two of their number, Anne Austin
+      and Mary Fisher, sailed for Boston. When they landed, on a May morning in
+      1656, Endicott happened to be away from Boston, but the deputy-governor,
+      Richard Bellingham, was equal to the occasion. He arrested the two women
+      and locked them up in jail, where, for fear they might proclaim their
+      heresies to the crowd gathered outside, the windows were boarded up. There
+      was no law as yet enacted against Quakers, but a council summoned for the
+      occasion pronounced their doctrines blasphemous and devilish. The books
+      which the poor women had with them were seized and publicly burned, and
+      the women themselves were kept in prison half-starved for five weeks until
+      the ship they had come in was ready to return to Barbadoes. Soon after
+      their departure Endicott came home. He found fault with Bellingham's
+      conduct as too gentle; if he had been there he would have had the hussies
+      flogged. [[Sidenote: Anne Austin and Mary Fisher]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Five years afterward Mary Fisher went to Adrianople and tried to convert
+      the Grand Turk, who treated her with grave courtesy and allowed her to
+      prophesy unmolested. This is one of the numerous incidents that, on a
+      superficial view of history, might be cited in support of the opinion that
+      there has been on the whole more tolerance in the Mussulman than in the
+      Christian world. Rightly interpreted, however, the fact has no such
+      implication. In Massachusetts the preaching of Quaker doctrines might (and
+      did) lead to a revolution; in Turkey it was as harmless as the barking of
+      dogs. Governor Endicott was afraid of Mary Fisher; Mahomet III. was not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No sooner had the two women been shipped from Boston than eight other
+      Quakers arrived from London. They were at once arrested. While they were
+      lying in jail the Federal Commissioners, then in session at Plymouth,
+      recommended that laws be forthwith enacted to keep these dreaded heretics
+      out of the land. Next year they stooped so far as to seek the aid of Rhode
+      Island, the colony which they had refused to admit into their confederacy.
+      "They sent a letter to the authorities of that colony, signing themselves
+      their loving friends and neighbours, and beseeching them to preserve the
+      whole body of colonies against 'such a pest' by banishing and excluding
+      all Quakers, a measure to which 'the rule of charity did oblige them.'"
+      Roger Williams was then president of Rhode Island, and in full accord with
+      his noble spirit was the reply of the assembly. "We have no law amongst us
+      whereby to punish any for only declaring by words their minds and
+      understandings concerning the things and ways of God as to salvation and
+      our eternal condition." As for these Quakers we find that where they are
+      "most of all suffered to declare themselves freely and only opposed by
+      arguments in discourse, there they least of all desire to come." Any
+      breach of the civil law shall be punished, but the "freedom of different
+      consciences shall be respected." This reply enraged the confederated
+      colonies, and Massachusetts, as the strongest and most overbearing,
+      threatened to cut off the trade of Rhode Island, which forthwith appealed
+      to Cromwell for protection. The language of the appeal is as touching as
+      its broad Christian spirit is grand. It recognizes that by stopping trade
+      the men of Massachusetts will injure themselves, yet, it goes on to say,
+      "for the safeguard of their religion they may seem to neglect themselves
+      in that respect; for what will not men do for their God?" But whatever
+      fortune may befall, "let us not be compelled to exercise any civil power
+      over men's consciences." <a href="#linknote-25" name="linknoteref-25"
+      id="linknoteref-25"><small>25</small></a> [[Sidenote: Noble conduct of
+      Rhode Island]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There could never, of course, be a doubt as to who drew up this state
+      paper. During his last visit to England, three years before, Roger
+      Williams had spent several weeks at Sir Harry Vane's country house in
+      Lincolnshire, and he had also been intimately associated with Cromwell and
+      Milton. The views of these great men were the most advanced of that age.
+      They were coming to understand the true principle upon which toleration
+      should be based. (See my Excursions of an Evolutionist, pp. 247, 289-293.)
+      Vane had said in Parliament, "Why should the labours of any be suppressed,
+      if sober, though never so different? We now profess to seek God, we desire
+      to see light!" [[Sidenote: Roger Williams appeals to Cromwell]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This Williams called a "heavenly speech." The sentiment it expressed was
+      in accordance with the practical policy of Cromwell, and in the appeal of
+      the president of Rhode Island to the Lord Protector one hears the tone
+      with which friend speaks to friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In thus protecting the Quakers, Williams never for a moment concealed his
+      antipathy to their doctrines. The author of "George Fox digged out of his
+      Burrowes," the sturdy controversialist who in his seventy-third year rowed
+      himself in a boat the whole length of Narragansett bay to engage in a
+      theological tournament against three Quaker champions, was animated by
+      nothing less than the broadest liberalism in his bold reply to the Federal
+      Commissioners in 1657. The event showed that under his guidance the policy
+      of Rhode Island was not only honourable but wise. The four confederated
+      colonies all proceeded to pass laws banishing Quakers and making it a
+      penal offence for shipmasters to bring them to New England. These laws
+      differed in severity. Those of Connecticut, in which we may trace the
+      influence of the younger John Winthrop, were the mildest; those of
+      Massachusetts were the most severe, and as Quakers kept coming all the
+      more in spite of them, they grew harsher and harsher. At first the Quaker
+      who persisted in returning was to be flogged and imprisoned at hard
+      labour, next his ears were to be cut off, and for a third offence his
+      tongue was to be bored with a hot iron. At length in 1658, the Federal
+      Commissioners, sitting at Boston with Endicott as chairman, recommended
+      capital punishment. It must be borne in mind that the general reluctance
+      toward prescribing or inflicting the death penalty was much weaker then
+      than now. On the statute-books there were not less than fifteen capital
+      crimes, including such offences as idolatry, witchcraft, blasphemy,
+      marriage within the Levitical degrees, "presumptuous sabbath-breaking,"
+      and cursing or smiting one's parents. <a href="#linknote-26"
+      name="linknoteref-26" id="linknoteref-26"><small>26</small></a> The
+      infliction of the penalty, however, lay practically very much within the
+      discretion of the court, and was generally avoided except in cases of
+      murder or other heinous felony. In some of these ecclesiastical offences
+      the statute seems to have served the purpose of a threat, and was
+      therefore perhaps the more easily enacted. Yet none of the colonies except
+      Massachusetts now adopted the suggestion of the Federal Commissioners and
+      threatened the Quakers with death. [[Sidenote: Laws passed against the
+      Quakers]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Massachusetts the opposition was very strong indeed, and its character
+      shows how wide the divergence in sentiment had already become between the
+      upper stratum of society and the people in general. This divergence was
+      one result of the excessive weight given to the clergy by the restriction
+      of the suffrage to church members. One might almost say that it was not
+      the people of Massachusetts, after all, that shed the blood of the
+      Quakers; it was Endicott and the clergy. The bill establishing death as
+      the penalty for returning after banishment was passed in the upper house
+      without serious difficulty; but in the lower house it was at first
+      defeated. Of the twenty-six deputies fifteen were opposed to it, but one
+      of these fell sick and two were intimidated, so that finally the infamous
+      measure was passed by a vote of thirteen against twelve. Probably it would
+      not have passed but for a hopeful feeling that an occasion for putting it
+      into execution would not be likely to arise. It was hoped that the mere
+      threat would prove effective. Endicott begged the Quakers to keep away,
+      saying earnestly that he did not desire their death; but the more resolute
+      spirits were not deterred by fear of the gallows. In September, 1659,
+      William Robinson, Marmaduke Stevenson, and Mary Dyer, who had come to
+      Boston expressly to defy the cruel law, were banished. Mrs. Dyer was a
+      lady of good family, wife of the secretary of Rhode Island. She had been
+      an intimate friend of Mrs. Hutchinson. While she went home to her husband,
+      Stevenson and Robinson went only to Salem and then faced about and came
+      back to Boston. Mrs. Dyer also returned. All three felt themselves under
+      divine command to resist and defy the persecutors. On the 27th of October
+      they were led to the gallows on Boston Common, under escort of a hundred
+      soldiers. Many people had begun to cry shame on such proceedings, and it
+      was thought necessary to take precautions against a tumult. The victims
+      tried to address the crowd, but their voices were drowned by the beating
+      of drums. While the Rev. John Wilson railed and scoffed at them from the
+      foot of the gallows the two brave men were hanged. The halter had been
+      placed upon Mrs. Dyer when her son, who had come in all haste from Rhode
+      Island, obtained her reprieve on his promise to take her away. The bodies
+      of the two men were denied Christian burial and thrown uncovered into a
+      pit. All the efforts of husband and son were unable to keep Mrs. Dyer at
+      home. In the following spring she returned to Boston and on the first day
+      of June was again taken to the gallows. At the last moment she was offered
+      freedom if she would only promise to go away and stay, but she refused.
+      "In obedience to the will of the Lord I came," said she, "and in his will
+      I abide faithful unto death." And so she died. [[Sidenote: Executions on
+      Boston Common] [[Sidenote: Wenlock Christison's defiance and victory]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Public sentiment in Boston was now turning so strongly against the
+      magistrates that they began to weaken in their purpose. But there was one
+      more victim. In November, 1660, William Leddra returned from banishment.
+      The case was clear enough, but he was kept in prison four months and every
+      effort was made to induce him to promise to leave the colony, but in vain.
+      In the following March he too was put to death. A few days before the
+      execution, as Leddra was being questioned in court, a memorable scene
+      occurred. Wenlock Christison was one of those who had been banished under
+      penalty of death. On his return he made straight for the town-house,
+      strode into the court-room, and with uplifted finger addressed the judges
+      in words of authority. "I am come here to warn you," said he, "that ye
+      shed no more innocent blood." He was instantly seized and dragged off to
+      jail. After three months he was brought to trial before the Court of
+      Assistants. The magistrates debated for more than a fortnight as to what
+      should be done. The air was thick with mutterings of insurrection, and
+      they had lost all heart for their dreadful work. Not so the savage old man
+      who presided, frowning gloomily under his black skull cap. Losing his
+      patience at last, Endicott smote the table with fury, upbraided the judges
+      for their weakness, and declared himself so disgusted that he was ready to
+      go back to England. <a href="#linknote-27" name="linknoteref-27"
+      id="linknoteref-27"><small>27</small></a> "You that will not consent,
+      record it," he shouted, as the question was again put to vote, "I thank
+      God I am not afraid to give judgment." Christison was condemned to death,
+      but the sentence was never executed. In the interval the legislature
+      assembled, and the law was modified. The martyrs had not died in vain.
+      Their cause was victorious. A revolution had been effected. The Puritan
+      ideal of a commonwealth composed of a united body of believers was broken
+      down, never again to be restored. The principle had been admitted that the
+      heretic might come to Massachusetts and stay there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not in a moment, however, that these results were fully realized.
+      For some years longer Quakers were fined, imprisoned, and now and then
+      tied to the cart's tail and whipped from one town to another. But these
+      acts of persecution came to be more and more discountenanced by public
+      opinion until at length they ceased.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was on the 25th of May, 1660, just one week before the martyrdom of
+      Mary Dyer, that Charles II. returned to England to occupy his father's
+      throne. One of the first papers laid before him was a memorial in behalf
+      of the oppressed Quakers in New England. In the course of the following
+      year he sent a letter to Endicott and the other New England governors,
+      ordering them to suspend proceedings against the Quakers, and if any were
+      then in prison, to send them to England for trial. Christison's victory
+      had already been won, but the "King's Missive" was now partially obeyed by
+      the release of all prisoners. As for sending anybody to England for trial,
+      that was something that no New England government could ever be made to
+      allow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Charles's defence of the Quakers was due, neither to liberality of
+      disposition nor to any sympathy with them, but rather to his inclinations
+      toward Romanism. Unlike in other respects, Quakers and Catholics were
+      alike in this, that they were the only sects which the Protestant world in
+      general agreed in excluding from toleration. Charles wished to secure
+      toleration for Catholics, and he could not prudently take steps toward
+      this end without pursuing a policy broad enough to diminish persecution in
+      other directions, and from these circumstances the Quakers profited. At
+      times there was something almost like a political alliance between Quaker
+      and Catholic, as instanced in the relations between William Penn and
+      Charles's brother, the Duke of York. [[Sidenote: The "King's Missive"]
+      [[Sidenote: Why Charles II. interfered to protect the Quakers]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides all this, Charles had good reason to feel that the governments of
+      New England were assuming too many airs of sovereignty. There were plenty
+      of people at hand to work upon his mind. The friends of Gorton and Child
+      and Vassall were loud with their complaints. Samuel Maverick swore that
+      the people of New England were all rebels, and he could prove it. The king
+      was assured that the Confederacy was "a war combination, made by the four
+      colonies when they had a design to throw off their dependence on England,
+      and for that purpose." The enemies of the New England people, while
+      dilating upon the rebellious disposition of Massachusetts, could also
+      remind the king that for several years that colony had been coining and
+      circulating shillings and sixpences with the name "Massachusetts" and a
+      tree on one side, and the name "New England" with the date on the other.
+      There was no recognition of England upon this coinage, which was begun in
+      1652 and kept up for more than thirty years. Such pieces of money used to
+      be called "pine-tree shillings"; but, so far as looks go, the tree might
+      be anything, and an adroit friend of New England once gravely assured the
+      king that it was meant for the royal oak in which his majesty hid himself
+      after the battle of Worcester!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Against the colony of New Haven the king had a special grudge. Two of the
+      regicide judges, who had sat in the tribunal which condemned his father,
+      escaped to New England in 1660 and were well received there. They were
+      gentlemen of high position. Edward Whalley was a cousin of Cromwell and
+      Hampden. He had distinguished himself at Naseby and Dunbar, and had risen
+      to the rank of lieutenant-general. He had commanded at the capture of
+      Worcester, where it is interesting to observe that the royalist commander
+      who surrendered to him was Sir Henry Washington, own cousin to the
+      grandfather of George Washington. The other regicide, William Goffe, as a
+      major-general in Cromwell's army, had won such distinction that there were
+      some who pointed to him as the proper person to succeed the Lord Protector
+      on the death of the latter. He had married Whalley's daughter. Soon after
+      the arrival of these gentlemen, a royal order for their arrest was sent to
+      Boston. If they had been arrested and sent back to England, their severed
+      heads would soon have been placed over Temple Bar. The king's detectives
+      hotly pursued them through the woodland paths of New England, and they
+      would soon have been taken but for the aid they got from the people. Many
+      are the stories of their hairbreadth escapes. Sometimes they took refuge
+      in a cave on a mountain near New Haven, sometimes they hid in friendly
+      cellars; and once, being hard put to it, they skulked under a wooden
+      bridge, while their pursuers on horseback galloped by overhead. After
+      lurking about New Haven and Milford for two or three years, on hearing of
+      the expected arrival of Colonel Nichols and his commission, they sought a
+      more secluded hiding-place near Hadley, a village lately settled far up
+      the Connecticut river, within the jurisdiction of Massachusetts. Here the
+      avengers lost the trail, the pursuit was abandoned, and the weary
+      regicides were presently forgotten. The people of New Haven had been
+      especially zealous in shielding the fugitives. Mr. Davenport had not only
+      harboured them in his own house, but on the Sabbath before their expected
+      arrival he had preached a very bold sermon, openly advising his people to
+      aid and comfort them as far as possible. <a href="#linknote-28"
+      name="linknoteref-28" id="linknoteref-28"><small>28</small></a> The
+      colony, moreover, did not officially recognize the restoration of Charles
+      II. to the throne until that event had been commonly known in New England
+      for more than a year. For these reasons the wrath of the king was
+      specially roused against New Haven, when circumstances combined to enable
+      him at once to punish this disloyal colony and deal a blow at the
+      Confederacy. We have seen that in restricting the suffrage to church
+      members New Haven had followed the example of Massachusetts, but
+      Connecticut had not; and at this time there was warm controversy between
+      the two younger colonies as to the wisdom Of such a policy. As yet none of
+      the colonies save Massachusetts had obtained a charter, and Connecticut
+      was naturally anxious to obtain one. Whether through a complaisant spirit
+      connected with this desire, or through mere accident, Connecticut had been
+      prompt in acknowledging the restoration of Charles II.; and in August,
+      1661, she dispatched the younger Winthrop to England to apply for a
+      charter. Winthrop was a man of winning address and of wide culture. His
+      scientific tastes were a passport to the favour of the king at a time when
+      the Royal Society was being founded, of which Winthrop himself was soon
+      chosen a fellow. In every way the occasion was an auspicious one. The king
+      looked upon the rise of the New England Confederacy with unfriendly eyes.
+      Massachusetts was as yet the only member of the league that was really
+      troublesome; and there seemed to be no easier way to weaken her than to
+      raise up a rival power by her side, and extend to it such privileges as
+      might awaken her jealousy. All the more would such a policy be likely to
+      succeed if accompanied by measures of which Massachusetts must necessarily
+      disapprove, and the suppression of New Haven would be such a measure.
+      [[Sidenote: New Haven annexed to Connecticut]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In accordance with these views, a charter of great liberality was at once
+      granted to Connecticut, and by the same instrument the colony of New Haven
+      was deprived of its separate existence and annexed to its stronger
+      neighbour. As if to emphasize the motives which had led to this display of
+      royal favour toward Connecticut, an equally liberal charter was granted to
+      Rhode Island. In the summer of 1664 Charles II. sent a couple of
+      ships-of-war to Boston harbour, with 400 troops under command of Colonel
+      Richard Nichols, who had been appointed, along with Samuel Maverick and
+      two others as royal commissioners, to look after the affairs of the New
+      World. Colonel Nichols took his ships to New Amsterdam, and captured that
+      important town. After his return the commissioners held meetings at
+      Boston, and for a time the Massachusetts charter seemed in danger. But the
+      Puritan magistrates were shrewd, and months were frittered away to no
+      purpose. Presently the Dutch made war upon England, and the king felt it
+      to be unwise to irritate the people of Massachusetts beyond endurance. The
+      turbulent state of English politics which followed still further absorbed
+      his attention, and New England had another respite of several years.
+      [[Sidenote: Founding of Newark]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In New Haven a party had grown up which was dissatisfied with its extreme
+      theocratic policy and approved of the union with Connecticut. Davenport
+      and his followers, the founders of the colony, were beyond measure
+      disgusted. They spurned "the Christless rule" of the sister colony. Many
+      of them took advantage of the recent conquest of New Netherland, and a
+      strong party, led by the Rev. Abraham Pierson, of Branford, migrated to
+      the banks of the Passaic in June, 1667, and laid the foundations of
+      Newark. For some years to come the theocratic idea that had given birth to
+      New Haven continued to live on in New Jersey. As for Mr. Davenport, he
+      went to Boston and ended his days there. Cotton Mather, writing at a later
+      date, when the theocratic scheme of the early settlers had been manifestly
+      outgrown and superseded, says of Davenport: "Yet, after all, the Lord gave
+      him to see that in this world a Church-State was impossible, whereinto
+      there enters nothing which defiles."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The theocratic policy, alike in New Haven and in Massachusetts, broke down
+      largely through its inherent weakness. It divided the community, and
+      created among the people a party adverse to its arrogance and
+      exclusiveness. This state of things facilitated the suppression of New
+      Haven by royal edict, and it made possible the victory of Wenlock
+      Christison in Massachusetts. We can now see the fundamental explanation of
+      the deadly hostility with which Endicott and his party regarded the
+      Quakers. The latter aimed a fatal blow at the very root of the idea which
+      had brought the Puritans to New England. Once admit these heretics as
+      citizens, or even as tolerated sojourners, and there was an end of the
+      theocratic state consisting of a united body of believers. It was a
+      life-and-death struggle, in which no quarter was given; and the Quakers,
+      aided by popular discontent with the theocracy, even more than by the
+      intervention of the crown, won a decisive victory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As the work of planting New England took place chiefly in the eleven years
+      1629-1640, during which Charles I. contrived to reign without a
+      parliament, so the prosperous period of the New England Confederacy,
+      1643-1664, covers the time of the Civil War and the Commonwealth, and just
+      laps on to the reign of Charles II. By the summary extinction of the
+      separate existence of one of its members for the benefit of another, its
+      vigour was sadly impaired. But its constitution was revised so as to make
+      it a league of three states instead of four; and the Federal Commissioners
+      kept on holding their meetings, though less frequently, until the
+      revocation of the Massachusetts charter in 1684. During this period a
+      great Indian war occurred, in the course of which this concentration of
+      the military strength of New England, imperfect as it was, proved itself
+      very useful. In the history of New England, from the restoration of the
+      Stuarts until their final expulsion, the two most important facts are the
+      military struggle of the newly founded states with the Indians, and their
+      constitutional struggle against the British government. The troubles and
+      dangers of 1636 were renewed on a much more formidable scale, but the
+      strength of the people had waxed greatly in the mean time, and the new
+      perils were boldly overcome or skilfully warded off; not, however, until
+      the constitution of Massachusetts had been violently wrenched out of shape
+      in the struggle, and seeds of conflict sown which in the following century
+      were to bear fruit in the American Revolution. [[Sidenote: Breaking down
+      of the theocratic policy] [[Sidenote: Weakening of the Confederacy]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER V. &mdash; KING PHILIP'S WAR.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      For eight-and-thirty years after the destruction of the Pequots, the
+      intercourse between the English and the Indians was to all outward
+      appearance friendly. The policy pursued by the settlers was in the main
+      well considered. While they had shown that they could strike with terrible
+      force when blows were needed, their treatment of the natives in time of
+      peace seems to have been generally just and kind. Except in the single
+      case of the conquered Pequot territory, they scrupulously paid for every
+      rood of ground on which they settled, and so far as possible they extended
+      to the Indians the protection of the law. On these points we have the
+      explicit testimony of Josiah Winslow, governor of Plymouth, in his report
+      to the Federal Commissioners in May, 1676; and what he says about Plymouth
+      seems to have been equally true of the other colonies. Says Winslow, "I
+      think I can clearly say that before these present troubles broke out, the
+      English did not possess one foot of land in this colony but what was
+      fairly obtained by honest purchase of the Indian proprietors. Nay, because
+      some of our people are of a covetous disposition, and the Indians are in
+      their straits easily prevailed with to part with their lands, we first
+      made a law that none should purchase or receive of gift any land of the
+      Indians without the knowledge and allowance of our Court .... And if at
+      any time they have brought complaints before us, they have had justice
+      impartial and speedy, so that our own people have frequently complained
+      that we erred on the other hand in showing them overmuch favour." The
+      general laws of Massachusetts and Connecticut as well as of Plymouth bear
+      out what Winslow says, and show us that as a matter of policy the colonial
+      governments were fully sensible of the importance of avoiding all
+      occasions for quarrel with their savage neighbours. [[Sidenote: Puritans
+      and Indians]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There can, moreover, be little doubt that the material comfort of the
+      Indians was for a time considerably improved by their dealings with the
+      white men. Hitherto their want of foresight and thrift had been wont to
+      involve them during the long winters in a dreadful struggle with famine.
+      Now the settlers were ready to pay liberally for the skin of every
+      fur-covered animal the red men could catch; and where the trade thus
+      arising did not suffice to keep off famine, instances of generous charity
+      were frequent. The Algonquin tribes of New England lived chiefly by
+      hunting, but partly by agriculture. They raised beans and corn, and
+      succotash was a dish which they contributed to the white man's table. They
+      could now raise or buy English vegetables, while from dogs and horses,
+      pigs and poultry, oxen and sheep, little as they could avail themselves of
+      such useful animals, they nevertheless derived some benefit. <a
+      href="#linknote-29" name="linknoteref-29" id="linknoteref-29"><small>29</small></a>
+      Better blankets and better knives were brought within their reach; and in
+      spite of all the colonial governments could do to prevent it, they were to
+      some extent enabled to supply themselves with muskets and rum. [[Sidenote:
+      Trade with the Indians]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides all this trade, which, except in the article of liquor, tended to
+      improve the condition of the native tribes, there was on the part of the
+      earlier settlers an earnest and diligent effort to convert them to
+      Christianity and give them the rudiments of a civilized education.
+      Missionary work was begun in 1643 by Thomas Mayhew on the islands of
+      Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. The savages at first declared they were
+      not so silly as to barter thirty-seven tutelar deities for one, but after
+      much preaching and many pow-wows Mayhew succeeded in persuading them that
+      the Deity of the white man was mightier than all their <i>manitous.</i>
+      Whether they ever got much farther than this toward a comprehension of the
+      white man's religion may be doubted; but they were prevailed upon to let
+      their children learn to read and write, and even to set up little courts,
+      in which justice was administered according to some of the simplest rules
+      of English law, and from which there lay an appeal to the court of
+      Plymouth. In 1646 Massachusetts enacted that the elders of the churches
+      should choose two persons each year to go and spread the gospel among the
+      Indians. In 1649 Parliament established the Society for propagating the
+      Gospel in New England, and presently from voluntary contributions the
+      society was able to dispose of an annual income of £2000. Schools were set
+      up in which agriculture was taught as well as religion. It was even
+      intended that Indians should go to Harvard College, and a building was
+      erected for their accommodation, but as none came to occupy it, the
+      college printing-press was presently set to work there. One solitary
+      Indian student afterward succeeded in climbing to the bachelor's degree,&mdash;Caleb
+      Cheeshahteaumuck of the class of 1665. It was this one success that was
+      marvellous, not the failure of the scheme, which vividly shows how
+      difficult it was for the white man of that day to understand the
+      limitations of the red man. [[Sidenote: Missionary work: Thomas Mayhew]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The greatest measure of success in converting the Indians was attained by
+      that famous linguist and preacher, the apostle John Eliot. This remarkable
+      man was a graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge. He had come to
+      Massachusetts in 1631, and in the following year had been settled as
+      teacher in the church at Roxbury of which Thomas Welde was pastor. He had
+      been distinguished at the university for philological scholarship and for
+      linguistic talent&mdash;two things not always found in connection&mdash;and
+      now during fourteen years he devoted such time as he could to acquiring a
+      complete mastery of the Algonquin dialect spoken by the Indians of
+      Massachusetts bay. To the modern comparative philologist his work is of
+      great value. He published not only an excellent Indian grammar, but a
+      complete translation of the Bible into the Massachusetts language,&mdash;a
+      monument of prodigious labour. It is one of the most instructive documents
+      in existence for the student of Algonquin speech, though the Massachusetts
+      tribe and its language have long been extinct, and there are very few
+      scholars living who can read the book. It has become one of the
+      curiosities of literature and at auction sales of private libraries
+      commands an extremely high price. Yet out of this rare book the American
+      public has somehow or other within the last five or six years contrived to
+      pick up a word which we shall very likely continue to hear for some time
+      to come. In Eliot's Bible, the word which means a great chief&mdash;such
+      as Joshua, or Gideon, or Joab&mdash;is "mugwump."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in 1646 that Eliot began his missionary preaching at a small Indian
+      village near Watertown. President Dunster, of Harvard College, and Mr.
+      Shepard, the minister at Cambridge, felt a warm interest in the
+      undertaking. These worthy men seriously believed that the aborigines of
+      America were the degenerate descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel,
+      and from this strange backsliding it was hoped that they might now be
+      reclaimed. With rare eloquence and skill did Eliot devote himself to the
+      difficult work of reaching the Indian's scanty intelligence and still
+      scantier moral sense. His ministrations reached from the sands of Cape Cod
+      to the rocky hillsides of Brookfield. But he soon found that single-handed
+      he could achieve but little over so wide an area, and accordingly he
+      adopted the policy of colonizing his converts in village communities near
+      the English towns, where they might be sequestered from their heathen
+      brethren and subjected to none but Christian influences. In these
+      communities he hoped to train up native missionaries who might thence go
+      and labour among the wild tribes until the whole lump of barbarism should
+      be leavened. In pursuance of this scheme a stockaded village was built at
+      Natick in 1651 Under the direction of an English carpenter the Indians
+      built log-houses for themselves, and most of them adopted the English
+      dress. Their simple government was administered by tithing-men, or "rulers
+      of tens," chosen after methods prescribed in the book of Exodus. Other
+      such communities were formed in the neighbourhoods of Concord and Grafton.
+      By 1674 the number of these "praying Indians," as they were called, was
+      estimated at 4000, of whom about 1500 were in Eliot's villages, as many
+      more in Martha's Vineyard, 300 in Nantucket, and 700 in the Plymouth
+      colony. There seems to be no doubt that these Indians were really
+      benefited both materially and morally by the change in their life. In
+      theology it is not likely that they reached any higher view than that
+      expressed by the Connecticut sachem Wequash who "seeing and beholding the
+      mighty power of God in the English forces, how they fell upon the Pequots,
+      ... from that time was convinced and persuaded that our God was a most
+      dreadful God;" accordingly, says the author of "New England's First
+      Fruits," "he became thoroughly reformed according to his light." Matters
+      of outward observance, too, the Indians could understand; for we read of
+      one of them rebuking an Englishman "for profaning the Lord's Day by
+      felling of a tree." The Indian's notions of religion were probably
+      confined within this narrow compass; the notions of some people that call
+      themselves civilized perhaps do not extend much further. [[Sidenote:
+      Villages of Christian Indians]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From such facts as those above cited we may infer that the early relations
+      of the Puritan settlers to the Algonquin tribes of New England were by no
+      means like the relations between white men and red men in recent times on
+      our western plains. During Philip's War, as we shall see, the Puritan
+      theory of the situation was entirely changed and our forefathers began to
+      act in accordance with the frontiersman's doctrine that the good Indians
+      are dead Indians. But down to that time it is clear that his intention was
+      to deal honourably and gently with his tawny neighbour. We sometimes hear
+      the justice and kindness of the Quakers in Pennsylvania alleged as an
+      adequate reason for the success with which they kept clear of an Indian
+      war. This explanation, however, does not seem to be adequate; it does not
+      appear that, on the whole, the Puritans were less just and kind than the
+      Quakers in their treatment of the red men. The true explanation is rather
+      to be found in the relations between the Indian tribes toward the close of
+      the seventeenth century. Early in that century the Pennsylvania region had
+      been in the hands of the ferocious and powerful Susquehannocks, but in
+      1672, after a frightful struggle of twenty years, this great tribe was
+      swept from the face of the earth by the resistless league of the Five
+      Nations. When the Quakers came to Pennsylvania in 1682, the only Indians
+      in that neighbourhood were the Delawares, who had just been terribly
+      beaten by the Five Nations and forced into a treaty by which they
+      submitted to be called "women," and to surrender their tomahawks. Penn's
+      famous treaty was made with the Delawares as occupants of the land and
+      also with the Iroquois league as overlords. <a href="#linknote-30"
+      name="linknoteref-30" id="linknoteref-30"><small>30</small></a> Now the
+      great central fact of early American history, so far as the relations
+      between white men and red men are concerned, is the unshaken friendship of
+      the Iroquois for the English. This was the natural consequence of the
+      deadly hostility between the Iroquois and the French which began with
+      Champlain's defeat of the Mohawks in 1609. During the seventy-three years
+      which intervened between the founding of Pennsylvania and the defeat of
+      Braddock there was never a moment when the Delawares could have attacked
+      the Quakers without incurring the wrath and vengeance of their overlords
+      the Five Nations. This was the reason why Pennsylvania was left so long in
+      quiet. No better proof could be desired than the fact that in Pontiac's
+      war, after the overthrow of the French and when Indian politics had
+      changed, no state suffered so much as Pennsylvania from the horrors of
+      Indian warfare. [[Sidenote: Why Pennsylvania was so long unmolested by the
+      Indians]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In New England at the time of Philip's War, the situation was very
+      different from what it was between the Hudson and the Susquehanna. The
+      settlers were thrown into immediate relations with several tribes whose
+      mutual hostility and rivalry was such that it was simply impossible to
+      keep on good terms with all at once. Such complicated questions as that
+      which involved the English in responsibility for the fate of Miantonomo
+      did not arise in Pennsylvania. Since the destruction of the Pequots we
+      have observed the Narragansetts and Mohegans contending for the foremost
+      place among New England tribes. Of the two rivals the Mohegans were the
+      weaker, and therefore courted the friendship of the formidable palefaces.
+      The English had no desire to take part in these barbarous feuds, but they
+      could not treat the Mohegans well without incurring the hostility of the
+      Narragansetts. For thirty years the feeling of the latter tribe toward the
+      English had been very unfriendly and would doubtless have vented itself in
+      murder but for their recollection of the fate of the Pequots. After the
+      loss of their chief Miantonomo their attitude became so sullen and defiant
+      that the Federal Commissioners, in order to be in readiness for an
+      outbreak, collected a force of 300 men. At the first news of these
+      preparations the Narragansetts, overcome with terror, sent a liberal
+      tribute of wampum to Boston, and were fain to conclude a treaty in which
+      they promised to behave themselves well in the future.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was impossible that this sort of English protectorate over the native
+      tribes, which was an inevitable result of the situation, should be other
+      than irksome and irritating to the Indians. They could not but see that
+      the white man stood there as master, and even in the utter absence of
+      provocation, this fact alone must have made them hate him. It is
+      difficult, moreover, for the civilized man and the savage to understand
+      each other. As a rule the one does not know what the other is thinking
+      about. When Mr. Hamilton Gushing a few years ago took some of his Zuni
+      friends into a hotel in Chicago, they marvelled at his entering such a
+      mighty palace with so little ceremony, and their wonder was heightened at
+      the promptness with which "slaves" came running at his beck and call; but
+      all at once, on seeing an American eagle over one of the doorways, they
+      felt that the mystery was solved. Evidently this palace was the communal
+      dwelling of the Eagle Clan of palefaces, and evidently Mr. Gushing was a
+      great sachem of this clan, and as such entitled to lordly sway there! The
+      Zunis are not savages, but representatives of a remote and primitive phase
+      of what Mr. Morgan calls the middle status of barbarism. The gulf between
+      their thinking and that of white men is wide because there is a wide gulf
+      between the experience of the two. [[Sidenote: Difficulty of the situation
+      in New England] [[Sidenote: It is hard for the savage and the civilized
+      man to understand one another]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This illustration may help us to understand an instance in which the
+      Indians of New England must inevitably have misinterpreted the actions of
+      the white settlers and read them in the light of their uneasy fears and
+      prejudices. I refer to the work of the apostle Eliot. His design in
+      founding his villages of Christian Indians was in the highest degree
+      benevolent and noble; but the heathen Indians could hardly be expected to
+      see anything in it but a cunning scheme for destroying them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Eliot's converts were for the most part from the Massachusetts tribe, the
+      smallest and weakest of all. The Plymouth converts came chiefly from the
+      tribe next in weakness, the Pokanokets or Wampanoags. The more powerful
+      tribes&mdash;Narragansetts, Nipmucks, and Mohegans&mdash;furnished very
+      few converts. When they saw the white intruders gathering members of the
+      weakest tribes into villages of English type, and teaching them strange
+      gods while clothing them in strange garments, they probably supposed that
+      the pale-faces were simply adopting these Indians into their white tribe
+      as a means of increasing their military strength. At any rate, such a
+      proceeding would be perfectly intelligible to the savage mind, whereas the
+      nature of Eliot's design lay quite beyond its ken. As the Indians
+      recovered from their supernatural dread of the English, and began to
+      regard them as using human means to accomplish their ends, they must of
+      course interpret their conduct in such light as savage experience could
+      afford. It is one of the commonest things in the world for a savage tribe
+      to absorb weak neighbours by adoption, and thus increase its force
+      preparatory to a deadly assault upon other neighbours. When Eliot in 1657
+      preached to the little tribe of Podunks near Hartford, and asked them if
+      they were willing to accept of Jesus Christ as their saviour, their old
+      men scornfully answered No! they had parted with most of their land, but
+      they were not going to become the white man's servants. A rebuke
+      administered to Eliot by Uncas in 1674 has a similar implication. When the
+      apostle was preaching one evening in a village over which that sachem
+      claimed jurisdiction, an Indian arose and announced himself as a deputy of
+      Uncas. Then he said, "Uncas is not well pleased that the English should
+      pass over Mohegan river to call <i>his</i> Indians to pray to God." <a
+      href="#linknote-31" name="linknoteref-31" id="linknoteref-31"><small>31</small></a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus, no matter how benevolent the white man's intentions, he could not
+      fail to be dreaded by the Indians as a powerful and ever encroaching
+      enemy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even in his efforts to keep the peace and prevent tribes from taking the
+      warpath without his permission, he was interfering with the red man's
+      cherished pastime of murder and pillage. The appeals to the court at
+      Plymouth, the frequent summoning of sachems to Boston, to explain their
+      affairs and justify themselves against accusers, must have been maddening
+      in their effects upon the Indian; for there is one sound instinct which
+      the savage has in common with the most progressive races, and that is the
+      love of self-government that resents all outside interference. All things
+      considered, it is remarkable that peace should have been maintained in New
+      England from 1637 to 1675; and probably nothing short of the consuming
+      vengeance wrought upon the Pequots could have done it. But with the lapse
+      of time the wholesome feeling of dread began to fade away, and as the
+      Indians came to use musket instead of bow and arrow, their fear of the
+      English grew less, until at length their ferocious temper broke forth in
+      an epidemic of fire and slaughter that laid waste the land. [[Sidenote: It
+      is remarkable that peace should have been so long preserved]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Massasoit, chief sachem of the Wampanoags and steadfast ally of the
+      Plymouth colonists, died in 1660, leaving two sons, Wamsutta and Metacom,
+      or as the English nicknamed them, Alexander and Philip. Alexander
+      succeeded to his father's position of savage dignity and influence, but
+      his reign was brief. Rumours came to Plymouth that he was plotting
+      mischief, and he was accordingly summoned to appear before the General
+      Court of that colony and explain himself. He seems to have gone
+      reluctantly, but he succeeded in satisfying the magistrates of his
+      innocence of any evil designs. Whether he caught cold at Plymouth or drank
+      rum as only Indians can, we do not know. At any rate, on starting
+      homeward, before he had got clear of English territory, he was seized by a
+      violent fever and died. The savage mind knows nothing of pneumonia or
+      delirium tremens. It knows nothing of what we call natural death. To the
+      savage all death means murder, for like other men he judges of the unknown
+      by the known. In the Indian's experience normal death was by tomahawk or
+      firebrand; abnormal death (such as we call natural) must come either from
+      poison or from witchcraft. So when the honest chronicler Hubbard tells us
+      that Philip suspected the Plymouth people of poisoning his brother, we can
+      easily believe him. It was long, however, before he was ready to taste the
+      sweets of revenge. He schemed and plotted in the dark. In one respect the
+      Indian diplomatist is unlike his white brethren; he does not leave
+      state-papers behind him to reward the diligence and gratify the curiosity
+      of later generations; and accordingly it is hard to tell how far Philip
+      was personally responsible for the storm which was presently to burst upon
+      New England. [[Sidenote: Deaths of Massasoit and Alexander] [[Sidenote:
+      Philip's designs]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whether his scheme was as comprehensive as that of Pontiac in 1763,
+      whether or not it amounted to a deliberate combination of all red men
+      within reach to exterminate the white men, one can hardly say with
+      confidence. The figure of Philip, in the war which bears his name, does
+      not stand out so prominently as the figure of Pontiac in the later
+      struggle. This may be partly because Pontiac's story has been told by such
+      a magician as Mr. Francis Parkman. But it is partly because the data are
+      too meagre. In all probability, however, the schemes of Sassacus the
+      Pequot, of Philip the Wampanoag, and of Pontiac the Ottawa, were
+      substantially the same. That Philip plotted with the Narragansetts seems
+      certain, and the early events of the war point clearly to a previous
+      understanding with the Nipmucks. The Mohegans, on the other hand, gave him
+      no assistance, but remained faithful to their white allies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For thirteen years had Philip been chief sachem of his tribe before the
+      crisis came. Rumours of his unfriendly disposition had at intervals found
+      their way to the ears of the magistrates at Plymouth, but Philip had
+      succeeded in setting himself right before them. In 1670 the rumours were
+      renewed, and the Plymouth men felt that it was time to strike, but the
+      other colonies held them back, and a meeting was arranged between Philip
+      and three Boston men at Taunton in April, 1671. There the crafty savage
+      expressed humility and contrition for all past offences, and even
+      consented to a treaty in which he promised that his tribe should surrender
+      all their fire-arms. On the part of the English this was an extremely
+      unwise measure, for while it could not possibly be enforced, and while it
+      must have greatly increased the irritation of the Indians, it was at the
+      same time interpretable as a symptom of fear. With ominous scowls and
+      grunts some seventy muskets were given up, but this was all. Through the
+      summer there was much uneasiness, and in September Philip was summoned to
+      Plymouth with five of his under-sachems, and solemnly warned to keep the
+      peace. The savages again behaved with humility and agreed to pay a yearly
+      tribute of five wolves' heads and to do no act of war without express
+      permission.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For three years things seemed quiet, until late in 1674 the alarm was
+      again sounded. Sausamon, a convert from the Massachusetts tribe, had
+      studied a little at Harvard College, and could speak and write English
+      with facility. He had at one time been employed by Philip as a sort of
+      private secretary or messenger, and at other times had preached and taught
+      school among the Indian converts at Natick. Sausamon now came to Plymouth
+      and informed Governor Winslow that Philip was certainly engaged in a
+      conspiracy that boded no good to the English. Somehow or other Philip
+      contrived to find out what Sausamon had said, and presently coming to
+      Plymouth loudly asseverated his innocence; but the magistrates warned him
+      that if they heard any more of this sort of thing his arms would surely be
+      seized. A few days after Philip had gone home, Sausamon's hat and gun were
+      seen lying on the frozen surface of Assowamsett Pond, near Middleborough,
+      and on cutting through the ice his body was found with unmistakable marks
+      of beating and strangling. After some months the crime was traced to three
+      Wampanoags, who were forthwith arrested, tried by a mixed jury of Indians
+      and white men, found guilty, and put to death. On the way to the gallows
+      one of them confessed that he had stood by while his two friends had
+      pounded and choked the unfortunate Sausamon. [[Sidenote: Murder of
+      Sausamon]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      More alarming reports now came from Swanzey, a pretty village of some
+      forty houses not far from Philip's headquarters at Mount Hope. On Sunday
+      June 20, while everybody was at church, a party of Indians had stolen into
+      the town and set fire to two houses. Messengers were hurried from Plymouth
+      and from Boston, to demand the culprits under penalty of instant war. As
+      they approached Swanzey the men from Boston saw a sight that filled them
+      with horror. The road was strewn with corpses of men, women, and children,
+      scorched, dismembered, and mangled with that devilish art of which the
+      American Indian is the most finished master. The savages had sacked the
+      village the day before, burning the houses and slaying the people. Within
+      three days a small force of colonial troops had driven Philip from his
+      position at Mount Hope; but while they were doing this a party of savages
+      swooped upon Dartmouth, burning thirty houses and committing fearful
+      atrocities. Some of their victims were flayed alive, or impaled on sharp
+      stakes, or roasted over slow fires. Similar horrors were wrought at
+      Middleborough and Taunton; and now the misery spread to Massachusetts,
+      where on the 14th of July the town of Mendon was attacked by a party of
+      Nipmucks. [[Sidenote: Massacres at Swanzey and Dartmouth, June, 1675]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At that time the beautiful highlands between Lancaster and the Connecticut
+      river were still an untrodden wilderness. On their southern slope
+      Worcester and Brookfield were tiny hamlets of a dozen houses each. Up the
+      Connecticut valley a line of little villages, from Springfield to
+      Northfield, formed the remotest frontier of the English, and their exposed
+      position offered tempting opportunities to the Indians. Governor Leverett
+      saw how great the danger would be if the other tribes should follow the
+      example set by Philip, and Captain Edward Hutchinson was accordingly sent
+      to Brookfield to negotiate with the Nipmucks. This officer was eldest son
+      of the unfortunate lady whose preaching in Boston nearly forty years
+      before had been the occasion of so much strife. Not only his mother, but
+      all save one or two of his brothers and sisters &mdash;and there were not
+      less than twelve of them&mdash;had been murdered by Indians on the New
+      Netherland border in 1643; now the same cruel fate overtook the gallant
+      captain. The savages agreed to hold a parley and appointed a time and
+      place for the purpose, but instead of keeping tryst they lay in ambush and
+      slew Hutchinson with eight of his men on their way to the conference.
+      [[Sidenote: Murder of Captain Hutchinson]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Three days afterward Philip, who had found home too hot for him, arrived
+      in the Nipmuck country, and on the night of August 2, took part in a
+      fierce assault on Brookfield. Thirty or forty men, with some fifty women
+      and children&mdash;all the inhabitants of the hamlet&mdash;took refuge in
+      a large house, where they were besieged by 300 savages whose bullets
+      pierced the wooden walls again and again. Arrows tipped with burning rags
+      were shot into the air in such wise as to fall upon the roof, but they who
+      crouched in the garret were watchful and well supplied with water, while
+      from the overhanging windows the volleys of musketry were so brisk and
+      steady that the screaming savages below could not get near enough to the
+      house to set it on fire. For three days the fight was kept up, while every
+      other house in the village was destroyed. By this time the Indians had
+      contrived to mount some planks on barrels so as to make a kind of rude
+      cart which they loaded with tow and chips. They were just about setting it
+      on fire and preparing to push it against the house with long poles, when
+      they were suddenly foiled by a heavy shower. That noon the gallant Simon
+      Willard, ancestor of two presidents of Harvard College, a man who had done
+      so much toward building up Concord and Lancaster that he was known as the
+      "founder of towns," was on his way from Lancaster to Groton at the head of
+      forty-seven horsemen, when he was overtaken by a courier with the news
+      from Brookfield. The distance was thirty miles, the road scarcely fit to
+      be called a bridle-path, and Willard's years were more than
+      threescore-and-ten; but by an hour after sunset he had gallopped into
+      Brookfield and routed the Indians who fled to a swamp ten miles distant.
+      [[Sidenote: Attack on Brookfield]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The scene is now shifted to the Connecticut valley, where on the 25th of
+      August Captain Lothrop defeated the savages at Hatfield. On the 1st of
+      September simultaneous attacks were made upon Deerfield and Hadley, and
+      among the traditions of the latter place is one of the most interesting of
+      the stories of that early time. The inhabitants were all in church keeping
+      a fast, when the yells of the Indians resounded. Seizing their guns, the
+      men rushed out to meet the foe; but seeing the village green swarming on
+      every side with the horrid savages, for a moment their courage gave way
+      and a panic was imminent; when all at once a stranger of reverend aspect
+      and stately form, with white beard flowing on his bosom, appeared among
+      them and took command with an air of authority which none could gainsay.
+      He bade them charge on the screeching rabble, and after a short sharp
+      skirmish the tawny foe was put to flight. When the pursuers came together
+      again, after the excitement of the rout, their deliverer was not to be
+      found. In their wonder, as they knew not whence he came or whither he had
+      gone, many were heard to say that an angel had been sent from heaven for
+      their deliverance. It was the regicide William Goffe, who from his
+      hiding-place had seen the savages stealing down the hillside, and sallied
+      forth to win yet one more victory over the hosts of Midian ere death
+      should come to claim him in his woodland retreat. Sir Walter Scott has put
+      this pretty story into the mouth of Major Bridgenorth in "Peveril of the
+      Peak," and Cooper has made use of it in "The Wept of Wish-ton-wish." Like
+      many other romantic stories, it rests upon insufficient authority and its
+      truth has been called in question. <a href="#linknote-32"
+      name="linknoteref-32" id="linknoteref-32"><small>32</small></a> But there
+      seems to be nothing intrinsically improbable in the tradition; and a
+      paramount regard for Goffe's personal safety would quite account for the
+      studied silence of contemporary writers like Hubbard and Increase Mather.
+      [[Sidenote: The mysterious stranger of Hadley]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This repulse did not check for a moment the activity of the Indians,
+      though for a long time we hear nothing more of Philip. On the 2d of
+      September they slew eight men at Northfield and on the 4th they surrounded
+      and butchered Captain Beers and most of his company of thirty-six marching
+      to the relief of that village. The next day but one, as Major Robert Treat
+      came up the road with his 100 Connecticut soldiers, they found long poles
+      planted by the wayside bearing the heads of their unfortunate comrades.
+      They in turn were assaulted, but beat off the enemy, and brought away the
+      people of Northfield. That village was abandoned, and presently Deerfield
+      shared its fate and the people were crowded into Hadley. Yet worse
+      remained to be seen. A large quantity of wheat had been left partly
+      threshed at Deerfield, and on the 11th of September eighteen wagons were
+      sent up with teamsters and farmers to finish the threshing and bring in
+      the grain. They were escorted by Captain Lothrop, with his train-band of
+      ninety picked men, known as the "Flower of Essex," perhaps the best
+      drilled company in the colony. The threshing was done, the wagons were
+      loaded, and the party made a night march southward. At seven in the
+      morning, as they were fording a shallow stream in the shade of overarching
+      woods, they were suddenly overwhelmed by the deadly fire of 700 ambushed
+      Nipmucks, and only eight of them escaped to tell the tale. A "black and
+      fatal" day was this, says the chronicler, "the saddest that ever befell
+      New England." To this day the memory of the slaughter at Bloody Brook
+      survives, and the visitor to South Deerfield may read the inscription over
+      the grave in which Major Treat's men next day buried all the victims
+      together. The Indians now began to feel their power, and on the 5th of
+      October they attacked Springfield and burned thirty houses there.
+      [[Sidenote: Ambuscade at Bloody Brook, September 12]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Things were becoming desperate. For ten weeks, from September 9 to
+      November 19, the Federal Commissioners were in session daily in Boston.
+      The most eminent of their number, for ability and character, was the
+      younger John Winthrop, who was still governor of Connecticut. Plymouth was
+      represented by its governor, Josiah Winslow, with the younger William
+      Bradford; Massachusetts by William Stoughton, Simon Bradstreet, and Thomas
+      Danforth. These strong men were confronted with a difficult problem. From
+      Batten's journal, kept during that disastrous summer, we learn the state
+      of feeling of excitement in Boston. The Puritans had by no means got rid
+      of that sense of corporate responsibility which civilized man has
+      inherited from prehistoric ages, and which has been one of the principal
+      causes of religious persecution. This sombre feeling has prompted men to
+      believe that to spare the heretic is to bring down the wrath of God upon
+      the whole community; and now in Boston many people stoutly maintained that
+      God had let loose the savages, with firebrand and tomahawk, to punish the
+      people of New England for ceasing to persecute "false worshippers and
+      especially idolatrous Quakers." Quaker meetings were accordingly forbidden
+      under penalty of fine and imprisonment. Some harmless Indians were
+      murdered. At Marblehead two were assaulted and killed by a crowd of women.
+      There was a bitter feeling toward the Christian Indians, many of whom had
+      joined their heathen kinsmen in burning and slaying. Daniel Gookin,
+      superintendent of the "praying Indians," a gentleman of the highest
+      character, was told that it would not be safe to show himself in the
+      streets of Boston. Mrs. Mary Pray, of Providence, wrote a letter
+      recommending the total extermination of the red men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The measures adopted by the Commissioners certainly went far toward
+      carrying out Mrs. Pray's suggestion. The demeanour of the Narragansetts
+      had become very threatening, and their capacity for mischief exceeded that
+      of all the other tribes together. In July the Commissioners had made a
+      treaty with them, but in October it became known in Boston that they were
+      harbouring some of Philip's hostile Indians. When the Commissioners
+      sharply called them to account for this, their sachem Canonchet, son of
+      Miantonomo, promised to surrender the fugitives within ten days. But the
+      ten days passed and nothing was heard from the Narragansetts. The victory
+      of their brethren at Bloody Brook had worked upon their minds, so that
+      they no longer thought it worth while to keep faith with the white men.
+      They had overcome their timidity and were now ready to take part in the
+      work of massacre. <a href="#linknote-33" name="linknoteref-33"
+      id="linknoteref-33"><small>33</small></a> The Commissioners soon learned
+      of their warlike preparations and lost no time in forestalling them. The
+      Narragansetts were fairly warned that if they did not at once fulfil their
+      promises they must expect the utmost severities of war. A thousand men
+      were enlisted for this service and put under command of Governor Winslow,
+      and in December they marched against the enemy. The redoubtable fighter
+      and lively chronicler Benjamin Church accompanied the expedition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Indians had fortified themselves on a piece of rising ground, six
+      acres in extent, in the middle of a hideous swamp impassable at most
+      seasons but now in some places frozen hard enough to afford a precarious
+      footing. They were surrounded by rows of tall palisades which formed a
+      wall twelve feet in thickness; and the only approach to the single door of
+      this stronghold was over the trunk of a felled tree some two feet in
+      diameter and slippery with snow and ice. A stout block-house filled with
+      sharpshooters guarded this rude bridge, which was raised some five feet
+      from the ground. Within the palisaded fortress perhaps not less than 2000
+      warriors, with many women and children, awaited the onset of the white
+      men, for here had Canonchet gathered together nearly the whole of his
+      available force. This was a military mistake. It was cooping up his men
+      for slaughter. They would have been much safer if scattered about in the
+      wilderness, and could have given the English much more trouble. But
+      readily as they acknowledged the power of the white man, they did not yet
+      understand it. One man's courage is not another's, and the Indian knew
+      little or nothing of that Gothic fury of self-abandonment which rushes
+      straight ahead and snatches victory from the jaws of death. His fortress
+      was a strong one, and it was no longer, as in the time of the Pequots, a
+      strife in which firearms were pitted against bow and arrow. Many of the
+      Narragansetts were equipped with muskets and skilled in their use, and
+      under such circumstances victory for the English was not to be lightly
+      won. [[Sidenote: Expedition against the Narragansetts]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the night of December 18 their little army slept in an open field at
+      Pettyquamscott without other blanket than a "moist fleece of snow." Thence
+      to the Indian fortress, situated in what is now South Kingston, the march
+      was eighteen miles. The morrow was a Sunday, but Winslow deemed it
+      imprudent to wait, as food had wellnigh given out. Getting up at five
+      o'clock, they toiled through deep snow till they came within sight of the
+      Narragansett stronghold early in the afternoon. First came the 527 men
+      from Massachusetts, led by Major Appleton, of Ipswich, and next the 158
+      from Plymouth, under Major Bradford; while Major Robert Treat, with the
+      300 from Connecticut, brought up the rear. There were 985 men in all. As
+      the Massachusetts men rushed upon the slippery bridge a deadly volley from
+      the blockhouse slew six of their captains, while of the rank and file
+      there were many killed or wounded. Nothing daunted they pressed on with
+      great spirit till they forced their way into the enclosure, but then the
+      head of their column, overcome by sheer weight of numbers in the
+      hand-to-hand fight, was pushed and tumbled out into the swamp. Meanwhile
+      some of the Connecticut men had discovered a path across the partly frozen
+      swamp leading to a weak spot in the rear, where the palisades were thin
+      and few, as undue reliance had been placed upon the steep bank crowned
+      with a thick rampart of bushes that had been reinforced with clods of
+      turf. In this direction Treat swept along with his men in a spirited
+      charge. Before they had reached the spot a heavy fire began mowing them
+      down, but with a furious rush they came up, and climbing on each other's
+      shoulders, some fought their way over the rampart, while others hacked
+      sturdily with axes till such a breach was made that all might enter. This
+      was effected just as the Massachusetts men had recovered themselves and
+      crossed the treacherous log in a second charge that was successful and
+      soon brought the entire English force within the enclosure. In the
+      slaughter which filled the rest of that Sunday afternoon till the sun went
+      down behind a dull gray cloud, the grim and wrathful Puritan, as he swung
+      his heavy cutlass, thought of Saul and Agag, and spared not. The Lord had
+      delivered up to him the heathen as stubble to his sword. As usual the
+      number of the slain is variously estimated. Of the Indians probably not
+      less than 1000 perished. Some hundreds, however, with Canonchet their
+      leader, saved themselves in flight, well screened by the blinding
+      snow-flakes that began to fall just after sunset. Within the fortified
+      area had been stored the greater part of the Indians' winter supply of
+      corn, and the loss of this food was a further deadly blow. Captain Church
+      advised sparing the wigwams and using them for shelter, but Winslow seems
+      to have doubted the ability of his men to maintain themselves in a
+      position so remote from all support. The wigwams with their tubs of corn
+      were burned, and a retreat was ordered. Through snowdrifts that deepened
+      every moment the weary soldiers dragged themselves along until two hours
+      after midnight, when they reached the tiny village of Wickford. Nearly
+      one-fourth of their number had been killed or wounded, and many of the
+      latter perished before shelter was reached. Forty of these were buried at
+      Wickford in the course of the next three days. Of the Connecticut men
+      eighty were left upon the swamp and in the breach at the rear of the
+      stronghold. Among the spoils which the victors brought away were a number
+      of good muskets that had been captured by the Nipmucks in their assault
+      upon Deerfield. [[Sidenote: Storming of the great swamp fortress, December
+      19]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This headlong overthrow of the Narragansett power completely changed the
+      face of things. The question was no longer whether the red men could
+      possibly succeed in making New England too hot for the white men, but
+      simply how long it would take for the white men to exterminate the red
+      men. The shiftless Indian was abandoning his squalid agriculture and
+      subsisting on the pillage of English farms; but the resources of the
+      colonies, though severely taxed, were by no means exhausted. The dusky
+      warriors slaughtered in the great swamp fight could not be replaced; but,
+      as Roger Williams told the Indians, there were still ten thousand white
+      men who could carry muskets, and should all these be slain, he added, with
+      a touch of hyperbole, the Great Father in England could send ten thousand
+      more. For the moment Williams seems to have cherished a hope that his
+      great influence with the savages might induce them to submit to terms of
+      peace while there was yet a remnant to be saved; but they were now as
+      little inclined to parley as tigers brought to bay, nor was the temper of
+      the colonists a whit less deadly, though it did not vent itself in
+      inflicting torture or in merely wanton orgies of cruelty. [[Sidenote:
+      Effect of the blow]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the modern these scenes of carnage are painful to contemplate. In the
+      wholesale destruction of the Pequots, and to a less degree in that of the
+      Narragansetts, the death-dealing power of the white man stands forth so
+      terrible and relentless that our sympathy is for a moment called out for
+      his victim. The feeling of tenderness toward the weak, almost unknown
+      among savages, is one of the finest products of civilization. Where
+      murderous emotions are frequently excited, it cannot thrive. Such advance
+      in humanity as we have made within recent times is chiefly due to the fact
+      that the horrors of war are seldom brought home to everybody's door.
+      Either war is conducted on some remote frontier, or if armies march
+      through a densely peopled country the conditions of modern warfare have
+      made it essential to their efficiency as military instruments that
+      depredation and riot should be as far as possible checked. Murder and
+      pillage are comparatively infrequent, massacre is seldom heard of, and
+      torture is almost or quite as extinct as cannibalism. The mass of citizens
+      escape physical suffering, the angry emotions are so directed upon
+      impersonal objects as to acquire a strong ethical value, and the intervals
+      of strife may find individual soldiers of hostile armies exchanging kindly
+      services. Members of a complex industrial society, without direct
+      experience of warfare save in this mitigated form, have their characters
+      wrought upon in a way that is distinctively modern, as they become more
+      and more disinclined to violence and cruelty. European historians have
+      noticed, with words of praise, the freedom from bloodthirstiness which
+      characterizes the American people. Mr. Lecky has more than once remarked
+      upon this humane temperament which is so characteristic of our peaceful
+      civilization, and which sometimes, indeed, shows the defects of its
+      excellence and tends to weaken society by making it difficult to inflict
+      due punishment upon the vilest criminals. In respect of this humanity the
+      American of the nineteenth century has without doubt improved very
+      considerably upon his forefathers of the seventeenth. The England of
+      Cromwell and Milton was not, indeed, a land of hard-hearted people as
+      compared with their contemporaries. The long experience of internal peace
+      since the War of the Roses had not been without its effect; and while the
+      Tudor and Stuart periods had atrocities enough, we need only remember what
+      was going on at the same time in France and Germany in order to realize
+      how much worse it might have been. In England, as elsewhere, however, it
+      was, when looked at with our eyes, a rough and brutal time. It was a day
+      of dungeons, whipping-posts, and thumbscrews, when slight offenders were
+      maimed and bruised and great offenders cut into pieces by sentence of
+      court. The pioneers of New England had grown up familiar with such things;
+      and among the townspeople of Boston and Hartford in 1675 were still many
+      who in youth had listened to the awful news from Magdeburg or turned pale
+      over the horrors in Piedmont upon which Milton invoked the wrath of
+      Heaven. [[Sidenote: Growth of humane sentiment in recent times]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When civilized men are removed from the safeguards of civilization and
+      placed in the wilderness amid the hideous dangers that beset human
+      existence in a savage state of society, whatever barbarism lies latent in
+      them is likely to find many opportunities for showing itself. The feelings
+      that stir the meekest of men, as he stands among the smouldering embers of
+      his homestead and gazes upon the mangled bodies of wife and children, are
+      feelings that he shares with the most bloodthirsty savage, and the primary
+      effect of his higher intelligence and greater sensitiveness is only to
+      increase their bitterness. The neighbour who hears the dreadful story is
+      quick to feel likewise, for the same thing may happen to him, and there is
+      nothing so pitiless as fear. With the Puritan such gloomy and savage
+      passions seemed to find justification in the sacred text from which he
+      drew his rules of life. To suppose that one part of the Bible could be
+      less authoritative than another would have been to him an incomprehensible
+      heresy; and bound between the same covers that included the Sermon on the
+      Mount were tales of wholesale massacre perpetrated by God's command.
+      Evidently the red men were not stray children of Israel, after all, but
+      rather Philistines, Canaanites, heathen, sons of Belial, firebrands of
+      hell, demons whom it was no more than right to sweep from the face of the
+      earth. Writing in this spirit, the chroniclers of the time were completely
+      callous in their accounts of suffering and ruin inflicted upon Indians,
+      and, as has elsewhere been known to happen, those who did not risk their
+      own persons were more truculent in tone than the professional fighters. Of
+      the narrators of the war, perhaps the fairest toward the Indian is the
+      doughty Captain Church, while none is more bitter and cynical than the
+      Ipswich pastor William Hubbard. [[Sidenote: Warfare with savages likely to
+      be truculent in character]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While the overthrow of the Narragansetts changed the face of things, it
+      was far from putting an end to the war. It showed that when the white man
+      could find his enemy he could deal crushing blows, but the Indian was not
+      always so easy to find. Before the end of January Winslow's little army
+      was partially disbanded for want of food, and its three contingents fell
+      back upon Stonington, Boston, and Plymouth. Early in February the Federal
+      Commissioners called for a new levy of 600 men to assemble at Brookfield,
+      for the Nipmucks were beginning to renew their incursions, and after an
+      interval of six months the figure of Philip again appears for a moment
+      upon the scene. What he had been doing, or where he had been, since the
+      Brookfield fight in August, was never known. When in February, 1676, he
+      re-appeared it was still in company with his allies the Nipmucks, in their
+      bloody assault upon Lancaster. On the 10th of that month at sunrise the
+      Indians came swarming into the lovely village. Danger had already been
+      apprehended, the pastor, Joseph Rowlandson, the only Harvard graduate of
+      1652, had gone to Boston to solicit aid, and Captain Wadsworth's company
+      was slowly making its way over the difficult roads from Marlborough, but
+      the Indians were beforehand. Several houses were at once surrounded and
+      set on fire, and men, women, and children began falling under the
+      tomahawk. The minister's house was large and strongly built, and more than
+      forty people found shelter there until at length it took fire and they
+      were driven out by the flames. Only one escaped, a dozen or more were
+      slain, and the rest, chiefly women and children, taken captive. The
+      Indians aimed at plunder as well as destruction; for they were in sore
+      need of food and blankets, as well as of powder and ball. Presently, as
+      they saw Wadsworth's armed men approaching, they took to flight and got
+      away, with many prisoners and a goodly store of provisions. [[Sidenote:
+      Attack upon Lancaster, February 10, 1676]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among the captives was Mary Rowlandson, the minister's wife, who afterward
+      wrote the story of her sad experiences. The treatment of the prisoners
+      varied with the caprice or the cupidity of the captors. Those for whom a
+      substantial ransom might be expected fared comparatively well; to others
+      death came as a welcome relief. One poor woman with a child in her arms
+      was too weak to endure the arduous tramp over the icy hillsides, and
+      begged to be left behind, till presently the savages lost their patience.
+      They built a fire, and after a kind of demon dance killed mother and child
+      with a club and threw the bodies into the flames. Such treatment may seem
+      exceptionally merciful, but those modern observers who best know the
+      Indian's habits say that he seldom indulges in torture except when he has
+      abundance of leisure and a mind quite undisturbed. He is an epicure in
+      human agony and likes to enjoy it in long slow sips. It is for the end of
+      the march that the accumulation of horrors is reserved; the victims by the
+      way are usually despatched quickly; and in the case of Mrs. Rowlandson's
+      captors their irregular and circuitous march indicates that they were on
+      the alert. Their movements seem to have covered much of the ground between
+      Wachusett mountain and the Connecticut river. They knew that the white
+      squaw of the great medicine man of an English village was worth a heavy
+      ransom, and so they treated Mrs. Rowlandson unusually well. She had been
+      captured when escaping from the burning house, carrying in her arms her
+      little six-year-old daughter. She was stopped by a bullet that grazed her
+      side and struck the child. The Indian who seized them placed the little
+      girl upon a horse, and as the dreary march began she kept moaning "I shall
+      die, mamma." "I went on foot after it," says the mother, "with sorrow that
+      cannot be expressed. At length I took it off the horse, and carried it in
+      my arms till my strength failed me, and I fell down with it .... After
+      this it quickly began to snow, and when night came on they stopped. And
+      now down I must sit in the snow, by a little fire, and a few boughs behind
+      me, with my sick child in my lap, and calling much for water, being now,
+      through the wound, fallen into a violent fever .... Oh, may I see the
+      wonderful power of God that my spirit did not utterly sink under my
+      affliction; still the Lord upheld me with his gracious and merciful
+      spirit." The little girl soon died. For three months the weary and
+      heartbroken mother was led about the country by these loathsome savages,
+      of whose habits and manners she gives a vivid description. At first their
+      omnivorousness astonished her. "Skunks and rattlesnakes, yea the very bark
+      of trees" they esteemed as delicacies. "They would pick up old bones and
+      cut them in pieces at the joints, ... then boil them and drink up the
+      liquor, and then beat the great ends of them in a mortar and so eat them."
+      After some weeks of starvation Mrs. Rowlandson herself was fain to partake
+      of such viands. One day, having made a cap for one of Philip's boys, she
+      was invited to dine with the great sachem. "I went," she says, "and he
+      gave me a pancake about as big as two fingers. It was made of parched
+      wheat, beaten, and fried in bear's grease; but I thought I never tasted
+      pleasanter meat in my life." Early in May she was redeemed for 20 pounds,
+      and went to find her husband in Boston, where the Old South Church society
+      hired a house for them. [[Sidenote: Mrs. Rowlandson's narrative]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such was the experience of a captive whose treatment was, according to
+      Indian notions, hospitable. There were few who came off so well. Almost
+      every week while she was led hither and thither by the savages. Mrs.
+      Rowlandson heard ghastly tales of fire and slaughter. It was a busy winter
+      and spring for these Nipmucks. Before February was over, their exploit at
+      Lancaster was followed by a shocking massacre at Medfield. They sacked and
+      destroyed the towns of Worcester, Marlborough, Mendon, and Groton, and
+      even burned some houses in Weymouth, within a dozen miles of Boston.
+      Murderous attacks were made upon Sudbury, Chelmsford, Springfield,
+      Hatfield, Hadley, Northampton, Wrentham, Andover, Bridgewater, Scituate,
+      and Middleborough. On the 18th of April Captain Wadsworth, with 70 men,
+      was drawn into an ambush near Sudbury, surrounded by 500 Nipmucks, and
+      killed with 50 of his men; six unfortunate captives were burned alive over
+      slow fires. But Wadsworth's party made the enemy pay dearly for his
+      victory; that afternoon 120 Nipmucks bit the dust. In such wise, by
+      killing two or three for one, did the English wear out and annihilate
+      their adversaries. Just one month from that day Captain Turner surprised
+      and slaughtered 300 of these warriors near the falls of the Connecticut
+      river which have since borne his name, and this blow at last broke the
+      strength of the Nipmucks. [[Sidenote: Virtual exterminations of the
+      Indians, February&mdash;August, 1676]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile the Narragansetts and Wampanoags had burned the towns of Warwick
+      and Providence. After the wholesale ruin of the great "swamp fight,"
+      Canonchet had still some 600 or 700 warriors left, and with these, on the
+      26th of March, in the neighbourhood of Pawtuxet, he surprised a company of
+      50 Plymouth men under Captain Pierce and slew them all, but not until he
+      had lost 140 of his best warriors. Ten days later Captain Denison, with
+      his Connecticut company, defeated and captured Canonchet, and the proud
+      son of Miantonomo met the same fate as his father. He was handed over to
+      the Mohegans and tomahawked. The Narragansett sachem had shown such
+      bravery that it seemed, says the chronicler Hubbard, as if "some old Roman
+      ghost had possessed the body of this western pagan." But next moment this
+      pious clergyman, as if ashamed of the classical eulogy just bestowed upon
+      the hated redskin, alludes to him as a "damned wretch." [[Sidenote: Death
+      of Canonchet]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fall of Canonchet marked the beginning of the end. In four sharp
+      fights in the last week of June, Major Talcott, of Hartford, slew from 300
+      to 400 warriors, being nearly all that were left of the Narragansetts; and
+      during the month of July Captain Church patrolled the country about
+      Taunton, making prisoners of the Wampanoags. Once more King Philip, shorn
+      of his prestige, comes upon the scene. We have seen that his agency in
+      these cruel events had been at the outset a potent one. Whatever else it
+      may have been, it was at least the agency of the match that explodes the
+      powder-cask. Under the conditions of that savage society, organized
+      leadership was not to be looked for. In the irregular and disorderly
+      series of murdering raids Philip may have been often present, but except
+      for Mrs. Rowlandson's narrative we should have known nothing of him since
+      the Brookfield fight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At length in July, 1676, having seen the last of his Nipmuck friends
+      overwhelmed, the tattered chieftain showed himself near Bridgewater, with
+      a handful of followers. In these his own hunting-grounds some of his
+      former friends had become disaffected. The daring and diplomatic Church
+      had made his way into the wigwam of Ashawonks, the squaw sachem of
+      Saconet, near Little Compton, and having first convinced her that a flask
+      of brandy might be tasted without fatal results, followed up his advantage
+      and persuaded her to make an alliance with the English. Many Indians came
+      in and voluntarily surrendered themselves, in order to obtain favourable
+      terms, and some lent their aid in destroying their old sachem. Defeated at
+      Taunton, the son of Massasoit was hunted by Church to his ancient lair at
+      Bristol Neck and there besieged. His only escape was over the narrow
+      isthmus of which the pursuers now took possession, and in this dire
+      extremity one of Philip's men presumed to advise his chief that the hour
+      for surrender had come. For his unwelcome counsel the sachem forthwith
+      lifted his tomahawk and struck him dead at his feet. Then the brother of
+      the slain man crept away through the bushes to Church's little camp, and
+      offered to guide the white men to the morass where Philip lay concealed.
+      At daybreak of August 12 the English stealthily advancing beat up their
+      prey. The savages in sudden panic rushed from under cover, and as the
+      sachem showed himself running at the top of his speed, a ball from an
+      Indian musket pierced his heart, and "he fell upon his face in the mud and
+      water, with his gun under him." His severed head was sent to Plymouth,
+      where it was mounted on a pole and exposed aloft upon the village green,
+      while the meeting-house bell summoned the townspeople to a special service
+      of thanksgiving. [[Sidenote: Death of Philip, August 12]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may be supposed that in such services at this time a Christian feeling
+      of charity and forgiveness was not uppermost. Among the captives was a son
+      of Philip, the little swarthy lad of nine years for whom Mrs. Rowlandson
+      had made a cap, and the question as to what was to be done with him
+      occasioned as much debate as if he had been a Jesse Pomeroy <a
+      href="#linknote-34" name="linknoteref-34" id="linknoteref-34"><small>34</small></a>
+      or a Chicago anarchist. The opinions of the clergy were, of course,
+      eagerly sought and freely vouchsafed. One minister somewhat doubtfully
+      urged that "although a precept in Deuteronomy explicitly forbids killing
+      the child for the father's sin," yet after all "the children of Saul and
+      Achan perished with their parents, though too young to have shared their
+      guilt." Thus curiously did this English reverence for precedent, with a
+      sort of grim conscientiousness colouring its gloomy wrath, search for
+      guidance among the ancient records of the children of Israel. Commenting
+      upon the truculent suggestion, Increase Mather, soon to be president of
+      Harvard, observed that, "though David had spared the infant Hadad, yet it
+      might have been better for his people if he had been less merciful." These
+      bloodthirsty counsels did not prevail, but the course that was adopted did
+      not lack in harshness. Among the sachems a dozen leading spirits were
+      hanged or shot, and hundreds of captives were shipped off to the West
+      Indies to be sold into slavery; among these was Philip's little son. The
+      rough soldier Church and the apostle Eliot were among the few who
+      disapproved of this policy. Church feared it might goad such Indians as
+      were still at large to acts of desperation. Eliot, in an earnest letter to
+      the Federal Commissioners, observed: "To sell souls for money seemeth to
+      me dangerous merchandise." But the plan of exporting the captives was
+      adhered to. As slaves they were understood to be of little or no value,
+      and sometimes for want of purchasers they were set ashore on strange
+      coasts and abandoned. A few were even carried to one of the foulest of
+      mediaeval slave-marts, Morocco, where their fate was doubtless wretched
+      enough. [[Sidenote: Indians sold into slavery]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In spite of Church's doubts as to the wisdom of this harsh treatment, it
+      did not prevent the beaten and starving savages from surrendering
+      themselves in considerable numbers. To some the Federal Commissioners
+      offered amnesty, and the promise was faithfully fulfilled. Among those who
+      laid down arms in reliance upon it were 140 Christian Indians, with their
+      leader known as James the Printer, because he had been employed at
+      Cambridge in setting up the type for Eliot's Bible. Quite early in the war
+      it had been discovered that these converted savages still felt the ties of
+      blood to be stronger than those of creed. At the attack on Mendon, only
+      three weeks after the horrors at Swanzey that ushered in the war, it was
+      known that Christian Indians had behaved themselves quite as cruelly as
+      their unregenerate brethren. Afterwards they made such a record that the
+      jokers and punsters of the day&mdash;for such there were, even among those
+      sombre Puritans&mdash;in writing about the "Praying Indians," spelled <i>praying</i>
+      with an <i>e</i>. The moral scruples of these savages, under the influence
+      of their evangelical training, betrayed queer freaks. One of them, says
+      Mrs. Rowlandson, would rather die than eat horseflesh, so narrow and
+      scrupulous was his conscience, although it was as wide as the whole
+      infernal abyss, when it came to torturing white Christians. The student of
+      history may have observed similar inconsistencies in the theories and
+      conduct of people more enlightened than these poor red men. "There was
+      another Praying Indian," continues Mrs. Rowlandson, "who, when he had done
+      all the mischief he could, betrayed his own father into the English's
+      hands, thereby to purchase his own life; ... and there was another ... so
+      wicked ... as to wear a string about his neck, strung with Christian
+      fingers." [[Sidenote: Conduct of the Christian Indians]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such incidents help us to comprehend the exasperation of our forefathers
+      in the days of King Philip. The month which witnessed his death saw also
+      the end of the war in the southern parts of New England; but, almost
+      before people had time to offer thanks for the victory, there came news of
+      bloodshed on the northeastern frontier. The Tarratines in Maine had for
+      some time been infected with the war fever. How far they may have been
+      comprehended in the schemes of Philip and Canonchet, it would be hard to
+      say. They had attacked settlers on the site of Brunswick as early as
+      September, 1675. About the time of Philip's death, Major Waldron of Dover
+      had entrapped a party of them by an unworthy stratagem, and after
+      satisfying himself that they were accomplices in that chieftain's scheme,
+      sent them to Boston to be sold into slavery. A terrible retribution was in
+      store for Major Waldron thirteen years later. For the present the hideous
+      strife, just ended in southern New England, was continued on the
+      northeastern frontier, and there was scarcely a village between the
+      Kennebec and the Piscataqua but was laid in ashes. [[Sidenote: War with
+      the Tarratines, 1676-78]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By midsummer of 1678 the Indians had been everywhere suppressed, and there
+      was peace in the land. For three years, since Philip's massacre at
+      Swanzey, there had been a reign of terror in New England. Within the
+      boundaries of Connecticut, indeed, little or no damage had been inflicted,
+      and the troops of that colony, not needed on their own soil, did noble
+      service in the common cause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Massachusetts and Plymouth, on the other hand, the destruction of life
+      and property had been simply frightful. Of ninety towns, twelve had been
+      utterly destroyed, while more than forty others had been the scene of fire
+      and slaughter. Out of this little society nearly a thousand staunch men,
+      including not few of broad culture and strong promise, had lost their
+      lives, while of the scores of fair women and poor little children that had
+      perished under the ruthless tomahawk, one can hardly give an accurate
+      account. Hardly a family throughout the land but was in mourning. The
+      war-debt of Plymouth was reckoned to exceed the total amount of personal
+      property in the colony; yet although it pinched every household for many a
+      year, it was paid to the uttermost farthing; nor in this respect were
+      Massachusetts and Connecticut at all behind-hand. [[Sidenote:
+      Destructiveness of the war]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But while King Philip's War wrought such fearful damage to the English, it
+      was for the Indians themselves utter destruction. Most of the warriors
+      were slain, and to the survivors, as we have seen, the conquerors showed
+      but scant mercy. The Puritan, who conned his Bible so earnestly, had taken
+      his hint from the wars of the Jews, and swept his New English Canaan with
+      a broom that was pitiless and searching. Henceforth the red man figures no
+      more in the history of New England, except as an ally of the French in
+      bloody raids upon the frontier. In that capacity he does mischief enough
+      for yet a half-century more, but from central and southern New England, as
+      an element of disturbance or a power to be reckoned with, he disappears
+      forever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VI. &mdash; THE TYRANNY OF ANDROS.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The beginnings of New England were made in the full daylight of modern
+      history. It was an age of town records, of registered deeds, of
+      contemporary memoirs, of diplomatic correspondence, of controversial
+      pamphlets, funeral sermons, political diatribes, specific instructions,
+      official reports, and private letters. It was not a time in which mythical
+      personages or incredible legends could flourish, and such things we do
+      find in the history of New England. There was nevertheless a romantic side
+      to this history, enough to envelop some of its characters and incidents in
+      a glamour that may mislead the modern reader. This wholesale migration
+      from the smiling fields of merry England to an unexplored wilderness
+      beyond a thousand leagues of sea was of itself a most romantic and
+      thrilling event, and when viewed in the light of its historic results it
+      becomes clothed with sublimity. The men who undertook this work were not
+      at all free from self-consciousness. They believed that they were doing a
+      wonderful thing. They felt themselves to be instruments in accomplishing a
+      kind of "manifest destiny." Their exodus was that of a chosen people who
+      were at length to lay the everlasting foundations of God's kingdom upon
+      earth. Such opinions, which took a strong colour from their assiduous
+      study of the Old Testament, reacted and disposed them all the more to
+      search its pages for illustrations and precedents, and to regard it as an
+      oracle, almost as a talisman. In every propitious event they saw a special
+      providence, an act of divine intervention to deliver them from the snares
+      of an ever watchful Satan. This steadfast faith in an unseen ruler and
+      guide was to them a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night. It was of
+      great moral value. It gave them clearness of purpose and concentration of
+      strength, and contributed toward making them, like the children of Israel,
+      a people of indestructible vitality and aggressive energy. At the same
+      time, in the hands of the Puritan writers, this feeling was apt to warp
+      their estimates of events and throw such a romantic haze about things as
+      seriously to interfere with a true historical perspective. [[Sidenote:
+      Romantic features in the early history of New England]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among such writings that which perhaps best epitomizes the Puritan
+      philosophy is "The Wonder-working Providence of Zion's Saviour in New
+      England," by Captain Edward Johnson, one of the principal founders of
+      Woburn. It is an extremely valuable history of New England from 1628 to
+      1651, and every page is alive with the virile energy of that stirring
+      time. With narrative, argument, and apologue, abounding in honesty of
+      purpose, sublimity of trust, and grotesqueness of fancy, wherein touching
+      tenderness is often alternated with sternness most grim and merciless, yet
+      now and then relieved by a sudden gleam of humour,&mdash;and all in a
+      style that is usually uncouth and harsh, but sometimes bursts forth in
+      eloquence worthy of Bunyan,&mdash;we are told how the founders of New
+      England are soldiers of Christ enlisted in a holy war, and how they must
+      "march manfully on till all opposers of Christ's kingly power be
+      abolished." "And as for you who are called to sound forth his silver
+      trumpets, blow loud and shrill to this chiefest treble tune&mdash;for the
+      armies of the great Jehovah are at hand." "He standeth not as an idle
+      spectator beholding his people's ruth and their enemies' rage, but as an
+      actor in all actions, to bring to naught the desires of the wicked, ...
+      having also the ordering of every weapon in its first produce, guiding
+      every shaft that flies, leading each bullet to his place of settling, and
+      weapon to the wound it makes." To men engaged in such a crusade against
+      the powers of evil, nothing could seem insignificant or trivial; for, as
+      Johnson continues, in truly prophetic phrase, "the Lord Christ intends to
+      achieve greater matters by this little handful than the world is aware
+      of." [[Sidenote: Edward Johnson]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The general sentiment of the early New England writers was like that of
+      the "Wonder-working Providence," though it did not always find such
+      rhapsodic expression. It has left its impress upon the minds of their
+      children's children down to our own time, and has affected the opinions
+      held about them by other people. It has had something to do with a certain
+      tacit assumption of superiority on the part of New Englanders, upon which
+      the men and women of other communities have been heard to comment in
+      resentful and carping tones. There has probably never existed, in any age
+      or at any spot on the earth's surface, a group of people that did not take
+      for granted its own preeminent excellence. Upon some such assumption, as
+      upon an incontrovertible axiom, all historical narratives, from the
+      chronicles of a parish to the annals of an empire, alike proceed. But in
+      New England it assumed a form especially apt to provoke challenge. One of
+      its unintentional effects was the setting up of an unreal and impossible
+      standard by which to judge the acts and motives of the Puritans of the
+      seventeenth century. We come upon instances of harshness and cruelty, of
+      narrow-minded bigotry, and superstitious frenzy; and feel, perhaps, a
+      little surprised that these men had so much in common with their
+      contemporaries. Hence the interminable discussion which has been called
+      forth by the history of the Puritans, in which the conclusions of the
+      writer have generally been determined by circumstances of birth or creed,
+      or perhaps of reaction against creed. One critic points to the Boston of
+      1659 or the Salem of 1692 with such gleeful satisfaction as used to stir
+      the heart of Thomas Paine when he alighted upon an inconsistency in some
+      text of the Bible; while another, in the firm conviction that Puritans
+      could do no wrong, plays fast and loose with arguments that might be made
+      to justify the deeds of a Torquemada. [[Sidenote: Acts of the Puritans
+      often judged by a wrong standard]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From such methods of criticism it is the duty of historians as far as
+      possible to free themselves. If we consider the Puritans in the light of
+      their surroundings as Englishmen of the seventeenth century and
+      inaugurators of a political movement that was gradually to change for the
+      better the aspect of things all over the earth, we cannot fail to discern
+      the value of that sacred enthusiasm which led them to regard themselves as
+      chosen soldiers of Christ. It was the spirit of the "Wonder-working
+      Providence" that hurled the tyrant from his throne at Whitehall and
+      prepared the way for the emancipation of modern Europe. No spirit less
+      intense, no spirit nurtured in the contemplation of things terrestrial,
+      could ever have done it. The political philosophy of a Vane or a Sidney
+      could never have done it. The passion for liberty as felt by a Jefferson
+      or an Adams, abstracted and generalized from the love of particular
+      liberties, was something scarcely intelligible to the seventeenth century.
+      The ideas of absolute freedom of thought and speech, which we breathe in
+      from childhood, were to the men of that age strange and questionable. They
+      groped and floundered among them, very much as modern wool growers in Ohio
+      or iron-smelters in Pennsylvania flounder and grope among the elementary
+      truths of political economy. But the spirit in which the Hebrew prophet
+      rebuked and humbled an idolatrous king was a spirit they could comprehend.
+      Such a spirit was sure to manifest itself in narrow cramping measures and
+      in ugly acts of persecution; but it is none the less to the fortunate
+      alliance of that fervid religious enthusiasm with the Englishman's love of
+      self-government that our modern freedom owes its existence. [[Sidenote:
+      Spirit of the Wonder-working Providence]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The history of New England under Charles II. yields abundant proof that
+      political liberty is no less indebted in the New World than in the Old to
+      the spirit of the "Wonder-working Providence." The theocratic ideal which
+      the Puritan sought to put into practice in Massachusetts and Connecticut
+      was a sacred institution in faults of the defence of which all his
+      faculties were kept perpetually alert. Much as he loved self-government he
+      would never have been so swift to detect and so stubborn to resist every
+      slightest encroachment on the part of the crown had not the loss of
+      self-government involved the imminent danger that the ark of the Lord
+      might be abandoned to the worshippers of Dagon. It was in Massachusetts,
+      where the theocracy was strongest, that the resistance to Charles II. was
+      most dogged and did most to prepare the way for the work of achieving
+      political independence a century later. Naturally it was in Massachusetts
+      at the same time that the faults of the theocracy were most conspicuous.
+      It was there that priestly authority most clearly asserted itself in such
+      oppressive acts as are always witnessed when too much power is left in the
+      hands of men whose primary allegiance is to a kingdom not of this world.
+      Much as we owe to the theocracy for warding off the encroachments of the
+      crown, we cannot be sorry that it was itself crushed in the process. It
+      was well that it did not survive its day of usefulness, and that the
+      outcome of the struggle was what has been aptly termed "the emancipation
+      of Massachusetts." [[Sidenote: Merits and faults of the theocracy]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The basis of the theocratic constitution of this commonwealth was the
+      provision by which the exercise of the franchise was made an incident of
+      church-membership. Unless a man could take part in the Lord's Supper, as
+      administered in the churches of the colony, he could not vote or hold
+      office. Church and state, parish and town, were thus virtually identified.
+      Here, as in some other aspects of early New England, one is reminded of
+      the ancient Greek cities, where the freeman who could vote in the
+      market-place or serve his turn as magistrate was the man qualified to
+      perform sacrifices to the tutelar deities of the tribe; other men might
+      dwell in the city but had no share in making or executing its laws. The
+      limitation of civil rights by religious tests is indeed one of those
+      common inheritances from the old Aryan world that we find again and again
+      cropping out, even down to the exclusion of Catholics from the House of
+      Commons from 1562 to 1829. The obvious purpose of this policy in England
+      was self-protection; and in like manner the restriction of the suffrage in
+      Massachusetts was designed to protect the colony against aggressive
+      episcopacy and to maintain unimpaired the uniformity of purpose which had
+      brought the settlers across the ocean. Under the circumstances there was
+      something to be said in behalf of such a measure of self-protection, and
+      the principle required but slight extension to cover such cases as the
+      banishment of Roger Williams and the Antinomians. There was another side
+      to the case, however. From the very outset this exclusive policy was in
+      some ways a source of weakness to Massachusetts, though we have seen that
+      the indirect effect was to diversify and enrich the political life of New
+      England as a whole. [[Sidenote: Restriction of the suffrage to church
+      members]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At first it led to the departure of the men who founded Connecticut, and
+      thereafter the way was certainly open for those who preferred the
+      Connecticut policy to go where it prevailed. Some such segregation was no
+      doubt effected, but it could not be complete and thorough. Men who
+      preferred Boston without the franchise to Hartford with it would remain in
+      Massachusetts; and thus the elder colony soon came to possess a
+      discontented class of people, always ready to join hand in glove with
+      dissenters or mischief-makers, or even with emissaries of the crown. It
+      afforded a suggestive commentary upon all attempts to suppress human
+      nature by depriving it of a share in political life; instead of keeping it
+      inside where you can try conclusions with it fairly, you thrust it out to
+      plot mischief in the dark. Within twenty years from the founding of Boston
+      the disfranchisement of such citizens as could not participate in
+      church-communion had begun to be regarded as a serious political
+      grievance. These men were obliged to pay taxes and were liable to be
+      called upon for military service against the Indians; and they naturally
+      felt that they ought to have a voice in the management of public affairs.
+      [[Sidenote: It was a source of political discontent]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides this fundamental ground of complaint, there were derivative
+      grievances. Under the influence of the clergy justice was administered in
+      somewhat inquisitorial fashion, there was an uncertainty as to just what
+      the law was, a strong disposition to confuse questions of law with
+      questions of ethics, and great laxity in the admission and estimation of
+      evidence. As early as 1639 people had begun to complain that too much
+      power was rested in the discretion of the magistrate, and they clamoured
+      for a code of laws; but as Winthrop says, the magistrates and ministers
+      were "not very forward in this matter," for they preferred to supplement
+      the common law of England by decisions based on the Old Testament rather
+      than by a body of statutes. It was not until 1649, after a persistent
+      struggle, that the deputies won a decisive victory over the assistants and
+      secured for Massachusetts a definite code of laws. In the New Haven colony
+      similar theocratic notions led the settlers to dispense with trial by jury
+      because they could find no precedent for it in the laws of Moses. Here, as
+      in Massachusetts, the inquisitorial administration of justice combined
+      with partial disfranchisement to awaken discontent, and it was partly for
+      this reason that New Haven fell so easily under the sway of Connecticut.
+      [[Sidenote: Inquisitorial administration of justice]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Massachusetts after 1650 the opinion rapidly gained ground that all
+      baptized persons of upright and decorous lives ought to be considered, for
+      practical purposes, as members of the church, and therefore entitled to
+      the exercise of political rights, even though unqualified for
+      participation in the Lord's Supper. This theory of church-membership,
+      based on what was at that time stigmatized as the "Halfway Covenant,"
+      aroused intense opposition. It was the great question of the day. In 1657
+      a council was held in Boston, which approved the principle of the Halfway
+      Covenant; and as this decision was far from satisfying the churches, a
+      synod of all the clergymen in Massachusetts was held five years later, to
+      reconsider the great question. The decision of the synod substantially
+      confirmed the decision of the council, but there were some dissenting
+      voices. Foremost among the dissenters, who wished to retain the old
+      theocratic regime in all its strictness, was Charles Chauncey, the
+      president of Harvard College, and Increase Mather agreed with him at the
+      time, though he afterward saw reason to change his opinion, and published
+      two tracts in favour of the Halfway Covenant. Most bitter of all toward
+      the new theory of church-membership was, naturally enough, Mr. Davenport
+      of New Haven. [[Sidenote: The "Halfway Covenant"]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This burning question was the source of angry contentions in the First
+      Church of Boston. Its teacher, the learned and melancholy Norton, died in
+      1663, and four years later the aged pastor, John Wilson, followed him. In
+      choosing a successor to Wilson the church decided to declare itself in
+      opposition to the liberal decision of the synod, and in token thereof
+      invited Davenport to come from New Haven to take charge of it. Davenport,
+      who was then seventy years old, was disgusted at the recent annexation of
+      his colony to Connecticut. He accepted the invitation and came to Boston,
+      against the wishes of nearly half of the Boston congregation who did not
+      like the illiberal principle which he represented. In little more than a
+      year his ministry at Boston was ended by death; but the opposition to his
+      call had already proceeded so far that a secession from the old church had
+      become inevitable. In 1669 the advocates of the Halfway Covenant organized
+      themselves into a new society under the title of the "Third Church in
+      Boston." A wooden meeting-house was built on a lot which had once belonged
+      to the late governor Winthrop, in what was then the south part of the
+      town, so that the society and its meeting-house became known as the South
+      Church; and after a new church founded in Summer Street in 1717 took the
+      name of the New South, the church of 1669 came to be further distinguished
+      as the Old South. As this church represented a liberal idea which was
+      growing in favour with the people, it soon became the most flourishing
+      church in America. After sixty years its numbers had increased so that the
+      old meeting-house could not contain them; and in 1729 the famous building
+      which still stands was erected on the same spot,&mdash;a building with a
+      grander history than any other on the American continent, unless it be
+      that other plain brick building in Philadelphia where the Declaration of
+      Independence was adopted and the Federal Constitution framed. [[Sidenote:
+      Founding of the Old South Church, 1669]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wrath of the First Church at this secession from its ranks was deep
+      and bitter, and for thirteen years it refused to entertain ecclesiastical
+      intercourse with the South Church. But by 1682 it had become apparent that
+      the king and his friends were meditating an attack upon the Puritan
+      theocracy in New England. It had even been suggested, in the council for
+      the colonies, that the Church of England should be established in
+      Massachusetts, and that none but duly ordained Episcopal clergymen should
+      be allowed to solemnize marriages. Such alarming suggestions began to
+      impress the various Puritan churches with the importance of uniting their
+      forces against the common enemy; and accordingly in 1682 the quarrel
+      between the two Boston societies came to an end. There was urgent need of
+      all the sympathy and good feeling that the community could muster, whereby
+      to cheer itself in the crisis that was coming. The four years from 1684 to
+      1688 were the darkest years in the history of New England. Massachusetts,
+      though not lacking in the spirit, had not the power to beard the tyrant as
+      she did eighty years later. Her attitude toward the Stuarts&mdash;as we
+      have seen&mdash;had been sometimes openly haughty and defiant, sometimes
+      silent and sullen, but always independent. At the accession of Charles II.
+      the colonists had thought it worth while to send commissioners to England
+      to confer with the king and avoid a quarrel. Charles promised to respect
+      their charter, but insisted that in return they must take an oath of
+      allegiance to the crown, must administer justice in the king's name, and
+      must repeal their laws restricting the right of suffrage to church members
+      and prohibiting the Episcopal form of worship. [[Sidenote: Founding of the
+      Old South Church, 1669] [[Sidenote: Demands of Charles II.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the people of Massachusetts received this message they consented to
+      administer justice in the king's name, but all the other matters were
+      referred for consideration to a committee, and so they dropped out of
+      sight. When the royal commissioners came to Boston in 1664, they were
+      especially instructed to ascertain whether Massachusetts had complied with
+      the king's demands; but upon this point the legislature stubbornly
+      withheld any definite answer, while it frittered away the time in trivial
+      altercations with the royal commissioners. The war with Holland and the
+      turbulent state of English politics operated for several years in favour
+      of this independent attitude of the colonists, though during all this time
+      their enemies at court were busy with intrigues and accusations. Apart
+      from mere slanders the real grounds of complaint were the restriction of
+      the suffrage, whereby members of the Church of England were shut out; the
+      claims of the eastern proprietors, heirs of Mason and Gorges, whose
+      territory Massachusetts had absorbed; the infraction of the navigation
+      laws; and the coinage of pine-tree shillings. The last named measure had
+      been forced upon the colonists by the scarcity of a circulating medium.
+      Until 1661 Indian wampum had been a legal tender, and far into the
+      eighteenth century it remained current in small transactions. "In 1693 the
+      ferriage from New York to Brooklyn was eight stivers in wampum or a silver
+      twopence." <a href="#linknote-35" name="linknoteref-35" id="linknoteref-35"><small>35</small></a>
+      As early as 1652 Massachusetts had sought to supply the deficiency by the
+      issue of shillings and sixpences. It was an affair of convenience and
+      probably had no political purpose. The infraction of the navigation laws
+      was a more serious matter. "Ships from France, Spain, and the Canaries
+      traded directly with Boston, and brought in goods which had never paid
+      duty in any English port." <a href="#linknote-36" name="linknoteref-36"
+      id="linknoteref-36"><small>36</small></a> The effect of this was to excite
+      the jealousy of the merchants in London and other English cities and to
+      deprive Massachusetts of the sympathy of that already numerous and
+      powerful class of people. [[Sidenote: Complaints against Massachusetts]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1675, the first year of King Philip's War, the British government made
+      up its mind to attend more closely to the affairs of its American
+      colonies. It had got the Dutch war off its hands, and could give heed to
+      other things. The general supervision of the colonies was assigned to a
+      standing committee of the privy council, styled the "Lords of the
+      Committee of Trade and Plantations," and henceforth familiarly known as
+      the "Lords of Trade." Next year the Lords of Trade sent an agent to
+      Boston, with a letter to Governor Leverett about the Mason and Gorges
+      claims. Under cover of this errand the messenger was to go about and
+      ascertain the sentiments which people in the Kennebec and Piscataqua
+      towns, as well as in Boston, entertained for the government of
+      Massachusetts. The person to whom this work was entrusted was Edward
+      Randolph, a cousin of Robert Mason who inherited the property claim to the
+      Piscataqua county. To these men had old John Mason bequeathed his deadly
+      feud with Massachusetts, and the fourteen years which Randolph now spent
+      in New England were busily devoted to sowing the seeds of strife. In 1678
+      the king appointed him collector and surveyor of customs at the port of
+      Boston, with instructions to enforce the navigation laws. Randolph was not
+      the man to do unpopular things in such a way as to dull the edge of the
+      infliction; he took delight in adding insult to injury. He was at once
+      harsh and treacherous. His one virtue was pecuniary integrity; he was
+      inaccessible to bribes and did not pick and steal from the receipts at the
+      custom-house. In the other relations of life he was disencumbered of
+      scruples. His abilities were not great, but his industry was untiring, and
+      he pursued his enemies with the tenacity of a sleuth-hound. As an
+      excellent British historian observes, "he was one of those men who, once
+      enlisted as partisans, lose every other feeling in the passion which is
+      engendered of strife." <a href="#linknote-37" name="linknoteref-37"
+      id="linknoteref-37"><small>37</small></a> [[Sidenote: The Lords of Trade]
+      [[Sidenote: Edward Randolph]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The arrival of such a man boded no good to Massachusetts. His reception at
+      the town-house was a cold one. Leverett liked neither his looks nor his
+      message, and kept his peaked hat on while he read the letter; when he came
+      to the signature of the king's chief secretary of state, he asked, with
+      careless contempt, "Who is this Henry Coventry?" Randolph's choking rage
+      found vent in a letter to the king, taking pains to remind him that the
+      governor of Massachusetts had once been an officer in Cromwell's army. As
+      we read this and think with what ghoulish glee the writer would have
+      betrayed Colonel Goffe into the hands of the headsman, had any clue been
+      given him, we can quite understand why Hubbard and Mather had nothing to
+      say about the mysterious stranger at Hadley. Everything that Randolph
+      could think of that would goad and irritate the king, he reported in full
+      to London; his letters were specimens of that worst sort of lie that is
+      based upon distorted half-truths; and his malicious pen but seldom lay
+      idle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While waiting for the effects of these reports to ripen, Randolph was
+      busily intriguing with some of the leading men in Boston who were
+      dissatisfied with the policy of the dominant party, and under his careful
+      handling a party was soon brought into existence which was ready to
+      counsel submission to the royal will. Such was the birth of Toryism in New
+      England. The leader of this party was Joseph Dudley, son of the grim
+      verse-maker who had come over as lieutenant to Winthrop. The younger
+      Dudley was graduated at Harvard in 1665, and proceeded to study theology,
+      but soon turned his attention entirely to politics. In 1673 he was a
+      deputy from Roxbury in the General Court; in 1675 he took part in the
+      storming of the Narragansett fort; in 1677 and the three following years
+      he was one of the Federal Commissioners. In character and temper he
+      differed greatly from his father. Like the proverbial minister's son whose
+      feet are swift toward folly, Joseph Dudley seems to have learned in stern
+      bleak years of childhood to rebel against the Puritan theory of life. Much
+      of the abuse that has been heaped upon him, as a renegade and traitor, is
+      probably undeserved. It does not appear that he ever made any pretence of
+      love for the Puritan commonwealth, and there were many like him who had as
+      lief be ruled by king as by clergy. But it cannot be denied that his
+      suppleness and sagacity went along with a moral nature that was weak and
+      vulgar. Joseph Dudley was essentially a self-seeking politician and
+      courtier, like his famous kinsman of the previous century, Robert, Earl of
+      Leicester. His party in Massachusetts was largely made up of men who had
+      come to the colony for commercial reasons, and had little or no sympathy
+      with the objects for which it was founded. Among them were Episcopalians,
+      Presbyterians, and Baptists, who were allowed no chance for public
+      worship, as well as many others who, like Gallio, cared for none of these
+      things. Their numbers, moreover, must have been large, for Boston had
+      grown to be a town of 5000 inhabitants, the population of Massachusetts
+      was approaching 30,000, and, according to Hutchinson, scarcely one grown
+      man in five was a church-member qualified to vote or hold office. Such a
+      fact speaks volumes as to the change which was coming over the Puritan
+      world. No wonder that the clergy had begun to preach about the weeds and
+      tares that were overrunning Christ's pleasant garden. No wonder that the
+      spirit of revolt against the disfranchising policy of the theocracy was
+      ripe. [[Sidenote: Joseph Dudley]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in 1679, when this weakness of the body politic had been duly
+      studied and reported by Randolph, and when all New England was groaning
+      under the bereavements and burdens entailed by Philip's war, that the
+      Stuart government began its final series of assaults upon Massachusetts.
+      The claims of the eastern proprietors, the heirs of Mason and Gorges,
+      furnished the occasion. Since 1643 the four Piscataqua towns&mdash;Hampton,
+      Exeter, Dover, and Portsmouth&mdash;had remained under the jurisdiction of
+      Massachusetts. After the Restoration the Mason claim had been revived, and
+      in 1677 was referred to the chief-justices North and Rainsford. Their
+      decision was that Mason's claim had always been worthless as based on a
+      grant in which the old Plymouth Company had exceeded its powers. They also
+      decided that Massachusetts had no valid claim since the charter assigned
+      her a boundary just north of the Merrimack. This decision left the four
+      towns subject to none but the king, who forthwith in 1679 proceeded to
+      erect them into the royal province of New Hampshire, with president and
+      council appointed by the crown, and an assembly chosen by the people, but
+      endowed with little authority,&mdash;a tricksome counterfeit of popular
+      government. Within three years an arrogant and thieving ruler, Edward
+      Cranfield, had goaded New Hampshire to acts of insurrection. [[Sidenote:
+      Royal province of New Hampshire]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the decisions of the chief-justices Massachusetts must needs submit.
+      The Gorges claim led to more serious results. Under Cromwell's rule in
+      1652&mdash;the same year in which she began coining money&mdash;Massachusetts
+      had extended her sway over Maine. In 1665 Colonel Nichols and his
+      commissioners, acting upon the express instructions of Charles II., took
+      it away from her. In 1668, after the commissioners had gone home,
+      Massachusetts coolly took possession again. In 1677 the chief-justices
+      decided that the claim of the Gorges family, being based on a grant from
+      James I., was valid. Then the young Ferdinando Gorges, grandson of the
+      first proprietor, offered to sell the province to the king, who had now
+      taken it into his head that he would like to bestow it upon the Duke of
+      Monmouth, his favourite son by Lucy Walters. Before Charles had responded,
+      Governor Leverett had struck a bargain with Gorges, who ceded to
+      Massachusetts all his rights over Maine for L1250 in hard cash. When the
+      king heard of this transaction he was furious. He sent a letter to Boston,
+      commanding the General Court to surrender the province again on repayment
+      of this sum of L1250, and expressing his indignation that the people
+      should thus dare to dispose of an important claim off-hand without
+      consulting his wishes. In the same letter the colony was enjoined to put
+      in force the royal orders of seventeen years before, concerning the oath
+      of allegiance, the restriction of the suffrage, and the prohibition of the
+      Episcopal form of worship. [[Sidenote: The Gorges claim]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This peremptory message reached Boston about Christmas, 1679. Leverett,
+      the sturdy Ironsides, had died six months before, and his place was filled
+      by Simon Bradstreet, a man of moderate powers but great integrity, and
+      held in peculiar reverence as the last survivor of those that had been
+      chosen to office before leaving England by the leaders of the great
+      Puritan exodus. Born in a Lincolnshire village in 1603, he was now
+      seventy-six years old. He had taken his degree at Emmanuel College,
+      Cambridge, had served as secretary to the Earl of Warwick, and in 1629 had
+      been appointed member of the board of assistants for the colony about to
+      be established on Massachusetts bay. In this position he had remained with
+      honour for half a century, while he had also served as Federal
+      Commissioner and as agent for the colony in London. His wife, who died in
+      1672, was a woman of quaint learning and quainter verses, which her
+      contemporaries admired beyond measure. One of her books was republished in
+      London, with the title: "The Tenth Muse, lately sprung up in America."
+      John Norton once said that if Virgil could only have heard the seraphic
+      poems of Anne Bradstreet, he would have thrown his heathen doggerel into
+      the fire. She was sister of Joseph Dudley, and evidently inherited this
+      rhyming talent, such as it was, from her father. Governor Bradstreet
+      belonged to the moderate party who would have been glad to extend the
+      franchise, but he did not go with his brother-in-law in subservience to
+      the king. [[Sidenote: Simon Bradstreet and his wife]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the General Court assembled, in May, 1680, the full number of
+      eighteen assistants appeared, for the first time in the history of the
+      colony, and in accordance with an expressed wish of the king. They were
+      ready to yield in trifles, but not in essentials. After wearisome
+      discussion, the answer to the royal letter was decided on. It stated in
+      vague and unsatisfactory terms that the royal orders of 1662 either had
+      been carried out already or would be in good time, while to the demand for
+      the surrender of Maine no reply whatever was made, save that "they were
+      heartily sorry that any actings of theirs should be displeasing to his
+      Majesty." After this, when Randolph wrote home that the king's letters
+      were of no more account in Massachusetts than an old London Gazette, he
+      can hardly be accused of stretching the truth. Randolph kept busily at
+      work, and seems to have persuaded the Bishop of London that if the charter
+      could be annulled, episcopacy might be established in Massachusetts as in
+      England. In February, 1682, a letter came from the king demanding
+      submission and threatening legal proceedings against the charter. Dudley
+      was then sent as agent to London, and with him was sent a Mr. Richards, of
+      the extreme clerical party, to watch him. [[Sidenote: Massachusetts
+      answers the king]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile the king's position at home had been changing. He had made up
+      his mind to follow his father's example and try the experiment of setting
+      his people at defiance and governing without a parliament. This could not
+      be done without a great supply of money. Louis XIV. had plenty of money,
+      for there was no constitution in France to prevent his squeezing what he
+      wanted out of the pockets of an oppressed people. France was thriving
+      greatly now, for Colbert had introduced a comparatively free system of
+      trade between the provinces and inaugurated an era of prosperity soon to
+      be cut short by the expulsion of the Huguenots. Louis could get money
+      enough for the asking, and would be delighted to foment civil disturbances
+      in England, so as to tie the hands of the only power which at that moment
+      could interfere with his seizing Alsace and Lorraine and invading
+      Flanders. The pretty Louise de Keroualle Duchess of Portsmouth, with her
+      innocent baby face and heart as cold as any reptile's, was the French
+      Delilah chosen to shear the locks of the British Samson. By such means and
+      from such motives a secret treaty was made in February, 1681, by which
+      Louis agreed to pay Charles 2,000,000 livres down, and 500,000 more in
+      each of the next two years, on condition that he should summon no more
+      parliaments within that time. This bargain for securing the means of
+      overthrowing the laws and liberties of England was, on the part of Charles
+      II., an act no less reprehensible than some of those for which his father
+      had gone to the block. But Charles could now afford for a while to wreak
+      his evil will. He had already summoned a parliament for the 21st of March,
+      to meet at Oxford within the precincts of the subservient university, and
+      out of reach of the high-spirited freemen of London. He now forced a
+      quarrel with the new parliament and dissolved it within a week. A joiner
+      named Stephen College, who had spoken his mind too freely in the taverns
+      at Oxford with regard to these proceedings, was drawn and quartered. The
+      Whig leader Lord Shaftesbury was obliged to flee to Holland. In the
+      absence of a parliament the only power of organized resistance to the
+      king's tyranny resided in the corporate governments of the chartered
+      towns. The charter of London was accordingly attacked by a writ of <i>quo
+      warranto</i>, and in June, 1683, the time-serving judges declared it
+      confiscated. George Jeffreys, a low drunken fellow whom Charles had made
+      Lord Chief Justice, went on a circuit through the country; and, as Roger
+      North says, "made all the charters, like the walls of Jericho, fall down
+      before him, and returned laden with surrenders, the spoils of towns." At
+      the same time a terrible blow was dealt at two of the greatest Whig
+      families in England. Lord William Russell, son of the Earl of Bedford, and
+      Algernon Sidney, younger son of the Earl of Leicester, two of the purest
+      patriots and ablest liberal leaders of the day, were tried on a false
+      charge of treason and beheaded. [[Sidenote: Secret treaty between Charles
+      II. and Louis XIV] [[Sidenote: Shameful proceedings in England]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By this quick succession of high-handed measures, the friends of law and
+      liberty were for a moment disconcerted and paralyzed. In the frightful
+      abasement of the courts of justice which these events so clearly showed,
+      the freedom of Englishmen seemed threatened in its last stronghold. The
+      doctrine of passive obedience to monarchs was preached in the pulpits and
+      inculcated by the university of Oxford, which ordered the works of John
+      Milton to be publicly burned. Sir Robert Filmer wrote that "not only in
+      human laws, but even in divine, a thing may by the king be commanded
+      contrary to law, and yet obedience to such a command is necessary."
+      Charles felt so strong that in 1684 he flatly refused to summon a
+      parliament.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not long before the effects of all this were felt in New England.
+      The mission of Dudley and his colleague was fruitless. They returned to
+      Boston, and Randolph, who had followed them to London, now followed them
+      back, armed with a writ of <i>quo warranto</i> which he was instructed not
+      to serve until he should have given Massachusetts one more chance to
+      humble herself in the dust. Should she modify her constitution to please a
+      tyrant or see it trampled under foot? Recent events in England served for
+      a solemn warning; for the moment the Tories were silenced; perhaps after
+      all, the absolute rule of a king was hardly to be preferred to the sway of
+      the Puritan clergy; the day when the House of Commons sat still and wept
+      seemed to have returned. A great town-meeting was held in the Old South
+      Meeting-House, and the moderator requested all who were for surrendering
+      the charter to hold up their hands. Not a hand was lifted, and out from
+      the throng a solitary voice exclaimed, with deep-drawn breath, "The Lord
+      be praised!" Then arose Increase Mather, president of Harvard College, and
+      reminded them how their fathers did win this charter, and should they
+      deliver it up unto the spoiler who demanded it "even as Ahab required
+      Naboth's vineyard, Oh! their children would be bound to curse them." Such
+      was the attitude of Massachusetts, and when it was known in London, the
+      blow was struck. For technical reasons Randolph's writ was not served; but
+      on the 21st of June a decree in chancery annulled the charter of
+      Massachusetts. [[Sidenote: Massachusetts refuses to surrender her charter]
+      [[Sidenote: It is annulled by degree of chancery, June 21, 1684]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To appreciate the force of this blow we must pause for a moment and
+      consider what it involved. The right to the soil of North America had been
+      hitherto regarded in England, on the strength of the discoveries of the
+      Cabots, as an appurtenance to the crown of Henry VII.,&mdash;as something
+      which descended from father to son like the palace at Hampton Court or the
+      castle at Windsor, but which the sovereign might alienate by his voluntary
+      act just as he might sell or give away a piece of his royal domain in
+      England. Over this vast territory it was doubtful how far Parliament was
+      entitled to exercise authority, and the rights of Englishmen settled there
+      had theoretically no security save in the provisions of the various
+      charters by which the crown had delegated its authority to individual
+      proprietors or to private companies. It was thus on the charter granted by
+      Charles I. to the Company of Massachusetts Bay that not only the cherished
+      political and ecclesiastical institutions of the colony, but even the
+      titles of individuals to their lands and houses, were supposed to be
+      founded. By the abrogation of the charter, all rights and immunities that
+      had been based upon it were at once swept away, and every rood of the soil
+      of Massachusetts became the personal property of the Stuart king, who
+      might, if he should possess the will and the power, turn out all the
+      present occupants or otherwise deal with them as trespassers. Such at
+      least was the theory of Charles II., and to show that he meant to wreak
+      his vengeance with no gentle hand, he appointed as his viceroy the brutal
+      Percy Kirke,&mdash;a man who would have no scruples about hanging a few
+      citizens without trial, should occasion require it. [[Sidenote: Effect of
+      annulling the charter]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in February, 1685, just as Charles seemed to be getting everything
+      arranged to his mind, a stroke of apoplexy carried him off the scene, and
+      his brother ascended the throne. Monmouth's rebellion, and the horrible
+      cruelties that followed, kept Colonel Kirke busy in England through the
+      summer, and left the new king scant leisure to think about America. Late
+      in the autumn, having made up his mind that he could not spare such an
+      exemplary knave as Kirke, James II. sent over Sir Edmund Andros. In the
+      mean time the government of Massachusetts had been administered by Dudley,
+      who showed himself willing to profit by the misfortunes of his country.
+      Andros had long been one of James's favourites. He was the dull and dogged
+      English officer such as one often meets, honest enough and faithful to his
+      master, neither cruel nor rapacious, but coarse in fibre and wanting in
+      tact. Some years before, when governor of New York, he had a territorial
+      dispute with Connecticut, and now cherished a grudge against the people of
+      New England, so that, from James's point of view, he was well fitted to be
+      their governor. James wished to abolish all the local governments in
+      America, and unite them, as far as possible, under a single
+      administration. With Plymouth there could be no trouble; she had never had
+      a charter, but had existed on sufferance from the outset. In 1687 the
+      charters of Rhode Island and Connecticut were rescinded, but the decrees
+      were not executed in due form. In October of that year Andros went to
+      Hartford, to seize the Connecticut charter but it was not surrendered.
+      While Sir Edmund was bandying threats with stout Robert Treat, the queller
+      of Indians and now governor of Connecticut, in the course of their evening
+      conference the candles were suddenly blown out, and when after some
+      scraping of tinder they were lighted again the document was nowhere to be
+      found, for Captain Wadsworth had carried it away and hidden it in the
+      hollow trunk of a mighty oak tree. Nevertheless for the moment the colony
+      was obliged to submit to the tyrant. Next day the secretary John Allyn
+      wrote "Finis" on the colonial records and shut up the book. Within another
+      twelvemonth New York and New Jersey were added to the viceroyalty of
+      Andros; so that all the northern colonies from the forests of Maine to the
+      Delaware river were thus brought under the arbitrary rule of one man, who
+      was responsible to no one but the king for whatever he might take it into
+      his head to do. [[Sidenote: Sir Edmund Andros] [[Sidenote: The Charter
+      Oak]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The vexatious character of the new government was most strongly felt at
+      Boston where Andros had his headquarters. Measures were at once taken for
+      the erection of an Episcopal church, and meantime the royal order was that
+      one of the principal meeting-houses should be seized for the use of the
+      Church of England. This was an ominous beginning. In the eyes of the
+      people it was much more than a mere question of disturbing Puritan
+      prejudices. They had before them the experience of Scotland during the
+      past ten years, the savage times of "Old Mortality," the times which had
+      seen the tyrannical prelate, on the lonely moor, begging in vain for his
+      life, the times of Drumclog and Bothwell Brigg, of Claverhouse and his
+      flinty-hearted troopers, of helpless women tied to stakes on the Solway
+      shore and drowned by inches in the rising tide. What had happened in one
+      part of the world might happen in another, for the Stuart policy was the
+      same. It aimed not at securing toleration but at asserting unchecked
+      supremacy. Its demand for an inch was the prelude to its seizing an ell,
+      and so our forefathers understood it. Sir Edmund's formal demand for the
+      Old South Meeting-House was flatly refused, but on Good Friday, 1687, the
+      sexton was frightened into opening it, and thenceforward Episcopal
+      services were held there alternately with the regular services until the
+      overthrow of Andros. The pastor, Samuel Willard, was son of the gallant
+      veteran who had rescued the beleaguered people of Brookfield in King
+      Philip's war. Amusing passages occurred between him and Sir Edmund, who
+      relished the pleasantry of keeping minister and congregation waiting an
+      hour or two in the street on Sundays before yielding to them the use of
+      their meeting-house. More kindly memories of the unpopular governor are
+      associated with the building of the first King's Chapel on the spot where
+      its venerable successor now stands. The church was not finished until
+      after Sir Edmund had taken his departure, but Lady Andros, who died in
+      February, 1688, lies in the burying-ground hard by. Her gentle manners had
+      won all hearts. For the moment, we are told, one touch of nature made
+      enemies kin, and as Sir Edmund walked to the townhouse "many a head was
+      bared to the bereaved husband that before had remained stubbornly covered
+      to the exalted governor." <a href="#linknote-38" name="linknoteref-38"
+      id="linknoteref-38"><small>38</small></a> [[Sidenote: Episcopal services
+      in Boston] [[Sidenote: Founding of the King's Chapel, 1689]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The despotic rule of Andros was felt in more serious ways than in the
+      seizing upon a meetinghouse. Arbitrary taxes were imposed, encroachments
+      were made upon common lands as in older manorial times, and the writ of <i>habeas
+      corpus</i> was suspended. Dudley was appointed censor of the press, and
+      nothing was allowed to be printed without his permission. All the public
+      records of the late New England governments were ordered to be brought to
+      Boston, whither it thus became necessary to make a tedious journey in
+      order to consult them. All deeds and wills were required to be registered
+      in Boston, and excessive fees were charged for the registry. It was
+      proclaimed that all private titles to land were to be ransacked, and that
+      whoever wished to have his title confirmed must pay a heavy quit-rent,
+      which under the circumstances amounted to blackmail. The General Court was
+      abolished. The power of taxation was taken from the town-meetings and
+      lodged with the governor. Against this crowning iniquity the town of
+      Ipswich, led by its sturdy pastor, John Wise, made protest. In response
+      Mr. Wise was thrown into prison, fined £50, and suspended from the
+      ministry. A notable and powerful character was this John Wise. One of the
+      broadest thinkers and most lucid writers of his time, he seems like a
+      forerunner of the liberal Unitarian divines of the nineteenth century. His
+      "Vindication of the Government of the New England Churches," published in
+      1717, was a masterly exposition of the principles of civil government, and
+      became "a text book of liberty for our Revolutionary fathers, containing
+      some of the notable expressions that are used in the Declaration of
+      Independence." [[Sidenote: Tyranny] [[Sidenote: John Wise of Ipswich]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was on the trial of Mr. Wise in October, 1687, that Dudley openly
+      declared that the people of New England had now no further privileges left
+      them than not to be sold for slaves. Such a state of things in the valley
+      of the Euphrates would not have attracted comment; the peasantry of
+      central Europe would have endured it until better instructed; but in an
+      English community it could not last long. If James II. had remained upon
+      the throne, New England would surely have soon risen in rebellion against
+      Andros. But the mother country had by this time come to repent the fresh
+      lease of life which she had granted to the Stuart dynasty after Cromwell's
+      death. Tired of the disgraceful subservience of her Court to the schemes
+      of Louis XIV., tired of fictitious plots and judicial murders, tired of
+      bloody assizes and declarations of indulgence and all the strange devices
+      of Stuart tyranny, England endured the arrogance of James but three years,
+      and then drove him across the Channel, to get such consolation as he might
+      from his French paymaster and patron. On the 4th of April, 1689, the
+      youthful John Winslow brought to Boston the news of the landing of the
+      Prince of Orange in England. For the space of two weeks there was quiet
+      and earnest deliberation among the citizens, as the success of the
+      Prince's enterprise was not yet regarded as assured. But all at once, on
+      the morning of the 18th, the drums beat to arms, the signal-fire was
+      lighted on Beacon Hill, a meeting was held at the Town-House, militia
+      began to pour in from the country, and Andros, summoned to surrender, was
+      fain to beseech Mr. Willard and the other ministers to intercede for him.
+      But the ministers refused. Next day the Castle was surrendered, the Rose
+      frigate riding in the harbour was seized and dismantled, and Andros was
+      arrested as he was trying to effect his escape disguised in woman's
+      clothes. Dudley and the other agents of tyranny were also imprisoned, and
+      thus the revolution was accomplished. It marks the importance which the
+      New England colonies were beginning to attain, that, before the Prince of
+      Orange had fully secured the throne, he issued a letter instructing the
+      people of Boston to preserve decorum and acquiesce yet a little longer in
+      the government of Andros, until more satisfactory arrangements could be
+      made. But Increase Mather, who was then in London on a mission in behalf
+      of New England, judiciously prevented this letter of instructions from
+      being sent. The zeal of the people outstripped the cautious policy of the
+      new sovereign, and provisional governments, in accordance with the old
+      charters, were at once set up in the colonies lately ruled by Andros.
+      Bradstreet now in his eighty-seventh year was reinstated as governor of
+      Massachusetts. Five weeks after this revolution in Boston the order to
+      proclaim King William and Queen Mary was received, amid such rejoicings as
+      had never before been seen in that quiet town, for it was believed that
+      self-government would now be guaranteed to New England. [[Sidenote: Fall
+      of James II.] [[Sidenote: Insurrection in Boston, and overthrow of Andros,
+      April 18, 1689]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This hope was at least so far realized that from the most formidable
+      dangers which had threatened it, New England was henceforth secured. The
+      struggle with the Stuarts was ended, and by this second revolution within
+      half a century the crown had received a check from which it never
+      recovered. There were troubles yet in store for England, but no more such
+      outrages as the judicial murders of Russell and Sidney. New England had
+      still a stern ordeal to go through, but never again was she to be so
+      trodden down and insulted as in the days of Andros. The efforts of George
+      III. to rule Englishmen despotically were weak as compared with those of
+      the Stuarts. In his time England had waxed strong enough to curb the
+      tyrant, America had waxed strong enough to defy and disown him. After 1689
+      the Puritan no longer felt that his religion was in danger, and there was
+      a reasonable prospect that charters solemnly granted him would be held
+      sacred. William III. was a sovereign of modern type, from whom freedom of
+      thought and worship had nothing to fear. In his theology he agreed, as a
+      Dutch Calvinist, more nearly with the Puritans than with the Church of
+      England. At the same time he had no great liking for so much independence
+      of thought and action as New England had exhibited. In the negotiations
+      which now definitely settled the affairs of this part of the world, the
+      intractable behaviour of Massachusetts was borne in mind and contrasted
+      with the somewhat less irritating attitude of the smaller colonies. It
+      happened that the decree which annulled the charters of Rhode Island and
+      Connecticut had not yet been formally enrolled. It was accordingly treated
+      as void, and the old charters were allowed to remain in force. They were
+      so liberal that no change in them was needed at the time of the
+      Revolution, so that Connecticut was governed under its old charter until
+      1818, and Rhode Island until 1842. [[Sidenote: Effects of the Revolution
+      of 1689]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was at this time a disposition on the part of the British government
+      to unite all the northern colonies under a single administration. The
+      French in Canada were fast becoming rivals to be feared; and the wonderful
+      explorations of La Salle, bringing the St. Lawrence into political
+      connection with the Mississippi, had at length foreshadowed a New France
+      in the rear of all the English colonies, aiming at the control of the
+      centre of the continent and eager to confine the English to the sea-board.
+      Already the relations of position which led to the great Seven Years' War
+      were beginning to shape themselves; and the conflict between France and
+      England actually broke out in 1689, as soon as Louis XIV.'s hired servant,
+      James II., was superseded by William III. as king of England and head of a
+      Protestant league. [[Sidenote: Need for union among all the northern
+      colonies]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In view of this new state of affairs, it was thought desirable to unite
+      the northern English colonies under one head, so far as possible, in order
+      to secure unity of military action. But natural prejudices had to be
+      considered. The policy of James II. had aroused such bitter feeling in
+      America that William must needs move with caution. Accordingly he did not
+      seek to unite New York with New England, and he did not think it worth
+      while to carry out the attack which James had only begun upon Connecticut
+      and Rhode Island. As for New Hampshire, he seems to have been restrained
+      by what in the language of modern politics would be called "pressure,"
+      brought to bear by certain local interests. <a href="#linknote-39"
+      name="linknoteref-39" id="linknoteref-39"><small>39</small></a> But in the
+      case of the little colony founded by the Pilgrims of the Mayflower there
+      was no obstacle. She was now annexed to Massachusetts, which also received
+      not only Maine but even Acadia, just won from the French; so that, save
+      for the short break at Portsmouth, the coast of Massachusetts now reached
+      all the way from Martha's Vineyard to the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
+      [[Sidenote: Plymouth, Maine, and Acadia, annexed to Massachusetts]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But along with this great territorial extension there went some
+      curtailment of the political privileges of the colony. By the new charter
+      of 1692 the right of the people to be governed by a legislature of their
+      own choosing was expressly confirmed. The exclusive right of this
+      legislature to impose taxes was also confirmed. But henceforth no
+      qualification of church-membership, but only a property qualification, was
+      to be required of voters; the governor was to be appointed by the crown
+      instead of being elected by the people; and all laws passed by the
+      legislature were to be sent to England for royal approval. These features
+      of the new charter,&mdash;the extension, or if I may so call it, the <i>secularization</i>
+      of the franchise, the appointment of the governor by the crown, and the
+      power of veto which the crown expressly reserved,&mdash;were grave
+      restrictions upon the independence which Massachusetts had hitherto
+      enjoyed. Henceforth her position was to be like that of the other colonies
+      with royal governors. But her history did not thereby lose its interest or
+      significance, though it became, like the history of most of the colonies,
+      a dismal record of irrepressible bickerings between the governor appointed
+      by the crown and the legislature elected by the people. In the period that
+      began in 1692 and ended in 1776, the movements of Massachusetts, while
+      restricted and hampered, were at the same time forced into a wider orbit.
+      She was brought into political sympathy with Virginia. While two
+      generations of men were passing across the scene, the political problems
+      of Massachusetts were assimilated to those of Virginia. In spite of all
+      the other differences, great as they were, there was a likeness in the
+      struggles between the popular legislature and the royal governor which
+      subordinated them all. It was this similarity of experience, during the
+      eighteenth century, that brought these two foremost colonies into cordial
+      alliance during the struggle against George III., and thus made it
+      possible to cement all the colonies together in the mighty nation whose
+      very name is fraught with so high and earnest a lesson to mankind,&mdash;the
+      UNITED STATES! [[Sidenote: Massachusetts becomes a royal province]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For such a far-reaching result, the temporary humiliation of Massachusetts
+      was a small price to pay. But it was not until long after the accession of
+      William III. that things could be seen in these grand outlines. With his
+      coronation began the struggle of seventy years between France and England,
+      far grander than the struggle between Rome and Carthage, two thousand
+      years earlier, for primacy in the world, for the prerogative of
+      determining the future career of mankind. That warfare, so fraught with
+      meaning, was waged as much upon American as upon European ground; and
+      while it continued, it was plainly for the interest of the British
+      government to pursue a conciliatory policy toward its American colonies,
+      for without their wholehearted assistance it could have no hope of
+      success. As soon as the struggle was ended, and the French power in the
+      colonial world finally overthrown, the perpetual quarrels between the
+      popular legislatures and the royal governors led immediately to the Stamp
+      Act and the other measures of the British government that brought about
+      the American revolution. People sometimes argue about that revolution as
+      if it had no past behind it and was simply the result of a discussion over
+      abstract principles. [[Sidenote: Seeds of the American Revolution already
+      sown]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We can now see that while the dispute involved an abstract principle of
+      fundamental importance to mankind, it was at the same time for Americans
+      illustrated by memories sufficiently concrete and real. James Otis in his
+      prime was no further distant from the tyranny of Andros than middle-aged
+      men of to-day are distant from the Missouri Compromise. The sons of men
+      cast into jail along with John Wise may have stood silent in the moonlight
+      on Griffin's Wharf and looked on while the contents of the tea-chests were
+      hurled into Boston harbour. In the events we have here passed in review,
+      it may be seen, so plainly that he who runs may read, how the spirit of
+      1776 was foreshadowed in 1689.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0010" id="link2H_4_0010"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      An interesting account of the Barons' War and the meeting of the first
+      House of Commons is given in Prothero's <i>Simon de Montfort</i>, London,
+      1877. For Wyclif and the Lollards, see Milman's <i>Latin Christianity</i>,
+      vol. viI. &mdash; The ecclesiastical history of the Tudor period may best
+      be studied in the works of John Strype, to wit, <i>Historical Memorials</i>,
+      6 vols.; <i>Annals of the Reformation</i>, 7 vols.; <i>Lives of Cranmer,
+      Parker, Whitgift, etc.</i>, Oxford, 1812-28. See also <i>Burnet's History
+      of the Reformation of the Church of England</i>, 3 vols., London,
+      1679-1715; Neal's <i>History of the Puritans</i>, London, 1793; Tulloch,
+      <i>Leaders of the Reformation</i>, Boston, 1859. A vast mass of
+      interesting information is to be found in <i>The Zurich Letters,
+      comprising the Correspondence of Several English Bishops, and Others, with
+      some of the Helvetian Reformers</i>, published by the Parker Society, 4
+      vols., Cambridge, Eng., 1845-46. Hooker's <i>Ecclesiastical Polity</i> was
+      published in London, 1594; a new edition, containing two additional books,
+      the first complete edition, was published in 1622.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the general history of England in the seventeenth century, there are
+      two modern works which stand far above all others,&mdash;Gardiner's <i>History
+      of England</i>, 10 vols., London, 1883-84; and Masson's <i>Life of Milton,
+      narrated in connection with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary
+      History of his Time</i>, 6 vols., Cambridge, Eng., 1859-80. These are
+      books of truly colossal erudition, and written in a spirit of judicial
+      fairness. Mr. Gardiner's ten volumes cover the forty years from the
+      accession of James I. to the beginning of the Civil War, 1603-1643. Mr.
+      Gardiner has lately published the first two volumes of his history of the
+      Civil War, and it is to be hoped that he will not stop until he reaches
+      the accession of William and Mary. Indeed, such books as his ought never
+      to stop. My friend and colleague, Prof. Hosmer, tells me that Mr. Gardiner
+      is a lineal descendant of Cromwell and Ireton. His little book, <i>The
+      Puritan Revolution</i>, in the "Epochs of History" series, is extremely
+      useful, and along with it one should read Airy's <i>The English
+      Restoration and Louis XIV</i>., in the same series, New York, 1889. The
+      best biography of Cromwell is by Mr. Allanson Picton, London, 1882; see
+      also Frederic Harrison's <i>Cromwell</i>, London, 1888, an excellent
+      little book. Hosmer's <i>Young Sir Henry Vane</i>, Boston, 1888, should be
+      read in the same connection; and one should not forget Carlyle's <i>Cromwell</i>.
+      See also Tulloch, <i>English Puritanism and its Leaders</i>, 1861, and <i>Rational
+      Theology and Christian Philosophy in England in the Seventeenth Century</i>,
+      1872; Skeats, <i>History of the Free Churches of England</i>, London,
+      1868; Mountfield, <i>The Church and Puritans</i>, London, 1881. Dexter's
+      <i>Congregationalism of the Last Three Hundred Years</i>, New York, 1880,
+      is a work of monumental importance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the history of New England the best general works are Palfrey, <i>History
+      of New England</i>, 4 vols., Boston, 1858-75; and Doyle, <i>The English in
+      America&mdash;The Puritan Colonies</i>, 2 vols., London, 1887. In point of
+      scholarship Dr. Palfrey's work is of the highest order, and it is written
+      in an interesting style. Its only shortcoming is that it deals somewhat
+      too leniently with the faults of the Puritan theocracy, and looks at
+      things too exclusively from a Massachusetts point of view. It is one of
+      the best histories yet written in America. Mr. Doyle's work is admirably
+      fair and impartial, and is based throughout upon a careful study of
+      original documents. The author is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford,
+      and has apparently made American history his specialty. His work on the
+      Puritan colonies is one of a series which when completed will cover the
+      whole story of English colonization in America. I have looked in vain in
+      his pages for any remark or allusion indicating that he has ever visited
+      America, and am therefore inclined to think that he has not done so. He
+      now and then makes a slight error such as would not be likely to be made
+      by a native of New England, but this is very seldom. The accuracy and
+      thoroughness of its research, its judicial temper, and its philosophical
+      spirit make Mr. Doyle's book in some respects the best that has been
+      written about New England.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among original authorities we may begin by citing John Smith's <i>Description
+      of New England</i>, 1616, and <i>New England's Trial</i>, 1622, contained
+      in Arber's new edition of Smith's works, London, 1884. Bradford's
+      narrative of the founding of Plymouth was for a long time supposed to be
+      lost. Nathaniel Morton's <i>New England's Memorial</i>, published in 1669,
+      was little more than an abridgment of it. After two centuries Bradford's
+      manuscript was discovered, and an excellent edition by Mr. Charles Deane
+      was published in the <i>Massachusetts Historical Collections</i>, 4th
+      series, vol. iii., 1856. Edward Winslow's <i>Journal of the Proceedings of
+      the English Plantation settled at Plymouth</i>, 1622, and <i>Good News
+      from New England</i>, 1624, are contained, with other valuable materials,
+      in Young's <i>Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers</i>, Boston, 1844. See
+      also Shurtleff and Pulsifer, <i>Records of Plymouth</i>, 12 vols., ending
+      with the annexation of the colony to Massachusetts in 1692; Prince's <i>Chronological
+      History of New England</i>, ed. Drake, 1852; and in this connection
+      Hunter's <i>Founders of New Plymouth</i>, London, 1854; Steele's <i>Life
+      of Brewster</i>, Philadelphia, 1857; Goodwin's <i>Pilgrim Republic</i>,
+      Boston, 1887; Bacon's <i>Genesis of the New England Churches</i>, New
+      York, 1874; Baylies's <i>Historical Memoir</i>, 1830; Thacher's <i>History
+      of the Town of Plymouth</i>, 1832.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Ferdinando Gorges wrote a <i>Briefe Narration of the Originall
+      Undertakings of the advancement of plantations into the parts of America,
+      especially showing the beginning, progress, and continuance of that of New
+      England</i>, London, 1658, contained in his grandson's collection entitled
+      <i>America Painted to the Life</i>. Thomas Morton, of Merrymount, gave his
+      own view of the situation in his <i>New English Canaan</i>, which has been
+      edited for the Prince Society, with great learning, by C.F. Adams. Samuel
+      Maverick also had his say in a valuable pamphlet entitled <i>A Description
+      of New England</i>, which has only come to light since 1875 and has been
+      edited by Mr. Deane. Maverick is, of course, hostile to the Puritans. See
+      also Lechford's <i>Plain Dealing in New England</i>, ed. J.H. Trumbull,
+      1867.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The earliest history of Massachusetts is by Winthrop himself, a work of
+      priceless value. In 1790, nearly a century and a half after the author's
+      death, it was published at Hartford. The best edition is that of 1853. In
+      1869 a valuable life of Winthrop was published by his descendant Robert
+      Winthrop. Hubbard's <i>History of New England</i> (<i>Mass. Hist. Coll.</i>,
+      2d series, vols. v., vi.) is drawn largely from Winthrop and from
+      Nathaniel Morton. There is much that is suggestive in William Wood's <i>New
+      England's Prospect</i>, 1634, and Edward Johnson's <i>Wonder-working
+      Providence of Zion's Saviour in New England</i>, 1654; the latter has been
+      ably edited by W.F. Poole, Andover, 1867. The records of the Massachusetts
+      government, from its founding in 1629 down to the overthrow of the charter
+      in 1684, were edited by Dr. Shurtleff in 6 vols. quarto, 1853-54; and
+      among the documents in the British Record Office, published since 1855,
+      three volumes&mdash;<i>Calendar of State Papers</i>, <i>Colonial America</i>,
+      vol. i., 1574-1660; vol. v., 1661-1668; vol. vii., 1669&mdash;are
+      especially useful. Of the later authorities the best is Hutchinson's <i>History
+      of Massachusetts Bay</i>, the first volume of which, coming down to 1689,
+      was published in Boston in 1764. The second volume, continuing the
+      narrative to 1749, was published in 1767. The third volume, coming down to
+      1774, was found among the illustrious author's MSS. after his death, and
+      was published in London in 1828. Hutchinson had access to many valuable
+      documents since lost, and his sound judgment and critical acumen deserve
+      the highest praise. In 1769 he published a volume of <i>Original Papers</i>,
+      illustrating the period covered by the first volume of his history. Many
+      priceless documents perished in the shameful sacking of his house by the
+      Boston rioters, Aug. 26, 1765. The second volume of Hutchinson's <i>History</i>
+      was continued to 1764 by G.R. Minot, 2 vols., 1798, and to 1820 by Alden
+      Bradford, 3 vols., 1822-29. Of recent works, the best is Barry's <i>History
+      of Massachusetts</i>, 3 vols., 1855-57. Many original authorities are
+      collected in Young's <i>Chronicles of Massachusetts</i>, Boston, 1846.
+      Cotton Mather's <i>Magnolia Christi Americana</i>, London, 1702 (reprinted
+      in 1820 and 1853), though crude and uncritical, is full of interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Many of the early Massachusetts documents relate to Maine. Of later books,
+      especial mention should be made of Folsom's <i>History of Saco and
+      Biddeford</i>, Saco, 1830; Willis's <i>History of Portland</i>, 2 vols.,
+      1831-33 (2d ed. 1865); <i>Memorial Volume of the Popham Celebration</i>,
+      Portland, 1862; Chamberlain's <i>Maine, Her Place in History</i>, Augusta,
+      1877. On New Hampshire the best general work is Belknap's <i>History of
+      New Hampshire</i>, 3 vols., Phila., 1784-92; the appendix contains many
+      original documents, and others are to be found in the <i>New Hampshire
+      Historical Collections</i>, 8 vols., 1824-66.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The <i>Connecticut Colonial Records</i> are edited by Dr. J.H. Trumbull,
+      12 vols., 1850-82. The <i>Connecticut Historical Society's Collections</i>,
+      1860-70, are of much value. The best general work is Trumbull's <i>History
+      of Connecticut</i>, 2 vols., Hartford, 1797. See also Stiles's <i>Ancient
+      Windsor</i>, 2 vols., 1859-63; Cothren's <i>Ancient Woodbury</i>, 3 vols.,
+      1854-79. Of the Pequot War we have accounts by three of the principal
+      actors. Mason's <i>History of the Pequod War</i> is in the <i>Mass. Hist.
+      Coll.</i>, 2d series, vol. viii.; Underhill's <i>News from America</i> is
+      in the 3d series, vol. vi.; and Lyon Gardiner's narrative is in the 3d
+      series, vol. iii. In the same volume with Underhill is contained <i>A True
+      Relation of the late Battle fought in New England between the English and
+      the Pequod Savages</i>, by Philip Vincent, London, 1638. The <i>New Haven
+      Colony Records</i> are edited by C.J. Hoadly, 2 vols., Hartford, 1857-58.
+      See also the <i>New Haven Historical Society's Papers</i>, 3 vols.,
+      1865-80; Lambert's <i>History of New Haven</i>, 1838; Atwater's <i>History
+      of New Haven</i>, 1881; Levermore's <i>Republic of New Haven</i>,
+      Baltimore, 1886; Johnston's <i>Connecticut</i>, Boston, 1887. The best
+      account of the Blue Laws is by J.H. Trumbull, <i>The True Blue Laws of
+      Connecticut and New Haven, and the False Blue Laws invented by the Rev.
+      Samuel Peters</i>, etc., Hartford, 1876. See also Hinman's <i>Blue Laws of
+      New Haven Colony</i>, Hartford, 1838; Barber's <i>History and Antiquities
+      of New Haven</i>, 1831; Peters's <i>History of Connecticut</i>, London,
+      1781. The story of the regicides is set forth in Stiles's <i>History of
+      the Three Judges</i> [the third being Colonel Dixwell], Hartford, 1794;
+      see also the <i>Mather Papers</i> in <i>Mass. Hist. Coll.</i>, 4th series,
+      vol. viiI. &mdash; <i>The Rhode Island Colonial Records</i> are edited by
+      J.R. Bartlett, 7 vols., 1856-62. One of the best state histories ever
+      written is that of S.G. Arnold, <i>History of the State of Rhode Island
+      and Providence Plantations</i>, 2 vols., New York, 1859-60. Many valuable
+      documents are reprinted in the <i>Rhode Island Historical Society's
+      Collections</i>. The <i>History of New England, with particular reference
+      to the denomination called Baptists</i>, by Rev. Isaac Backus, 3 vols.,
+      1777-96, has much that is valuable relating to Rhode Island. The series of
+      <i>Rhode Island Historical Tracts</i>, issued since 1878 by Mr. S.S.
+      Rider, is of great merit. Biographies of Roger Williams have been written
+      by J.D. Knowles, 1834; by William Gammell, 1845; and by Romeo Elton, 1852.
+      Williams's works have been republished by the Narragansett Club in 6
+      vols., 1866. The first volume contains the valuable <i>Key to the Indian
+      Languages of America</i>, edited by Dr. Trumbull. Williams's views of
+      religious liberty are set forth in his <i>Bloudy Tenent of Persecution</i>,
+      London, 1644; to which John Cotton replied in <i>The Bloudy Tenent washed
+      and made White in the Blood of the Lamb</i>, London, 1647; Williams's
+      rejoinder was entitled <i>The Bloudy Tenent made yet more Bloudy through
+      Mr. Cotton's attempt to Wash it White</i>, London, 1652. The controversy
+      was conducted on both sides with a candour and courtesy rare in that age.
+      The titles of Williams's other principal works, <i>George Fox digged out
+      of his Burrowes</i>, Boston, 1676; <i>Hireling Ministry none of Christ's</i>,
+      London, 1652; and <i>Christenings make not Christians</i>, 1643;
+      sufficiently indicate their character. The last-named tract was discovered
+      in the British Museum by Dr. Dexter and edited by him in Rider's <i>Tracts</i>,
+      No. xiv., 1881. The treatment of Roger Williams by the government of
+      Massachusetts is thoroughly discussed in Dexter's <i>As to Roger Williams</i>,
+      Boston, 1876. See also G.E. Ellis on "The Treatment of Intruders and
+      Dissentients by the Founders of Massachusetts," in <i>Lowell Lectures</i>,
+      Boston, 1869.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The case of Mrs. Hutchinson is treated, from a hostile and somewhat
+      truculent point of view, in Thomas Welde's pamphlet entitled <i>A Short
+      Story of the Rise, Reign, and Ruin of Antinomians, Familists, and
+      Libertines that infected the Churches of New England</i>, London, 1644. It
+      was answered in an anonymous pamphlet entitled <i>Mercurius Americanus</i>,
+      republished for the Prince Society, Boston, 1876, with prefatory notice by
+      C.H. Bell. Cotton's view of the theocracy may be seen in his <i>Milk for
+      Babes, drawn out of the Breasts of both Testaments</i>, London, 1646; <i>Keyes
+      of the Kingdom of Heaven</i>; and <i>Way of the Congregational Churches
+      Cleared</i>, London, 1648. See also Thomas Hooker's <i>Survey of the Summe
+      of Church Discipline</i>, London, 1648. The intolerant spirit of the time
+      finds quaint and forcible expression in Nathaniel Ward's satirical book,
+      <i>The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam</i>, 1647.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the Gorton controversy the best original authorities are his own book
+      entitled <i>Simplicitie's Defence against Sevenheaded Polity</i>, London,
+      1646; and Winslow's answer entitled <i>Hypocracie Unmasked</i>, London,
+      1646. See also Mackie's <i>Life of Samuel Gorton</i>, Boston, 1845, and
+      Brayton's <i>Defence of Samuel Gorton</i>, in Rider's <i>Tracts</i>, No.
+      xviI. &mdash; For the early history of the Quakers, see Robert Barclay's
+      <i>Inner Life of the Religious Societies of the Commonwealth</i>, London,
+      1876,&mdash;an admirable book. See also <i>New England a Degenerate Plant</i>,
+      1659; Bishop's <i>New England judged by the Spirit of the Lord</i>, 1661;
+      Sewel's <i>History of the Quakers</i>, 1722; Besse's <i>Sufferings of the
+      Quakers</i>, 1753; <i>The Popish Inquisition newly erected in New England</i>,
+      London, 1659; <i>The Secret Works of a Cruel People made Manifest</i>,
+      1659; and the pamphlet of the martyrs Stevenson and Robinson, entitled <i>A
+      Call from Death to Life</i>, 1660. John Norton's view of the case was
+      presented in his book, <i>The Heart of New England Rent at the Blasphemies
+      of the Present Generation</i>, London, 1660. See also J.S. Pike's <i>New
+      Puritan</i>, New York, 1879; Hallowell's <i>Pioneer Quakers</i>, Boston,
+      1887; and his <i>Quaker Invasion of Massachusetts</i>, Boston, 1883;
+      Brooks Adams, <i>The Emancipation of Massachusetts</i>, Boston, 1887;
+      Ellis, <i>The Puritan Age and Rule</i>, Boston, 1888.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some additional light upon the theocratic idea may be found in a treatise
+      by the apostle Eliot, <i>The Christian Commonwealth; or, the Civil Polity
+      of the Rising Kingdom of Jesus Christ</i>, London, 1659. An account of
+      Eliot's missionary work is given in <i>The Day breaking, if not the Sun
+      rising, of the Gospel with the Indians in New England</i>, London, 1647;
+      and <i>The Glorious Progress of the Gospel amongst the Indians in New
+      England</i>, 1649. See also Shepard's <i>Clear Sunshine of the Gospel
+      breaking forth upon the Indians</i>, 1648; and Whitfield's <i>Light
+      appearing more and more towards the Perfect Day</i>, 1651.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The principal authority for Philip's war is Hubbard's <i>Present State of
+      New England, being a Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians</i>, 1677.
+      Church's <i>Entertaining Passages relating to Philip's War</i>, published
+      in 1716, and republished in 1865, with notes by Mr. Dexter, is a charming
+      book. See also Mrs. Rowlandson's <i>True History</i>, Cambridge, Mass.,
+      1682; Mather's <i>Brief History of the War</i>, 1676; Drake's <i>Old
+      Indian Chronicle</i>, Boston, 1836; Gookin's <i>Historical Collections of
+      the Indians in New England</i>, 1674; and <i>Account of the Doings and
+      Sufferings of the Christian Indians</i>, in <i>Archchaeologia Americana</i>,
+      vol. ii. Batten's <i>Journal</i> is the diary of a citizen of Boston, sent
+      to England, and it now in MS. among the <i>Colonial Papers</i>. Mrs. Mary
+      Pray's letter (Oct. 20, 1675) is in <i>Mass. Hist. Coll.</i>, 5th series,
+      vol. i. p. 105.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The great storehouse of information for the Andros period is the <i>Andros
+      Tracts</i>, 3 vols., edited for the Prince Society by W.H. Whitmore. See
+      also Sewall's <i>Diary, Mass. Hist. Coll.</i>, 5th series, vols. v.&mdash;viii.
+      Sewall has been appropriately called the Puritan Pepys. His book is a
+      mirror of the state of society in Massachusetts at the time when it was
+      beginning to be felt that the old theocratic idea had been tried in the
+      balance and found wanting. There is a wonderful charm in such a book. It
+      makes one feel as if one had really "been there" and taken part in the
+      homely scenes, full of human interest, which it so naively portrays. Anne
+      Bradstreet's works have been edited by J.H. Ellis, Charlestown, 1867.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For further references and elaborate bibliographical discussions, see
+      Winsor's <i>Narrative and Critical History of America</i>, vol. iii.; and
+      his <i>Memorial History of Boston</i>, 4 vols., Boston, 1880. There is a
+      good account of the principal New England writers of the seventeenth
+      century, with illustrative extracts, in Tyler's <i>History of American
+      Literature</i>, 2 vols., New York, 1878. For extracts see also the first
+      two volumes of Stedman and Hutchinson's <i>Library of American Literature</i>,
+      New York, 1888.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In conclusion I would observe that town histories, though seldom written
+      in a philosophical spirit and apt to be quite amorphous in structure, are
+      a mine of wealth for the philosophic student of history.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      ]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_NOTE" id="link2H_NOTE"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      NOTES:
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-1" id="linknote-1"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      1 (<a href="#linknoteref-1">return</a>)<br /> [ Milman, <i>Lat. Christ.</i>
+      vii. 395.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-2" id="linknote-2"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      2 (<a href="#linknoteref-2">return</a>)<br /> [ Gardiner, <i>The Puritan
+      Revolution</i>, p. 12.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-3" id="linknote-3"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      3 (<a href="#linknoteref-3">return</a>)<br /> [ Green, <i>History of the
+      English People</i>, iii. 47.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-4" id="linknote-4"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      4 (<a href="#linknoteref-4">return</a>)<br /> [ Steele's <i>Life of
+      Brewster,</i> p. 161.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-5" id="linknote-5"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      5 (<a href="#linknoteref-5">return</a>)<br /> [ Gardiner, <i>Puritan
+      Revolution</i>, p. 50.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-6" id="linknote-6"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      6 (<a href="#linknoteref-6">return</a>)<br /> [ It is now 204 years since a
+      battle has been fought in England. The last was Sedgmoor in 1685. For four
+      centuries, since Bosworth, in 1485, the English people have lived in peace
+      in their own homes, except for the brief episode of the Great Rebellion,
+      and Monmouth's slight affair. This long peace, unparalleled in history,
+      has powerfully influenced the English and American character for good.
+      Since the Middle Ages most English warfare has been warfare at a distance,
+      and that does not nourish the brutal passions in the way that warfare at
+      home does. An instructive result is to be seen in the mildness of temper
+      which characterized the conduct of our stupendous Civil War. Nothing like
+      it was ever seen before.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-7" id="linknote-7"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      7 (<a href="#linknoteref-7">return</a>)<br /> [ Picton's <i>Cromwell</i>,
+      pp. 61, 67; Gardiner, <i>Puritan Revolution</i>, p. 72.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-8" id="linknote-8"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      8 (<a href="#linknoteref-8">return</a>)<br /> [ Quincy, History of Harvard
+      University, ii. 654.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-9" id="linknote-9"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      9 (<a href="#linknoteref-9">return</a>)<br /> [ C.F. Adams, <i>Sir
+      Christopher Gardiner, Knight</i>, p. 31.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-10" id="linknote-10"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      10 (<a href="#linknoteref-10">return</a>)<br /> [ The compact drawn up in
+      the Mayflower's cabin was not, in the strict sense a constitution, which
+      is a document defining and limiting the functions of government. Magna
+      Charta partook of the nature of a written constitution, as far as it went,
+      but it did not create a government.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-11" id="linknote-11"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      11 (<a href="#linknoteref-11">return</a>)<br /> [ See Johnston's
+      Connecticut, p. 321, a very brilliant book.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-12" id="linknote-12"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      12 (<a href="#linknoteref-12">return</a>)<br /> [ See the passionate
+      exclamation of Endicott, below, p. 190.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-13" id="linknote-13"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      13 (<a href="#linknoteref-13">return</a>)<br /> [ Excursions of an
+      Evolutionist: pp. 250, 255.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-14" id="linknote-14"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      14 (<a href="#linknoteref-14">return</a>)<br /> [ A glimmer of light upon
+      Gorton may be got from reading the title-page of one of his books: "AN
+      INCORRUPTIBLE KEY, composed of the CX PSALME, wherewith you may open the
+      Rest of the Holy Scriptures; Turning itself only according to the
+      Composure and Art of that Lock, of the Closure and Secresie of that great
+      Mystery of God manifest in the Flesh, but justified only by the Spirit,
+      which it evidently openeth and revealeth, out of Fall and Resurrection,
+      Sin and Righteousness, Ascension and Descension, Height and Depth, First
+      and Last, Beginning and Ending, Flesh and Spirit, Wisdome and
+      Foolishnesse, Strength and Weakness, Mortality and Immortality, Jew and
+      Gentile, Light and Darknesse, Unity and Multiplication, Fruitfulness and
+      Barrenness, Curse and Blessing, Man and Woman, Kingdom and Priesthood,
+      Heaven and Earth, Allsufficiency and Deficiency, God and Man. And out of
+      every Unity made up of twaine, it openeth that great two-leafed Gate,
+      which is the sole Entrie into the City of God, of New Jerusalem, <i>into
+      which none but the King of glory can enter</i>; and as that Porter openeth
+      the Doore of the Sheepfold, <i>by which whosoever entreth is the Shepheard
+      of the Sheep</i>; See Isa. 45. 1. Psal. 24. 7, 8, 9, 10. John 10. 1, 2, 3;
+      Or, (according to the Signification of the Word translated <i>Psalme</i>,)
+      it is a Pruning-Knife, to lop off from the Church of Christ all
+      superfluous Twigs <i>of earthly and carnal Commandments</i>, Leviticall
+      Services or Ministery, and fading and vanishing Priests, or Ministers, who
+      are taken away and cease, and are not established and confirmed by Death,
+      as holding no Correspondency with the princely Dignity, Office, and
+      Ministry of our <i>Melchisedek</i>, who is the only Minister and Ministry
+      of the Sanctuary, and of that true Tabernacle which the Lord pitcht, and
+      not Man. For it supplants the Old Man, and implants the New; abrogates the
+      Old Testament or Covenant, and confirms the New, unto a thousand
+      Generations, or in Generations forever. By Samuel Gorton, <i>Gent.</i>,
+      and at the time of penning hereof, in the Place of Judicature (upon
+      Aquethneck, alias Road Island) of Providence Plantations in the
+      Nanhyganset Bay, New England. Printed in the Yeere 1647."]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-15" id="linknote-15"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      15 (<a href="#linknoteref-15">return</a>)<br /> [ Father of Benedict
+      Arnold, afterward governor of Rhode Island, and owner of the stone
+      windmill (apparently copied from one in Chesterton, Warwickshire) which
+      was formerly supposed by some antiquarians to be a vestige of the
+      Northmen. Governor Benedict Arnold was great-grandfather of the traitor.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-16" id="linknote-16"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      16 (<a href="#linknoteref-16">return</a>)<br /> [ <i>Gorton, Simplicitie's
+      Defence against Seven-headed Policy</i>, p. 88.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-17" id="linknote-17"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      17 (<a href="#linknoteref-17">return</a>)<br /> [ De Forest, <i>History of
+      the Indians of Connecticut</i>, Hartford, 1850, p. 198.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-18" id="linknote-18"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      18 (<a href="#linknoteref-18">return</a>)<br /> [ Doyle, <i>Puritan
+      Colonies</i>, i. 324.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-19" id="linknote-19"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      19 (<a href="#linknoteref-19">return</a>)<br /> [ See below, p. 222, note.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-20" id="linknote-20"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      20 (<a href="#linknoteref-20">return</a>)<br /> [ See my <i>Excursions of
+      an Evolutionist,</i> pp. 239-242, 250-255, 286-289.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-21" id="linknote-21"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      21 (<a href="#linknoteref-21">return</a>)<br /> [ Gorton's life at Warwick,
+      after all these troubles, seems to have been quiet and happy. He died in
+      1677 at a great age. In 1771 Dr. Ezra Stiles visited, in Providence, his
+      last surviving disciple, born in 1691. This old man said that Gorton wrote
+      in heaven, and none can understand his books except those who live in
+      heaven while on earth.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-22" id="linknote-22"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      22 (<a href="#linknoteref-22">return</a>)<br /> [ Doyle, <i>Puritan
+      Colonies</i>,: i. 369.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-23" id="linknote-23"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      23 (<a href="#linknoteref-23">return</a>)<br /> [ Doyle, i.: 372.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-24" id="linknote-24"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      24 (<a href="#linknoteref-24">return</a>)<br /> [ Milman, <i>Latin
+      Christianity</i>, vii. 390.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-25" id="linknote-25"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      25 (<a href="#linknoteref-25">return</a>)<br /> [ Doyle, ii. 133, 134;
+      Rhode Island Records, i. 377, 378.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-26" id="linknote-26"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      26 (<a href="#linknoteref-26">return</a>)<br /> [ Colonial Laws of
+      Massachusetts, pp. 14-16; Levermore's Republic of New Haven, p. 153.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-27" id="linknote-27"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      27 (<a href="#linknoteref-27">return</a>)<br /> [ See my remarks above, p.
+      145.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-28" id="linknote-28"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      28 (<a href="#linknoteref-28">return</a>)<br /> [ The daring passage in the
+      sermon is thus given in Bacon's <i>Historical Discourses</i>, New Haven,
+      1838: "Withhold not countenance, entertainment, and protection from the
+      people of God&mdash;whom men may call fools and fanatics&mdash;if any such
+      come to you from other countries, as from France or England, or any other
+      place. Be not forgetful to entertain strangers. Remember those that are in
+      bonds, as bound with them. The Lord required this of Moab, saying, 'Make
+      thy shadow as the night in the midst of the noonday; hide the outcasts;
+      bewray not him that wandereth. Let mine outcasts dwell with thee, Moab; be
+      thou a covert to them from the face of the spoiler.' Is it objected&mdash;'But
+      so I may expose myself to be spoiled or troubled'? He, therefore, to
+      remove this objection, addeth, 'For the extortioner is at an end, the
+      spoiler ceaseth, the oppressors are consumed out of the land.' While we
+      are attending to our duty in owning and harbouring Christ's witnesses, God
+      will be providing for their and our safety, by destroying those that would
+      destroy his people."]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-29" id="linknote-29"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      29 (<a href="#linknoteref-29">return</a>)<br /> [ Palfrey, <i>History of
+      New England,</i> in. 138-140.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-30" id="linknote-30"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      30 (<a href="#linknoteref-30">return</a>)<br /> [ See Parkman, <i>Conspiracy
+      of Pontiac</i>, i. 80-85.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-31" id="linknote-31"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      31 (<a href="#linknoteref-31">return</a>)<br /> [ De Forest, <i>History of
+      the Indians of Connecticut,</i> pp. 252, 257.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-32" id="linknote-32"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      32 (<a href="#linknoteref-32">return</a>)<br /> [ The story rests chiefly
+      upon the statements of Hutchinson, an extremely careful and judicious
+      writer, and not in the least what the French call a <i>gobemouche</i>.
+      Goffe kept a diary which came into Hutchinson's possession, and was one of
+      the priceless manuscripts that perished in the infamous sacking of his
+      house by the Boston mob of August 26, 1765. What light that diary might
+      have thrown upon the matter can never be known. Hutchinson was born in
+      1711, only thirty-six years after the event, so that his testimony is not
+      so very far removed from that of a contemporary. Whalley seems to have
+      died in Hadley shortly before 1675, and Goffe deemed it prudent to leave
+      that neighbourhood in 1676. His letters to Increase Mather are dated from
+      "Ebenezer," i. e., wherever in his roamings he set up his Ebenezer. One of
+      these letters, dated September 8, 1676, shows that his Ebenezer was then
+      set up in Hartford, where probably he died about 1679 In 1676 the arrival
+      of Edward Randolph (see below, p. 256) renewed the peril of the regicide
+      judge, and his sudden removal from his skilfully contrived hiding-place at
+      Hadley might possibly have been due to his having exposed himself to
+      recognition in the Indian fight. Possibly even the supernatural
+      explanation might have been started, with a touch of Yankee humour, as a
+      blind. The silence of Mather and Hubbard was no more remarkable than some
+      of the other ingenious incidents which had so long served to conceal the
+      existence of this sturdy and crafty man. The reasons for doubting the
+      story are best stated by Mr. George Sheldon of Deerfield, in <i>Hist.-Genealogical
+      Register</i>, October, 1874.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-33" id="linknote-33"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      33 (<a href="#linknoteref-33">return</a>)<br /> [ If Philip was half the
+      diplomatist that he is represented in tradition, he never would have gone
+      into such a war without assurance of Narragansett help. Canonchet was a
+      far more powerful sachem than Philip, and played a more conspicuous part
+      in the war. May we not suppose that Canonchet's desire to avenge his
+      father's death was one of the principal incentives to the war; that
+      Philip's attack upon Swanzey was a premature explosion; and that Canonchet
+      then watched the course of events for a while before making up his mind
+      whether to abandon Philip or support him?]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-34" id="linknote-34"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      34 (<a href="#linknoteref-34">return</a>)<br /> [ A wretched little
+      werewolf who some few years ago, being then a lad of fourteen or fifteen
+      years, most cruelly murdered two or three young children, just to amuse
+      himself with their dying agonies. The misdirected "humanitarianism," which
+      in our country makes every murderer an object of popular sympathy,
+      prevailed to save this creature from the gallows. Massachusetts has lately
+      witnessed a similar instance of misplaced clemency in the case of a vile
+      woman who had poisoned eight or ten persons, including some of her own
+      children, in order to profit by their life insurance. Such instances help
+      to explain the prolonged vitality of "Judge Lynch," and sometimes almost
+      make one regret the days in old England when William Probert, after
+      escaping in 1824 as "king's evidence," from the Thurtell affair, got
+      caught and hanged within a twelvemonth for horse-stealing. Any one who
+      wishes to study the results of allowing criminality to survive and
+      propagate itself should read Dugdale's The Jukes; Hereditary Crime, New
+      York, 1877.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-35" id="linknote-35"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      35 (<a href="#linknoteref-35">return</a>)<br /> [ Weeden, <i>Indian Money
+      as a Factor in New England Civilization</i>, Johns Hopkins University
+      Studies, II. viii., ix. p. 30.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-36" id="linknote-36"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      36 (<a href="#linknoteref-36">return</a>)<br /> [ Doyle, ii. 253.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-37" id="linknote-37"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      37 (<a href="#linknoteref-37">return</a>)<br /> [ Doyle, <i>Puritan
+      Colonies</i>, ii. 254.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-38" id="linknote-38"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      38 (<a href="#linknoteref-38">return</a>)<br /> [ The quotation is from an
+      unpublished letter of Rev. Robert Ratcliffe to the Bishop of London, cited
+      in an able article in the <i>Boston Herald</i>, January 4, 1888. I have
+      not seen the letter.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-39" id="linknote-39"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      39 (<a href="#linknoteref-39">return</a>)<br /> [ Doyle, <i>Puritan
+      Colonies</i>, ii. 379, 380.]
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+
+  <div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12767 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #12767 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12767)
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Beginnings of New England, by John Fiske
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Beginnings of New England
+       Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty
+
+Author: John Fiske
+
+Release Date: June 28, 2004 [EBook #12767]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW ENGLAND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Franks and PG Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW ENGLAND
+
+OR THE PURITAN THEOCRACY IN ITS RELATIONS TO CIVIL AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY
+
+BY
+
+JOHN FISKE
+
+"The Lord Christ intends to achieve greater matters by this little
+handful than the world is aware of." EDWARD JOHNSON, _Wonder-Working
+Providence of Zion's Saviour in New England_ 1654
+
+1892
+
+
+
+
+To
+
+MY DEAR CLASSMATES,
+
+
+BENJAMIN THOMPSON FROTHINGHAM,
+
+WILLIAM AUGUSTUS WHITE,
+
+AND
+
+FREDERIC CROMWELL,
+
+I DEDICATE THIS BOOK.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+This book contains the substance of the lectures originally given at
+the Washington University, St. Louis, in May, 1887, in the course of my
+annual visit to that institution as University Professor of American
+History. The lectures were repeated in the following month of June at
+Portland, Oregon, and since then either the whole course, or one or more
+of the lectures, have been given in Boston, Newton, Milton, Chelsea,
+New Bedford, Lowell, Worcester, Springfield, and Pittsfield, Mass.;
+Farmington, Middletown, and Stamford, Conn.; New York, Brooklyn, and
+Tarrytown, N.Y.; Philadelphia and Ogontz, Pa.; Wilmington, Del.;
+Chicago, 111.; San Francisco and Oakland, Cal.
+
+In this sketch of the circumstances which attended the settlement of New
+England, I have purposely omitted many details which in a formal history
+of that period would need to be included. It has been my aim to give the
+outline of such a narrative as to indicate the principles at work in
+the history of New England down to the Revolution of 1689. When I was
+writing the lectures I had just been reading, with much interest, the
+work of my former pupil, Mr. Brooks Adams, entitled "The Emancipation of
+Massachusetts."
+
+With the specific conclusions set forth in that book I found myself
+often agreeing, but it seemed to me that the general aspect of the case
+would be considerably modified and perhaps somewhat more adequately
+presented by enlarging the field of view. In forming historical
+judgments a great deal depends upon our perspective. Out of the very
+imperfect human nature which is so slowly and painfully casting off the
+original sin of its inheritance from primeval savagery, it is scarcely
+possible in any age to get a result which will look quite satisfactory
+to the men of a riper and more enlightened age. Fortunately we can learn
+something from the stumblings of our forefathers, and a good many
+things seem quite clear to us to-day which two centuries ago were only
+beginning to be dimly discerned by a few of the keenest and boldest
+spirits. The faults of the Puritan theocracy, which found its most
+complete development in Massachusetts, are so glaring that it is idle to
+seek to palliate them or to explain them away. But if we would really
+understand what was going on in the Puritan world of the seventeenth
+century, and how a better state of things has grown out of it, we must
+endeavour to distinguish and define the elements of wholesome strength
+in that theocracy no less than its elements of crudity and weakness.
+
+The first chapter, on "The Roman Idea and the English Idea," contains a
+somewhat more developed statement of the points briefly indicated in the
+thirteenth section (pp. 85-95) of "The Destiny of Man." As all of the
+present book, except the first chapter, was written here under the
+shadow of the Washington University, I take pleasure in dating it from
+this charming and hospitable city where I have passed some of the most
+delightful hours of my life.
+
+St. Louis, April 15, 1889.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE ROMAN IDEA AND THE ENGLISH IDEA.
+
+When did the Roman Empire come to an end? ... 1-3
+
+Meaning of Odovakar's work ... 3
+
+The Holy Roman Empire ... 4, 5
+
+Gradual shifting of primacy from the men who spoke Latin, and their
+descendants, to the men who speak English ... 6-8
+
+Political history is the history of nation-making ... 8, 9
+
+The ORIENTAL method of nation-making; _conquest without incorporation_
+... 9
+
+Illustrations from eastern despotisms ... 10
+
+And from the Moors in Spain ... 11
+
+The ROMAN method of nation-making; _conquest with incorporation, but
+without representation_ ... 12
+
+Its slow development ... 13
+
+Vices in the Roman system. ... 14
+
+Its fundamental defect ... 15
+
+It knew nothing of political power delegated by the people to
+representatives ... 16
+
+And therefore the expansion of its dominion ended in a centralized
+Despotism ... 16
+
+Which entailed the danger that human life might come to stagnate in
+Europe, as it had done in Asia ... 17
+
+The danger was warded off by the Germanic invasions, which, however,
+threatened to undo the work which the Empire had done in organizing
+European society ... 17
+
+But such disintegration was prevented by the sway which the Roman Church
+had come to exercise over the European mind ... 18
+
+The wonderful thirteenth century ... 19
+
+The ENGLISH method of nation-making; _incorporation with representation_
+... 20
+
+Pacific tendencies of federalism ... 21
+
+Failure of Greek attempts at federation ... 22
+
+Fallacy of the notion that republics must be small ... 23
+
+"It is not the business of a government to support its people, but of
+the people to support their government" ... 24
+
+Teutonic March-meetings and representative assemblies ... 25
+
+Peculiarity of the Teutonic conquest of Britain ... 26, 27
+
+Survival and development of the Teutonic representative assembly in
+England ... 28
+
+Primitive Teutonic institutions less modified in England than in Germany
+... 29
+
+Some effects of the Norman conquest of England ... 30
+
+The Barons' War and the first House of Commons ... 31
+
+Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty ... 32
+
+Conflict between Roman Idea and English Idea begins to become clearly
+visible in the thirteenth century ... 33
+
+Decline of mediaeval Empire and Church with the growth of modern
+nationalities ... 34
+
+Overthrow of feudalism, and increasing power of the crown ... 35
+
+Formidable strength of the Roman Idea ... 36
+
+Had it not been for the Puritans, political liberty would probably have
+disappeared from the world ... 37
+
+Beginnings of Protestantism in the thirteenth century ... 38
+
+The Cathari, or Puritans of the Eastern Empire ... 39
+
+The Albigenses ... 40
+
+Effects of persecution; its feebleness in England ... 41
+
+Wyclif and the Lollards ... 42
+
+Political character of Henry VIII.'s revolt against Rome ... 43
+
+The yeoman Hugh Latimer ... 44
+
+The moment of Cromwell's triumph was the most critical moment in history
+... 45
+
+Contrast with France; fate of the Huguenots ... 46, 47
+
+Victory of the English Idea ... 48
+
+Significance of the Puritan Exodus ... 49
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE PURITAN EXODUS.
+
+Influence of Puritanism upon modern Europe ... 50, 51
+
+Work of the Lollards ... 52
+
+They made the Bible the first truly popular literature in England ...
+53, 54
+
+The English version of the Bible ... 54, 55
+
+Secret of Henry VIII.'s swift success in his revolt against Rome ... 56
+
+Effects of the persecution under Mary ... 57
+
+Calvin's theology in its political bearings ... 58, 59
+
+Elizabeth's policy and its effects ... 60, 61
+
+Puritan sea-rovers ... 61
+
+Geographical distribution of Puritanism in England; it was strongest in
+the eastern counties ... 62
+
+Preponderance of East Anglia in the Puritan exodus ... 63
+
+Familiar features of East Anglia to the visitor from New England ... 64
+
+Puritanism was not intentionally allied with liberalism ... 65
+
+Robert Brown and the Separatists ... 66
+
+Persecution of the Separatists ... 67
+
+Recantation of Brown; it was reserved for William Brewster to take the
+lead in the Puritan exodus ... 68
+
+James Stuart, and his encounter with Andrew Melville ... 69
+
+What James intended to do when he became King of England ... 70
+
+His view of the political situation, as declared in the conference at
+Hampton Court ... 71
+
+The congregation of Separatists at Scrooby ... 72
+
+The flight to Holland, and settlement at Leyden in 1609 ... 73
+
+Systematic legal toleration in Holland ... 74
+
+Why the Pilgrims did not stay there; they wished to keep up their
+distinct organization and found a state ... 74
+
+And to do this they must cross the ocean, because European territory was
+all preoccupied ... 75
+
+The London and Plymouth companies ... 75
+
+First explorations of the New England coast; Bartholomew Gosnold (1602),
+and George Weymouth (1605) ... 76
+
+The Popham colony (1607) ... 77
+
+Captain John Smith gives to New England its name (1614) ... 78
+
+The Pilgrims at Leyden decide to make a settlement near the Delaware
+river ... 79
+
+How King James regarded the enterprise ... 80
+
+Voyage of the Mayflower; she goes astray and takes the Pilgrims to Cape
+Cod bay ... 81
+
+Founding of the Plymouth colony (1620) ... 82, 83
+
+Why the Indians did not molest the settlers ... 84, 85
+
+The chief interest of this beginning of the Puritan exodus lies not so
+much in what it achieved as in what it suggested ... 86, 87
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE PLANTING OF NEW ENGLAND.
+
+Sir Ferdinando Gorges and the Council for New England ... 88, 89
+
+Wessagusset and Merrymount ... 90, 91
+
+The Dorchester adventurers ... 92
+
+John White wishes to raise a bulwark against the Kingdom of Antichrist
+... 93
+
+And John Endicott undertakes the work of building it ... 94
+
+Conflicting grants sow seeds of trouble; the Gorges and Mason claims ...
+94, 95
+
+Endicott's arrival in New England, and the founding of Salem ... 95
+
+The Company of Massachusetts Bay; Francis Higginson takes a powerful
+reinforcement to Salem ... 96
+
+The development of John White's enterprise into the Company of
+Massachusetts Bay coincided with the first four years of the reign of
+Charles I ... 97
+
+Extraordinary scene in the House of Commons (June 5, 1628) ... 98, 99
+
+The King turns Parliament out of doors (March 2, 1629) ... 100
+
+Desperate nature of the crisis ... 100, 101
+
+The meeting at Cambridge (Aug. 26, 1629), and decision to transfer the
+charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company, and the government established
+under it, to New England ... 102
+
+Leaders of the great migration; John Winthrop ... 102
+
+And Thomas Dudley ... 103
+
+Founding of Massachusetts; the schemes of Gorges overwhelmed ... 104
+
+Beginnings of American constitutional history; the question as to
+self-government raised at Watertown ... 105
+
+Representative system established ... 106
+
+Bicameral assembly; story of the stray pig ... 107
+
+Ecclesiastical polity; the triumph of Separatism ... 108
+
+Restriction of the suffrage to members of the Puritan congregational
+churches ... 109
+
+Founding of Harvard College ... 110
+
+Threefold danger to the New England settlers in 1636:--
+
+  1. From the King, who prepares to attack the charter, but is foiled by
+dissensions at home ... 111-113
+
+  2. From religious dissensions; Roger Williams ... 114-116
+     Henry Vane and Anne Hutchinson ... 116-119
+     Beginnings of New Hampshire and Rhode Island ... 119-120
+
+  3. From the Indians; the Pequot supremacy ... 121
+
+First movements into the Connecticut valley, and disputes with the Dutch
+settlers of New Amsterdam ... 122, 123
+
+Restriction of the suffrage leads to disaffection in Massachusetts;
+profoundly interesting opinions of Winthrop and Hooker ... 123, 124
+
+Connecticut pioneers and their hardships ... 125
+
+Thomas Hooker, and the founding of Connecticut ... 120
+
+The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut (Jan 14, 1639); the first written
+constitution that created a government ... 127
+
+Relations of Connecticut to the genesis of the Federal Union ... 128
+
+Origin of the Pequot War; Sassacus tries to unite the Indian tribes in a
+crusade against the English ... 129, 130
+
+The schemes of Sassacus are foiled by Roger Williams ... 130
+
+The Pequots take the war path alone ... 131
+
+And are exterminated ... 132-134
+
+John Davenport, and the founding of New Haven ... 135
+
+New Haven legislation, and legend of the "Blue Laws" ... 136
+
+With the meeting of the Long Parliament, in 1640, the Puritan exodus
+comes to its end ... 137
+
+What might have been ... 138, 391
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE NEW ENGLAND CONFEDERACY.
+
+The Puritan exodus was purely and exclusively English ... 140
+
+And the settlers were all thrifty and prosperous; chiefly country
+squires and yeomanry of the best and sturdiest type ... 141, 142
+
+In all history there has been no other instance of colonization so
+exclusively effected by picked and chosen men ... 143
+
+What, then, was the principle of selection? The migration was not
+intended to promote what we call religious liberty ... 144, 145
+
+Theocratic ideal of the Puritans ... 146
+
+The impulse which sought to realize itself in the Puritan ideal was an
+ethical impulse ... 147
+
+In interpreting Scripture, the Puritan appealed to his Reason ... 148,
+149
+
+Value of such perpetual theological discussion as was carried on in
+early New England ... 150, 151
+
+Comparison with the history of Scotland ... 152
+
+Bearing of these considerations upon the history of the New England
+confederacy ... 153
+
+The existence of so many colonies (Plymouth, Massachusetts, Connecticut,
+New Haven, Rhode Island, the Piscataqua towns, etc.) was due to
+differences of opinion on questions in which men's religious ideas were
+involved ... 154
+
+And this multiplication of colonies led to a notable and significant
+attempt at confederation ... 155
+
+Turbulence of dissent in Rhode Island ... 156
+
+The Earl of Warwick, and his Board of Commissioners ... 157
+
+Constitution of the Confederacy ... 158
+
+It was only a league, not a federal union ... 159
+
+Its formation involved a tacit assumption of sovereignty ... 160
+
+The fall of Charles I. brought up, for a moment, the question as to the
+supremacy of Parliament over the colonies ... 161
+
+Some interesting questions ... 162
+
+Genesis of the persecuting spirit ... 163
+
+Samuel Gorton and his opinions ... 163-165
+
+He flees to Aquedneck and is banished thence ... 166
+
+Providence protests against him ... 167
+
+He flees to Shawomet, where he buys land of the Indians ... 168
+
+Miantonomo and Uncas ... 169, 170
+
+Death of Miantonomo ... 171
+
+Edward Johnson leads an expedition against Shawomet ... 172
+
+Trial and sentence of the heretics ... 173
+
+Winthrop declares himself in a prophetic opinion ... 174
+
+The Presbyterian cabal ... 175-177
+
+The Cambridge Platform; deaths of Winthrop and Cotton ... 177
+
+Views of Winthrop and Cotton as to toleration in matters of Religion ...
+178
+
+After their death, the leadership in Massachusetts was in the hands of
+Endicott and Norton ... 179
+
+The Quakers; their opinions and behavior ... 179-181
+
+Violent manifestations of dissent ... 182
+
+Anne Austin and Mary Fisher; how they were received in Boston ... 183
+
+The confederated colonies seek to expel the Quakers; noble attitude of
+Rhode Island ... 184
+
+Roger Williams appeals to his friend, Oliver Cromwell ... 185
+
+The "heavenly speech" of Sir Harry Vane ... 185
+
+Laws passed against the Quakers ... 186
+
+How the death penalty was regarded at that time in New England ... 187
+
+Executions of Quakers on Boston Common ... 188, 189
+
+Wenlock Christison's defiance and victory ... 189, 190
+
+The "King's Missive" ... 191
+
+Why Charles II. interfered to protect the Quakers ... 191
+
+His hostile feeling toward the New England governments ... 192
+
+The regicide judges, Goffe and Whalley ... 193, 194
+
+New Haven annexed to Connecticut ... 194, 195
+
+Abraham Pierson, and the founding of Newark ... 196
+
+Breaking-down of the theocratic policy ... 197
+
+Weakening of the Confederacy ... 198
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+KING PHILIP'S WAR.
+
+Relations between the Puritan settlers and the Indians ... 199
+
+Trade with the Indians ... 200
+
+Missionary work; Thomas Mayhew ... 201
+
+John Eliot and his translation of the Bible ... 202
+
+His preaching to the Indians ... 203
+
+His villages of Christian Indians ... 204
+
+The Puritan's intention was to deal gently and honourably with the red
+men ... 205
+
+Why Pennsylvania was so long unmolested by the Indians ... 205, 206
+
+Difficulty of the situation in New England ... 207
+
+It is hard for the savage and the civilized man to understand one
+another ... 208
+
+How Eliot's designs must inevitably have been misinterpreted by the
+Indians ... 209
+
+It is remarkable that peace should have been so long preserved ... 210
+
+Deaths of Massasoit and his son Alexander ... 211
+
+Very little is known about the nature of Philip's designs ... 212
+
+The meeting at Taunton ... 213
+
+Sausamon informs against Philip ... 213
+
+And is murdered ... 214
+
+Massacres at Swanzey and Dartmouth ... 214
+
+Murder of Captain Hutchinson ... 215
+
+Attack on Brookfield, which is relieved by Simon Willard ... 216
+
+Fighting in the Connecticut valley; the mysterious stranger at Hadley
+... 217, 218
+
+Ambuscade at Bloody Brook ... 219
+
+Popular excitement in Boston ... 220
+
+The Narragansetts prepare to take the war-path ... 221
+
+And Governor Winslow leads an army against them ... 222, 223
+
+Storming of the great swamp fortress ... 224
+
+Slaughter of the Indians ... 225
+
+Effect of the blow ... 226
+
+Growth of the humane sentiment in recent times, due to the fact that the
+horrors of war are seldom brought home to everybody's door ... 227, 228
+
+Warfare with savages is likely to be truculent in character ... 229
+
+Attack upon Lancaster ... 230
+
+Mrs. Rowlandson's narrative ... 231-233
+
+Virtual extermination of the Indians (February to August, 1676) ... 233,
+234
+
+Death of Canonchet ... 234
+
+Philip pursued by Captain Church ... 235
+
+Death of Philip ... 236
+
+Indians sold into slavery ... 237
+
+Conduct of the Christian Indians ... 238
+
+War with the Tarratines ... 239
+
+Frightful destruction of life and property ... 240
+
+Henceforth the red man figures no more in the history of New England,
+except in frontier raids under French guidance ... 241
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE TYRANNY OF ANDROS.
+
+Romantic features in the early history of New England ... 242
+
+Captain Edward Johnson, of Woburn, and his book on "The Wonder-working
+Providence of Zion's Saviour in New England" ... 243,244
+
+Acts of the Puritans often judged by an unreal and impossible standard
+... 245
+
+Spirit of the "Wonder-working Providence" ... 246
+
+Merits and faults of the Puritan theocracy ... 247
+
+Restriction of the suffrage to church members ... 248
+
+It was a source of political discontent ... 249
+
+Inquisitorial administration of justice ... 250
+
+The "Half way Covenant" ... 251
+
+Founding of the Old South church ... 252
+
+Unfriendly relations between Charles II and Massachusetts ... 253
+
+Complaints against Massachusetts ... 254
+
+The Lords of Trade ... 255
+
+Arrival of Edward Randolph in Boston ... 256
+
+Joseph Dudley and the beginnings of Toryism in New England ... 257, 258
+
+Charles II. erects the four Piscataqua towns into the royal province of
+New Hampshire ... 259
+
+And quarrels with Massachusetts over the settlement of the Gorges claim
+to the Maine district ... 260
+
+Simon Bradstreet and his verse-making wife ... 261
+
+Massachusetts answers the king's peremptory message ... 262
+
+Secret treaty between Charles II. and Louis XIV ... 263
+
+Shameful proceedings in England ... 264
+
+Massachusetts refuses to surrender her charter; and accordingly it is
+annulled by decree of chancery, June 21, 1684 ... 265
+
+Effect of annulling the charter ... 266
+
+Death of Charles II, accession of James II., and appointment of Sir
+Edmund Andros as viceroy over New England, with despotic powers ... 267
+
+The charter oak ... 268
+
+Episcopal services in Boston ... 268, 269
+
+Founding of the King's Chapel ... 269
+
+The tyranny ... 270
+
+John Wise of Ipswich ... 271
+
+Fall of James II ... 271
+
+Insurrection in Boston, and overthrow of Andros ... 272
+
+Effects of the Revolution of 1689 ... 273
+
+Need for union among all the northern colonies ... 274
+
+Plymouth, Maine, and Acadia annexed to Massachusetts ... 275
+
+Which becomes a royal province ... 276
+
+And is thus brought into political sympathy with Virginia ... 276
+
+The seeds of the American Revolution were already sown, and the spirit
+of 1776 was foreshadowed in 1689 ... 277, 278
+
+
+
+
+THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW ENGLAND.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE ROMAN IDEA AND THE ENGLISH IDEA.
+
+
+It used to be the fashion of historians, looking superficially at the
+facts presented in chronicles and tables of dates, without analyzing and
+comparing vast groups of facts distributed through centuries, or even
+suspecting the need for such analysis and comparison, to assign the date
+476 A.D. as the moment at which the Roman Empire came to an end. It was
+in that year that the soldier of fortune, Odovakar, commander of the
+Herulian mercenaries in Italy, sent the handsome boy Romulus, son of
+Orestes, better known as "little Augustus," from his imperial throne
+to the splendid villa of Lucullus near Naples, and gave him a yearly
+pension of $35,000 [6,000 solidi] to console him for the loss of a
+world. As 324 years elapsed before another emperor was crowned at Rome,
+and as the political headship of Europe after that happy restoration
+remained upon the German soil to which the events of the eighth century
+had shifted it, nothing could seem more natural than the habit which
+historians once had, of saying that the mighty career of Rome had ended,
+as it had begun, with a Romulus. Sometimes the date 476 was even set up
+as a great landmark dividing modern from ancient history. For those,
+however, who took such a view, it was impossible to see the events of
+the Middle Ages in their true relations to what went before and what
+came after. It was impossible to understand what went on in Italy in
+the sixth century, or to explain the position of that great Roman power
+which had its centre on the Bosphorus, which in the code of Justinian
+left us our grandest monument of Roman law, and which for a thousand
+years was the staunch bulwark of Europe against the successive
+aggressions of Persian, Saracen, and Turk. It was equally impossible to
+understand the rise of the Papal power, the all-important politics of
+the great Saxon and Swabian emperors, the relations of mediaeval England
+to the Continental powers, or the marvellously interesting growth of the
+modern European system of nationalities. [Sidenote: When did the Roman
+Empire come to an end?]
+
+Since the middle of the nineteenth century the study of history has
+undergone changes no less sweeping than those which have in the same
+time affected the study of the physical sciences. Vast groups of facts
+distributed through various ages and countries have been subjected to
+comparison and analysis, with the result that they have not only thrown
+fresh light upon one another, but have in many cases enabled us to
+recover historic points of view that had long been buried in oblivion.
+Such an instance was furnished about twenty-five years ago by Dr.
+Bryce's epoch-making work on the Holy Roman Empire. Since then
+historians still recognize the importance of the date 476 as that which
+left the Bishop of Rome the dominant personage in Italy, and marked the
+shifting of the political centre of gravity from the Palatine to the
+Lateran. This was one of those subtle changes which escape notice until
+after some of their effects have attracted attention. The most important
+effect, in this instance, realized after three centuries, was not the
+overthrow of Roman power in the West, but its indefinite extension and
+expansion. The men of 476 not only had no idea that they were entering
+upon a new era, but least of all did they dream that the Roman Empire
+had come to an end, or was ever likely to. Its cities might be pillaged,
+its provinces overrun, but the supreme imperial power itself was
+something without which the men of those days could not imagine the
+world as existing. It must have its divinely ordained representative in
+one place if not in another. If the throne in Italy was vacant, it
+was no more than had happened before; there was still a throne at
+Constantinople, and to its occupant Zeno the Roman Senate sent a
+message, saying that one emperor was enough for both ends of the earth,
+and begging him to confer upon the gallant Odovakar the title of
+patrician, and entrust the affairs of Italy to his care. So when
+Sicambrian Chlodwig set up his Merovingian kingdom in northern Gaul, he
+was glad to array himself in the robe of a Roman consul, and obtain from
+the eastern emperor a formal ratification of his rule.
+
+[Transcriber's note: page missing in original.] still survives in
+political methods and habits of thought that will yet be long in dying
+out. With great political systems, as with typical forms of organic
+life, the processes of development and of extinction are exceedingly
+slow, and it is seldom that the stages can be sharply marked by dates.
+The processes which have gradually shifted the seat of empire until the
+prominent part played nineteen centuries ago by Rome and Alexandria,
+on opposite sides of the Mediterranean, has been at length assumed by
+London and New York, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, form a most
+interesting subject of study. But to understand them, one must do much
+more than merely catalogue the facts of political history; one must
+acquire a knowledge of the drifts and tendencies of human thought and
+feeling and action from the earliest ages to the times in which we
+live. In covering so wide a field we cannot of course expect to obtain
+anything like complete results. In order to make a statement simple
+enough to be generally intelligible, it is necessary to pass over many
+circumstances and many considerations that might in one way and another
+qualify what we have to say. Nevertheless it is quite possible for us to
+discern, in their bold general outlines, some historic truths of supreme
+importance. In contemplating the salient features of the change which
+has now for a long time been making the world more English and less
+Roman, we shall find not only intellectual pleasure and profit but
+practical guidance. For in order to understand this slow but mighty
+change, we must look a little into that process of nation-making which
+has been going on since prehistoric ages and is going on here among us
+to-day, and from the recorded experience of men in times long past
+we may gather lessons of infinite value for ourselves and for our
+children's children. As in all the achievements of mankind it is only
+after much weary experiment and many a heart-sickening failure that
+success is attained, so has it been especially with nation-making. Skill
+in the political art is the fruit of ages of intellectual and moral
+discipline; and just as picture-writing had to come before printing and
+canoes before steamboats, so the cruder political methods had to be
+tried and found wanting, amid the tears and groans of unnumbered
+generations, before methods less crude could be put into operation. In
+the historic survey upon which we are now to enter, we shall see that
+the Roman Empire represented a crude method of nation-making which began
+with a masterful career of triumph over earlier and cruder methods, but
+has now for several centuries been giving way before a more potent and
+satisfactory method. And just as the merest glance at the history of
+Europe shows us Germanic peoples wresting the supremacy from Rome, so in
+this deeper study we shall discover a grand and far-reaching Teutonic
+Idea of political life overthrowing and supplanting the Roman Idea. Our
+attention will be drawn toward England as the battle-ground and the
+seventeenth century as the critical moment of the struggle; we shall see
+in Puritanism the tremendous militant force that determined the issue;
+and when our perspective has thus become properly adjusted, we shall
+begin to realize for the first time how truly wonderful was the age that
+witnessed the Beginnings of New England. We have long had before our
+minds the colossal figure of Roman Julius as "the foremost man of all
+this world," but as the seventeenth century recedes into the past
+the figure of English Oliver begins to loom up as perhaps even more
+colossal. In order to see these world-events in their true perspective,
+and to make perfectly clear the manner in which we are to estimate them,
+we must go a long distance away from them. We must even go back, as
+nearly as may be, to the beginning of things. [Sidenote: Gradual
+shifting of primacy from the men who spoke Latin, and their descendants,
+to the men who speak English]
+
+If we look back for a moment to the primitive stages of society, we may
+picture to ourselves the surface of the earth sparsely and scantily
+covered with wandering tribes of savages, rude in morals and manners,
+narrow and monotonous in experience, sustaining life very much as lower
+animals sustain it, by gathering wild fruits or slaying wild game, and
+waging chronic warfare alike with powerful beasts and with rival tribes
+of men. [Sidenote: Political history is the history of nation-making]
+
+In the widest sense the subject of political history is the description
+of the processes by which, under favourable circumstances, innumerable
+such primitive tribes have become welded together into mighty nations,
+with elevated standards of morals and manners, with wide and varied
+experience, sustaining life and ministering to human happiness by
+elaborate arts and sciences, and putting a curb upon warfare by limiting
+its scope, diminishing its cruelty, and interrupting it by intervals of
+peace. The story, as laid before us in the records of three thousand
+years, is fascinating and absorbing in its human interest for those who
+content themselves with the study of its countless personal incidents,
+and neglect its profound philosophical lessons. But for those who study
+it in the scientific spirit, the human interest of its details becomes
+still more intensely fascinating and absorbing. Battles and coronations,
+poems and inventions, migrations and martyrdoms, acquire new meanings
+and awaken new emotions as we begin to discern their bearings upon the
+solemn work of ages that is slowly winning for humanity a richer and
+more perfect life. By such meditation upon men's thoughts and deeds is
+the understanding purified, till we become better able to comprehend our
+relations to the world and the duty that lies upon each of us to shape
+his conduct rightly.
+
+In the welding together of primitive shifting tribes into stable and
+powerful nations, we can seem to discern three different methods that
+have been followed at different times and places, with widely different
+results. In all cases the fusion has been effected by war, but it has
+gone on in three broadly contrasted ways. The first of these methods,
+which has been followed from time immemorial in the Oriental world, may
+be roughly described as _conquest without incorporation._ A tribe grows
+to national dimensions by conquering and annexing its neighbours,
+without admitting them to a share in its political life. Probably there
+is always at first some incorporation, or even perhaps some crude germ
+of federative alliance; but this goes very little way,--only far enough
+to fuse together a few closely related tribes, agreeing in speech and
+habits, into a single great tribe that can overwhelm its neighbours. In
+early society this sort of incorporation cannot go far without being
+stopped by some impassable barrier of language or religion. After
+reaching that point, the conquering tribe simply annexes its neighbours
+and makes them its slaves. It becomes a superior caste, ruling over
+vanquished peoples, whom it oppresses with frightful cruelty, while
+living on the fruits of their toil in what has been aptly termed
+Oriental luxury. Such has been the origin of many eastern despotisms, in
+the valleys of the Nile and Euphrates, and elsewhere. Such a political
+structure admits of a very considerable development of material
+civilization, in which gorgeous palaces and artistic temples may be
+built, and perhaps even literature and scholarship rewarded, with money
+wrung from millions of toiling wretches. There is that sort of brutal
+strength in it, that it may endure for many long ages, until it comes
+into collision with some higher civilization. Then it is likely to end
+in sudden collapse, because the fighting quality of the people has
+been destroyed. Populations that have lived for centuries in fear of
+impalement or crucifixion, and have known no other destination for
+the products of their labour than the clutches of the omnipresent
+tax-gatherer, are not likely to furnish good soldiers. A handful of
+freemen will scatter them like sheep, as the Greeks did twenty-three
+centuries ago at Kynaxa, as the English did the other day at Tel
+el-Kebir. On the other hand, where the manliness of the vanquished
+people is not crushed, the sway of the conquerors who cannot enter into
+political union with them is likely to be cast off, as in the case of
+the Moors in Spain. There was a civilization in many respects admirable.
+It was eminent for industry, science, art, and poetry; its annals are
+full of romantic interest; it was in some respects superior to the
+Christian system which supplanted it; in many ways it contributed
+largely to the progress of the human race; and it was free from some
+of the worst vices of Oriental civilizations. Yet because of the
+fundamental defect that between the Christian Spaniard and his
+Mussulman conqueror there could be no political fusion, this brilliant
+civilization was doomed. During eight centuries of more or less
+extensive rule in the Spanish peninsula, the Moor was from first to last
+an alien, just as after four centuries the Turk is still an alien in
+the Balkan peninsula. The natural result was a struggle that lasted
+age after age till it ended in the utter extermination of one of the
+parties, and left behind it a legacy of hatred and persecution that has
+made the history of modern Spain a dismal record of shame and disaster.
+[Sidenote: The Oriental method of nation-making]
+
+In this first method of nation-making, then, which we may call the
+Oriental method, one now sees but little to commend. It was better than
+savagery, and for a long time no more efficient method was possible,
+but the leading peoples of the world have long since outgrown it; and
+although the resulting form of political government is the oldest we
+know and is not yet extinct, it nevertheless has not the elements
+of permanence. Sooner or later it will disappear, as savagery is
+disappearing, as the rudest types of inchoate human society have
+disappeared.
+
+The second method by which nations have been made may be called
+the Roman method; and we may briefly describe it as _conquest with
+incorporation, but without representation_. The secret of Rome's
+wonderful strength lay in the fact that she incorporated the vanquished
+peoples into her own body politic. In the early time there was a fusion
+of tribes going on in Latium, which, if it had gone no further, would
+have been similar to the early fusion of Ionic tribes in Attika or of
+Iranian tribes in Media. But whereas everywhere else this political
+fusion soon stopped, in the Roman world it went on. One after another
+Italian tribes and Italian towns were not merely overcome but admitted
+to a share in the political rights and privileges of the victors. By the
+time this had gone on until the whole Italian peninsula was consolidated
+under the headship of Rome, the result was a power incomparably greater
+than any other that the world had yet seen. Never before had so many
+people been brought under one government without making slaves of most
+of them. Liberty had existed before, whether in barbaric tribes or
+in Greek cities. Union had existed before, in Assyrian or Persian
+despotisms. Now liberty and union were for the first time joined
+together, with consequences enduring and stupendous. The whole
+Mediterranean world was brought under one government; ancient barriers
+of religion, speech, and custom were overthrown in every direction; and
+innumerable barbarian tribes, from the Alps to the wilds of northern
+Britain, from the Bay of Biscay to the Carpathian mountains, were more
+or less completely transformed into Roman citizens, protected by Roman
+law, and sharing in the material and spiritual benefits of Roman
+civilization. Gradually the whole vast structure became permeated by
+Hellenic and Jewish thought, and thus were laid the lasting foundations
+of modern society, of a common Christendom, furnished with a common
+stock of ideas concerning man's relation to God and the world, and
+acknowledging a common standard of right and wrong. This was a
+prodigious work, which raised human life to a much higher plane than
+that which it had formerly occupied, and endless gratitude is due to the
+thousands of steadfast men who in one way or another devoted their lives
+to its accomplishment. [Sidenote: The Roman method of nation-making]
+
+This Roman method of nation-making had nevertheless its fatal
+shortcomings, and it was only very slowly, moreover, that it wrought
+out its own best results. It was but gradually that the rights and
+privileges of Roman citizenship were extended over the whole Roman
+world, and in the mean time there were numerous instances where
+conquered provinces seemed destined to no better fate than had awaited
+the victims of Egyptian or Assyrian conquest. The rapacity and cruelty
+of Caius Verres could hardly have been outdone by the worst of Persian
+satraps; but there was a difference. A moral sense and political sense
+had been awakened which could see both the wickedness and the folly of
+such conduct. The voice of a Cicero sounded with trumpet tones against
+the oppressor, who was brought to trial and exiled for deeds which under
+the Oriental system, from the days of Artaxerxes to those of the Grand
+Turk, would scarcely have called forth a reproving word. It was by slow
+degrees that the Roman came to understand the virtues of his own method,
+and learned to apply it consistently until the people of all parts of
+the empire were, in theory at least, equal before the law. In theory, I
+say, for in point of fact there was enough of viciousness in the Roman
+system to prevent it from achieving permanent success. Historians have
+been fond of showing how the vitality of the whole system was impaired
+by wholesale slave-labour, by the false political economy which taxes
+all for the benefit of a few, by the debauching view of civil office
+which regards it as private perquisite and not as public trust,
+and--worst of all, perhaps--by the communistic practice of feeding an
+idle proletariat out of the imperial treasury. The names of these deadly
+social evils are not unfamiliar to American ears. Even of the last we
+have heard ominous whispers in the shape of bills to promote mendicancy
+under the specious guise of fostering education or rewarding military
+services. And is it not a striking illustration of the slowness with
+which mankind learns the plainest rudiments of wisdom and of justice,
+that only in the full light of the nineteenth century, and at the cost
+of a terrible war, should the most intelligent people on earth have got
+rid of a system of labour devised in the crudest ages of antiquity and
+fraught with misery to the employed, degradation to the employers, and
+loss to everybody? [Sidenote: Its slow development]
+
+These evils, we see, in one shape or another, have existed almost
+everywhere; and the vice of the Roman system did not consist in the fact
+that under it they were fully developed, but in the fact that it had no
+adequate means of overcoming them. Unless helped by something supplied
+from outside the Roman world, civilization must have succumbed to these
+evils, the progress of mankind must have been stopped. What was needed
+was the introduction of a fierce spirit of personal liberty and local
+self-government. The essential vice of the Roman system was that it had
+been unable to avoid weakening the spirit of personal independence and
+crushing out local self-government among the peoples to whom it had been
+applied. It owed its wonderful success to joining Liberty with Union,
+but as it went on it found itself compelled gradually to sacrifice
+Liberty to Union, strengthening the hands of the central government and
+enlarging its functions more and more, until by and by the political
+life of the several parts had so far died away that, under the pressure
+of attack from without, the Union fell to pieces and the whole political
+system had to be slowly and painfully reconstructed.
+
+Now if we ask why the Roman government found itself thus obliged to
+sacrifice personal liberty and local independence to the paramount
+necessity of holding the empire together, the answer will point us to
+the essential and fundamental vice of the Roman method of nation-making.
+It lacked the principle of representation. The old Roman world knew
+nothing of representative assemblies. [Sidenote: It knew nothing of
+representation]
+
+Its senates were assemblies of notables, constituting in the main an
+aristocracy of men who had held high office; its popular assemblies were
+primary assemblies,--town-meetings. There was no notion of such a thing
+as political power delegated by the people to representatives who were
+to wield it away from home and out of sight of their constituents. The
+Roman's only notion of delegated power was that of authority delegated
+by the government to its generals and prefects who discharged at a
+distance its military and civil functions. When, therefore, the Roman
+popular government, originally adapted to a single city, had come
+to extend itself over a large part of the world, it lacked the one
+institution by means of which government could be carried on over
+so vast an area without degenerating into despotism. [Sidenote: And
+therefore ended in despotism]
+
+Even could the device of representation have occurred to the mind of
+some statesman trained in Roman methods, it would probably have made no
+difference. Nobody would have known how to use it. You cannot invent
+an institution as you would invent a plough. Such a notion as that of
+representative government must needs start from small beginnings and
+grow in men's minds until it should become part and parcel of their
+mental habits. For the want of it the home government at Rome became
+more and more unmanageable until it fell into the hands of the army,
+while at the same time the administration of the empire became more and
+more centralized; the people of its various provinces, even while their
+social condition was in some respects improved, had less and less
+voice in the management of their local affairs, and thus the spirit of
+personal independence was gradually weakened. This centralization was
+greatly intensified by the perpetual danger of invasion on the northern
+and eastern frontiers, all the way from the Rhine to the Euphrates.
+Do what it would, the government must become more and more a military
+despotism, must revert toward the Oriental type. The period extending
+from the third century before Christ to the third century after was a
+period of extraordinary intellectual expansion and moral awakening; but
+when we observe the governmental changes introduced under the emperor
+Diocletian at the very end of this period, we realize how serious had
+been the political retrogression, how grave the danger that the stream
+of human life might come to stagnate in Europe, as it had long since
+stagnated in Asia.
+
+Two mighty agents, cooperating in their opposite ways to prevent any
+such disaster, were already entering upon the scene. The first was the
+colonization of the empire by Germanic tribes already far advanced
+beyond savagery, already somewhat tinctured with Roman civilization, yet
+at the same time endowed with an intense spirit of personal and local
+independence. With this wholesome spirit they were about to refresh and
+revivify the empire, but at the risk of undoing its work of political
+organization and reducing it to barbarism. The second was the
+establishment of the Roman church, an institution capable of holding
+European society together in spite of a political disintegration that
+was widespread and long-continued. While wave after wave of Germanic
+colonization poured over romanized Europe, breaking down old
+boundary-lines and working sudden and astonishing changes on the map,
+setting up in every quarter baronies, dukedoms, and kingdoms fermenting
+with vigorous political life; while for twenty generations this salutary
+but wild and dangerous work was going on, there was never a moment when
+the imperial sway of Rome was quite set aside and forgotten, there was
+never a time when union of some sort was not maintained through the
+dominion which the church had established over the European mind. When
+we duly consider this great fact in its relations to what went before
+and what came after, it is hard to find words fit to express the debt of
+gratitude which modern civilization owes to the Roman Catholic church.
+When we think of all the work, big with promise of the future, that went
+on in those centuries which modern writers in their ignorance used once
+to set apart and stigmatize as the "Dark Ages"; when we consider how the
+seeds of what is noblest in modern life were then painfully sown upon
+the soil which imperial Rome had prepared; when we think of the various
+work of a Gregory, a Benedict, a Boniface, an Alfred, a Charlemagne; we
+feel that there is a sense in which the most brilliant achievements
+of pagan antiquity are dwarfed in comparison with these. Until quite
+lately, indeed, the student of history has had his attention too
+narrowly confined to the ages that have been preeminent for literature
+and art--the so-called classical ages--and thus his sense of historical
+perspective has been impaired. When Mr. Freeman uses Gregory of Tours as
+a text-book, he shows that he realizes how an epoch may be none the less
+portentous though it has not had a Tacitus to describe it, and certainly
+no part of history is more full of human interest than the troubled
+period in which the powerful streams of Teutonic life pouring into Roman
+Europe were curbed in their destructiveness and guided to noble ends by
+the Catholic church. Out of the interaction between these two mighty
+agents has come the political system of the modern world. The moment
+when this interaction might have seemed on the point of reaching a
+complete and harmonious result was the glorious thirteenth century, the
+culminating moment of the Holy Roman Empire. Then, as in the times of
+Caesar or Trajan, there might have seemed to be a union among civilized
+men, in which the separate life of individuals and localities was not
+submerged. In that golden age alike of feudal system, of empire, and of
+church, there were to be seen the greatest monarchs, in fullest sympathy
+with their peoples, that Christendom has known,--an Edward I., a St.
+Louis, a Frederick II. Then when in the pontificates of Innocent III.
+and his successors the Roman church reached its apogee, the religious
+yearnings of men sought expression in the sublimest architecture the
+world has seen. Then Aquinas summed up in his profound speculations the
+substance of Catholic theology, and while the morning twilight of modern
+science might be discerned in the treatises of Roger Bacon, while
+wandering minstrelsy revealed the treasures of modern speech, soon to
+be wrought under the hands of Dante and Chaucer into forms of exquisite
+beauty, the sacred fervour of the apostolic ages found itself renewed in
+the tender and mystic piety of St. Francis of Assisi. It was a wonderful
+time, but after all less memorable as the culmination of mediaeval
+empire and mediaeval church than as the dawning of the new era in which
+we live to-day, and in which the development of human society proceeds
+in accordance with more potent methods than those devised by the genius
+of pagan or Christian Rome. [Sidenote: The German invaders and the Roman
+church] [Sidenote: The wonderful thirteenth century]
+
+For the origin of these more potent methods we must look back to the
+early ages of the Teutonic people; for their development and application
+on a grand scale we must look chiefly to the history of that most
+Teutonic of peoples in its institutions, though perhaps not more than
+half-Teutonic in blood, the English, with their descendants in the New
+World. The third method of nation-making may be called the Teutonic or
+preeminently the English method. It differs from the Oriental and Roman
+methods which we have been considering in a feature of most profound
+significance; it contains the principle of representation. For this
+reason, though like all nation-making it was in its early stages
+attended with war and conquest, it nevertheless does not necessarily
+require war and conquest in order to be put into operation. Of the other
+two methods war was an essential part. In the typical Oriental nation,
+such as Assyria or Persia, we see a conquering tribe holding down a
+number of vanquished peoples, and treating them like slaves: here the
+nation is very imperfectly made, and its government is subject to sudden
+and violent changes. In the Roman empire we see a conquering people hold
+sway over a number of vanquished peoples, but instead of treating them
+like slaves, it gradually makes them its equals before the law; here
+the resulting political body is much more nearly a nation, and its
+government is much more stable. A Lydian of the fifth century before
+Christ felt no sense of allegiance to the Persian master who simply
+robbed and abused him; but the Gaul of the fifth century after Christ
+was proud of the name of Roman and ready to fight for the empire of
+which he was a citizen. We have seen, nevertheless, that for want of
+representation the Roman method failed when applied to an immense
+territory, and the government tended to become more and more despotic,
+to revert toward the Oriental type. Now of the English or Teutonic
+method, I say, war is not an essential part; for where representative
+government is once established, it is possible for a great nation to be
+formed by the peaceful coalescence of neighbouring states, or by their
+union into a federal body. An instance of the former was the coalescence
+of England and Scotland effected early in the eighteenth century
+after ages of mutual hostility; for instances of the latter we have
+Switzerland and the United States. Now federalism, though its rise
+and establishment may be incidentally accompanied by warfare, is
+nevertheless in spirit pacific. Conquest in the Oriental sense is quite
+incompatible with it; conquest in the Roman sense is hardly less so. At
+the close of our Civil War there were now and then zealous people to
+be found who thought that the southern states ought to be treated as
+conquered territory, governed by prefects sent from Washington, and held
+down by military force for a generation or so. Let us hope that there
+are few to-day who can fail to see that such a course would have been
+fraught with almost as much danger as the secession movement itself.
+At least it would have been a hasty confession, quite uncalled for
+and quite untrue, that American federalism had thus far proved itself
+incompetent,--that we had indeed preserved our national unity, but only
+at the frightful cost of sinking to a lower plane of national life.
+[Sidenote: The English method of nation-making] [Sidenote: Pacific
+tendencies of federalism]
+
+But federalism, with its pacific implications, was not an invention of
+the Teutonic mind. The idea was familiar to the city communities of
+ancient Greece, which, along with their intense love of self-government,
+felt the need of combined action for warding off external attack. In
+their Achaian and Aitolian leagues the Greeks made brilliant attempts
+toward founding a nation upon some higher principle than that of mere
+conquest, and the history of these attempts is exceedingly
+interesting and instructive. They failed for lack of the principle
+of representation, which was practically unknown to the world until
+introduced by the Teutonic colonizers of the Roman empire. Until the
+idea of power delegated by the people had become familiar to men's minds
+in its practical bearings, it was impossible to create a great nation
+without crushing out the political life in some of its parts. Some
+centre of power was sure to absorb all the political life, and grow at
+the expense of the outlying parts, until the result was a centralized
+despotism. Hence it came to be one of the commonplace assumptions of
+political writers that republics must be small, that free government
+is practicable only in a confined area, and that the only strong and
+durable government, capable of maintaining order throughout a vast
+territory, is some form of absolute monarchy. [Sidenote: Fallacy of the
+notion that republics must be small]
+
+It was quite natural that people should formerly have held this opinion,
+and it is indeed not yet quite obsolete, but its fallaciousness will
+become more and more apparent as American history is better understood.
+Our experience has now so far widened that we can see that despotism
+is not the strongest but wellnigh the weakest form of government; that
+centralized administrations, like that of the Roman empire, have fallen
+to pieces, not because of too much but because of too little freedom;
+and that the only perdurable government must be that which succeeds in
+achieving national unity on a grand scale, without weakening the sense
+of personal and local independence. For in the body politic this spirit
+of freedom is as the red corpuscles in the blood; it carries the life
+with it. It makes the difference between a society of self-respecting
+men and women and a society of puppets.
+
+Your nation may have art, poetry, and science, all the refinements of
+civilized life, all the comforts and safeguards that human ingenuity can
+devise; but if it lose this spirit of personal and local independence,
+it is doomed and deserves its doom. As President Cleveland has well
+said, it is not the business of a government to support its people, but
+of the people to support their government; and once to lose sight
+of this vital truth is as dangerous as to trifle with some stealthy
+narcotic poison. Of the two opposite perils which have perpetually
+threatened the welfare of political society--anarchy on the one hand,
+loss of self-government on the other--Jefferson was right in maintaining
+that the latter is really the more to be dreaded because its beginnings
+are so terribly insidious. Many will understand what is meant by a
+threat of secession, where few take heed of the baneful principle
+involved in a Texas Seed-bill.
+
+That the American people are still fairly alive to the importance of
+these considerations, is due to the weary ages of struggle in which our
+forefathers have manfully contended for the right of self-government.
+From the days of Arminius and Civilis in the wilds of lower Germany to
+the days of Franklin and Jefferson in Independence Hall, we have been
+engaged in this struggle, not without some toughening of our political
+fibre, not without some refining of our moral sense. Not among our
+English forefathers only, but among all the peoples of mediaeval and
+modern Europe has the struggle gone on, with various and instructive
+results. In all parts of romanized Europe invaded and colonized by
+Teutonic tribes, self-government attempted to spring up. What may have
+been the origin of the idea of representation we do not know; like most
+origins, it seems lost in the prehistoric darkness. Wherever we find
+Teutonic tribes settling down over a wide area, we find them holding
+their primary assemblies, usually their annual March-meetings, like
+those in which Mr. Hosea Biglow and others like him have figured.
+Everywhere, too, we find some attempt at representative assemblies,
+based on the principle of the three estates, clergy, nobles, and
+commons. But nowhere save in England does the representative principle
+become firmly established, at first in county-meetings, afterward in a
+national parliament limiting the powers of the national monarch as the
+primary tribal assembly had limited the powers of the tribal chief. It
+is for this reason that we must call the method of nation-making by
+means of a representative assembly the English method. While the idea of
+representation was perhaps the common property of the Teutonic tribes,
+it was only in England that it was successfully put into practice and
+became the dominant political idea. We may therefore agree with Dr.
+Stubbs that in its political development England is the most Teutonic of
+all European countries,--the country which in becoming a great nation
+has most fully preserved the local independence so characteristic of the
+ancient Germans. The reasons for this are complicated, and to try to
+assign them all would needlessly encumber our exposition. But there is
+one that is apparent and extremely instructive. There is sometimes a
+great advantage in being able to plant political institutions in a
+virgin soil, where they run no risk of being modified or perhaps
+metamorphosed through contact with rival institutions. In America the
+Teutonic idea has been worked out even more completely than in Britain;
+and so far as institutions are concerned, our English forefathers
+settled here as in an empty country. They were not obliged to modify
+their political ideas so as to bring them into harmony with those of the
+Indians; the disparity in civilization was so great that the Indians
+were simply thrust aside, along with the wolves and buffaloes.
+[Sidenote: Teutonic March-meetings and representative assemblies]
+
+This illustration will help us to understand the peculiar features of
+the Teutonic settlement of Britain. Whether the English invaders really
+slew all the romanized Kelts who dwelt in the island, except those who
+found refuge in the mountains of Cumberland, Wales, and Cornwall, or
+fled across the channel to Brittany, we need not seek to decide. It
+is enough to point out one respect in which the Teutonic conquest was
+immeasurably more complete in Britain than in any other part of the
+empire. Everywhere else the tribes who settled upon Roman soil--the
+Goths, Vandals, Suevi, and Burgundians--were christianized, and so to
+some extent romanized, before they came to take possession. Even the
+more distant Franks had been converted to Christianity before they
+had completed their conquest of Gaul. Everywhere except in Britain,
+therefore, the conquerors had already imbibed Roman ideas, and the
+authority of Rome was in a certain sense acknowledged. There was no
+break in the continuity of political events. In Britain, on the other
+hand, there was a complete break, so that while on the continent the
+fifth and sixth centuries are seen in the full midday light of history,
+in Britain they have lapsed into the twilight of half-legendary
+tradition. The Saxon and English tribes, coming from the remote wilds
+of northern Germany, whither Roman missionaries had not yet penetrated,
+still worshipped Thor and Wodan; and their conquest of Britain was
+effected with such deadly thoroughness that Christianity was destroyed
+there, or lingered only in sequestered nooks. A land once christianized
+thus actually fell back into paganism, so that the work of converting it
+to Christianity had to be done over again. From the landing of heathen
+Hengest on the isle of Thanet to the landing of Augustine and his monks
+on the same spot, one hundred and forty-eight years elapsed, during
+which English institutions found time to take deep root in British
+soil with scarcely more interference, as to essential points, than in
+American soil twelve centuries afterward. [Sidenote: Peculiarity of the
+Teutonic conquest of Britain]
+
+The century and a half between 449 and 597 is therefore one of the most
+important epochs in the history of the people that speak the English
+language. Before settling in Britain our forefathers had been tribes in
+the upper stages of barbarism; now they began the process of coalescence
+into a nation in which the principle of self-government should be
+retained and developed. The township and its town-meeting we find there,
+as later in New England. The county-meeting we also find, while the
+county is a little state in itself and not a mere administrative
+district. And in this county-meeting we may observe a singular feature,
+something never seen before in the world, something destined to work
+out vaster political results than Caesar ever dreamed of. This
+county-meeting is not a primary assembly; all the freemen from all the
+townships cannot leave their homes and their daily business to attend
+it. Nor is it merely an assembly of notables, attended by the most
+important men of the neighbourhood. It is a representative assembly,
+attended by select men from each township. We may see in it the germ of
+the British parliament and of the American congress, as indeed of all
+modern legislative bodies, for it is a most suggestive commentary upon
+what we are saying that in all other countries which have legislatures,
+they have been copied, within quite recent times, from English or
+American models. We can seldom if ever fix a date for the beginning
+of anything, and we can by no means fix a date for the beginning of
+representative assemblies in England. We can only say that where
+we first find traces of county organization, we find traces of
+representation. Clearly, if the English conquerors of Britain had left
+the framework of Roman institutions standing there, as it remained
+standing in Gaul, there would have been great danger of this principle
+of representation not surviving. It would most likely have been crushed
+in its callow infancy. The conquerors would insensibly have fallen into
+the Roman way of doing things, as they did in Gaul. [Sidenote: Survival
+and development of Teutonic representative assembly in England]
+
+
+From the start, then, we find the English nationality growing up under
+very different conditions from those which obtained in other parts
+of Europe. So far as institutions are concerned, Teutonism was less
+modified in England than in the German fatherland itself, For the
+gradual conquest and Christianization of Germany which began with
+Charles the Great, and went on until in the thirteenth century the
+frontier had advanced eastward to the Vistula, entailed to a certain
+extent the romanization of Germany. For a thousand years after Charles
+the Great, the political head of Germany was also the political head
+of the Holy Roman Empire, and the civil and criminal code by which the
+daily life of the modern German citizen is regulated is based upon the
+jurisprudence of Rome. Nothing, perhaps, could illustrate more forcibly
+than this sheer contrast the peculiarly Teutonic character of English
+civilization. Between the eighth and the eleventh centuries, when the
+formation of English nationality was approaching completion, it received
+a fresh and powerful infusion of Teutonism in the swarms of heathen
+Northmen or Danes who occupied the eastern coasts, struggled long for
+the supremacy, and gradually becoming christianized, for a moment
+succeeded in seizing the crown. Of the invasion of partially romanized
+Northmen from Normandy which followed soon after, and which has so
+profoundly affected English society and English speech, we need notice
+here but two conspicuous features. First, it increased the power of the
+crown and the clergy, brought all England more than ever under one law,
+and strengthened the feeling of nationality. It thus made England a
+formidable military power, while at the same time it brought her into
+closer relations with continental Europe than she had held since the
+fourth century. Secondly, by superposing a new feudal nobility as the
+upper stratum of society, it transformed the Old-English thanehood into
+the finest middle-class of rural gentry and yeomanry that has ever
+existed in any country; a point of especial interest to Americans, since
+it was in this stratum of society that the two most powerful streams of
+English migration to America--the Virginia stream and the New
+England stream--alike had their source. [Sidenote: Primitive Teutonic
+institutions less modified in England than in Germany]
+
+By the thirteenth century the increasing power and pretensions of the
+crown, as the unification of English nationality went on, brought about
+a result unlike anything known on the continent of Europe; it brought
+about a resistless coalition between the great nobles, the rural gentry
+and yeomanry, and the burghers of the towns, for the purpose of curbing
+royalty, arresting the progress of centralization, and setting up
+representative government on a truly national scale. This grand result
+was partly due to peculiar circumstances which had their origin in
+the Norman conquest; but it was largely due to the political habits
+generated by long experience of local representative assemblies,--habits
+which made it comparatively easy for different classes of society to
+find their voice and use it for the attainment of ends in common. On the
+continent of Europe the encroaching sovereign had to contend with
+here and there an arrogant vassal, here and there a high-spirited and
+rebellious town; in England, in this first great crisis of popular
+government, he found himself confronted by a united people. The fruits
+of the grand combination were _first_, the wresting of Magna Charta from
+King John in 1215, and _secondly_, the meeting of the first House of
+Commons in 1265. Four years of civil war were required to secure these
+noble results. The Barons' War, of the years 1263 to 1267, was an
+event of the same order of importance as the Great Rebellion of the
+seventeenth century and the American Revolution; and among the
+founders of that political freedom which is enjoyed to-day by all
+English-speaking people, the name of Simon de Montfort, Earl of
+Leicester, deserves a place in our grateful remembrance beside the names
+of Cromwell and Washington. Simon's great victory at Lewes in 1264 must
+rank with Naseby and Yorktown. The work begun by his House of Commons
+was the same work that has continued to go on without essential
+interruption down to the days of Cleveland and Gladstone. The
+fundamental principle of political freedom is "no taxation without
+representation"; you must not take a farthing of my money without
+consulting my wishes as to the use that shall be made of it. Only
+when this principle of justice was first practically recognized, did
+government begin to divorce itself from the primitive bestial barbaric
+system of tyranny and plunder, and to ally itself with the forces that
+in the fulness of time are to bring peace on earth and good will to
+men. Of all dates in history, therefore, there is none more fit to be
+commemorated than 1265; for in that year there was first asserted and
+applied at Westminster, on a national scale, that fundamental principle
+of "no taxation without representation," that innermost kernel of the
+English Idea, which the Stamp Act Congress defended at New York exactly
+five hundred years afterward. When we think of these dates, by the way,
+we realize the import of the saying that in the sight of the Lord a
+thousand years are but as a day, and we feel that the work of the Lord
+cannot be done by the listless or the slothful. So much time and so much
+strife by sea and land has it taken to secure beyond peradventure the
+boon to mankind for which Earl Simon gave up his noble life on the field
+of Evesham! Nor without unremitting watchfulness can we be sure that the
+day of peril is yet past. From kings, indeed, we have no more to fear;
+they have come to be as spooks and bogies of the nursery. But the
+gravest dangers are those which present themselves in new forms, against
+which people's minds have not yet been fortified with traditional
+sentiments and phrases. The inherited predatory tendency of men to seize
+upon the fruits of other people's labour is still very strong, and while
+we have nothing more to fear from kings, we may yet have trouble enough
+from commercial monopolies and favoured industries, marching to the
+polls their hordes of bribed retainers. Well indeed has it been said
+that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. God never meant that in
+this fair but treacherous world in which He has placed us we should earn
+our salvation without steadfast labour. [Eternal vigilance is the price
+of liberty]
+
+To return to Earl Simon, we see that it was just in that wonderful
+thirteenth century, when the Roman idea of government might seem to
+have been attaining its richest and most fruitful development, that the
+richer and more fruitful English idea first became incarnate in the
+political constitution of a great and rapidly growing nation. It was not
+long before the struggle between the Roman Idea and the English Idea,
+clothed in various forms, became the dominating issue in European
+history. We have now to observe the rise of modern nationalities, as new
+centres of political life, out of the various provinces of the Roman
+world. In the course of this development the Teutonic representative
+assembly is at first everywhere discernible, in some form or other,
+as in the Spanish Cortes or the States-General of France, but on the
+continent it generally dies out. Only in such nooks as Switzerland and
+the Netherlands does it survive. In the great nations it succumbs before
+the encroachments of the crown. The comparatively novel Teutonic idea of
+power delegated by the people to their representatives had not become
+deeply enough rooted in the political soil of the continent; and
+accordingly we find it more and more disused and at length almost
+forgotten, while the old and deeply rooted Roman idea of power delegated
+by the governing body to its lieutenants and prefects usurps its place.
+Let us observe some of the most striking features of this growth of
+modern nationalities. [Sidenote: Conflict between Roman Idea and English
+Idea begins to become clearly visible in the thirteenth century]
+
+The reader of medieval history cannot fail to be impressed with the
+suddenness with which the culmination of the Holy Roman Empire, in
+the thirteenth century, was followed by a swift decline. The imperial
+position of the Hapsburgs was far less splendid than that of the
+Hohenstauffen; it rapidly became more German and less European, until
+by and by people began to forget what the empire originally meant.
+The change which came over the papacy was even more remarkable. The
+grandchildren of the men who had witnessed the spectacle of a king of
+France and a king of England humbled at the feet of Innocent III., the
+children of the men who had found the gigantic powers of a Frederick II.
+unequal to the task of curbing the papacy, now beheld the successors of
+St. Peter carried away to Avignon, there to be kept for seventy years
+under the supervision of the kings of France. Henceforth the glory of
+the papacy in its political aspect was to be but the faint shadow of
+that with which it had shone before. This sudden change in its position
+showed that the medieval dream of a world-empire was passing away,
+and that new powers were coming uppermost in the shape of modern
+nationalities with their national sovereigns. So long as these
+nationalities were in the weakness of their early formation, it was
+possible for pope and emperor to assert, and sometimes to come near
+maintaining, universal supremacy. But the time was now at hand when
+kings could assert their independence of the pope, while the emperor was
+fast sinking to be merely one among kings.
+
+As modern kingdoms thus grew at the expense of empire and papacy above,
+so they also grew at the expense of feudal dukedoms, earldoms, and
+baronies below. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were as fatal
+to feudalism as to world-empire and world-church. A series of wars
+occurring at this time were especially remarkable for the wholesale
+slaughter of the feudal nobility, whether on the field or under the
+headsman's axe. This was a conspicuous feature of the feuds of the
+Trastamare in Spain, of the English invasions of France, followed by the
+quarrel between Burgundians and Armagnacs, and of the great war of the
+Roses in England. So thorough-going was the butchery in England, for
+example, that only twenty-nine lay peers could be found to sit in the
+first parliament of Henry VII in 1485. The old nobility was almost
+annihilated, both in person and in property; for along with the
+slaughter there went wholesale confiscation, and this added greatly to
+the disposable wealth of the crown. The case was essentially similar in
+France and Spain. In all three countries the beginning of the sixteenth
+century saw the power of the crown increased and increasing. Its vast
+accessions of wealth made it more independent of legislative assemblies,
+and at the same time enabled it to make the baronage more subservient in
+character by filling up the vacant places with new creations of its own.
+Through the turbulent history of the next two centuries, we see the
+royal power aiming at unchecked supremacy and in the principal instances
+attaining it except in England. Absolute despotism was reached first in
+Spain, under Philip II.; in France it was reached a century later, under
+Louis XIV.; and at about the same time in the hereditary estates of
+Austria; while over all the Italian and German soil of the disorganized
+empire, except among the glaciers of Switzerland and the dykes of the
+Netherlands, the play of political forces had set up a host of petty
+tyrannies which aped the morals and manners of the great autocrats at
+Paris and Madrid and Vienna. [Sidenote: Increasing power of the crown]
+
+As we look back over this growth of modern monarchy, we cannot but
+be struck with the immense practical difficulty of creating a strong
+nationality without sacrificing self-government. Powerful, indeed, is
+the tendency toward over-centralization, toward stagnation, toward
+political death. Powerful is the tendency to revert to the Roman, if not
+to the Oriental method. As often as we reflect upon the general state of
+things at the end of the seventeenth century--the dreadful ignorance and
+misery which prevailed among most of the people of continental Europe,
+and apparently without hope of remedy--so often must we be impressed
+anew with the stupendous significance of the part played by
+self-governing England in overcoming dangers which have threatened the
+very existence of modern civilization. It is not too much to say that
+in the seventeenth century the entire political future of mankind was
+staked upon the questions that were at issue in England. To keep the
+sacred flame of liberty alive required such a rare and wonderful
+concurrence of conditions that, had our forefathers then succumbed in
+the strife, it is hard to imagine how or where the failure could have
+been repaired. Some of these conditions we have already considered; let
+us now observe one of the most important of all. Let us note the part
+played by that most tremendous of social forces, religious sentiment,
+in its relation to the political circumstances which we have passed
+in review. If we ask why it was that among modern nations absolute
+despotism was soonest and most completely established in Spain, we find
+it instructive to observe that the circumstances under which the
+Spanish monarchy grew up, during centuries of deadly struggle with the
+Mussulman, were such as to enlist the religious sentiment on the side of
+despotic methods in church and state. It becomes interesting, then, to
+observe by contrast how it was that in England the dominant religious
+sentiment came to be enlisted on the side of political freedom.
+[Illustration: Had it not been for the Puritans, political liberty would
+probably have disappeared from the world]
+
+In such an inquiry we have nothing to do with the truth or falsity of
+any system of doctrines, whether Catholic or Protestant. The legitimate
+purposes of the historian do not require him to intrude upon the
+province of the theologian. Our business is to trace the sequence of
+political cause and effect. Nor shall we get much help from crude
+sweeping statements which set forth Catholicism as invariably the enemy
+and Protestantism as invariably the ally of human liberty. The Catholic
+has a right to be offended at statements which would involve a
+Hildebrand or a St. Francis in the same historical judgment with a
+Sigismund or a Torquemada. The character of ecclesiastical as of all
+other institutions has varied with the character of the men who have
+worked them and the varying needs of the times and places in which they
+have been worked; and our intense feeling of the gratitude we owe to
+English Puritanism need in nowise diminish the enthusiasm with which we
+praise the glorious work of the mediaeval church. It is the duty of
+the historian to learn how to limit and qualify his words of blame or
+approval; for so curiously is human nature compounded of strength and
+weakness that the best of human institutions are likely to be infected
+with some germs of vice or folly. [Sidenote: Beginnings of Protestantism
+in the thirteenth century]
+
+Of no human institution is this more true than of the great medieval
+church of Gregory and Innocent when viewed in the light of its claims
+to unlimited temporal and spiritual sovereignty. In striking down the
+headship of the emperors, it would have reduced Europe to a sort of
+Oriental caliphate, had it not been checked by the rising spirit of
+nationality already referred to. But there was another and even mightier
+agency coming in to curb its undue pretensions to absolute sovereignty.
+That same thirteenth century which witnessed the culmination of its
+power witnessed also the first bold and determined manifestation of the
+Protestant temper of revolt against spiritual despotism. It was long
+before this that the earliest Protestant heresy had percolated into
+Europe, having its source, like so many other heresies, in that eastern
+world where the stimulating thought of the Greeks busied itself with the
+ancient theologies of Asia. From Armenia in the eighth century came the
+Manichaean sect of Paulicians into Thrace, and for twenty generations
+played a considerable part in the history of the Eastern Empire. In the
+Bulgarian tongue they were known as Bogomilians, or men constant in
+prayer. In Greek they were called Cathari, or "Puritans." They accepted
+the New Testament, but set little store by the Old; they laughed at
+transubstantiation, denied any mystical efficiency to baptism, frowned
+upon image-worship as no better than idolatry, despised the intercession
+of saints, and condemned the worship of the Virgin Mary. As for the
+symbol of the cross, they scornfully asked, "If any man slew the son of
+a king with a bit of wood, how could this piece of wood be dear to the
+king?" Their ecclesiastical government was in the main presbyterian, and
+in politics they showed a decided leaning toward democracy. They wore
+long faces, looked askance at frivolous amusements, and were terribly in
+earnest. Of the more obscure pages of mediaeval history, none are fuller
+of interest than those in which we decipher the westward progress of
+these sturdy heretics through the Balkan peninsula into Italy, and
+thence into southern France, where toward the end of the twelfth century
+we find their ideas coming to full blossom in the great Albigensian
+heresy. It was no light affair to assault the church in the days of
+Innocent III. The terrible crusade against the Albigenses, beginning in
+1207, was the joint work of the most powerful of popes and one of the
+most powerful of French kings. On the part of Innocent it was the
+stamping out of a revolt that threatened the very existence of
+the Catholic hierarchy; on the part of Philip Augustus it was the
+suppression of those too independent vassals the Counts of Toulouse, and
+the decisive subjection of the southern provinces to the government at
+Paris. Nowhere in European history do we read a more frightful story
+than that which tells of the blazing fires which consumed thousand after
+thousand of the most intelligent and thrifty people in France. It was
+now that the Holy Inquisition came into existence, and after forty years
+of slaughter these Albigensian Cathari or Puritans seemed exterminated.
+The practice of burning heretics, first enacted by statute in Aragon in
+1197, was adopted in most parts of Europe during the thirteenth century,
+but in England not until the beginning of the fifteenth. The Inquisition
+was never established in England. Edward II. attempted to introduce
+it in 1311 for the purpose of suppressing the Templars, but his utter
+failure showed that the instinct of self-government was too strong in
+the English people to tolerate the entrusting of so much power over
+men's lives to agents of the papacy. Mediaeval England was ignorant and
+bigoted enough, but under a representative government which so strongly
+permeated society, it was impossible to set the machinery of repression
+to work with such deadly thoroughness as it worked under the guidance of
+Roman methods. When we read the history of persecution in England, the
+story in itself is dreadful enough; but when we compare it with the
+horrors enacted in other countries, we arrive at some startling results.
+During the two centuries of English persecution, from Henry IV. to James
+I., some 400 persons were burned at the stake, and three-fourths of
+these cases occurred in 1555-57, the last three years of Mary Tudor.
+Now in a single province of Spain, in the single year 1482, about 2000
+persons were burned. The lowest estimates of the number slain for heresy
+in the Netherlands in the course of the sixteenth century place it at
+75,000. Very likely such figures are in many cases grossly exaggerated.
+But after making due allowance for this, the contrast is sufficiently
+impressive. In England the persecution of heretics was feeble and
+spasmodic, and only at one moment rose to anything like the appalling
+vigour which ordinarily characterized it in countries where the
+Inquisition was firmly established. Now among the victims of religious
+persecution must necessarily be found an unusual proportion of men and
+women more independent than the average in their thinking, and more
+bold than the average in uttering their thoughts. The Inquisition was a
+diabolical winnowing machine for removing from society the most flexible
+minds and the stoutest hearts; and among every people in which it was
+established for a length of time it wrought serious damage to the
+national character. It ruined the fair promise of Spain, and inflicted
+incalculable detriment upon the fortunes of France. No nation could
+afford to deprive itself of such a valuable element in its political
+life as was furnished in the thirteenth century by the intelligent and
+sturdy Cathari of southern Gaul. [Sidenote: The Cathari, or Puritans of
+the Eastern Empire] [Sidenote: The Albigenses] [Sidenote: Effects of
+persecution; its feebleness in England]
+
+The spirit of revolt against the hierarchy, though broken and repressed
+thus terribly by the measures of Innocent III., continued to live on
+obscurely in sequestered spots, in the mountains of Savoy, and Bosnia,
+and Bohemia, ready on occasion to spring into fresh and vigorous life.
+In the following century Protestant ideas were rapidly germinating in
+England, alike in baron's castle, in yeoman's farmstead, in citizen's
+shop, in the cloistered walks of the monastery. Henry Knighton,
+writing in the time of Richard II., declares, with the exaggeration of
+impatience, that every second man you met was a Lollard, or "babbler,"
+for such was the nickname given to these free-thinkers, of whom the most
+eminent was John Wyclif, professor at Oxford, and rector of Lutterworth,
+greatest scholar of the age. [Sidenote: Wyclif and the Lollards]
+
+The career of this man is a striking commentary upon the difference
+between England and continental Europe in the Middle Ages. Wyclif denied
+transubstantiation, disapproved of auricular confession, opposed the
+payment of Peter's pence, taught that kings should not be subject to
+prelates, translated the Bible into English and circulated it among the
+people, and even denounced the reigning pope as Antichrist; yet he was
+not put to death, because there was as yet no act of parliament for the
+burning of heretics, and in England things must be done according to the
+laws which the people had made. [1] Pope Gregory XI. issued five bulls
+against him, addressed to the king, the archbishop of Canterbury, and
+the university of Oxford; but their dictatorial tone offended the
+national feeling, and no heed was paid to them. Seventeen years after
+Wyclif's death, the statute for burning heretics was passed, and the
+persecution of Lollards began. It was feeble and ineffectual, however.
+Lollardism was never trampled out in England as Catharism was trampled
+out in France. Tracts of Wyclif and passages from his translation of
+the Bible were copied by hand and secretly passed about to be read on
+Sundays in the manor-house, or by the cottage fireside after the day's
+toil was over. The work went on quietly, but not the less effectively,
+until when the papal authority was defied by Henry VIII., it soon became
+apparent that England was half-Protestant already. It then appeared
+also that in this Reformation there were two forces cooperating,--the
+sentiment of national independence which would not brook dictation from
+Rome, and the Puritan sentiment of revolt against the hierarchy in
+general. The first sentiment had found expression again and again in
+refusals to pay tribute to Rome, in defiance of papal bulls, and in the
+famous statutes of _praemunire_, which made it a criminal offence to
+acknowledge any authority in England higher than the crown. The revolt
+of Henry VIII. was simply the carrying out of these acts of Edward I.
+and Edward III. to their logical conclusion. It completed the detachment
+of England from the Holy Roman Empire, and made her free of all the
+world. Its intent was political rather than religious. Henry, who wrote
+against Martin Luther, was far from wishing to make England a Protestant
+country. Elizabeth, who differed from her father in not caring a straw
+for theology, was by temperament and policy conservative. Yet England
+could not cease to be Papist without ceasing in some measure to be
+Catholic; nor could she in that day carry on war against Spain without
+becoming a leading champion of Protestantism. The changes in creed and
+ritual wrought by the government during this period were cautious and
+skilful; and the resulting church of England, with its long line of
+learned and liberal divines, has played a noble part in history.
+[Sidenote: Political character of Henry VIII's revolt against Rome]
+
+But along with this moderate Protestantism espoused by the English
+government, as consequent upon the assertion of English national
+independence, there grew up the fierce uncompromising democratic
+Protestantism of which the persecuted Lollards had sown the seeds. This
+was not the work of government. [Sidenote: The yeoman, Hugh Latimer]
+
+By the side of Henry VIII. stands the sublime figure of Hugh Latimer,
+most dauntless of preachers, the one man before whose stern rebuke the
+headstrong and masterful Tudor monarch quailed. It was Latimer
+that renewed the work of Wyclif. and in his life as well as in his
+martyrdom,--to use his own words of good cheer uttered while the fagots
+were kindling around him,--lighted "such a candle in England as by God's
+grace shall never be put out." This indomitable man belonged to that
+middle-class of self-governing, self-respecting yeomanry that has been
+the glory of free England and free America. He was one of the sturdy
+race that overthrew French chivalry at Crecy and twice drove the
+soldiery of a tyrant down the slope of Bunker Hill. In boyhood he worked
+on his father's farm and helped his mother to milk the thirty kine; he
+practised archery on the village green, studied in the village school,
+went to Cambridge, and became the foremost preacher of Christendom. Now
+the most thorough and radical work of the English Reformation was done
+by this class of men of which Latimer was the type. It was work that was
+national in its scope, arousing to fervent heat the strong religious
+and moral sentiment of the people, and hence it soon quite outran the
+cautious and conservative policy of the government, and tended to
+introduce changes extremely distasteful to those who wished to keep
+England as nearly Catholic as was consistent with independence of the
+pope. Hence before the end of Elizabeth's reign, we find the crown set
+almost as strongly against Puritanism as against Romanism. Hence, too,
+when under Elizabeth's successors the great decisive struggle between
+despotism and liberty was inaugurated, we find all the tremendous force
+of this newly awakened religious enthusiasm cooperating with the English
+love of self-government and carrying it under Cromwell to victory. From
+this fortunate alliance of religious and political forces has come all
+the noble and fruitful work of the last two centuries in which men of
+English speech have been labouring for the political regeneration of
+mankind. But for this alliance of forces, it is quite possible that the
+fateful seventeenth century might have seen despotism triumphant in
+England as on the continent of Europe, and the progress of civilization
+indefinitely arrested. [Sidenote: The moment of Cromwell's triumph was
+the most critical moment in history]
+
+In illustration of this possibility, observe what happened in France
+at the very time when the victorious English tendencies were shaping
+themselves in the reign of Elizabeth. In France there was a strong
+Protestant movement, but it had no such independent middle-class to
+support it as that which existed in England; nor had it been able to
+profit by such indispensable preliminary work as that which Wyclif had
+done; the horrible slaughter of the Albigenses had deprived France of
+the very people who might have played a part in some way analogous to
+that of the Lollards. Consequently the Protestant movement in France
+failed to become a national movement. Against the wretched Henry III who
+would have temporized with it, and the gallant Henry IV who honestly
+espoused it, the oppressed peasantry and townsmen made common cause by
+enlisting under the banner of the ultra-Catholic Guises. The mass of
+the people saw nothing in Protestantism but an idea favoured by the
+aristocracy and which they could not comprehend. Hence the great king
+who would have been glad to make France a Protestant country could only
+obtain his crown by renouncing his religion, while seeking to protect
+it by his memorable Edict of Nantes. But what a generous despot could
+grant, a bigoted despot might revoke; and before another century had
+elapsed, the good work done by Henry IV. was undone by Louis XIV., the
+Edict of Nantes was set aside, the process of casting out the most
+valuable political element in the community was carried to completion,
+and seven percent of the population of France was driven away and added
+to the Protestant populations of northern Germany and England and
+America. The gain to these countries and the damage to France was far
+greater than the mere figures would imply; for in determining the
+character of a community a hundred selected men and women are more
+potent than a thousand men and women taken at random. Thus while the
+Reformation in France reinforced to some extent the noble army of
+freemen, its triumphs were not to be the triumphs of Frenchmen, but of
+the race which has known how to enlist under its banner the forces that
+fight for free thought, free speech, and self-government, and all that
+these phrases imply. [Sidenote: Contrast with France; fate of the
+Huguenots]
+
+In view of these facts we may see how tremendous was the question at
+stake with the Puritans of the seventeenth century. Everywhere else the
+Roman idea seemed to have conquered or to be conquering, while they
+seemed to be left as the forlorn hope of the human race. But from the
+very day when Oliver Cromwell reached forth his mighty arm to stop the
+persecutions in Savoy, the victorious English idea began to change the
+face of things. The next century saw William Pitt allied with Frederick
+of Prussia to save the work of the Reformation in central Europe and set
+in motion the train of events that were at last to make the people of
+the Teutonic fatherland a nation. At that same moment the keenest
+minds in France were awaking to the fact that in their immediate
+neighbourhood, separated from them only by a few miles of salt water,
+was a country where people were equal in the eye of the law. It was the
+ideas of Locke and Milton, of Vane and Sidney, that, when transplanted
+into French soil, produced that violent but salutary Revolution which
+has given fresh life to the European world. And contemporaneously with
+all this, the American nation came upon the scene, equipped as no
+other nation had ever been, for the task of combining sovereignty with
+liberty, indestructible union of the whole with indestructible life in
+the parts. The English idea has thus come to be more than national,
+it has become imperial. It has come to rule, and it has come to stay.
+[Sidenote: Victory of the English Idea]
+
+We are now in a position to answer the question when the Roman Empire
+came to an end, in so far as it can be answered at all. It did not come
+to its end at the hands of an Odovakar in the year 476, or of a Mahomet
+II in 1453, or of a Napoleon in 1806. It has been coming to its end as
+the Roman idea of nation-making has been at length decisively overcome
+by the English idea. For such a fact it is impossible to assign a date,
+because it is not an event but a stage in the endless procession
+of events. But we can point to landmarks on the way. Of movements
+significant and prophetic there have been many. The whole course of the
+Protestant reformation, from the thirteenth century to the nineteenth,
+is coincident with the transfer of the world's political centre of
+gravity from the Tiber and the Rhine to the Thames and the Mississippi.
+The whole career of the men who speak English has within this period
+been the most potent agency in this transfer. In these gigantic
+processes of evolution we cannot mark beginnings or endings by years,
+hardly even by centuries. But among the significant events which
+prophesied the final triumph of the English over the Roman idea, perhaps
+the most significant--the one which marks most incisively the dawning
+of a new era--was the migration of English Puritans across the Atlantic
+Ocean, to repeat in a new environment and on a far grander scale the
+work which their forefathers had wrought in Britain. The voyage of the
+Mayflower was not in itself the greatest event in this migration; but
+it serves to mark the era, and it is only when we study it in the mood
+awakened by the general considerations here set forth that we can
+properly estimate the historic importance of the great Puritan Exodus.
+[Sidenote: Significance of the Puritan Exodus]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE PURITAN EXODUS.
+
+
+In the preceding chapter I endeavoured to set forth and illustrate some
+of the chief causes which have shifted the world's political centre of
+gravity from the Mediterranean and the Rhine to the Atlantic and the
+Mississippi; from the men who spoke Latin to the men who speak English.
+In the course of the exposition we began to catch glimpses of the
+wonderful significance of the fact that--among the people who had
+first suggested the true solution of the difficult problem of making a
+powerful nation without sacrificing local self-government--when the
+supreme day of trial came, the dominant religious sentiment was arrayed
+on the side of political freedom and against political despotism. If we
+consider merely the territorial area which it covered, or the numbers
+of men slain in its battles, the war of the English parliament against
+Charles I. seems a trivial affair when contrasted with the gigantic
+but comparatively insignificant work of barbarians like Jinghis or
+Tamerlane. But if we consider the moral and political issues involved,
+and the influence of the struggle upon the future welfare of mankind,
+we soon come to see that there never was a conflict of more world-wide
+importance than that from which Oliver Cromwell came out victorious. It
+shattered the monarchical power in England at a time when monarchical
+power was bearing down all opposition in the other great countries of
+Europe. It decided that government by the people and for the people
+should not then perish from the earth. It placed free England in a
+position of such moral advantage that within another century the
+English Idea of political life was able to react most powerfully upon
+continental Europe. It was the study of English institutions by such men
+as Montesquieu and Turgot, Voltaire and Rousseau, that gave shape and
+direction to the French Revolution. That violent but wholesome clearing
+of the air, that tremendous political and moral awakening, which ushered
+in the nineteenth century in Europe, had its sources in the spirit
+which animated the preaching of Latimer, the song of Milton, the solemn
+imagery of Bunyan, the political treatises of Locke and Sidney, the
+political measures of Hampden and Pym. The noblest type of modern
+European statesmanship, as represented by Mazzini and Stein, is the
+spiritual offspring of seventeenth-century Puritanism. To speak of
+Naseby and Marston Moor as merely English victories would be as
+absurd as to restrict the significance of Gettysburg to the state of
+Pennsylvania. If ever there were men who laid down their lives in the
+cause of all mankind, it was those grim old Ironsides whose watchwords
+were texts from Holy Writ, whose battle-cries were hymns of praise.
+[Sidenote: Influence of Puritanism upon modern Europe]
+
+It was to this unwonted alliance of intense religious enthusiasm with
+the instinct of self-government and the spirit of personal independence
+that the preservation of English freedom was due. When James I. ascended
+the English throne, the forces which prepared the Puritan revolt had
+been slowly and quietly gathering strength among the people for at least
+two centuries. The work which Wyclif had begun in the fourteenth century
+had continued to go on in spite of occasional spasmodic attempts to
+destroy it with the aid of the statute passed in 1401 for the burning
+of heretics. The Lollards can hardly be said at any time to have
+constituted a sect, marked off from the established church by the
+possession of a system of doctrines held in common. The name by which
+they were known was a nickname which might cover almost any amount
+of diversity in opinion, like the modern epithets "free-thinker" and
+"agnostic." The feature which characterized the Lollards in common was a
+bold spirit of inquiry which led them, in spite of persecution, to read
+Wyclif's English Bible and call in question such dogmas and rites of the
+church as did not seem to find warrant in the sacred text. Clad in long
+robes of coarse red wool, barefoot, with pilgrim's staff in hand, the
+Lollard preachers fared to and fro among the quaint Gothic towns and
+shaded hamlets, setting forth the word of God wherever they could find
+listeners, now in the parish church or under the vaulted roof of the
+cathedral, now in the churchyard or market-place, or on some green
+hillside. During the fifteenth century persecution did much to check
+this open preaching, but passages from Wyclif's tracts and texts from
+the Bible were copied by hand and passed about among tradesmen and
+artisans, yeomen and plough-boys, to be pondered over and talked about
+and learned by heart. It was a new revelation to the English people,
+this discovery of the Bible. Christ and his disciples seemed to come
+very near when the beautiful story of the gospels was first read in
+the familiar speech of every-day life. Heretofore they might well have
+seemed remote and unreal, just as the school-boy hardly realizes that
+the Cato and Cassius over whom he puzzles in his Latin lessons were once
+living men like his father and neighbours, and not mere nominatives
+governing a verb, or ablatives of means or instrument. Now it became
+possible for the layman to contrast the pure teachings of Christ with
+the doctrines and demeanour of the priests and monks to whom the
+spiritual guidance of Englishmen had been entrusted. Strong and
+self-respecting men and women, accustomed to manage their own affairs,
+could not but be profoundly affected by the contrast. [Sidenote: Work of
+the Lollards]
+
+While they were thus led more and more to appeal to the Bible as the
+divine standard of right living and right thinking, at the same time
+they found in the sacred volume the treasures of a most original and
+noble literature unrolled before them; stirring history and romantic
+legend, cosmical theories and priestly injunctions, profound metaphysics
+and pithy proverbs, psalms of unrivalled grandeur and pastorals of
+exquisite loveliness, parables fraught with solemn meaning, the mournful
+wisdom of the preacher, the exultant faith of the apostle, the matchless
+eloquence of Job and Isaiah, the apocalyptic ecstasy of St. John. At a
+time when there was as yet no English literature for the common people,
+this untold wealth of Hebrew literature was implanted in the English
+mind as in a virgin soil. Great consequences have flowed from the fact
+that the first truly popular literature in England--the first which
+stirred the hearts of all classes of people, and filled their minds with
+ideal pictures and their every-day speech with apt and telling phrases--
+was the literature comprised within the Bible. The superiority of the
+common English version of the Bible, made in the reign of James I., over
+all other versions, is a fact generally admitted by competent critics.
+The sonorous Latin of the Vulgate is very grand, but in sublimity of
+fervour as in the unconscious simplicity of strength it is surpassed
+by the English version, which is scarcely if at all inferior to the
+original, while it remains to-day, and will long remain, the noblest
+monument of English speech. The reason for this is obvious. The common
+English version of the Bible was made by men who were not aiming at
+literary effect, but simply gave natural expression to the feelings
+which for several generations had clustered around the sacred text. They
+spoke with the voice of a people, which is more than the voice of the
+most highly gifted man. They spoke with the voice of a people to whom
+the Bible had come to mean all that it meant to the men who wrote it. To
+the Englishmen who listened to Latimer, to the Scotchmen who listened
+to Knox, the Bible more than filled the place which in modern times
+is filled by poem and essay, by novel and newspaper and scientific
+treatise. To its pages they went for daily instruction and comfort,
+with its strange Semitic names they baptized their children, upon its
+precepts, too often misunderstood and misapplied, they sought to build
+up a rule of life that might raise them above the crude and unsatisfying
+world into which they were born. [Sidenote: The English version of the
+Bible]
+
+It would be wrong to accredit all this awakening of spiritual life in
+England to Wyclif and the Lollards, for it was only after the Bible, in
+the translations of Tyndall and Coverdale, had been made free to the
+whole English people in the reign of Edward VI. that its significance
+began to be apparent; and it was only a century later, in the time of
+Cromwell and Milton, that its full fruition was reached. It was with the
+Lollards, however, that the spiritual awakening began and was continued
+until its effects, when they came, were marked by surprising maturity
+and suddenness. Because the Lollards were not a clearly defined sect, it
+was hard to trace the manifold ramifications of their work. During the
+terrible Wars of the Roses, contemporary chroniclers had little or
+nothing to say about the labours of these humble men, which seemed
+of less importance than now, when we read them in the light of their
+world-wide results. From this silence some modern historians have
+carelessly inferred that the nascent Protestantism of the Lollards had
+been extinguished by persecution under the Lancastrian kings, and was in
+nowise continuous with modern English Protestantism. Nothing could be
+more erroneous. The extent to which the Lollard leaven had permeated all
+classes of English society was first clearly revealed when Henry VIII.
+made his domestic affairs the occasion for a revolt against the Papacy.
+Despot and brute as he was in many ways, Henry had some characteristics
+which enabled him to get on well with his people. He not only
+represented the sentiment of national independence, but he had a truly
+English reverence for the forms of law. In his worst acts he relied upon
+the support of his Parliament, which he might in various ways cajole or
+pack, but could not really enslave. In his quarrel with Rome he could
+have achieved but little, had he not happened to strike a chord of
+feeling to which the English people, trained by this slow and subtle
+work of the Lollards, responded quickly and with a vehemence upon which
+he had not reckoned. As if by magic, the fabric of Romanism was broken
+to pieces in England, monasteries were suppressed and their abbots
+hanged, the authority of the Pope was swept away, and there was no
+powerful party, like that of the Guises in France to make such sweeping
+measures the occasion for civil war. The whole secret of Henry's swift
+success lay in the fact that the English people were already more than
+half Protestant in temper, and needed only an occasion for declaring
+themselves. Hence, as soon as Catholic Henry died, his youthful son
+found himself seated on the throne of a Protestant nation. The terrible
+but feeble persecution which followed under Mary did much to strengthen
+the extreme Protestant sentiment by allying it with the outraged feeling
+of national independence. The bloody work of the grand-daughter of
+Ferdinand and Isabella, the doting wife of Philip II., was rightly felt
+to be Spanish work; and never, perhaps, did England feel such a sense of
+relief as on the auspicious day which welcomed to the throne the great
+Elizabeth, an Englishwoman in every fibre, and whose mother withal was
+the daughter of a plain country gentleman. But the Marian persecution
+not only increased the strength of the extreme Protestant sentiment, but
+indirectly it supplied it with that Calvinistic theology which was to
+make it indomitable. Of the hundreds of ministers and laymen who fled
+from England in 1555 and the two following years, a great part found
+their way to Geneva, and thus came under the immediate personal
+influence of that man of iron who taught the very doctrines for which
+their souls were craving, and who was then at the zenith of his power.
+[Sidenote: Secret of Henry VIII.'s swift success in his revolt against
+Rome] [Sidenote: Effects of the persecution under Mary]
+
+Among all the great benefactors of mankind the figure of Calvin is
+perhaps the least attractive. He was, so to speak, the constitutional
+lawyer of the Reformation, with vision as clear, with head as cool, with
+soul as dry, as any old solicitor in rusty black that ever dwelt in
+chambers in Lincoln's Inn. His sternness was that of the judge who
+dooms a criminal to the gallows. His theology had much in it that is in
+striking harmony with modern scientific philosophy, and much in it, too,
+that the descendants of his Puritan converts have learned to loathe as
+sheer diabolism. It is hard for us to forgive the man who burned Michael
+Servetus, even though it was the custom of the time to do such things
+and the tender-hearted Melanchthon found nothing to blame in it. It is
+not easy to speak of Calvin with enthusiasm, as it comes natural to
+speak of the genial, whole-souled, many-sided, mirth-and-song-loving
+Luther. Nevertheless it would be hard to overrate the debt which mankind
+owe to Calvin. The spiritual father of Coligny, of William the Silent,
+and of Cromwell must occupy a foremost rank among the champions of
+modern democracy. Perhaps not one of the mediaeval popes was more
+despotic in temper than Calvin; but it is not the less true that the
+promulgation of his theology was one of the longest steps that mankind
+have taken toward personal freedom. Calvinism left the individual man
+alone in the presence of his God. His salvation could not be wrought by
+priestly ritual, but only by the grace of God abounding in his soul; and
+wretched creature that he felt himself to be, through the intense moral
+awakening of which this stern theology was in part the expression, his
+soul was nevertheless of infinite value, and the possession of it was
+the subject of an everlasting struggle between the powers of heaven and
+the powers of hell. In presence of the awful responsibility of life, all
+distinctions of rank and fortune vanished; prince and pauper were alike
+the helpless creatures of Jehovah and suppliants for his grace. Calvin
+did not originate these doctrines; in announcing them he was but setting
+forth, as he said, the Institutes of the Christian religion; but in
+emphasizing this aspect of Christianity, in engraving it upon men's
+minds with that keen-edged logic which he used with such unrivalled
+skill, Calvin made them feel, as it had perhaps never been felt before,
+the dignity and importance of the individual human soul. It was a
+religion fit to inspire men who were to be called upon to fight for
+freedom, whether in the marshes of the Netherlands or on the moors of
+Scotland. In a church, moreover, based upon such a theology there was
+no room for prelacy. Each single church tended to become an independent
+congregation of worshippers, constituting one of the most effective
+schools that has ever existed for training men in local self-government.
+[Sidenote: Calvin's theology in its political bearings]
+
+When, therefore, upon the news of Elizabeth's accession to the throne,
+the Protestant refugees made their way back to England, they came as
+Calvinistic Puritans. Their stay upon the Continent had been short, but
+it had been just enough to put the finishing touch upon the work that
+had been going on since the days of Wyclif. Upon such men and their
+theories Elizabeth could not look with favour. With all her father's
+despotic temper, Elizabeth possessed her mother's fine tact, and
+she represented so grandly the feeling of the nation in its
+life-and-death-struggle with Spain and the pope, that never perhaps in
+English history has the crown wielded so much real power as during the
+five-and-forty years of her wonderful reign.
+
+One day Elizabeth asked a lady of the court how she contrived to retain
+her husband's affection. The lady replied that "she had confidence
+in her husband's understanding and courage, well founded on her own
+steadfastness not to offend or thwart, but to cherish and obey, whereby
+she did persuade her husband of her own affection, and in so doing did
+command his." "Go to, go to, mistress," cried the queen, "You are
+wisely bent, I find. After such sort do I keep the good will of all
+my husbands, my good people; for if they did not rest assured of some
+special love towards them, they would not readily yield me such good
+obedience." [2] Such a theory of government might work well in the hands
+of an Elizabeth, and in the circumstances in which England was then
+placed; but it could hardly be worked by a successor. The seeds of
+revolt were already sown. The disposition to curb the sovereign was
+growing and would surely assert itself as soon as it should have some
+person less loved and respected than Elizabeth to deal with. The queen
+in some measure foresaw this, and in the dogged independence and
+uncompromising enthusiasm of the Puritans she recognized the rock on
+which the monarchy might dash itself into pieces. She therefore hated
+the Puritans, and persecuted them zealously with one hand, while
+circumstances forced her in spite of herself to aid and abet them with
+the other. She could not maintain herself against Spain without helping
+the Dutch and the Huguenots; but every soldier she sent across the
+channel came back, if he came at all, with his head full of the
+doctrines of Calvin; and these stalwart converts were reinforced by the
+refugees from France and the Netherlands who came flocking into English
+towns to set up their thrifty shops and hold prayer-meetings in their
+humble chapels. To guard the kingdom against the intrigues of Philip and
+the Guises and the Queen of Scots, it was necessary to choose the most
+zealous Protestants for the most responsible positions, and such men
+were more than likely to be Calvinists and Puritans. Elizabeth's great
+ministers, Burleigh, Walsingham, and Nicholas Bacon, were inclined
+toward Puritanism; and so were the naval heroes who won the most
+fruitful victories of that century, by shattering the maritime power of
+Spain and thus opening the way for Englishmen to colonize North America.
+If we would realize the dangers that would have beset the Mayflower and
+her successors but for the preparatory work of these immortal sailors,
+we must remember the dreadful fate of Ribault and his Huguenot followers
+in Florida, twenty-three years before that most happy and glorious
+event, the destruction of the Spanish Armada. But not even the devoted
+men and women who held their prayer-meetings in the Mayflower's cabin
+were more constant in prayer or more assiduous in reading the Bible than
+the dauntless rovers, Drake and Hawkins, Gilbert and Cavendish. In the
+church itself, too, the Puritan spirit grew until in 1575-83 it seized
+upon Grindal, archbishop of Canterbury, who incurred the queen's
+disfavour by refusing to meddle with the troublesome reformers or to
+suppress their prophesyings. By the end of the century the majority
+of country gentlemen and of wealthy merchants in the towns had become
+Puritans, and the new views had made great headway in both universities,
+while at Cambridge they had become dominant. [Sidenote: Elizabeth's
+policy, and its effects] [Sidenote: Puritan Sea-rovers]
+
+This allusion to the universities may serve to introduce the very
+interesting topic of the geographical distribution of Puritanism in
+England. No one can study the history of the two universities without
+being impressed with the greater conservatism of Oxford, and the greater
+hospitality of Cambridge toward new ideas. Possibly the explanation
+may have some connection with the situation of Cambridge upon the East
+Anglian border. The eastern counties of England have often been remarked
+as rife in heresy and independency. For many generations the coast
+region between the Thames and the Humber was a veritable _litus
+haereticum._ Longland, bishop of Lincoln in 1520, reported Lollardism as
+especially vigorous and obstinate in his diocese, where more than two
+hundred heretics were once brought before him in the course of a single
+visitation. It was in Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, and
+among the fens of Ely, Cambridge, and Huntingdon, that Puritanism was
+strongest at the end of the sixteenth century. It was as member and
+leading spirit of the Eastern Counties Association that Oliver Cromwell
+began his military career; and in so far as there was anything sectional
+in the struggle between Charles I. and the Long Parliament, it was a
+struggle which ended in the victory of east over west. East Anglia was
+from first to last the one region in which the supremacy of Parliament
+was unquestionable and impregnable, even after the strength of its
+population had been diminished by sending some thousands of picked men
+and women to America. While every one of the forty counties of England
+was represented in the great Puritan exodus, the East Anglian counties
+contributed to it far more than all the rest. Perhaps it would not be
+far out of the way to say that two-thirds of the American people who can
+trace their ancestry to New England might follow it back to the East
+Anglian shires of the mother-country; one-sixth might follow it to those
+southwestern countries--Devonshire, Dorset, and Somerset--which so
+long were foremost in maritime enterprise; one-sixth to other parts of
+England. I would not insist upon the exactness of such figures, in a
+matter where only a rough approximation is possible; but I do not think
+they overstate the East Anglian preponderance. It was not by accident
+that the earliest counties of Massachusetts were called Norfolk,
+Suffolk, and Essex, or that Boston in Lincolnshire gave its name to the
+chief city of New England. The native of Connecticut or Massachusetts
+who wanders about rural England to-day finds no part of it so homelike
+as the cosy villages and smiling fields and quaint market towns as he
+fares leisurely and in not too straight a line from Ipswich toward Hull.
+Countless little unobtrusive features remind him of home. The very names
+on the sign-boards over the sleepy shops have an unwontedly familiar
+look. In many instances the homestead which his forefathers left, when
+they followed Winthrop or Hooker to America, is still to be found,
+well-kept and comfortable; the ancient manor-house built of massive
+unhewn stone, yet in other respects much like the New England farmhouse,
+with its long sloping roof and gable end toward the road, its staircase
+with twisted balusters running across the shallow entry-way, its low
+ceilings with their sturdy oaken beams, its spacious chimneys, and its
+narrow casements from which one might have looked out upon the anxious
+march of Edward IV. from Ravenspur to the field of victory at Barnet
+in days when America was unknown. Hard by, in the little parish church
+which has stood for perhaps a thousand years, plain enough and bleak
+enough to suit the taste of the sternest Puritan, one may read upon
+the cold pavement one's own name and the names of one's friends and
+neighbours in startling proximity, somewhat worn and effaced by the
+countless feet that have trodden there. And yonder on the village green
+one comes with bated breath upon the simple inscription which tells of
+some humble hero who on that spot in the evil reign of Mary suffered
+death by fire. Pursuing thus our interesting journey, we may come at
+last to the quiet villages of Austerfield and Scrooby, on opposite
+banks of the river Idle, and just at the corner of the three shires of
+Lincoln, York, and Nottingham. It was from this point that the Puritan
+exodus to America was begun. [Sidenote: Puritanism was strongest in the
+eastern counties] [Sidenote: Preponderance of East Anglia in the Puritan
+exodus]
+
+It was not, however, in the main stream of Puritanism, but in one of its
+obscure rivulets that this world-famous movement originated. During the
+reign of Elizabeth it was not the purpose of the Puritans to separate
+themselves from the established church of which the sovereign was the
+head, but to remain within it and reform it according to their own
+notions. For a time they were partially successful in this work,
+especially in simplifying the ritual and in giving a Calvinistic tinge
+to the doctrines. In doing this they showed no conscious tendency toward
+freedom of thought, but rather a bigotry quite as intense as that which
+animated the system against which they were fighting. The most advanced
+liberalism of Elizabeth's time was not to be found among the Puritans,
+but in the magnificent treatise on "Ecclesiastical Polity" by the
+churchman Richard Hooker. But the liberalism of this great writer, like
+that of Erasmus a century earlier, was not militant enough to meet the
+sterner demands of the time. It could not then ally itself with the
+democratic spirit, as Puritanism did. It has been well said that while
+Luther was the prophet of the Reformation that has been, Erasmus was the
+prophet of the Reformation that is to come, and so it was to some extent
+with the Puritans and Hooker. The Puritan fight against the hierarchy
+was a political necessity of the time, something without which no real
+and thorough reformation could then be effected. In her antipathy to
+this democratic movement, Elizabeth vexed and tormented the Puritans
+as far as she deemed it prudent; and in the conservative temper of the
+people she found enough support to prevent their transforming the church
+as they would have liked to do. Among the Puritans themselves, indeed,
+there was no definite agreement on this point. Some would have stopped
+short with Presbyterianism, while others held that "new presbyter was
+but old priest writ large," and so pressed on to Independency. It was
+early in Elizabeth's reign that the zeal of these extreme brethren,
+inflamed by persecution, gave rise to the sect of Separatists, who
+flatly denied the royal supremacy over ecclesiastical affairs, and
+asserted the right to set up churches of their own, with pastors
+and elders and rules of discipline, independent of queen or bishop.
+[Sidenote: Puritanism was not intentionally allied with liberalism]
+
+In 1567 the first congregation of this sort, consisting of about a
+hundred persons assembled in a hall in Anchor Lane in London, was
+forcibly broken up and thirty-one of the number were sent to jail and
+kept there for nearly a year. By 1576 the Separatists had come to be
+recognized as a sect, under the lead of Robert Brown, a man of high
+social position, related to the great Lord Burleigh. Brown fled to
+Holland, where he preached to a congregation of English exiles, and
+wrote books which were smuggled into England and privately circulated
+there, much to the disgust, not only of the queen, but of all parties,
+Puritans as well as High Churchmen. The great majority of Puritans,
+whose aim was not to leave the church, but to stay in it and control
+it, looked with dread and disapproval upon these extremists who seemed
+likely to endanger their success by forcing them into deadly opposition
+to the crown. Just as in the years which ushered in our late Civil War,
+the opponents of the Republicans sought to throw discredit upon them by
+confusing them with the little sect of Abolitionists; and just as the
+Republicans, in resenting the imputation, went so far as to frown upon
+the Abolitionists, so that in December, 1860, men who had just voted for
+Mr. Lincoln were ready to join in breaking up "John Brown meetings" in
+Boston; so it was with religious parties in the reign of Elizabeth. The
+opponents of the Puritans pointed to the Separatists, and cried, "See
+whither your anarchical doctrines are leading!" and in their eagerness
+to clear themselves of this insinuation, the leading Puritans were as
+severe upon the Separatists as anybody. It is worthy of note that in
+both instances the imputation, so warmly resented, was true. Under the
+pressure of actual hostilities the Republicans did become Abolitionists,
+and in like manner, when in England it came to downright warfare the
+Puritans became Separatists. But meanwhile it fared ill with the little
+sect which everybody hated and despised. Their meetings were broken up
+by mobs. In an old pamphlet describing a "tumult in Fleet Street, raised
+by the disorderly preachment, pratings, and prattlings of a swarm of
+Separatists," one reads such sentences as the following: "At length they
+catcht one of them alone, but they kickt him so vehemently as if they
+meant to beat him into a jelly. It is ambiguous whether they have kil'd
+him or no, but for a certainty they did knock him about as if they meant
+to pull him to pieces. I confesse it had been no matter if they had
+beaten the whole tribe in the like manner." For their leaders the
+penalty was more serious. The denial of the queen's ecclesiastical
+supremacy could be treated as high treason, and two of Brown's friends,
+convicted of circulating his books, were sent to the gallows. In spite
+of these dangers Brown returned to England in 1585. William the Silent
+had lately been murdered, and heresy in Holland was not yet safe from
+the long arm of the Spaniard. Brown trusted in Lord Burleigh's ability
+to protect him, but in 1588, finding himself in imminent danger, he
+suddenly recanted and accepted a comfortable living under the bishops
+who had just condemned him. His followers were already known as
+Brownists; henceforth their enemies took pains to call them so and twit
+them with holding doctrines too weak for making martyrs. [Sidenote:
+Robert Brown and the Separatists]
+
+The flimsiness of Brown's moral texture prevented him from becoming the
+leader in the Puritan exodus to New England. That honour was reserved
+for William Brewster, son of a country gentleman who had for many
+years been postmaster at Scrooby. The office was then one of high
+responsibility and influence. After taking his degree at Cambridge,
+Brewster became private secretary to Sir William Davison, whom he
+accompanied on his mission to the Netherlands. When Davison's public
+career came to an end in 1587, Brewster returned to Scrooby, and soon
+afterward succeeded his father as postmaster, in which position he
+remained until 1607. During the interval Elizabeth died, and James
+Stuart came from Scotland to take her place on the throne. [Sidenote:
+William Brewster]
+
+The feelings with which the late queen had regarded Puritanism were mild
+compared with the sentiments entertained by her successor. For some
+years he had been getting worsted in his struggle with the Presbyterians
+of the northern kingdom. His vindictive memory treasured up the day when
+a mighty Puritan preacher had in public twitched him by the sleeve and
+called him "God's silly vassal." "I tell you, sir," said Andrew Melville
+on that occasion, "there are two kings and two kingdoms in Scotland.
+There is Christ Jesus the King, and his kingdom the Kirk, whose subject
+James VI. is, and of whose kingdom not a king, nor a lord, nor a head,
+but a member. And they whom Christ hath called to watch over his kirk
+and govern his spiritual kingdom have sufficient power and authority so
+to do both together and severally." In this bold and masterful speech
+we have the whole political philosophy of Puritanism, as in a nutshell.
+Under the guise of theocratic fanaticism, and in words as arrogant as
+ever fell from priestly lips, there was couched the assertion of the
+popular will against despotic privilege. Melville could say such things
+to the king's face and walk away unharmed, because there stood behind
+him a people fully aroused to the conviction that there is an eternal
+law of God, which kings no less than scullions must obey. [3] Melville
+knew this full well, and so did James know it in the bitterness of his
+heart. He would have no such mischievous work in England. He despised
+Elizabeth's grand national policy which his narrow intellect could not
+comprehend. He could see that in fighting Spain and aiding Dutchmen and
+Huguenots she was strengthening the very spirit that sought to pull
+monarchy down. In spite of her faults, which were neither few nor small,
+the patriotism of that fearless woman was superior to any personal
+ambition. It was quite otherwise with James. He was by no means
+fearless, and he cared more for James Stuart than for either England or
+Scotland. He had an overweening opinion of his skill in kingcraft. In
+coming to Westminster it was his policy to use his newly acquired
+power to break down the Puritan party in both kingdoms and to fasten
+episcopacy upon Scotland. In pursuing this policy he took no heed of
+English national sentiment, but was quite ready to defy and insult it,
+even to the point of making--before children who remembered the Armada
+had yet reached middle age--an alliance with the hated Spaniard. In such
+wise James succeeded in arraying against the monarchical principle the
+strongest forces of English life,--the sentiment of nationality, the
+sentiment of personal freedom, and the uncompromising religious fervour
+of Calvinism; and out of this invincible combination of forces has been
+wrought the nobler and happier state of society in which we live to-day.
+[Sidenote: James Stuart and Andrew Melville]
+
+Scarcely ten months had James been king of England when he invited
+the leading Puritan clergymen to meet himself and the bishops in a
+conference at Hampton Court, as he wished to learn what changes they
+would like to make in the government and ritual of the church. In the
+course of the discussion he lost his temper and stormed, as was his
+wont. [Sidenote: King James's view of the political situation]
+
+The mention of the word "presbytery" lashed him into fury. "A Scottish
+presbytery," he cried, "agreeth as well with a monarchy as God and the
+Devil. Then Jack and Tom and Will and Dick shall meet, and at their
+pleasures censure me and my council and all our proceedings .... Stay,
+I pray you, for one seven years, before you demand that from me, and if
+then you find me pursy and fat, and my windpipes stuffed, I will perhaps
+hearken to you .... Until you find that I grow lazy, let that alone."
+One of the bishops declared that in this significant tirade his Majesty
+spoke by special inspiration from Heaven! The Puritans saw that their
+only hope lay in resistance. If any doubt remained, it was dispelled by
+the vicious threat with which the king broke up the conference. "I will
+_make_ them conform," said he, "or I will harry them out of the land."
+
+These words made a profound sensation in England, as well they might,
+for they heralded the struggle which within half a century was to
+deliver up James's son to the executioner. The Parliament of 1604 met
+in angrier mood than any Parliament which had assembled at Westminster
+since the dethronement of Richard II. Among the churches non-conformity
+began more decidedly to assume the form of secession. The key-note of
+the conflict was struck at Scrooby. Staunch Puritan as he was, Brewster
+had not hitherto favoured the extreme measures of the Separatists. Now
+he withdrew from the church, and gathered together a company of men and
+women who met on Sundays for divine service in his own drawing-room at
+Scrooby Manor. In organizing this independent Congregationalist
+society, Brewster was powerfully aided by John Robinson, a native of
+Lincolnshire. Robinson was then thirty years of age, and had taken his
+master's degree at Cambridge in 1600. He was a man of great learning and
+rare sweetness of temper, and was moreover distinguished for a broad and
+tolerant habit of mind too seldom found among the Puritans of that day.
+Friendly and unfriendly writers alike bear witness to his spirit of
+Christian charity and the comparatively slight value which he attached
+to orthodoxy in points of doctrine; and we can hardly be wrong in
+supposing that the comparatively tolerant behaviour of the Plymouth
+colonists, whereby they were contrasted with the settlers of
+Massachusetts, was in some measure due to the abiding influence of the
+teachings of this admirable man. Another important member of the Scrooby
+congregation was William Bradford, of the neighbouring village of
+Austerfield, then a lad of seventeen years, but already remarkable for
+maturity of intelligence and weight of character. Afterward governor of
+Plymouth for nearly thirty years, he became the historian of his colony;
+and to his picturesque chronicle, written in pure and vigorous English,
+we are indebted for most that we know of the migration that started
+from Scrooby and ended in Plymouth. [Sidenote: The congregation of
+Separatists at Scrooby]
+
+It was in 1606--two years after King James's truculent threat--that
+this independent church of Scrooby was organized. Another year had not
+elapsed before its members had suffered so much at the hands of officers
+of the law, that they began to think of following the example of former
+heretics and escaping to Holland. After an unsuccessful attempt in
+the autumn of 1607, they at length succeeded a few months later in
+accomplishing their flight to Amsterdam, where they hoped to find a
+home. But here they found the English exiles who had preceded them so
+fiercely involved in doctrinal controversies, that they decided to
+go further in search of peace and quiet. This decision, which we may
+ascribe to Robinson's wise counsels, served to keep the society of
+Pilgrims from getting divided and scattered. They reached Leyden in
+1609, just as the Spanish government had sullenly abandoned the hopeless
+task of conquering the Dutch, and had granted to Holland the Twelve
+Years Truce. During eleven of these twelve years the Pilgrims remained
+in Leyden, supporting themselves by various occupations, while their
+numbers increased from 300 to more than 1000. Brewster opened a
+publishing house, devoted mainly to the issue of theological books.
+Robinson accepted a professorship in the university, and engaged in the
+defence of Calvinism against the attacks of Episcopius, the successor
+of Arminius. The youthful Bradford devoted himself to the study of
+languages,--Dutch, French, Latin, Greek, and finally Hebrew; wishing,
+as he said, to "see with his own eyes the ancient oracles of God in all
+their native beauty." During their sojourn in Leyden the Pilgrims were
+introduced to a strange and novel spectacle,--the systematic legal
+toleration of all persons, whether Catholic or Protestant, who called
+themselves followers of Christ. Not that there was not plenty of
+intolerance in spirit, but the policy inaugurated by the idolized
+William the Silent held it in check by law. All persons who came to
+Holland, and led decorous lives there, were protected in their opinions
+and customs. By contemporary writers in other countries this eccentric
+behaviour of the Dutch government was treated with unspeakable scorn.
+"All strange religions flock thither," says one; it is "a common harbour
+of all heresies," a "cage of unclean birds," says another; "the great
+mingle mangle of religion," says a third. [4] In spite of the relief
+from persecution, however, the Pilgrims were not fully satisfied with
+their new home. The expiration of the truce with Spain might prove that
+this relief was only temporary; and at any rate, complete toleration
+did not fill the measure of their wants. Had they come to Holland as
+scattered bands of refugees, they might have been absorbed into the
+Dutch population, as Huguenot refugees have been absorbed in Germany,
+England, and America. But they had come as an organized community, and
+absorption into a foreign nation was something to be dreaded. They
+wished to preserve their English speech and English traditions, keep up
+their organization, and find some favoured spot where they might lay the
+corner-stone of a great Christian state. The spirit of nationality was
+strong in them; the spirit of self-government was strong in them; and
+the only thing which could satisfy these feelings was such a migration
+as had not been seen since ancient times, a migration like that of
+Phokaians to Massilia or Tyrians to Carthage. [Sidenote: The flight to
+Holland] [Sidenote: Why the Pilgrims did not stay there]
+
+It was too late in the world's history to carry out such a scheme upon
+European soil. Every acre of territory there was appropriated. The only
+favourable outlook was upon the Atlantic coast of America, where English
+cruisers had now successfully disputed the pretensions of Spain, and
+where after forty years of disappointment and disaster a flourishing
+colony had at length been founded in Virginia. The colonization of the
+North American coast had now become part of the avowed policy of the
+British government. In 1606 a great joint-stock company was formed for
+the establishment of two colonies in America. The branch which was to
+take charge of the proposed southern colony had its headquarters in
+London; the management of the northern branch was at Plymouth in
+Devonshire. Hence the two branches are commonly spoken of as the London
+and Plymouth companies. The former was also called the Virginia Company,
+and the latter the North Virginia Company, as the name of Virginia was
+then loosely applied to the entire Atlantic coast north of Florida. The
+London Company had jurisdiction from 34 degrees to 38 degrees north
+latitude; the Plymouth Company had jurisdiction from 45 degrees down to
+41 degrees; the intervening territory, between 38 degrees and 41 degrees
+was to go to whichever company should first plant a self-supporting
+colony. The local government of each colony was to be entrusted to a
+council resident in America and nominated by the king; while general
+supervision over both colonies was to be exercised by a council resident
+in England. [Sidenote: The London and Plymouth companies]
+
+In pursuance of this general plan, though with some variations in
+detail, the settlement of Jamestown had been begun in 1607, and its
+success was now beginning to seem assured. On the other hand all the
+attempts which had been made to the north of the fortieth parallel had
+failed miserably. As early as 1602 Bartholomew Gosnold, with 32 men, had
+landed on the headland which they named Cape Cod from the fish found
+thereabouts in great numbers. This was the first English name given to
+any spot in that part of America, and so far as known these were the
+first Englishmen that ever set foot there. They went on and gave names
+to Martha's Vineyard and the Elizabeth Islands in Buzzard's Bay; and
+on Cuttyhunk they built some huts with the intention of remaining, but
+after a month's experience they changed their mind and went back to
+England. Gosnold's story interested other captains, and on Easter
+Sunday, 1605, George Weymouth set sail for North Virginia, as it was
+called. He found Cape Cod and coasted northward as far as the Kennebec
+river, up which he sailed for many miles. Weymouth kidnapped five
+Indians and carried them to England, that they might learn the language
+and acquire a wholesome respect for the arts of civilization and the
+resistless power of white men. His glowing accounts of the spacious
+harbours, the abundance of fish and game, the noble trees, the luxuriant
+herbage, and the balmy climate, aroused general interest in England, and
+doubtless had some influence upon the formation, in the following year,
+of the great joint-stock company just described. The leading spirit of
+the Plymouth Company was Sir John Popham, chief-justice of England, and
+he was not disposed to let his friends of the southern branch excel him
+in promptness. Within three months after the founding of Jamestown, a
+party of 120 colonists, led by the judge's kinsman George Popham, landed
+at the mouth of the Kennebec, and proceeded to build a rude village of
+some fifty cabins, with storehouse, chapel, and block-house. When
+they landed in August they doubtless shared Weymouth's opinion of the
+climate. These Englishmen had heard of warm countries like Italy and
+cold countries like Russia; harsh experience soon taught them that there
+are climates in which the summer of Naples may alternate with the winter
+of Moscow. The president and many others fell sick and died. News came
+of the death of Sir John Popham in England, and presently the weary and
+disappointed settlers abandoned their enterprise and returned to their
+old homes. Their failure spread abroad in England the opinion that
+North Virginia was uninhabitable by reason of the cold, and no further
+attempts were made upon that coast until in 1614 it was visited by
+Captain John Smith. [Sidenote: First exploration of the New England
+coast]
+
+The romantic career of this gallant and garrulous hero did not end with
+his departure from the infant colony at Jamestown. By a curious destiny
+his fame is associated with the beginnings of both the southern and the
+northern portions of the United States. To Virginia Smith may be said to
+have given its very existence as a commonwealth; to New England he
+gave its name. In 1614 he came over with two ships to North Virginia,
+explored its coast minutely from the Penobscot river to Cape Cod, and
+thinking it a country of such extent and importance as to deserve a name
+of its own, rechristened it New England. On returning home he made a
+very good map of the coast and dotted it with English names suggested by
+Prince Charles. Of these names Cape Elizabeth, Cape Ann, Charles River,
+and Plymouth still remain where Smith placed them. In 1615 Smith again
+set sail for the New World, this time with a view to planting a colony
+under the auspices of the Plymouth Company, but his talent for strange
+adventures had not deserted him. He was taken prisoner by a French
+fleet, carried hither and thither on a long cruise, and finally set
+ashore at Rochelle, whence, without a penny in his pocket, he contrived
+to make his way back to England. Perhaps Smith's life of hardship may
+have made him prematurely old. After all his wild and varied experience
+he was now only in his thirty-seventh year, but he does not seem to have
+gone on any more voyages. The remaining sixteen years of his life
+were spent quietly in England in writing books, publishing maps, and
+otherwise stimulating the public interest in the colonization of the New
+World. But as for the rocky coast of New England, which he had explored
+and named, he declared that he was not so simple as to suppose that any
+other motive than riches would "ever erect there a commonwealth or draw
+company from their ease and humours at home, to stay in New England."
+[Sidenote: John Smith]
+
+In this opinion, however, the bold explorer was mistaken. Of all
+migrations of peoples the settlement of New England is preeminently
+the one in which the almighty dollar played the smallest part, however
+important it may since have become as a motive power. It was left for
+religious enthusiasm to achieve what commercial enterprise had failed
+to accomplish. By the summer of 1617 the Pilgrim society at Leyden had
+decided to send a detachment of its most vigorous members to lay
+the foundations of a Puritan state in America. There had been much
+discussion as to the fittest site for such a colony. Many were in favour
+of Guiana, which Sir Walter Raleigh had described in such glowing
+colours; but it was thought that the tropical climate would be
+ill-suited to northern men of industrious and thrifty habit, and the
+situation, moreover, was dangerously exposed to the Spaniards. Half a
+century had scarcely elapsed since the wholesale massacre of Huguenots
+in Florida. Virginia was then talked of, but Episcopal ideas had already
+taken root there. New England, on the other hand, was considered too
+cold. Popham's experience was not encouraging. But the country about
+the Delaware river afforded an opportunity for erecting an independent
+colony under the jurisdiction of the London Company, and this seemed
+the best course to pursue. Sir Edwin Sandys, the leading spirit in the
+London Company, was favourably inclined toward Puritans, and through him
+negotiations were begun. Capital to the amount of £7000 was furnished
+by seventy merchant adventurers in England, and the earnings of the
+settlers were to be thrown into a common stock until these subscribers
+should have been remunerated. A grant of land was obtained from the
+London Company, and the king was asked to protect the emigrants by a
+charter, but this was refused. James, however, made no objections to
+their going, herein showing himself less of a bigot than Louis XIV.
+in later days, who would not suffer a Huguenot to set foot in Canada,
+though France was teeming with Huguenots who would have been glad
+enough to go. When James inquired how the colonists expected to support
+themselves, some one answered, most likely by fishing. "Very good,"
+quoth the king, "it was the Apostles' own calling." He declared that no
+one should molest them so long as they behaved themselves properly. From
+this unwonted urbanity it would appear that James anticipated no trouble
+from the new colony. A few Puritans in America could not do much to
+annoy him, and there was of course a fair chance of their perishing, as
+so many other colonizers had perished. [Sidenote: The Pilgrims at Leyden
+decide to make a settlement near the Delaware river]
+
+The congregation at Leyden did not think it wise to cut loose from
+Holland until they should have secured a foothold in America. It was but
+an advance guard that started out from Delft haven late in July, 1620,
+in the rickety ship Speedwell, with Brewster and Bradford, and sturdy
+Miles Standish, a trained soldier whose aid was welcome, though he does
+not seem to have belonged to the congregation. Robinson remained at
+Leyden, and never came to America. After a brief stop at Southampton,
+where they met the Mayflower with friends from London, the Pilgrims
+again set sail in the two ships. The Speedwell sprang a leak, and they
+stopped at Dartmouth for repairs. Again they started, and had put three
+hundred miles of salt water between themselves and Land's End, when the
+Speedwell leaked so badly that they were forced to return. When they
+dropped anchor at Plymouth in Devonshire, about twenty were left on
+shore, and the remainder, exactly one hundred in number, crowded into
+the Mayflower and on the 6th of September started once more to cross the
+Atlantic. The capacity of the little ship was 180 tons, and her strength
+was but slight. In a fierce storm in mid-ocean a mainbeam amidships was
+wrenched and cracked, and but for a huge iron screw which one of the
+passengers had brought from Delft, they might have gone to the bottom.
+The foul weather prevented any accurate calculation of latitude and
+longitude, and they were so far out in their reckoning that when they
+caught sight of land on the 9th of November, it was to Cape Cod that
+they had come. Their patent gave them no authority to settle here, as
+it was beyond the jurisdiction of the London Company. They turned their
+prow southward, but encountering perilous shoals and a stiff headwind
+they desisted and sought shelter in Cape Cod bay. On the 11th they
+decided to find some place of abode in this neighbourhood, anticipating
+no difficulty in getting a patent from the Plymouth Company, which was
+anxious to obtain settlers. For five weeks they stayed in the ship while
+little parties were exploring the coast and deciding upon the best site
+for a town. It was purely a coincidence that the spot which they chose
+had already received from John Smith the name of Plymouth, the beautiful
+port in Devonshire from which the Mayflower had sailed. [Sidenote:
+Founding of Plymouth]
+
+There was not much to remind them of home in the snow-covered coast on
+which they landed. They had hoped to get their rude houses built before
+the winter should set in, but the many delays and mishaps had served to
+bring them ashore in the coldest season. When the long winter came to
+an end, fifty-one of the hundred Pilgrims had died,--a mortality even
+greater than that before which the Popham colony had succumbed. But
+Brewster spoke truth when he said, "It is not with us as with men whom
+small things can discourage or small discontentments cause to wish
+themselves at home again." At one time the living were scarcely able to
+bury the dead; only Brewster, Standish, and five other hardy ones were
+well enough to get about. At first they were crowded under a single
+roof, and as glimpses were caught of dusky savages skulking among the
+trees, a platform was built on the nearest hill and a few cannon were
+placed there in such wise as to command the neighbouring valleys and
+plains. By the end of the first summer the platform had grown to a
+fortress, down from which to the harbour led a village street with seven
+houses finished and others going up. Twenty-six acres had been cleared,
+and a plentiful harvest gathered in; venison, wild fowl, and fish were
+easy to obtain. When provisions and fuel had been laid in for the
+ensuing winter, Governor Bradford appointed a day of Thanksgiving.
+Town-meetings had already been held, and a few laws passed. The history
+of New England had begun.
+
+This had evidently been a busy summer for the forty-nine survivors.
+On the 9th of November, the anniversary of the day on which they had
+sighted land, a ship was descried in the offing. She was the Fortune,
+bringing some fifty more of the Leyden company. It was a welcome
+reinforcement, but it diminished the rations of food that could be
+served during the winter, for the Fortune was not well supplied. When
+she set sail for England, she carried a little cargo of beaver-skins and
+choice wood for wainscoting to the value of L500 sterling, as a first
+instalment of the sum due to the merchant adventurers. But this cargo
+never reached England, for the Fortune was overhauled by a French
+cruiser and robbed of everything worth carrying away.
+
+For two years more it was an anxious and difficult time for the new
+colony. By 1624 its success may be said to have become assured. That the
+Indians in the neighbourhood had not taken advantage of the distress of
+the settlers in that first winter, and massacred every one of them, was
+due to a remarkable circumstance. Early in 1617 a frightful pestilence
+had swept over New England and slain, it is thought, more than half the
+Indian population between the Penobscot river and Narragansett bay. Many
+of the Indians were inclined to attribute this calamity to the murder of
+two or three white fishermen the year before. They had not got over the
+superstitious dread with which the first sight of white men had inspired
+them, and now they believed that the strangers held the demon of the
+plague at their disposal and had let him loose upon the red men in
+revenge for the murders they had committed. This wholesome delusion
+kept their tomahawks quiet for a while. When they saw the Englishmen
+establishing themselves at Plymouth, they at first held a powwow in
+the forest, at which the new-comers were cursed with all the elaborate
+ingenuity that the sorcery of the medicine-men could summon for so
+momentous an occasion; but it was deemed best to refrain from merely
+human methods of attack. It was not until the end of the first winter
+that any of them mustered courage to visit the palefaces. Then an Indian
+named Samoset, who had learned a little English from fishermen and for
+his own part was inclined to be friendly, came one day into the
+village with words of welcome. He was so kindly treated that presently
+Massasoit, principal sachem of the Wampanoags, who dwelt between
+Narragansett and Cape Cod bays, came with a score of painted and
+feathered warriors and squatting on a green rug and cushions in the
+governor's log-house smoked the pipe of peace, while Standish with
+half-a-dozen musketeers stood quietly by. An offensive and defensive
+alliance was then and there made between King Massasoit and King James,
+and the treaty was faithfully kept for half a century. Some time
+afterward, when Massasoit had fallen sick and lay at death's door, his
+life was saved by Edward Winslow, who came to his wigwam and skilfully
+nursed him. Henceforth the Wampanoag thought well of the Pilgrim. The
+powerful Narragansetts, who dwelt on the farther side of the bay, felt
+differently, and thought it worth while to try the effect of a threat.
+A little while after the Fortune had brought its reinforcement, the
+Narragansett sachem Canonicus sent a messenger to Plymouth with a bundle
+of newly-made arrows wrapped in a snake-skin. The messenger threw it
+in at the governor's door and made off with unseemly haste. Bradford
+understood this as a challenge, and in this he was confirmed by a
+friendly Wampanoag. The Narragansetts could muster 2000 warriors, for
+whom forty or fifty Englishmen, even with firearms, were hardly a fair
+match; but it would not do to show fear. Bradford stuffed the snake-skin
+with powder and bullets, and sent it back to Canonicus, telling him that
+if he wanted war he might come whenever he liked and get his fill of it.
+When the sachem saw what the skin contained, he was afraid to touch
+it or have it about, and medicine-men, handling it no doubt gingerly
+enough, carried it out of his territory. [Sidenote: Why the colony was
+not attacked by the Indians]
+
+It was a fortunate miscalculation that brought the Pilgrims to New
+England. Had they ventured upon the lands between the Hudson and the
+Delaware, they would probably have fared worse. They would soon have
+come into collision with the Dutch, and not far from that neighbourhood
+dwelt the Susquehannocks, at that time one of the most powerful and
+ferocious tribes on the continent. For the present the new-comers were
+less likely to be molested in the Wampanoag country than anywhere else.
+In the course of the year 1621 they obtained their grant from the
+Plymouth Company. This grant was not made to them directly but to
+the joint-stock company of merchant adventurers with whom they were
+associated. But the alliance between the Pilgrims and these London
+merchants was not altogether comfortable; there was too much divergence
+between their aims. In 1627 the settlers, wishing to be entirely
+independent, bought up all the stock and paid for it by instalments
+from the fruits of their labour. By 1633 they had paid every penny, and
+become the undisputed owners of the country they had occupied.
+
+Such was the humble beginning of that great Puritan exodus from England
+to America which had so much to do with founding and peopling the United
+States. These Pilgrims of the Mayflower were but the pioneers of a
+mighty host. Historically their enterprise is interesting not so much
+for what it achieved as for what it suggested. Of itself the Plymouth
+colony could hardly have become a wealthy and powerful state. Its growth
+was extremely slow. After ten years its numbers were but three hundred.
+In 1643, when the exodus had come to an end, and the New England
+Confederacy was formed, the population of Plymouth was but three
+thousand. In an established community, indeed, such a rate of increase
+would be rapid, but it was not sufficient to raise in New England a
+power which could overcome Indians and Dutchmen and Frenchmen, and
+assert its will in opposition to the crown. It is when we view the
+founding of Plymouth in relation to what came afterward, that it assumes
+the importance which belongs to the beginning of a new era.
+
+We have thus seen how it was that the political aspirations of James I.
+toward absolute sovereignty resulted in the beginnings of the Puritan
+exodus to America. In the next chapter we shall see how the still more
+arbitrary policy of his ill-fated son all at once gave new dimensions to
+that exodus and resulted in the speedy planting of a high-spirited and
+powerful New England.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE PLANTING OF NEW ENGLAND.
+
+
+When Captain George Weymouth in the summer of 1605 sailed into the
+harbour of Plymouth in Devonshire, with his five kidnapped savages and
+his glowing accounts of the country since known as New England, the
+garrison of that fortified seaport was commanded by Sir Ferdinando
+Gorges. The Christian name of this person now strikes us as rather odd,
+but in those days it was not so uncommon in England, and it does not
+necessarily indicate a Spanish or Italian ancestry for its bearer.
+Gorges was a man of considerable ability, but not of high character. On
+the downfall of his old patron the Earl of Essex he had contrived to
+save his own fortunes by a course of treachery and ingratitude. He had
+served in the Dutch war against Spain, and since 1596 had been military
+governor of Plymouth. The sight of Weymouth's Indians and the recital of
+his explorations awakened the interest of Gorges in the colonization of
+North America. He became one of the most active members of the Plymouth,
+or North Virginia, Company established in the following year. It was he
+who took the leading part in fitting out the two ships with which John
+Smith started on his unsuccessful expedition in 1615. In the following
+years he continued to send out voyages of exploration, became largely
+interested in the fisheries, and at length in 1620 succeeded in
+obtaining a new patent for the Plymouth Company, by which it was made
+independent of the London Company, its old yoke-fellow and rival. This
+new document created a corporation of forty patentees who, sitting in
+council as directors of their enterprise, were known as the Council for
+New England. The president of this council was King James's unpopular
+favourite the Duke of Buckingham, and its most prominent members
+were the earls of Pembroke and Lenox, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, and
+Shakespeare's friend the Earl of Southampton. This council was empowered
+to legislate for its American territory, to exercise martial law there
+and expel all intruders, and to exercise a monopoly of trade within the
+limits of the patent. Such extensive powers, entrusted to a company of
+which Buckingham was the head, excited popular indignation, and in the
+great struggle against monopolies which was then going on, the Plymouth
+Company did not fail to serve as a target for attacks. It started,
+however, with too little capital to enter upon schemes involving
+immediate outlay, and began almost from the first to seek to increase
+its income by letting or selling portions of its territory, which
+extended from the latitude of Philadelphia to that of Quebec, thus
+encroaching upon regions where Holland and France were already gaining
+a foothold. It was from this company that the merchant adventurers
+associated with the Mayflower Pilgrims obtained their new patent in
+the summer of 1621, and for the next fifteen years all settlers in New
+England based their claims to the soil upon territorial rights conveyed
+to them by the Plymouth Company. The grants, however, were often
+ignorantly and sometimes unscrupulously made, and their limits were so
+ill-defined that much quarrelling ensued. [Sidenote: Sir Ferdinando
+Gorges, and the Council for New England]
+
+During the years immediately following the voyage of the Mayflower,
+several attempts at settlement were made about the shores of
+Massachusetts bay. One of the merchant adventurers, Thomas Weston, took
+it into his head in 1622 to separate from his partners and send out a
+colony of seventy men on his own account. These men made a settlement
+at Wessagusset, some twenty-five miles north of Plymouth. They were a
+disorderly, thriftless rabble, picked up from the London streets, and
+soon got into trouble with the Indians; after a year they were glad
+to get back to England as best they could, and in this the Plymouth
+settlers willingly aided them. In June of that same year 1622 there
+arrived on the scene a picturesque but ill understood personage, Thomas
+Morton, "of Clifford's Inn, Gent.," as he tells on the title-page of
+his quaint and delightful book, the "New English Canaan." Bradford
+disparagingly says that he "had been a kind of petie-fogger of
+Furnifell's Inn"; but the churchman Samuel Maverick declares that he
+was a "gentleman of good qualitie." He was an agent of Sir Ferdinando
+Gorges, and came with some thirty followers to make the beginnings of
+a royalist and Episcopal settlement in the Massachusetts bay. He was
+naturally regarded with ill favour by the Pilgrims as well as by the
+later Puritan settlers, and their accounts of him will probably
+bear taking with a grain or two of salt. [Sidenote: Wessagusset and
+Merrymount]
+
+In 1625 there came one Captain Wollaston, with a gang of indented white
+servants, and established himself on the site of the present town
+of Quincy. Finding this system of industry ill suited to northern
+agriculture, he carried most of his men off to Virginia, where he sold
+them. Morton took possession of the site of the settlement, which he
+called Merrymount. There, according to Bradford, he set up a "schoole of
+athisme," and his men did quaff strong waters and comport themselves "as
+if they had anew revived and celebrated the feasts of ye Roman Goddes
+Flora, or the beastly practices of ye madd Bachanalians." Charges of
+atheism have been freely hurled about in all ages. In Morton's case the
+accusation seems to have been based upon the fact that he used the Book
+of Common Prayer. His men so far maintained the ancient customs of
+merry England as to plant a Maypole eighty feet high, about which they
+frolicked with the redskins, while furthermore they taught them the
+use of firearms and sold them muskets and rum. This was positively
+dangerous, and in the summer of 1628 the settlers at Merrymount were
+dispersed by Miles Standish. Morton was sent to England, but returned
+the next year, and presently again repaired to Merrymount.
+
+By this time other settlements were dotted about the coast. There were
+a few scattered cottages or cabins at Nantasket and at the mouth of the
+Piscataqua, while Samuel Maverick had fortified himself on Noddle's
+Island, and William Blackstone already lived upon the Shawmut peninsula,
+since called Boston. These two gentlemen were no friends to the
+Puritans; they were churchmen and representatives of Sir Ferdinando
+Gorges.
+
+The case was very different with another of these earliest settlements,
+which deserves especial mention as coming directly in the line of
+causation which led to the founding of Massachusetts by Puritans. For
+some years past the Dorchester adventurers--a small company of merchants
+in the shire town of Dorset--had been sending vessels to catch fish off
+the New England coast. In 1623 these men conceived the idea of planting
+a small village as a fishing station, and setting up a church and
+preacher therein, for the spiritual solace of the fishermen and sailors.
+In pursuance of this scheme a small party occupied Cape Ann, where after
+two years they got into trouble with the men of Plymouth. Several grants
+and assignments had made it doubtful where the ownership lay, and
+although this place was not near their own town, the men of Plymouth
+claimed it. The dispute was amicably arranged by Roger Conant, an
+independent settler who had withdrawn from Plymouth because he did not
+fully sympathize with the Separatist views of the people there. The
+next step was for the Dorchester adventurers to appoint Conant as their
+manager, and the next was for them to abandon their enterprise, dissolve
+their partnership, and leave the remnant of the little colony to shift
+for itself. The settlers retained their tools and cattle, and Conant
+found for them a new and safer situation at Naumkeag, on the site of the
+present Salem. So far little seemed to have been accomplished; one more
+seemed added to the list of failures.
+
+But the excellent John White, the Puritan rector of Trinity Church in
+Dorchester, had meditated carefully about these things. He saw that
+many attempts at colonization had failed because they made use of unfit
+instruments, "a multitude of rude ungovernable persons, the very scum of
+the land." So Virginia had failed in its first years, and only succeeded
+when settled by worthy and industrious people under a strong government.
+The example of Plymouth, as contrasted with Wessagusset, taught a
+similar lesson. We desire, said White, "to raise a bulwark against the
+kingdom of Antichrist." Learn wisdom, my countrymen, from the ruin which
+has befallen the Protestants at Rochelle and in the Palatinate; learn
+"to avoid the plague while it is foreseen, and not to tarry as they did
+till it overtook them." The Puritan party in England was numerous and
+powerful, but the day of strife was not far off and none might foretell
+its issue. Clearly it was well to establish a strong and secure retreat
+in the New World, in case of disaster in the Old. What had been done at
+Plymouth by a few men of humble means might be done on a much greater
+scale by an association of leading Puritans, including men of wealth and
+wide social influence. Such arguments were urged in timely pamphlets, of
+one of which White is supposed to have been the author. The matter was
+discussed in London, and inquiry was made whether fit men could be found
+"to engage their persons in the voyage." "It fell out that among others
+they lighted at last on Master Endicott, a man well known to divers
+persons of good note, who manifested much willingness to accept of the
+offer as soon as it was tendered." All were thereby much encouraged, the
+schemes of White took definite shape, and on the 19th of March, 1628, a
+tract of land was obtained from the Council for New England, consisting
+of all the territory included between three miles north of the Merrimack
+and three miles south of the Charles in one direction, and the Atlantic
+and Pacific Oceans in the other. [Sidenote: John White and his noble
+scheme]
+
+This liberal grant was made at a time when people still supposed the
+Pacific coast to be not far west of Henry Hudson's river. The territory
+was granted to an association of six gentlemen, only one of whom--John
+Endicott--figures conspicuously in the history of New England. The
+grant was made in the usual reckless style, and conflicted with various
+patents which had been issued before. In 1622 Gorges and John Mason
+had obtained a grant of all the land between the rivers Kennebec
+and Merrimack, and the new grant encroached somewhat upon this. The
+difficulty seems to have been temporarily adjusted by some sort of
+compromise which restricted the new grant to the Merrimack, for in 1629
+we find Mason's title confirmed to the region between that river and the
+Piscataqua, while later on Gorges appears as proprietor of the territory
+between the Piscataqua and the Kennebec. A more serious difficulty was
+the claim of Robert Gorges, son of Sir Ferdinando. That young man had in
+1623 obtained a grant of some 300 square miles in Massachusetts, and had
+gone to look after it, but had soon returned discouraged to England
+and shortly afterward died. But his claim devolved upon his surviving
+brother, John Gorges, and Sir Ferdinando, in consenting to the grant to
+Endicott and his friends, expressly reserved the rights of his sons. No
+such reservation, however, was mentioned in the Massachusetts charter,
+and the colonists never paid the slightest heed to it. In these
+conflicting claims were sown seeds of trouble which bore fruit for more
+than half a century. In such cases actual possession is apt to make nine
+points in the law, and accordingly Endicott was sent over, as soon as
+possible, with sixty persons, to reinforce the party at Naumkeag and
+supersede Conant as its leader. On Endicott's arrival in September,
+1628, the settlers were at first inclined to dispute his authority, but
+they were soon conciliated, and in token of this amicable adjustment the
+place was called by the Hebrew name of Salem, or "peace." [Sidenote:
+Conflicting grants sow seeds of trouble] [Sidenote: John Endicot and the
+founding of Salem]
+
+Meanwhile Mr. White and the partners in England were pushing things
+vigorously. Their scheme took a wider scope. They were determined to
+establish something more than a trading company. From Charles I. it
+was sometimes easy to get promises because he felt himself under no
+obligation to keep them. In March, 1629, a royal charter was granted,
+creating a corporation, under the legal style of the Governor and
+Company of Massachusetts Bay in New England. The affairs of this
+corporate body were to be managed by a governor, deputy-governor, and a
+council of eighteen assistants, to be elected annually by the company.
+They were empowered to make such laws as they liked for their settlers,
+provided they did not contravene the laws of England,--a proviso
+susceptible of much latitude of interpretation. The place where the
+company was to hold its meetings was not mentioned in the charter. The
+law-officers of the crown at first tried to insert a condition that
+the government must reside in England, but the grantees with skilful
+argument succeeding in preventing this. Nothing was said in the charter
+about religious liberty, for a twofold reason: the crown would not have
+granted it, and it was not what the grantees wanted; such a provision
+would have been liable to hamper them seriously in carrying out their
+scheme. They preferred to keep in their own hands the question as to how
+much or how little religious liberty they should claim or allow. Six
+small ships were presently fitted out, and upon them were embarked 300
+men, 80 women, and 26 children, with 140 head of cattle, 40 goats, and
+abundance of arms, ammunition, and tools. The principal leader of this
+company was Francis Higginson, of St. John's College, Cambridge, rector
+of a church in Leicestershire, who had been deprived of his living for
+non-conformity. With him were associated two other ministers, also
+graduates of Cambridge. All three were members of the council. By the
+arrival of this company at Salem, Endicott now became governor of a
+colony larger than any yet started in New England,--larger than Plymouth
+after its growth of nearly nine years. [Sidenote: The Company of
+Massachusetts Bay]
+
+The time was at length ripe for that great Puritan exodus of which the
+voyage of the Mayflower had been the premonitory symptom. The grand
+crisis for the Puritans had come, the moment when decisive action could
+no longer be deferred. It was not by accident that the rapid development
+of John White's enterprise into the Company of Massachusetts Bay
+coincided exactly with the first four years of the reign of Charles I.
+They were years well fitted to bring such a scheme to quick maturity.
+The character of Charles was such as to exacerbate the evils of his
+father's reign. James could leave some things alone in the comfortable
+hope that all would by and by come out right, but Charles was not
+satisfied without meddling everywhere. Both father and son cherished
+some good intentions; both were sincere believers in their narrow theory
+of kingcraft. For wrong-headed obstinacy, utter want of tact, and
+bottomless perfidy, there was little to choose between them. The
+humorous epitaph of the grandson "whose word no man relies on" might
+have served for them all. But of this unhappy family Charles I. was
+eminently the dreamer. He lived in a world of his own, and was slow
+in rendering thought into action; and this made him rely upon the
+quick-witted but unwise and unscrupulous Buckingham, [5] who was silly
+enough to make feeble attempts at unpopular warfare without consulting
+Parliament. During each of Charles's first four years there was an
+angry session of Parliament, in which, through the unwillingness of the
+popular leaders to resort to violence, the king's policy seemed able
+to hold its ground. Despite all protest the king persisted in levying
+strange taxes and was to some extent able to collect them. Men who
+refused to pay enforced loans were thrown into jail and the writ of
+_habeas corpus_ was denied them. Meanwhile the treatment of Puritans
+became more and more vexatious. It was clear enough that Charles meant
+to become an absolute monarch, like Louis XIII., but Parliament began
+by throwing all the blame upon the unpopular minister and seeking to
+impeach him.
+
+On the 5th of June, 1628, the House of Commons presented the most
+extraordinary spectacle, perhaps in all its history. The famous Petition
+of Right had been Passed by both Houses, and the royal answer had just
+been received. Its tone was that of gracious assent, but it omitted the
+necessary legal formalities, and the Commons well knew what this meant.
+They were to be tricked with sweet words, and the petition was not to
+acquire the force of a statute. How was it possible to deal with such a
+slippery creature? There was but one way of saving the dignity of the
+throne without sacrificing the liberty of the people, and that was to
+hold the king's ministers responsible to Parliament, in anticipation
+of modern methods. It was accordingly proposed to impeach the Duke
+of Buckingham before the House of Lords. The Speaker now "brought an
+imperious message from the king, ... warning them ... that he would not
+tolerate any aspersion upon his ministers." Nothing daunted by this,
+Sir John Eliot arose to lead the debate, when the Speaker called him to
+order in view of the king's message. "Amid a deadly stillness" Eliot
+sat down and burst into tears. For a moment the House was overcome
+with despair. Deprived of all constitutional methods of redress, they
+suddenly saw yawning before them the direful alternative--slavery or
+civil war. Since the day of Bosworth a hundred and fifty years had
+passed without fighting worthy of mention on English soil, such an era
+of peace as had hardly ever before been seen on the earth; now half the
+nation was to be pitted against the other half, families were to be
+divided against themselves, as in the dreadful days of the Roses, and
+with what consequences no one could foresee. "Let us sit in silence,"
+quoth Sir Dudley Digges, "we are miserable, we know not what to do!"
+Nay, cried Sir Nathaniel Rich, "we _must_ now speak, or forever hold our
+peace." Then did grim Mr. Prynne and Sir Edward Coke mingle their words
+with sobs, while there were few dry eyes in the House. Presently they
+found their voices, and used them in a way that wrung from the startled
+king his formal assent to the Petition of Right. [Sidenote: Remarkable
+scene in the House of Commons]
+
+There is something strangely pathetic and historically significant [6]
+in the emotion of these stern, fearless men. The scene was no less
+striking on the 2d of the following March, when, "amid the cries and
+entreaties of the Speaker held down in his chair by force," while the
+Usher of the Black Rod was knocking loudly at the bolted door, and the
+tramp of the king's soldiers was heard in the courtyard, Eliot's clear
+voice rang out the defiance that whoever advised the levy of tonnage and
+poundage without a grant from Parliament, or whoever voluntarily paid
+those duties, was to be counted an enemy to the kingdom and a betrayer
+of its liberties. As shouts of "Aye, aye," resounded on every side, "the
+doors were flung open, and the members poured forth in a throng." The
+noble Eliot went to end his days in the Tower, and for eleven years no
+Parliament sat again in England. [7]
+
+It was in one and the same week that Charles I. thus began his
+experiment of governing without a Parliament, and that he granted a
+charter to the Company of Massachusetts Bay. He was very far, as we
+shall see, from realizing the import of what he was doing. To the
+Puritan leaders it was evident that a great struggle was at hand.
+Affairs at home might well seem desperate, and the news from abroad was
+not encouraging. It was only four months since the surrender of Rochelle
+had ended the existence of the Huguenots as an armed political party.
+They had now sunk into the melancholy condition of a tolerated sect
+which may at any moment cease to be tolerated. In Germany the
+terrible Thirty Years War had just reached the darkest moment for
+the Protestants. Fifteen months were yet to pass before the immortal
+Gustavus was to cross the Baltic and give to the sorely harassed cause
+of liberty a fresh lease of life. The news of the cruel Edict of
+Restitution in this same fateful month of March, 1629, could not but
+give the English Puritans great concern. Everywhere in Europe the
+champions of human freedom seemed worsted. They might well think that
+never had the prospect looked so dismal; and never before, as never
+since, did the venture of a wholesale migration to the New World so
+strongly recommend itself as the only feasible escape from a situation
+that was fast becoming intolerable. Such were the anxious thoughts of
+the leading Puritans in the spring of 1629, and in face of so grave a
+problem different minds came naturally to different conclusions. Some
+were for staying in England to fight it out to the bitter end; some were
+for crossing the ocean to create a new England in the wilderness. Either
+task was arduous enough, and not to be achieved without steadfast and
+sober heroism. [Sidenote: Desperate nature of the crisis]
+
+On the 26th of August twelve gentlemen, among the most eminent in the
+Puritan party, held a meeting at Cambridge, and resolved to lead a
+migration to New England, provided the charter of the Massachusetts Bay
+Company and the government established under it could be transferred to
+that country. On examination it appeared that no legal obstacle stood in
+the way. Accordingly such of the old officers as did not wish to take
+part in the emigration resigned their places, which were forthwith
+filled by these new leaders. For governor the choice fell upon John
+Winthrop, a wealthy gentleman from Groton in Suffolk, who was henceforth
+to occupy the foremost place among the founders of New England. Winthrop
+was at this time forty-one years of age, having been born in the
+memorable year of the Armada. He was a man of remarkable strength and
+beauty of character, grave and modest, intelligent and scholarlike,
+intensely religious and endowed with a moral sensitiveness that was
+almost morbid, yet liberal withal in his opinions and charitable in
+disposition. When his life shall have been adequately written, as it
+never has been, he will be recognized as one of the very noblest figures
+in American history. From early youth he had that same power of
+winning confidence and commanding respect for which Washington was so
+remarkable; and when he was selected as the Moses of the great Puritan
+exodus, there was a wide-spread feeling that extraordinary results were
+likely to come of such an enterprise.
+
+In marked contrast to Winthrop stands the figure of the man associated
+with him as deputy-governor. Thomas Dudley came of an ancient family,
+the history of which, alike in the old and in the new England, has not
+been altogether creditable. He represented the elder branch of that
+Norman family, to the younger branch of which belonged the unfortunate
+husband of Lady Jane Grey and the unscrupulous husband of Amy Robsart.
+There was, however, very little likeness to Elizabeth's gay lover
+in grim Thomas Dudley. His Puritanism was bleak and stern, and for
+Christian charity he was not eminent. He had a foible for making verses,
+and at his death there was found in his pocket a poem of his, containing
+a quatrain wherein the intolerance of that age is neatly summed up:--
+
+"Let men of God in courts and churches watch O'er such as do a
+Toleration hatch, Lest that ill egg bring forth a cockatrice To poison
+all with heresy and vice."
+
+Such was the spirit of most of the Puritans of that day, but in the
+manifestation of it there were great differences, and here was the
+strong contrast between Dudley and Winthrop,--a contrast which shows
+itself in their portraits. In that of Dudley we see the typical
+narrow-minded, strait-laced Calvinist for whom it is so much easier to
+entertain respect than affection. In that of Winthrop we see a face
+expressive of what was finest in the age of Elizabeth,--the face of a
+spiritual brother of Raleigh and Bacon.
+
+The accession of two men so important as Winthrop and Dudley served to
+bring matters speedily to a crisis. Their embarkation in April, 1630,
+was the signal for a general movement on the part of the English
+Puritans. Before Christmas of that year seventeen ships had come to
+New England, bringing more than 1000 passengers. This huge wave of
+immigration quite overwhelmed and bore away the few links of possession
+by which Gorges had thus far kept his hold upon the country. In January,
+1629, John Gorges had tried to assert the validity of his late brother's
+claim by executing conveyances covering portions of it. One of these
+was to John Oldham, a man who had been harshly treated at Plymouth, and
+might be supposed very ready to defend his rights against settlers
+of the Puritan company. Gorges further maintained that he retained
+possession of the country through the presence of his brother's tenants,
+Blackstone, Maverick, Walford, and others on the shores of the bay. In
+June, 1629, Endicott had responded by sending forward some fifty persons
+from Salem to begin the settlement of Charlestown. Shortly before
+Winthrop's departure from England, Gorges had sent that singular
+personage Sir Christopher Gardiner to look after his interests in the
+New World, and there he was presently found established near the mouth
+of the Neponset river, in company with "a comly yonge woman whom he
+caled his cousin." But these few claimants were now at once lost in the
+human tide which poured over Charlestown, Boston, Newtown, Watertown,
+Roxbury, and Dorchester. The settlement at Merrymount was again
+dispersed, and Morton sent back to London; Gardiner fled to the coast
+of Maine and thence sailed for England in 1632. The Puritans had indeed
+occupied the country in force.
+
+Here on the very threshold we are confronted by facts which show that
+not a mere colonial plantation, but a definite and organized state was
+in process of formation. The emigration was not like that of Jamestown
+or of Plymouth. It sufficed at once to make the beginnings of half a
+dozen towns, and the question as to self-government immediately sprang
+up. Early in 1631 a tax of £60 was assessed upon the settlements, in
+order to pay for building frontier fortifications at Newtown. This
+incident was in itself of small dimensions, as incidents in newly
+founded states are apt to be. But in its historic import it may serve
+to connect the England of John Hampden with the New England of Samuel
+Adams. The inhabitants of Watertown at first declined to pay this tax,
+which was assessed by the Board of Assistants, on the ground that
+English freemen cannot rightfully be taxed save by their own consent.
+This protest led to a change in the constitution of the infant colony,
+and here, at once, we are introduced to the beginnings of American
+constitutional history. At first it was thought that public business
+could be transacted by a primary assembly of all the freemen in the
+colony meeting four times in the year; but the number of freemen
+increased so fast that this was almost at once (in October, 1630) found
+to be impracticable. The right of choosing the governor and making the
+laws was then left to the Board of Assistants; and in May, 1631, it was
+further decided that the assistants need not be chosen afresh every
+year, but might keep their seats during good behaviour or until ousted
+by special vote of the freemen. If the settlers of Massachusetts had
+been ancient Greeks or Romans, this would have been about as far as they
+could go in the matter; the choice would have been between a primary
+assembly and an assembly of notables. It is curious to see Englishmen
+passing from one of these alternatives to the other. But it was only for
+a moment. The protest of the Watertown men came in time to check these
+proceedings, which began to have a decidedly oligarchical look. To
+settle the immediate question of the tax, two deputies were sent from
+each settlement to advise with the Board of Assistants; while the power
+of choosing each year the governor and assistants was resumed by the
+freemen. Two years later, in order to reserve to the freemen the power
+of making laws without interfering too much with the ordinary business
+of life, the colonists fell back upon the old English rural plan of
+electing deputies or representatives to a general court. [Sidenote: The
+question as to self-government raised at Watertown]
+
+At first the deputies sat in the same chamber with the assistants, but
+at length in 1644 they were formed into a second chamber with increased
+powers, and the way in which this important constitutional change came
+about is worth remembering, as an illustration of the smallness of the
+state which so soon was to play a great part in history. As Winthrop
+puts it, "there fell out a great business upon a very small occasion."
+To a certain Captain Keayne, of Boston, a rich man deemed to be hard and
+overbearing toward the poor, there was brought a stray pig, whereof he
+gave due public notice through the town-crier, yet none came to claim it
+till after he had killed a pig of his own which he kept in the same stye
+with the stray. A year having passed by, a poor woman named Sherman came
+to see the stray and to decide if it were one that she had lost. Not
+recognizing it as hers, she forthwith laid claim to the slaughtered pig.
+The case was brought before the elders of the church of Boston, who
+decided that the woman was mistaken. Mrs. Sherman then accused the
+captain of theft, and brought the case before a jury, which exonerated
+the defendant with £3 costs. The captain then sued Mrs. Sherman for
+defamation of character and got a verdict for £40 damages, a round
+sum indeed to assess upon the poor woman. But long before this it had
+appeared that she had many partisans and supporters; it had become a
+political question, in which the popular protest against aristocracy was
+implicated. Not yet browbeaten, the warlike Mrs. Sherman appealed to the
+General Court. The length of the hearing shows the importance which
+was attached to the case. After seven days of discussion, the vote
+was taken. Seven assistants and eight deputies approved the former
+decisions, two assistants and fifteen deputies condemned them, while
+seven deputies refrained from voting. In other words, Captain Keayne has
+a decided majority among the more aristocratic assistants, while Mrs.
+Sherman seemed to prevail with the more democratic deputies. Regarding
+the result as the vote of a single body, the woman had a plurality of
+two; regarding it as the vote of a double body, her cause had prevailed
+in the lower house, but was lost by the veto of the upper. No decision
+was reached at the time, but after a year of discussion the legislature
+was permanently separated into two houses, each with a veto power upon
+the other; and this was felt to be a victory for the assistants. As for
+the ecclesiastical polity of the new colony, it had begun to take
+shape immediately upon the arrival of Endicott's party at Salem. The
+clergymen, Samuel Skelton and Francis Higginson, consecrated each
+other, and a church covenant and confession of faith were drawn up by
+Higginson. Thirty persons joining in this covenant constituted the first
+church in the colony; and several brethren appointed by this church
+proceeded formally to ordain the two ministers by the laying on of
+hands. In such simple wise was the first Congregational church in
+Massachusetts founded. The simple fact of removal from England converted
+all the Puritan emigrants into Separatists, as Robinson had already
+predicted. Some, however, were not yet quite prepared for so radical a
+measure. These proceedings gave umbrage to two of the Salem party, who
+attempted forthwith to set up a separate church in conformity with
+episcopal models. A very important question was thus raised at once, but
+it was not allowed to disturb the peace of the colony. Endicott was a
+man of summary methods. He immediately sent the two malcontents back to
+England; and thus the colonial church not only seceded from the national
+establishment, but the principle was virtually laid down that the
+Episcopal form of worship would not be tolerated in the colony. For the
+present such a step was to be regarded as a measure of self-defence on
+the part of the colonists. Episcopacy to them meant actual and practical
+tyranny--the very thing they had crossed the ocean expressly to get
+away from--and it was hardly to be supposed that they would encourage
+the growth of it in their new home. One or two surpliced priests,
+conducting worship in accordance with the Book of Common Prayer, might
+in themselves be excellent members of society; but behind the surpliced
+priest the colonist saw the intolerance of Laud and the despotism of
+the Court of High Commission. In 1631 a still more searching measure
+of self-protection was adopted. It was decided that "no man shall be
+admitted to the freedom of this body politic, but such as are members of
+some of the churches within the limits of the same." Into the merits of
+this measure as illustrating the theocratic ideal of society which the
+Puritans sought to realize in New England, we shall inquire hereafter.
+At present we must note that, as a measure of self-protection, this
+decree was intended to keep out of the new community all emissaries of
+Strafford and Laud, as well as such persons as Morton and Gardiner and
+other agents of Sir Ferdinando Gorges.
+
+By the year 1634 the scheme of the Massachusetts Company had so far
+prospered that nearly 4000 Englishmen had come over, and some twenty
+villages on or near the shores of the bay had been founded. The building
+of permanent houses, roads, fences, and bridges had begun to go on quite
+briskly; farms were beginning to yield a return for the labour of the
+husbandman; lumber, furs, and salted fish were beginning to be sent to
+England in exchange for manufactured articles; 4000 goats and 1500 head
+of cattle grazed in the pastures, and swine innumerable rooted in the
+clearings and helped to make ready the land for the ploughman. Political
+meetings were held, justice was administered by magistrates after old
+English precedents, and church services were performed by a score of
+clergymen, nearly all graduates of Cambridge, though one or two had
+their degrees from Oxford, and nearly all of whom had held livings in
+the Church of England. The most distinguished of these clergymen, John
+Cotton, in his younger days a Fellow and Tutor of Emmanuel College, had
+for more than twenty years been rector of St. Botolph's, when he left
+the most magnificent parish church in England to hold service in the
+first rude meeting-house of the new Boston. From Emmanuel College came
+also Thomas Hooker and John Harvard. Besides these clergymen, so many of
+the leading persons concerned in the emigration were university men that
+it was not long before a university began to seem indispensable to
+the colony. In 1636 the General Court appropriated £400 toward the
+establishment of a college at Newtown. In 1638 John Harvard, dying
+childless, bequeathed his library and the half of his estate to the new
+college, which the Court forthwith ordered to be called by his name;
+while in honour of the mother university the name of the town was
+changed to Cambridge.
+
+[Illustration: Founding of Harvard College]
+
+It has been said that the assembly which decreed the establishment
+of Harvard College was "the first body in which the people, by their
+representatives, ever gave their own money to found a place of
+education." [8] The act was a memorable one if we have regard to all the
+circumstances of the year in which it was done. On every side danger was
+in the air. Threatened at once with an Indian war, with the enmity of
+the home government, and with grave dissensions among themselves, the
+year 1636 was a trying one indeed for the little community of Puritans,
+and their founding a college by public taxation just at this time is a
+striking illustration of their unalterable purpose to realize, in this
+new home, their ideal of an educated Christian society. [Sidenote:
+Threefold danger in the year 1636]
+
+That the government of Charles I. should view with a hostile eye the
+growth of a Puritan state in New England is not at all surprising. (1.
+From the king, who prepares to attack the infant colony but is fueled by
+dissensions at home.) The only fit ground for wonder would seem to be
+that Charles should have been willing at the outset to grant a charter
+to the able and influential Puritans who organized the Company of
+Massachusetts Bay. Probably, however, the king thought at first that it
+would relieve him at home if a few dozen of the Puritan leaders could
+be allowed to concentrate their minds upon a project of colonization in
+America. It might divert attention for a moment from his own despotic
+schemes. Very likely the scheme would prove a failure and the
+Massachusetts colony incur a fate like that of Roanoke Island; and at
+all events the wealth of the Puritans might better be sunk in a remote
+and perilous enterprise than employed at home in organizing resistance
+to the crown. Such, very likely, may have been the king's motive in
+granting the Massachusetts charter two days after turning his Parliament
+out of doors. But the events of the last half-dozen years had come to
+present the case in a new light. The young colony was not languishing.
+It was full of sturdy life; it had wrought mischief to the schemes of
+Gorges; and what was more, it had begun to take unheard-of liberties
+with things ecclesiastical and political. Its example was getting to be
+a dangerous one. It was evidently worth while to put a strong curb upon
+Massachusetts. Any promise made to his subjects Charles regarded as
+a promise made under duress which he was quite justified in breaking
+whenever it suited his purpose to do so. Enemies of Massachusetts were
+busy in England. Schismatics from Salem and revellers from Merrymount
+were ready with their tales of woe, and now Gorges and Mason were
+vigorously pressing their territorial claims. They bargained with
+the king. In February, 1635, the moribund Council for New England
+surrendered its charter and all its corporate rights in America, on
+condition that the king should disregard all the various grants by which
+these rights had from time to time been alienated, and should divide
+up the territory of New England in severalty among the members of the
+Council. In pursuance of this scheme Gorges and Mason, together with
+half a dozen noblemen, were allowed to parcel out New England among
+themselves as they should see fit. In this way the influence of the
+Marquis of Hamilton, with the Earls of Arundel, Surrey, Carlisle, and
+Stirling, might be actively enlisted against the Massachusetts Company.
+A writ of _quo warranto_ was brought against it; and it was proposed to
+send Sir Ferdinando to govern New England with viceregal powers like
+those afterward exercised by Andros.
+
+For a moment the danger seemed alarming; but, as Winthrop says, "the
+Lord frustrated their design." It was noted as a special providence that
+the ship in which Gorges was to sail was hardly off the stocks when it
+fell to pieces. Then the most indefatigable enemy of the colony, John
+Mason, suddenly died. The king issued his famous writ of ship-money and
+set all England by the ears; and, to crown all, the attempt to read the
+Episcopal liturgy at St. Giles's church in Edinburgh led straight to
+the Solemn League and Covenant. Amid the first mutterings of the Great
+Rebellion the proceedings against Massachusetts were dropped, and the
+unheeded colony went on thriving in its independent course. Possibly too
+some locks at Whitehall may have been turned with golden keys, [9] for
+the company was rich, and the king was ever open to such arguments. But
+when the news of his evil designs had first reached Boston the people of
+the infant colony showed no readiness to yield to intimidation. In their
+measures there was a decided smack of what was to be realized a hundred
+and forty years later. Orders were immediately issued for fortifying
+Castle Island in the harbour and the heights at Charlestown and
+Dorchester. Militia companies were put in training, and a beacon was
+set up on the highest hill in Boston, to give prompt notice to all the
+surrounding country of any approaching enemy.
+
+While the ill will of the home government thus kept the colonists in a
+state of alarm, there were causes of strife at work at their very doors,
+of which they were fain to rid themselves as soon as possible. Among all
+the Puritans who came to New England there is no more interesting figure
+than the learned, quick-witted pugnacious Welshman, Roger Williams. He
+was over-fond of logical subtleties and delighted in controversy. There
+was scarcely any subject about which he did not wrangle, from the
+sinfulness of persecution to the propriety of women wearing veils in
+church. Yet, with all this love of controversy, there has perhaps
+never lived a more gentle and kindly soul. Within five years from the
+settlement of Massachusetts this young preacher had announced the true
+principles of religious liberty with a clearness of insight quite
+remarkable in that age. Roger Williams had been aided in securing an
+education by the great lawyer Sir Edward Coke, and had lately taken his
+degree at Pembroke College, Cambridge; but the boldness with which he
+declared his opinions had aroused the hostility of Laud, and in 1631 he
+had come over to Plymouth, whence he removed two years later to Salem,
+and became pastor of the church there. The views of Williams, if
+logically carried out, involved the entire separation of church from
+state, the equal protection of all forms of religious faith, the repeal
+of all laws compelling attendance on public worship, the abolition of
+tithes and of all forced contributions to the support of religion. Such
+views are to-day quite generally adopted by the more civilized portions
+of the Protestant world; but it is needless to say that they were not
+the views of the seventeenth century, in Massachusetts or elsewhere. For
+declaring such opinions as these on the continent of Europe, anywhere
+except in Holland, a man like Williams would in that age have run great
+risk of being burned at the stake. In England, under the energetic
+misgovernment of Laud, he would very likely have had to stand in the
+pillory with his ears cropped, or perhaps, like Bunyan and Baxter, would
+have been sent to jail. In Massachusetts such views were naturally
+enough regarded as anarchical, but in Williams's case they were further
+complicated by grave political imprudence. He wrote a pamphlet in which
+he denied the right of the colonists to the lands which they held in New
+England under the king's grant. He held that the soil belonged to the
+Indians, that the settlers could only obtain a valid title to it by
+purchase from them, and that the acceptance of a patent from a mere
+intruder, like the king, was a sin requiring public repentance. This
+doctrine was sure to be regarded in England as an attack upon the king's
+supremacy over Massachusetts, and at the same time an incident occurred
+in Salem which made it all the more unfortunate. The royal colours under
+which the little companies of militia marched were emblazoned with the
+red cross of St. George. The uncompromising Endicott loathed this emblem
+as tainted with Popery, and one day he publicly defaced the flag of the
+Salem company by cutting out the cross. The enemies of Massachusetts
+misinterpreted this act as a defiance aimed at the royal authority, and
+they attributed it to the teachings of Williams. In view of the king's
+unfriendliness these were dangerous proceedings. Endicott was summoned
+before the General Court at Boston, where he was publicly reprimanded
+and declared incapable of holding office for a year. A few months
+afterward, in January, 1636, Williams was ordered by the General Court
+to come to Boston and embark in a ship that was about to set sail for
+England. But he escaped into the forest, and made his way through the
+snow to the wigwam of Massasoit. He was a rare linguist, and had learned
+to talk fluently in the language of the Indians, and now he passed the
+winter in trying to instill into their ferocious hearts something of the
+gentleness of Christianity. In the spring he was privately notified by
+Winthrop that if he were to steer his course to Narragansett bay he
+would be secure from molestation; and such was the beginning of the
+settlement of Providence. [Sidenote: From religious dissensions; Roger
+Williams]
+
+Shortly before the departure of Williams, there came to Boston one of
+the greatest Puritan statesmen of that heroic age, the younger Henry
+Vane. It is pleasant to remember that the man and Anne who did so much
+to overthrow the tyranny of Strafford, who brought the military strength
+of Scotland to the aid of the hard-pressed Parliament, who administered
+the navy with which Blake won his astonishing victories, who dared even
+withstand Cromwell at the height of his power when his measures became
+too violent,--it is pleasant to remember that this admirable man was
+once the chief magistrate of an American commonwealth. It is pleasant
+for a Harvard man to remember that as such he presided over the assembly
+that founded our first university. Thorough republican and enthusiastic
+lover of liberty, he was spiritually akin to Jefferson and to Samuel
+Adams. Like Williams he was a friend to toleration, and like Williams
+he found Massachusetts an uncomfortable home. In 1636 he was only
+twenty-four years of age, "young in years," and perhaps not yet "in
+sage counsel old." He was chosen governor for that year, and his
+administration was stormy. Among those persons who had followed Mr.
+Cotton from Lincolnshire was Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, a very bright and
+capable lady, if perhaps somewhat impulsive and indiscreet. She had
+brought over with her, says Winthrop, "two dangerous errors: first, that
+the person of the Holy Ghost dwells in a justified person; second, that
+no sanctification can help to evidence to us our justification." Into
+the merits of such abstruse doctrines it is not necessary for the
+historian to enter. One can hardly repress a smile as one reflects
+how early in the history of Boston some of its characteristic social
+features were developed. It is curious to read of lectures there in
+1636, lectures by a lady, and transcendentalist lectures withal! Never
+did lectures in Boston arouse greater excitement than Mrs. Hutchinson's.
+Many of her hearers forsook the teachings of the regular ministers, to
+follow her. [Sidenote: Henry Vane and Anne Hutchinson]
+
+She was very effectively supported by her brother-in-law, Mr.
+Wheelwright, an eloquent preacher, and for a while she seemed to be
+carrying everything before her. She won her old minister Mr. Cotton, she
+won the stout soldier Captain Underhill, she won Governor Vane himself;
+while she incurred the deadly hatred of such men as Dudley and Cotton's
+associate John Wilson. The church at Boston was divided into two hostile
+camps. The sensible Winthrop marvelled at hearing men distinguished "by
+being under a covenant of grace or a covenant of works, as in other
+countries between Protestants and Papists," and he ventured to doubt
+whether any man could really tell what the difference was. The
+theological strife went on until it threatened to breed civil
+disaffection among the followers of Mrs. Hutchinson. A peculiar
+bitterness was given to the affair, from the fact that she professed to
+be endowed with the spirit of prophecy and taught her partisans that it
+was their duty to follow the biddings of a supernatural light; and there
+was nothing which the orthodox Puritan so steadfastly abhorred as the
+anarchical pretence of living by the aid of a supernatural light. In a
+strong and complex society the teachings of Mrs. Hutchinson would have
+awakened but a languid speculative interest, or perhaps would have
+passed by unheeded. In the simple society of Massachusetts in 1636,
+physically weak and as yet struggling for very existence, the practical
+effect of such teachings may well have been deemed politically
+dangerous. When things came to such a pass that the forces of the colony
+were mustered for an Indian campaign and the men of Boston were ready to
+shirk the service because they suspected their chaplain to be "under a
+covenant of works," it was naturally thought to be high time to put Mrs.
+Hutchinson down. In the spring of 1637 Winthrop was elected governor,
+and in August Vane returned to England. His father had at that moment
+more influence with the king than any other person except Strafford,
+and the young man had indiscreetly hinted at an appeal to the home
+government for the protection of the Antinomians, as Mrs. Hutchinson's
+followers were called. But an appeal from America to England was
+something which Massachusetts would no more tolerate in the days of
+Winthrop than in the days of Hancock and Adams. Soon after Vane's
+departure, Mrs. Hutchinson and her friends were ordered to leave the
+colony. It was doubtless an odious act of persecution, yet of all
+such acts which stain the history of Massachusetts in the seventeenth
+century, it is just the one for which the plea of political necessity
+may really be to some extent accepted.
+
+We now begin to see how the spreading of the New England colonization,
+and the founding of distinct communities, was hastened by these
+differences of opinion on theological questions or on questions
+concerning the relations between church and state. Of Mrs. Hutchinson's
+friends and adherents, some went northward, and founded the towns of
+Exeter and Hampton. Some time before Portsmouth and Dover had been
+settled by followers of Mason and Gorges. In 1641 these towns were added
+to the domain of Massachusetts, and so the matter stood until 1679, when
+we shall see Charles II. marking them off as a separate province, under
+a royal government. Such were the beginnings of New Hampshire. Mrs.
+Hutchinson herself, however, with the rest of her adherents, bought
+the island of Aquedneck from the Indians, and settlements were made at
+Portsmouth and Newport. After a quarter of a century of turbulence,
+these settlements coalesced with Williams's colony at Providence, and
+thus was formed the state of Rhode Island. After her husband's death in
+1642, Mrs. Hutchinson left Aquedneck and settled upon some land to the
+west of Stamford and supposed to be within the territory of the New
+Netherlands. There in the following year she was cruelly murdered by
+Indians, together with nearly all her children and servants, sixteen
+victims in all. One of her descendants was the illustrious Thomas
+Hutchinson, the first great American historian, and last royal governor
+of Massachusetts.
+
+To the dangers arising from the ill-will of the crown, and from these
+theological quarrels, there was added the danger of a general attack by
+the savages. Down to this time, since the landing of the Pilgrims at
+Plymouth, the settlers of New England had been in no way molested by the
+natives. Massasoit's treaty with the Pilgrims was scrupulously observed
+on both sides, and kept the Wampanoags quiet for fifty-four years. The
+somewhat smaller tribe which took its name from the _Massawachusett_, or
+Great Hill, of Milton, kept on friendly terms with the settlers about
+Boston, because these red men coveted the powerful aid of the white
+strangers in case of war with their hereditary foes the Tarratines, who
+dwelt in the Piscataqua country. It was only when the English began
+to leave these coast regions and press into the interior that trouble
+arose. The western shores of Narragansett bay were possessed by
+the numerous and warlike tribe of that name, which held in partial
+subjection the Nyantics near Point Judith. To the west of these, and
+about the Thames river, dwelt the still more formidable Pequots, a tribe
+which for bravery and ferocity asserted a preeminence in New England
+not unlike that which the Iroquois league of the Mohawk valley was fast
+winning over all North America east of the Mississippi. North of the
+Pequots, the squalid villages of the Nipmucks were scattered over the
+beautiful highlands that stretch in long ridges from Quinsigamond to
+Nichewaug, and beyond toward blue Monadnock. Westward, in the lower
+Connecticut valley, lived the Mohegans, a small but valiant tribe, now
+for some time held tributary to their Pequot cousins, and very restive
+under the yoke. The thickly wooded mountain ranges between the
+Connecticut and the Hudson had few human inhabitants. These hundred
+miles of crag and forest were a bulwark none too wide or strong against
+the incursions of the terrible Mohawks, whose name sent a shiver of fear
+throughout savage New England, and whose forbearance the Nipmucks and
+Mohegans were fain to ensure by a yearly payment of blackmail. Each
+summer there came two Mohawk elders, secure in the dread that Iroquois
+prowess had everywhere inspired; and up and down the Connecticut valley
+they seized the tribute of weapons and wampum, and proclaimed the last
+harsh edict issued from the savage council at Onondaga. The scowls that
+greeted their unwelcome visits were doubtless nowhere fiercer than among
+the Mohegans, thus ground down between Mohawk and Pequot as between the
+upper and the nether millstone. [Sidenote: From the Indians: the Pequot
+supremacy]
+
+Among the various points in which civilized man surpasses the savage
+none is more conspicuous than the military brute force which in the
+highest civilization is always latent though comparatively seldom
+exerted. The sudden intrusion of English warfare into the Indian world
+of the seventeenth century may well have seemed to the red men a
+supernatural visitation, like the hurricane or the earthquake. The
+uncompromising vigour with which the founders of Massachusetts carried
+on their work was viewed in some quarters with a dissatisfaction which
+soon thrust the English migration into the very heart of the Indian
+country.
+
+The first movement, however, was directed against the encroachments of
+the New Netherlands. In October, 1634, some men of Plymouth, led by
+William Holmes, sailed up the Connecticut river, and, after bandying
+threats with a party of Dutch who had built a rude fort on the site of
+Hartford, passed on and fortified themselves on the site of Windsor.
+Next year Governor Van Twiller sent a company of seventy men to drive
+away these intruders, but after reconnoitring the situation the Dutchmen
+thought it best not to make an attack. Their little stronghold at
+Hartford remained unmolested by the English, and, in order to secure
+the communication between this advanced outpost and New Amsterdam, Van
+Twiller decided to build another fort at the mouth of the river, but
+this time the English were beforehand. Rumours of Dutch designs may
+have reached the ears of Lord Say and Sele and Lord Brooke--"fanatic
+Brooke," as Scott calls him in "Marmion"--who had obtained from the
+Council for New England a grant of territory on the shores of the Sound.
+These noblemen chose as their agent the younger John Winthrop, son of
+the Massachusetts governor, and this new-comer arrived upon the scene
+just in time to drive away Van Twiller's vessel and build an English
+fort which in honour of his two patrons he called "Say-Brooke."
+
+Had it not been for seeds of discontent already sown in Massachusetts,
+the English hold upon the Connecticut valley might perhaps have been
+for a few years confined to these two military outposts at Windsor and
+Saybrook. But there were people in Massachusetts who did not look with
+favour upon the aristocratic and theocratic features in its polity. The
+provision that none but church-members should vote or hold office was
+by no means unanimously approved. We see it in the course of another
+generation putting altogether too much temporal power into the hands of
+the clergy, and we can trace the growth of the opposition to it until in
+the reign of Charles II. it becomes a dangerous source of weakness to
+Massachusetts. At the outset the opposition seems to have been strongest
+in Dorchester, Newtown, and Watertown. When the Board of Assistants
+undertook to secure for themselves permanency of tenure, together with
+the power of choosing the governor and making the laws, these three
+towns sent deputies to Boston to inspect the charter and see if it
+authorized any such stretch of power. They were foremost in insisting
+that representatives chosen by the towns must have a share in the
+general government. Men who held such opinions were naturally unwilling
+to increase the political weight of the clergy, who, during these early
+disputes and indeed until the downfall of the charter, were inclined to
+take aristocratic views and to sympathize with the Board of Assistants.
+Cotton declared that democracy was no fit government either for church
+or for commonwealth, and the majority of the ministers agreed with
+him. Chief among those who did not was the learned and eloquent Thomas
+Hooker, pastor of the church at Newtown. When Winthrop, in a letter to
+Hooker, defended the restriction of the suffrage on the ground that "the
+best part is always the least, and of that best part the wiser part is
+always the lesser;" Hooker replied that "in matters which concern the
+common good, a general council, chosen by all, to transact businesses
+which concern all, I conceive most suitable to rule and most safe for
+relief of the whole." It is interesting to meet, on the very threshold
+of American history, with such a lucid statement of the strongly
+contrasted views which a hundred and fifty years later were to be
+represented on a national scale by Hamilton and Jefferson. There were
+many in Newtown who took Hooker's view of the matter; and there, as
+also in Watertown and Dorchester, which in 1633 took the initiative in
+framing town governments with selectmen, a strong disposition was shown
+to evade the restrictions upon the suffrage.
+
+While such things were talked about in the summer of 1633 the
+adventurous John Oldham was making his way through the forest and over
+the mountains into the Connecticut valley, and when he returned to
+the coast his glowing accounts set some people to thinking. Two years
+afterward a few pioneers from Dorchester pushed through the wilderness
+as far as the Plymouth men's fort at Windsor, while a party from
+Watertown went farther and came to a halt upon the site of Wethersfield.
+A larger party, bringing cattle and such goods as they could carry,
+set out in the autumn and succeeded in reaching Windsor. Their winter
+supplies were sent around by water to meet them, but early in November
+the ships had barely passed the Saybrook fort when they found the river
+blocked with ice and were obliged to return to Boston. The sufferings of
+the pioneers, thus cut off from the world, were dreadful. Their cattle
+perished, and they were reduced to a diet of acorns and ground-nuts.
+Some seventy of them, walking on the frozen river to Saybrook, were
+so fortunate as to find a crazy little sloop jammed in the ice. They
+succeeded in cutting her adrift, and steered themselves back to Boston.
+Others surmounted greater obstacles in struggling back through the snow
+over the region which the Pullman car now traverses, regardless of
+seasons, in three hours. A few grim heroes, the nameless founders of a
+noble commonwealth, stayed on the spot and defied starvation. In the
+next June, 1636, the Newtown congregation, a hundred or more in number,
+led by their sturdy pastor, and bringing with them 160 head of cattle,
+made the pilgrimage to the Connecticut valley. Women and children took
+part in this pleasant summer journey; Mrs. Hooker, the pastor's wife,
+being too ill to walk, was carried on a litter. Thus, in the memorable
+year in which our great university was born, did Cambridge become, in
+the true Greek sense of a much-abused word, the _metropolis_ or "mother
+town" of Hartford. The migration at once became strong in numbers.
+During the past twelvemonth a score of ships had brought from England
+to Massachusetts more than 3000 souls, and so great an accession made
+further movement easy. Hooker's pilgrims were soon followed by the
+Dorchester and Watertown congregations, and by the next May 800 people
+were living in Windsor, Hartford, and Wethersfield. As we read of these
+movements, not of individuals, but of organic communities, united in
+allegiance to a church and its pastor, and fervid with the instinct
+of self-government, we seem to see Greek history renewed, but with
+centuries of added political training. For one year a board of
+commissioners from Massachusetts governed the new towns, but at the end
+of that time the towns chose representatives and held a General Court at
+Hartford, and thus the separate existence of Connecticut was begun. As
+for Springfield, which was settled about the same time by a party from
+Roxbury, it remained for some years doubtful to which state it belonged.
+At the opening session of the General Court, May 31,1638, Mr. Hooker
+preached a sermon of wonderful power, in which he maintained that "the
+foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people,"
+"that the choice of public magistrates belongs unto the people by God's
+own allowance," and that "they who have power to appoint officers and
+magistrates have the right also to set the bounds and limitations of
+the power and place unto which they call them." On the 14th of January,
+1639, all the freemen of the three towns assembled at Hartford and
+adopted a written constitution in which the hand of the great preacher
+is clearly discernible. It is worthy of note that this document contains
+none of the conventional references to a "dread sovereign" or a
+"gracious king," nor the slightest allusion to the British or any other
+government outside of Connecticut itself, nor does it prescribe any
+condition of church-membership for the right of suffrage. It was the
+first written constitution known to history, that created a government,
+[10] and it marked the beginnings of American democracy, of which Thomas
+Hooker deserves more than any other man to be called the father. The
+government of the United States today is in lineal descent more nearly
+related to that of Connecticut than to that of any of the other thirteen
+colonies. The most noteworthy feature of the Connecticut republic was
+that it was a federation of independent towns, and that all attributes
+of sovereignty not expressly granted to the General Court remained,
+as of original right, in the towns. Moreover, while the governor and
+council were chosen by a majority vote of the whole people, and by a
+suffrage that was almost universal, there was for each township an
+equality of representation in the assembly. [11] This little federal
+republic was allowed to develop peacefully and normally; its
+constitution was not violently wrenched out of shape like that of
+Massachusetts at the end of the seventeenth century. It silently grew
+till it became the strongest political structure on the continent, as
+was illustrated in the remarkable military energy and the unshaken
+financial credit of Connecticut during the Revolutionary War; and in the
+chief crisis of the Federal Convention of 1787 Connecticut, with her
+compromise which secured equal state representation in one branch of the
+national government and popular representation in the other, played the
+controlling part. [Sidenote: Connecticut Pioneers] [Sidenote: The first
+written constitution]
+
+Before the little federation of towns had framed its government, it had
+its Indian question to dispose of. Three years before the migration led
+by Hooker, a crew of eight traders, while making their way up the river
+to the Dutch station on the site of Hartford, had been murdered by a
+party of Indians subject to Sassacus, chief sachem of the Pequots.
+Negotiations concerning this outrage had gone on between Sassacus and
+the government at Boston, and the Pequots had promised to deliver up
+the murderers, but had neglected to do so. In the summer of 1636 some
+Indians on Block Island subject to the Narragansetts murdered the
+pioneer John Oldham, who was sailing on the Sound, and captured his
+little vessel. At this, says Underhill, "God stirred up the hearts" of
+Governor Vane and the rest of the magistrates. They were determined to
+make an end of the Indian question and show the savages that such things
+would not be endured. First an embassy was sent to Canonicus and his
+nephew Miantonomo, chief sachems of the Narragansetts, who hastened
+to disclaim all responsibility for the murder, and to throw the blame
+entirely upon the Indians of the island. Vane then sent out three
+vessels under command of Endicott, who ravaged Block Island, burning
+wigwams, sinking canoes, and slaying dogs, for the men had taken to the
+woods. Endicott then crossed to the mainland to reckon with the Pequots.
+He demanded the surrender of the murderers, with a thousand fathoms of
+wampum for damages; and not getting a satisfactory answer, he attacked
+the Indians, killed a score of them, seized their ripe corn, and burned
+and spoiled what he could. But such reprisals served only to enrage the
+red men. Lyon Gardiner, commander of the Saybrook fort, complained to
+Endicott: "You come hither to raise these wasps about my ears; then
+you will take wing and flee away." The immediate effect was to incite
+Sassacus to do his utmost to compass the ruin of the English. The
+superstitious awe with which the white men were at first regarded had
+been somewhat lessened by familiar contact with them, as in Aesop's
+fable of the fox and the lion. The resources of Indian diplomacy were
+exhausted in the attempt to unite the Narragansett warriors with the
+Pequots in a grand crusade against the white men. Such a combination
+could hardly have been as formidable as that which was effected forty
+years afterward in King Philip's war; for the savages had not as yet
+become accustomed to firearms, and the English settlements did not
+present so many points exposed to attack; but there is no doubt that
+it might have wrought fearful havoc. We can, at any rate, find no
+difficulty in comprehending the manifold perplexity of the Massachusetts
+men at this time, threatened as they were at once by an Indian crusade,
+by the machinations of a faithless king, and by a bitter theological
+quarrel at home, in this eventful year when they laid aside part of
+their incomes to establish Harvard College. [Sidenote: Origin of the
+Pequot War]
+
+The schemes of Sassacus were unsuccessful. The hereditary enmity of the
+Narragansetts toward their Pequot rivals was too strong to be lightly
+overcome. Roger Williams, taking advantage of this feeling, so worked
+upon the minds of the Narragansett chiefs that in the autumn of 1636
+they sent an embassy to Boston and made a treaty of alliance with the
+English. The Pequots were thus left to fight out their own quarrel; and
+had they still been separated from the English by the distance between
+Boston and the Thames river, the feud might very likely have smouldered
+until the drift of events had given a different shape to it. But as the
+English had in this very year thrown out their advanced posts into the
+lower Connecticut valley, there was clearly no issue from the situation
+save in deadly war. All through the winter of 1636-37 the Connecticut
+towns were kept in a state of alarm by the savages. Men going to their
+work were killed and horribly mangled. A Wethersfield man was kidnapped
+and roasted alive. Emboldened by the success of this feat, the Pequots
+attacked Wethersfield, massacred ten people, and carried away two girls.
+[Sidenote: Sassacus is foiled by Roger Williams] [Sidenote: The Pequots
+take the warpath alone]
+
+Wrought up to desperation by these atrocities, the Connecticut men
+appealed to Massachusetts and Plymouth for aid, and put into service
+ninety of their own number, under command of John Mason, an excellent
+and sturdy officer who had won golden opinions from Sir Thomas Fairfax,
+under whom he had served in the Netherlands. It took time to get men
+from Boston, and all that Massachusetts contributed to the enterprise at
+its beginning was that eccentric daredevil John Underhill, with a force
+of twenty men. Seventy friendly Mohegans, under their chief Uncas, eager
+to see vengeance wrought upon their Pequot oppressors, accompanied the
+expedition. From the fort at Saybrook this little company set sail on
+the twentieth of May, 1637, and landed in brilliant moonlight near Point
+Judith, where they were reinforced by four hundred Narragansetts and
+Nyantics. From this point they turned westward toward the stronghold of
+the Pequots, near the place where the town of Stonington now stands. As
+they approached the dreaded spot the courage of the Indian allies gave
+out, and they slunk behind, declaring that Sassacus was a god whom
+it was useless to think of attacking. The force with which Mason
+and Underhill advanced to the fray consisted of just seventy-seven
+Englishmen. Their task was to assault and carry an entrenched fort or
+walled village containing seven hundred Pequots. The fort was a
+circle of two or three acres in area, girdled by a palisade of
+sturdy sapling-trunks, set firm and deep into the ground, the narrow
+interstices between them serving as loopholes wherefrom to reconnoitre
+any one passing by and to shoot at assailants. At opposite sides of
+this stronghold were two openings barely large enough to let any one go
+through. Within this enclosure were the crowded wigwams. The attack was
+skilfully managed, and was a complete surprise. A little before daybreak
+Mason, with sixteen men, occupied one of the doors, while Underhill made
+sure of the other. The Indians in panic sought first one outlet and then
+the other, and were ruthlessly shot down, whichever way they turned. A
+few succeeded in breaking loose, but these were caught and tomahawked by
+the Indian allies, who, though afraid to take the risks of the fight,
+were ready enough to help slay the fugitives. The English threw
+firebrands among the wigwams, and soon the whole village was in a light
+blaze, and most of the savages suffered the horrible death which they
+were so fond of inflicting upon their captives. Of the seven hundred
+Pequots in the stronghold, but five got away with their lives. All this
+bloody work had been done in less than an hour, and of the English there
+had been two killed and sixteen wounded. It was the end of the Pequot
+nation. Of the remnant which had not been included in this wholesale
+slaughter, most were soon afterwards destroyed piecemeal in a running
+fight which extended as far westward as the site of Fairfield. Sassacus
+fled across the Hudson river to the Mohawks, who slew him and sent his
+scalp to Boston, as a peace-offering to the English. The few survivors
+were divided between the Mohegans and Narragansetts and adopted into
+those tribes. Truly the work was done with Cromwellian thoroughness. The
+tribe which had lorded it so fiercely over the New England forests was
+all at once wiped out of existence. So terrible a vengeance the Indians
+had never heard of. If the name of Pequot had hitherto been a name of
+terror, so now did the Englishmen win the inheritance of that deadly
+prestige. Not for eight-and-thirty years after the destruction of the
+Pequots, not until a generation of red men had grown up that knew not
+Underhill and Mason, did the Indian of New England dare again to lift
+his hand against the white man. [Sidenote: And are exterminated]
+
+Such scenes of wholesale slaughter are not pleasant reading in this
+milder age. But our forefathers felt that the wars of Canaan afforded
+a sound precedent for such cases; and, indeed, if we remember what
+the soldiers of Tilly and Wallenstein were doing at this very time in
+Germany, we shall realize that the work of Mason and Underhill would not
+have been felt by any one in that age to merit censure or stand in need
+of excuses. As a matter of practical policy the annihilation of the
+Pequots can be condemned only by those who read history so incorrectly
+as to suppose that savages, whose business is to torture and slay, can
+always be dealt with according to the methods in use between civilized
+peoples. A mighty nation, like the United States, is in honour bound to
+treat the red man with scrupulous justice and refrain from cruelty in
+punishing his delinquencies. But if the founders of Connecticut, in
+confronting a danger which threatened their very existence, struck with
+savage fierceness, we cannot blame them. The world is so made that it
+is only in that way that the higher races have been able to preserve
+themselves and carry on their progressive work.
+
+The overthrow of the Pequots was a cardinal event in the planting of
+New England. It removed the chief obstacle to the colonization of
+the Connecticut coast, and brought the inland settlements into such
+unimpeded communication with those on tide-water as to prepare the way
+for the formation of the New England confederacy. Its first fruits were
+seen in the direction taken by the next wave of migration, which ended
+the Puritan exodus from England to America. About a month after the
+storming of the palisaded village there arrived in Boston a company of
+wealthy London merchants, with their families. The most prominent among
+them, Theophilus Eaton, was a member of the Company of Massachusetts
+Bay. Their pastor, John Davenport, was an eloquent preacher and a man of
+power. He was a graduate of Oxford, and in 1624 had been chosen vicar
+of St. Stephen's parish, in Coleman street, London. When he heard that
+Cotton and Hooker were about to sail for America, he sought earnestly to
+turn them from what he deemed the error of their ways, but instead he
+became converted himself and soon incurred the especial enmity of Laud,
+so that it became necessary for him to flee to Amsterdam. In 1636 he
+returned to England, and in concert with Eaton organized a scheme of
+emigration that included men from Yorkshire, Hertfordshire, and Kent.
+The leaders arrived in Boston in the midst of the Antinomian disputes,
+and although Davenport won admiration for his skill in battling with
+heresy, he may perhaps have deemed it preferable to lead his flock
+to some new spot in the wilderness where such warfare might not be
+required. The merchants desired a fine harbour and good commercial
+situation, and the reports of the men who returned from hunting the
+Pequots told them of just such a spot at Quinnipiack on Long Island
+Sound. Here they could carry out their plan of putting into practice
+a theocratic ideal even more rigid than that which obtained in
+Massachusetts, and arrange their civil as well as ecclesiastical affairs
+in accordance with rules to be obtained from a minute study of the
+Scriptures. [Sidenote: The colony of New Haven]
+
+In the spring of 1638 the town of New Haven was accordingly founded.
+The next year a swarm from this new town settled Milford, while another
+party, freshly arrived from England, made the beginnings of Guilford. In
+1640 Stamford was added to the group, and in 1643 the four towns were
+united into the republic of New Haven, to which Southold, on Long
+Island, and Branford were afterwards added. As being a confederation of
+independent towns, New Haven resembled Connecticut. In other respects
+the differences between the two reflected the differences between
+Davenport and Hooker; the latter was what would now be called more
+radical than Winthrop or Cotton, the former was more conservative.
+In the New Haven colony none but church-members could vote, and this
+measure at the outset disfranchised more than half the settlers in New
+Haven town, nearly half in Guilford, and less than one fifth in Milford.
+This result was practically less democratic than in Massachusetts where
+it was some time before the disfranchisement attained such dimensions.
+The power of the clergy reached its extreme point in New Haven, where
+each of the towns was governed by seven ecclesiastical officers known as
+"pillars of the church." These magistrates served as judges, and trial
+by jury was dispensed with, because no authority could be found for it
+in the laws of Moses. The legislation was quaint enough, though the
+famous "Blue Laws" of New Haven, which have been made the theme of so
+many jests at the expense of our forefathers, never really existed. The
+story of the Blue Laws was first published in 1781 by the Rev. Samuel
+Peters, a Tory refugee in London, who took delight in horrifying our
+British cousins with tales of wholesale tarring and feathering done by
+the patriots of the Revolution. In point of strict veracity Dr. Peters
+reminds one of Baron Munchausen; he declares that the river at Bellows
+Falls flows so fast as to float iron crowbars, and he gravely describes
+sundry animals who were evidently cousins to the Jabberwok. The most
+famous passage of his pretended code is that which enacts that "no woman
+shall kiss her child on the Sabbath," and that "no one shall play on any
+instrument of music except the drum, trumpet, or jewsharp." [Sidenote:
+Legend of the "Blue Laws"]
+
+When the Long Parliament met in 1640, the Puritan exodus to New England
+came to an end. During the twenty years which had elapsed since the
+voyage of the Mayflower, the population had grown to 26,000 souls. Of
+this number scarcely 500 had arrived before 1629. It is a striking fact,
+since it expresses a causal relation and not a mere coincidence, that
+the eleven years, 1629-1640, during which Charles I. governed England
+without a parliament, were the same eleven years that witnessed the
+planting of New England. For more than a century after this there was no
+considerable migration to this part of North America. Puritan England
+now found employment for all its energies and all its enthusiasm at
+home. The struggle with the king and the efforts toward reorganization
+under Cromwell were to occupy it for another score of years, and
+then, by the time of the Restoration the youthful creative energy of
+Puritanism had spent itself. The influence of this great movement
+was indeed destined to grow wider and deeper with the progress of
+civilization, but after 1660 its creative work began to run in new
+channels and assume different forms. [Sidenote: End of the Puritan
+exodus]
+
+It is curious to reflect what might have been the result, to America and
+to the world, had things in England gone differently between 1620 and
+1660. Had the policy of James and Charles been less formidable, the
+Puritan exodus might never have occurred, and the Virginian type of
+society, varied perhaps by a strong Dutch infusion, might have become
+supreme in America. The western continent would have lost in richness
+and variety of life, and it is not likely that Europe would have made a
+corresponding gain, for the moral effect of the challenge, the struggle,
+and the overthrow of monarchy in England was a stimulus sorely needed
+by neighbouring peoples. It is not always by avoiding the evil, it
+is rather by grappling with it and conquering it that character is
+strengthened and life enriched, and there is no better example of this
+than the history of England in the seventeenth century.
+
+On the other hand, if the Stuart despotism had triumphed in England, the
+Puritan exodus would doubtless have been swelled to huge dimensions. New
+England would have gained strength so quickly that much less irritation
+than she actually suffered between 1664 and 1689 would probably have
+goaded her into rebellion. The war of independence might have been waged
+a century sooner than it was. It is not easy to point to any especial
+advantage that could have come to America from this; one is rather
+inclined to think of the peculiarly valuable political training of the
+eighteenth century that would have been lost. Such surmises are for the
+most part idle. But as concerns Europe, it is plain to be seen, for
+reasons stated in my first chapter, that the decisive victory of Charles
+I. would have been a calamity of the first magnitude. It would have been
+like the Greeks losing Marathon or the Saracens winning Tours, supposing
+the worst consequences ever imagined in those hypothetical cases to have
+been realized. Or taking a more contracted view, we can see how England,
+robbed of her Puritan element, might still have waxed in strength, as
+France has done in spite of losing the Huguenots; but she could not
+have taken the proud position that she has come to occupy as mother of
+nations. Her preeminence since Cromwell's time has been chiefly due to
+her unrivalled power of planting self-supporting colonies, and that
+power has had its roots in English self-government. It is the vitality
+of the English Idea that is making the language of Cromwell and
+Washington dominant in the world.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE NEW ENGLAND CONFEDERACY.
+
+
+The Puritan exodus to New England, which came to an end about 1640, was
+purely and exclusively English. There was nothing in it that came from
+the continent of Europe, nothing that was either Irish or Scotch, very
+little that was Welsh. As Palfrey says, the population of 26,000 that
+had been planted in New England by 1640 "thenceforward continued to
+multiply on its own soil for a century and a half, in remarkable
+seclusion from other communities." During the whole of this period New
+England received but few immigrants; and it was not until after the
+Revolutionary War that its people had fairly started on their westward
+march into the state of New York and beyond, until now, after yet
+another century, we find some of their descendants dwelling in a
+homelike Salem and a Portland of charming beauty on the Pacific coast.
+Three times between the meeting of the Long Parliament and the meeting
+of the Continental Congress did the New England colonies receive a
+slight infusion of non-English blood. In 1652, after his victories at
+Dunbar and Worcester, Cromwell sent 270 of his Scottish prisoners to
+Boston, where the descendants of some of them still dwell. After the
+revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, 150 families of Huguenots
+came to Massachusetts. And finally in 1719, 120 Presbyterian families
+came over from the north of Ireland, and settled at Londonderry in New
+Hampshire, and elsewhere. In view of these facts it may be said that
+there is not a county in England of which the population is more purely
+English than the population of New England at the end of the eighteenth
+century. From long and careful research, Mr. Savage, the highest
+authority on this subject, concludes that more than 98 in 100 of the New
+England people at that time could trace their origin to England in
+the narrowest sense, excluding even Wales. As already observed, every
+English shire contributed something to the emigration, but there was
+a marked preponderance of people from the East Anglian counties.
+[Sidenote: The exodus was purely English]
+
+The population of New England was nearly as homogeneous in social
+condition as it was in blood. The emigration was preeminent for its
+respectability. Like the best part of the emigration to Virginia, it
+consisted largely of country squires and yeomen. The men who followed
+Winthrop were thrifty and prosperous in their old homes from which their
+devotion to an idea made them voluntary exiles. They attached so much
+importance to regular industry and decorous behaviour that for a long
+time the needy and shiftless people who usually make trouble in new
+colonies were not tolerated among them. Hence the early history of New
+England is remarkably free from those scenes of violence and disorder
+which have so often made hideous the first years of new communities.
+Of negro slaves there were very few, and these were employed wholly in
+domestic service; there were not enough of them to affect the industrial
+life of New England or to be worth mentioning as a class. Neither were
+there many of the wretched people, kidnapped from the jails and slums
+of English sea-ports, such as in those early days when negro labour was
+scarce, were sent by ship-loads to Virginia, to become the progenitors
+of the "white trash." There were a few indented white servants, usually
+of the class known as "redemptioners," or immigrants who voluntarily
+bound themselves to service for a stated time in order to defray the
+cost of their voyage from Europe. At a later time there were many of
+these "redemptioners" in the middle colonies, but in New England they
+were very few; and as no stigma of servitude was attached to manual
+labour, they were apt at the end of their terms of service to become
+independent farmers; thus they ceased to be recognizable as a distinct
+class of society. Nevertheless the common statement that no traces of
+the "mean white" are to be found in New England is perhaps somewhat
+too sweeping. Interspersed among those respectable and tidy mountain
+villages, once full of such vigorous life, one sometimes comes upon
+little isolated groups of wretched hovels whose local reputation is
+sufficiently indicated by such terse epithets as "Hardscrabble" or
+"Hell-huddle." Their denizens may in many instances be the degenerate
+offspring of a sound New England stock, but they sometimes show strong
+points of resemblance to that "white trash" which has come to be a
+recognizable strain of the English race; and one cannot help suspecting
+that while the New England colonies made every effort to keep out such
+riff raff, it may nevertheless have now and then crept in. However this
+may be, it cannot be said that this element ever formed a noticeable
+feature in the life of colonial New England. As regards their social
+derivation, the settlers of New England were homogeneous in character to
+a remarkable degree, and they were drawn from the sturdiest part of
+the English stock. In all history there has been no other instance of
+colonization so exclusively effected by picked and chosen men. The
+colonists knew this, and were proud of it, as well they might be. It was
+the simple truth that was spoken by William Stoughton when he said, in
+his election sermon of 1688: "God sifted a whole nation, that He might
+send choice grain into the wilderness." [Sidenote: Respectable character
+of the emigration]
+
+This matter comes to have more than a local interest, when we reflect
+that the 26,000 New Englanders of 1640 have in two hundred and fifty
+years increased to something like 15,000,000. From these men have come
+at least one-fourth of the present population of the United States.
+Striking as this fact may seem, it is perhaps less striking than the
+fact of the original migration when duly considered. In these times,
+when great steamers sail every day from European ports, bringing
+immigrants to a country not less advanced in material civilization
+than the country which they leave, the daily arrival of a thousand new
+citizens has come to be a commonplace event. But in the seventeenth
+century the transfer of more than twenty thousand well-to-do people
+within twenty years from their comfortable homes in England to the
+American wilderness was by no means a commonplace event. It reminds one
+of the migrations of ancient peoples, and in the quaint thought of
+our forefathers it was aptly likened to the exodus of Israel from the
+Egyptian house of bondage.
+
+In this migration a principle of selection was at work which insured an
+extraordinary uniformity of character and of purpose among the settlers.
+To this uniformity of purpose, combined with complete homogeneity of
+race, is due the preponderance early acquired by New England in the
+history of the American people. In view of this, it is worth while to
+inquire what were the real aims of the settlers of New England. What was
+the common purpose which brought these men together in their resolve to
+create for themselves new homes in the wilderness?
+
+This is a point concerning which there has been a great deal of popular
+misapprehension, and there has been no end of nonsense talked about it.
+It has been customary first to assume that the Puritan migration was
+undertaken in the interests of religious liberty, and then to upbraid
+the Puritans for forgetting all about religious liberty as soon as
+people came among them who disagreed with their opinions. But this view
+of the case is not supported by history. It is quite true that the
+Puritans were chargeable with gross intolerance; but it is not true that
+in this they were guilty of inconsistency. The notion that they came to
+New England for the purpose of establishing religious liberty, in
+any sense in which we should understand such a phrase, is entirely
+incorrect. It is neither more nor less than a bit of popular legend. If
+we mean by the phrase "religious liberty" a state of things in which
+opposite or contradictory opinions on questions of religion shall exist
+side by side in the same community, and in which everybody shall
+decide for himself how far he will conform to the customary religious
+observances, nothing could have been further from their thoughts. There
+is nothing they would have regarded with more genuine abhorrence. If
+they could have been forewarned by a prophetic voice of the general
+freedom--or, as they would have termed it, license--of thought and
+behaviour which prevails in this country to-day, they would very likely
+have abandoned their enterprise in despair. [12] The philosophic student
+of history often has occasion to see how God is wiser than man. In other
+words, he is often brought to realize how fortunate it is that the
+leaders in great historic events cannot foresee the remote results of
+the labours to which they have zealously consecrated their lives. It is
+part of the irony of human destiny that the end we really accomplish by
+striving with might and main is apt to be something quite different from
+the end we dreamed of as we started on our arduous labour. So it was
+with the Puritan settlers of New England. The religious liberty that
+we enjoy to-day is largely the consequence of their work; but it is a
+consequence that was unforeseen, while the direct and conscious aim of
+their labours was something that has never been realized, and probably
+never will be. [Sidenote: The migration was not intended to promote what
+we call religious liberty]
+
+The aim of Winthrop and his friends in coming to Massachusetts was the
+construction of a theocratic state which should be to Christians, under
+the New Testament dispensation, all that the theocracy of Moses and
+Joshua and Samuel had been to the Jews in Old Testament days. They
+should be to all intents and purposes freed from the jurisdiction of
+the Stuart king, and so far as possible the text of the Holy Scriptures
+should be their guide both in weighty matters of general legislation and
+in the shaping of the smallest details of daily life. In such a scheme
+there was no room for religious liberty as we understand it. No doubt
+the text of the Scriptures may be interpreted in many ways, but among
+these men there was a substantial agreement as to the important points,
+and nothing could have been further from their thoughts than to found
+a colony which should afford a field for new experiments in the art of
+right living. The state they were to found was to consist of a united
+body of believers; citizenship itself was to be co-extensive with
+church-membership; and in such a state there was apparently no more room
+for heretics than there was in Rome or Madrid. This was the idea which
+drew Winthrop and his followers from England at a time when--as events
+were soon to show--they might have stayed there and defied persecution
+with less trouble than it cost them to cross the ocean and found a new
+state. [Sidenote: Theocratic ideal of the Puritans]
+
+Such an ideal as this, considered by itself and apart from the concrete
+acts in which it was historically manifested, may seem like the merest
+fanaticism. But we cannot dismiss in this summary way a movement which
+has been at the source of so much that is great in American history:
+mere fanaticism has never produced such substantial results. Mere
+fanaticism is sure to aim at changing the constitution of human society
+in some essential point, to undo the work of evolution, and offer in
+some indistinctly apprehended fashion to remodel human life. But in
+these respects the Puritans were intensely conservative. The impulse by
+which they were animated was a profoundly ethical impulse--the desire
+to lead godly lives, and to drive out sin from the community--the same
+ethical impulse which animates the glowing pages of Hebrew poets and
+prophets, and which has given to the history and literature of Israel
+their commanding influence in the world. The Greek, says Matthew Arnold,
+held that the perfection of happiness was to have one's thoughts hit the
+mark; but the Hebrew held that it was to serve the Lord day and night.
+It was a touch of this inspiration that the Puritan caught from his
+earnest and reverent study of the sacred text, and that served to
+justify and intensify his yearning for a better life, and to give it
+the character of a grand and holy ideal. Yet with all this religious
+enthusiasm, the Puritan was in every fibre a practical Englishman with
+his full share of plain common-sense. He avoided the error of
+mediaeval anchorites and mystics in setting an exaggerated value upon
+otherworldliness. In his desire to win a crown of glory hereafter he did
+not forget that the present life has its simple duties, in the exact
+performance of which the welfare of society mainly consists. He likewise
+avoided the error of modern radicals who would remodel the fundamental
+institutions of property and of the family, and thus disturb the very
+groundwork of our ethical ideals. The Puritan's ethical conception of
+society was simply that which has grown up in the natural course of
+historical evolution, and which in its essential points is therefore
+intelligible to all men, and approved by the common-sense of men,
+however various may be the terminology--whether theological or
+scientific--in which it is expounded. For these reasons there was
+nothing essentially fanatical or impracticable in the Puritan scheme: in
+substance it was something that great bodies of men could at once put
+into practice, while its quaint and peculiar form was something that
+could be easily and naturally outgrown and set aside. [Sidenote: The
+impulse which sought to realize itself in the Puritan ideal was an
+ethical impulse]
+
+Yet another point in which the Puritan scheme of a theocratic society
+was rational and not fanatical was its method of interpreting the
+Scriptures. That method was essentially rationalistic in two ways.
+First, the Puritan laid no claim to the possession of any peculiar
+inspiration or divine light whereby he might be aided in ascertaining
+the meaning of the sacred text; but he used his reason just as he would
+in any matter of business, and he sought to convince, and expected to
+be convinced, by rational argument, and by nothing else. Secondly, it
+followed from this denial of any peculiar inspiration that there was no
+room in the Puritan commonwealth for anything like a priestly class, and
+that every individual must hold his own opinions at his own personal
+risk. The consequences of this rationalistic spirit have been very
+far-reaching. In the conviction that religious opinion must be consonant
+with reason, and that religious truth must be brought home to each
+individual by rational argument, we may find one of the chief causes of
+that peculiarly conservative yet flexible intelligence which has enabled
+the Puritan countries to take the lead in the civilized world of
+today. Free discussion of theological questions, when conducted with
+earnestness and reverence, and within certain generally acknowledged
+limits, was never discountenanced in New England. On the contrary, there
+has never been a society in the world in which theological problems have
+been so seriously and persistently discussed as in New England in the
+colonial period. The long sermons of the clergymen were usually learned
+and elaborate arguments of doctrinal points, bristling with quotations
+from the Bible, or from famous books of controversial divinity, and in
+the long winter evenings the questions thus raised afforded the occasion
+for lively debate in every household. The clergy were, as a rule, men
+of learning, able to read both Old and New Testaments in the original
+languages, and familiar with the best that had been talked and written,
+among Protestants at least, on theological subjects. They were also, for
+the most part, men of lofty character, and they were held in high social
+esteem on account of their character and scholarship, as well as on
+account of their clerical position. But in spite of the reverence in
+which they were commonly held, it would have been a thing quite unheard
+of for one of these pastors to urge an opinion from the pulpit on the
+sole ground of his personal authority or his superior knowledge of
+Scriptural exegesis. The hearers, too, were quick to detect novelties
+or variations in doctrine; and while there was perhaps no more than the
+ordinary human unwillingness to listen to a new thought merely because
+of its newness, it was above all things needful that the orthodox
+soundness of every new suggestion should be thoroughly and severely
+tested. This intense interest in doctrinal theology was part and parcel
+of the whole theory of New England life; because, as I have said, it was
+taken for granted that each individual must hold his own opinions at
+his own personal risk in the world to come. Such perpetual discussion,
+conducted, under such a stimulus, afforded in itself no mean school
+of intellectual training. Viewed in relation to the subsequent mental
+activity of New England, it may be said to have occupied a position
+somewhat similar to that which the polemics of the medieval schoolmen
+occupied in relation to the European thought of the Renaissance, and of
+the age of Hobbes and Descartes. At the same time the Puritan theory of
+life lay at the bottom of the whole system of popular education in New
+England. According to that theory, it was absolutely essential that
+every one should be taught from early childhood how to read and
+understand the Bible. So much instruction as this was assumed to be a
+sacred duty which the community owed to every child born within its
+jurisdiction. In ignorance, the Puritans maintained, lay the principal
+strength of popery in religion as well as of despotism in politics; and
+so, to the best of their lights, they cultivated knowledge with might
+and main. But in this energetic diffusion of knowledge they were
+unwittingly preparing the complete and irreparable destruction of the
+theocratic ideal of society which they had sought to realize by crossing
+the ocean and settling in New England. This universal education, and
+this perpetual discussion of theological questions, were no more
+compatible with rigid adherence to the Calvinistic system than with
+submission to the absolute rule of Rome. The inevitable result was the
+liberal and enlightened Protestantism which is characteristic of the
+best American society at the present day, and which is continually
+growing more liberal as it grows more enlightened--a Protestantism
+which, in the natural course of development, is coming to realize the
+noble ideal of Roger Williams, but from the very thought of which such
+men as Winthrop and Cotton and Endicott would have shrunk with dismay.
+[Sidenote: In interpreting Scripture, the Puritan appealed to his
+reason] [Sidenote: Value of theological discussion]
+
+In this connection it is interesting to note the similarity between the
+experience of the Puritans in New England and in Scotland with respect
+to the influence of their religious theory of life upon general
+education. Nowhere has Puritanism, with its keen intelligence and its
+iron tenacity of purpose, played a greater part than it has played in
+the history of Scotland. And one need not fear contradiction in saying
+that no other people in modern times, in proportion to their numbers,
+have achieved so much in all departments of human activity as the people
+of Scotland have achieved. It would be superfluous to mention the
+preeminence of Scotland in the industrial arts since the days of James
+Watt, or to recount the glorious names in philosophy, in history, in
+poetry and romance, and in every department of science, which since the
+middle of the eighteenth century have made the country of Burns and
+Scott, of Hume and Adam Smith, of Black and Hunter and Hutton and
+Lyell, illustrious for all future time. Now this period of magnificent
+intellectual fruition in Scotland was preceded by a period of
+Calvinistic orthodoxy quite as rigorous as that of New England. The
+ministers of the Scotch Kirk in the seventeenth century cherished a
+theocratic ideal of society not unlike that which the colonists of New
+England aimed at realizing. There was the same austerity, the same
+intolerance, the same narrowness of interests, in Scotland that there
+was in New England. Mr. Buckle, in the book which thirty years ago
+seemed so great and stimulating, gave us a graphic picture of this state
+of society, and the only thing which he could find to say about it, as
+the result of his elaborate survey, was that the spirit of the Scotch
+Kirk was as thoroughly hostile to human progress as the spirit of the
+Spanish Inquisition! If this were really so, it would be difficult
+indeed to account for the period of brilliant mental activity which
+immediately followed. But in reality the Puritan theory of life led
+to general education in Scotland as it did in New England, and for
+precisely the same reasons, while the effects of theological discussion
+in breaking down the old Calvinistic exclusiveness have been illustrated
+in the history of Edinburgh as well as in the history of Boston.
+[Sidenote: Comparison with the case of Scotland]
+
+It is well for us to bear in mind the foregoing considerations as we
+deal with the history of the short-lived New England Confederacy. The
+story is full of instances of an intolerant and domineering spirit,
+especially on the part of Massachusetts, and now and then this spirit
+breaks forth in ugly acts of persecution. In considering these facts, it
+is well to remember that we are observing the workings of a system
+which contained within itself a curative principle; and it is further
+interesting to observe how political circumstances contributed to
+modify the Puritan ideal, gradually breaking down the old theocratic
+exclusiveness and strengthening the spirit of religious liberty.
+
+Scarcely had the first New England colonies been established when it was
+found desirable to unite them into some kind of a confederation. It is
+worthy of note that the separate existence of so many colonies was at
+the outset largely the result of religious differences. The uniformity
+of purpose, great as it was, fell far short of completeness. [Sidenote:
+Existence of so many colonies due to slight religious differences]
+
+Could all have agreed, or had there been religious toleration in the
+modern sense, there was still room enough for all in Massachusetts;
+and a compact settlement would have been in much less danger from the
+Indians. But in the founding of Connecticut the theocratic idea had less
+weight, and in the founding of New Haven it had more weight, than
+in Massachusetts. The existence of Rhode Island was based upon that
+principle of full toleration which the three colonies just mentioned
+alike abhorred, and its first settlers were people banished from
+Massachusetts. With regard to toleration Plymouth occupied a middle
+ground; without admitting the principles of Williams, the people of that
+colony were still fairly tolerant in practice. Of the four towns of New
+Hampshire, two had been founded by Antinomians driven from Boston, and
+two by Episcopal friends of Mason and Gorges. It was impossible that
+neighbouring communities, characterized by such differences of opinion,
+but otherwise homogeneous in race and in social condition, should fail
+to react upon one another and to liberalize one another. Still more was
+this true when they attempted to enter into a political union. When, for
+example, Massachusetts in 1641-43 annexed the New Hampshire townships,
+she was of necessity obliged to relax in their case her policy of
+insisting upon religious conformity as a test of citizenship. So in
+forming the New England Confederacy, there were some matters of dispute
+that had to be passed over by mutual consent or connivance. [Sidenote:
+It led to a notable attempt at federation]
+
+The same causes which had spread the English settlements over so wide a
+territory now led, as an indirect result, to their partial union into a
+confederacy. The immediate consequence of the westward movement had been
+an Indian war. Several savage tribes were now interspersed between the
+settlements, so that it became desirable that the military force should
+be brought, as far as possible, under one management. The colony of
+New Netherlands, moreover, had begun to assume importance, and the
+settlements west of the Connecticut river had already occasioned hard
+words between Dutch and English, which might at any moment be followed
+by blows. In the French colonies at the north, with their extensive
+Indian alliances under Jesuit guidance, the Puritans saw a rival power
+which was likely in course of time to prove troublesome. With a view to
+more efficient self-defence, therefore, in 1643 the four colonies of
+Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven formed themselves
+into a league, under the style of "The United Colonies of New England."
+These four little states now contained thirty-nine towns, with an
+aggregate population of 24,000. To the northeast of Massachusetts,
+which now extended to the Piscataqua, a small colony had at length been
+constituted under a proprietary charter somewhat similar to that held by
+the Calverts in Maryland. Of this new province or palatinate of Maine
+the aged Sir Ferdinando Gorges was Lord Proprietary, and he had
+undertaken not only to establish the Church of England there, but also
+to introduce usages of feudal jurisdiction like those remaining in the
+old country. Such a community was not likely to join the Confederacy;
+apart from other reasons, its proprietary constitution and the feud
+between the Puritans and Gorges would have been sufficient obstacles.
+
+As for Rhode Island, on the other hand, it was regarded with strong
+dislike by the other colonies. It was a curious and noteworthy
+consequence of the circumstances under which this little state was
+founded that for a long time it became the refuge of all the fanatical
+and turbulent people who could not submit to the strict and orderly
+governments of Connecticut or Massachusetts. All extremes met on
+Narragansett bay. There were not only sensible advocates of religious
+liberty, but theocrats as well who saw flaws in the theocracy of
+other Puritans. The English world was then in a state of theological
+fermentation. People who fancied themselves favoured with direct
+revelations from Heaven; people who thought it right to keep the seventh
+day of the week as a Sabbath instead of the first day; people who
+cherished a special predilection for the Apocalypse and the Book of
+Daniel; people with queer views about property and government; people
+who advocated either too little marriage or too much marriage; all such
+eccentric characters as are apt to come to the surface in periods of
+religious excitement found in Rhode Island a favoured spot where they
+could prophesy without let or hindrance. But the immediate practical
+result of so much discordance in opinion was the impossibility of
+founding a strong and well-ordered government. The early history of
+Rhode Island was marked by enough of turbulence to suggest the question
+whether, after all, at the bottom of the Puritan's refusal to recognize
+the doctrine of private inspiration, or to tolerate indiscriminately all
+sorts of opinions, there may not have been a grain of shrewd political
+sense not ill adapted to the social condition of the seventeenth
+century. In 1644 and again in 1648 the Narragansett settlers asked leave
+to join the Confederacy; but the request was refused on the ground
+that they had no stable government of their own. They were offered
+the alternative of voluntary annexation either to Massachusetts or to
+Plymouth, or of staying out in the cold; and they chose the latter
+course. Early in 1643 they had sent Roger Williams over to England to
+obtain a charter for Rhode Island. In that year Parliament created a
+Board of Commissioners, with the Earl of Warwick at its head, for the
+superintendence of colonial affairs; and nothing could better illustrate
+the loose and reckless manner in which American questions were treated
+in England than the first proceedings of this board. It gave an early
+instance of British carelessness in matters of American geography. In
+December, 1643, it granted to Massachusetts all the territory on the
+mainland of Narragansett bay; and in the following March it incorporated
+the townships of Newport and Portsmouth, which stood on the island,
+together with Providence, which stood on the mainland, into an
+independent colony empowered to frame a government and make laws for
+itself. With this second document Williams returned to Providence in the
+autumn of 1644. Just how far it was intended to cancel the first one,
+nobody could tell, but it plainly afforded an occasion for a conflict of
+claims. [Sidenote: Turbulence of dissent in Rhode Island] [Sidenote: The
+Earl of Warwick and his Board of Commissioners]
+
+The league of the four colonies is interesting as the first American
+experiment in federation. By the articles it was agreed that each colony
+should retain full independence so far as concerned the management of
+its internal affairs, but that the confederate government should have
+entire control over all dealings with the Indians or with foreign
+powers. The administration of the league was put into the hands of
+a board of eight Federal Commissioners, two from each colony. The
+commissioners were required to be church-members in good standing. They
+could choose for themselves a president or chairman out of their own
+number, but such a president was to have no more power than the other
+members of the Board. If any measure were to come up concerning
+which the commissioners could not agree, it was to be referred for
+consideration to the legislatures or general courts of the four
+colonies. Expenses for war were to be charged to each colony in
+proportion to the number of males in each between sixteen years of
+age and sixty. A meeting of the Board might be summoned by any two
+magistrates whenever the public safety might seem to require it; but a
+regular meeting was to be held once every year.
+
+In this scheme of confederacy all power of taxation was expressly left
+to the several colonies. The scheme provided for a mere league, not for
+a federal union. The government of the Commissioners acted only upon the
+local governments, not upon individuals. The Board had thus but little
+executive power, and was hardly more than a consulting body. Another
+source of weakness in the confederacy was the overwhelming preponderance
+of Massachusetts. Of the 24,000 people in the confederation, 15,000
+belonged to Massachusetts, while the other three colonies had only about
+3,000 each. Massachusetts accordingly had to carry the heaviest burden,
+both in the furnishing of soldiers and in the payment of war expenses,
+while in the direction of affairs she had no more authority than one of
+the small colonies. As a natural consequence, Massachusetts tried
+to exert more authority than she was entitled to by the articles of
+confederation; and such conduct was not unnaturally resented by the
+small colonies, as betokening an unfair and domineering spirit. In
+spite of these drawbacks, however, the league was of great value to
+New England. On many occasions it worked well as a high court of
+jurisdiction, and it made the military strength of the colonies more
+available than it would otherwise have been. But for the interference
+of the British government, which brought it to an untimely end, the
+Confederacy might have been gradually amended so as to become enduring.
+After its downfall it was pleasantly remembered by the people of New
+England; in times of trouble their thoughts reverted to it; and the
+historian must in fairness assign it some share in preparing men's minds
+for the greater work of federation which was achieved before the end of
+the following century. [Sidenote: It was only a league, not a federal
+union]
+
+The formation of such a confederacy certainly involved something very
+like a tacit assumption of sovereignty on the part of the four colonies.
+It is worthy of note that they did not take the trouble to ask the
+permission of the home government in advance. They did as they pleased,
+and then defended their action afterward. In England the act of
+confederation was regarded with jealousy and distrust. But Edward
+Winslow, who was sent over to London to defend the colonies, pithily
+said: "If we in America should forbear to unite for offence and defence
+against a common enemy till we have leave from England, our throats
+might be all cut before the messenger would be half seas through."
+Whether such considerations would have had weight with Charles I. or not
+was now of little consequence. His power of making mischief soon came
+to an end, and from the liberal and sagacious policy of Cromwell the
+Confederacy had not much to fear. Nevertheless the fall of Charles I.
+brought up for the first time that question which a century later was
+to acquire surpassing interest,--the question as to the supremacy of
+Parliament over the colonies.
+
+Down to this time the supreme control over colonial affairs had been in
+the hands of the king and his privy council, and the Parliament had
+not disputed it. In 1624 they had grumbled at James I.'s high-handed
+suppression of the Virginia Company, but they had not gone so far as
+to call in question the king's supreme authority over the colonies. In
+1628, in a petition to Charles I. relating to the Bermudas, they had
+fully admitted this royal authority. But the fall of Charles I. for the
+moment changed all this. Among the royal powers devolved upon Parliament
+was the prerogative of superintending the affairs of the colonies. Such,
+at least, was the theory held in England, and it is not easy to see how
+any other theory could logically have been held; but the Americans never
+formally admitted it, and in practice they continued to behave toward
+Parliament very much as they had behaved toward the crown, yielding
+just as little obedience as possible. When the Earl of Warwick's
+commissioners in 1644 seized upon a royalist vessel in Boston harbour,
+the legislature of Massachusetts debated the question whether it was
+compatible with the dignity of the colony to permit such an act of
+sovereignty on the part of Parliament. It was decided to wink at the
+proceeding, on account of the strong sympathy between Massachusetts and
+the Parliament which was overthrowing the king. At the same time the
+legislature sent over to London a skilfully worded protest against
+any like exercise of power in future. In 1651 Parliament ordered
+Massachusetts to surrender the charter obtained from Charles I. and take
+out a new one from Parliament, in which the relations of the colony to
+the home government should be made the subject of fresh and more precise
+definition. To this request the colony for more than a year vouchsafed
+no answer; and finally, when it became necessary to do something,
+instead of sending back the charter, the legislature sent back a
+memorial, setting forth that the people of Massachusetts were quite
+contented with their form of government, and hoped that no change would
+be made in it. War between England and Holland, and the difficult
+political problems which beset the brief rule of Cromwell, prevented
+the question from coming to an issue, and Massachusetts was enabled to
+preserve her independent and somewhat haughty attitude. [Sidenote: Fall
+of Charles I. brings up the question as to supremacy of Parliament over
+the colonies]
+
+During the whole period of the Confederacy, however, disputes kept
+coming up which through endless crooked ramifications were apt to end
+in an appeal to the home government, and thus raise again and again the
+question as to the extent of its imperial supremacy. For our present
+purpose, it is enough to mention three of these cases: 1, the adventures
+of Samuel Gorton; 2, the Presbyterian cabal; 3, the persecution of the
+Quakers. Other cases in point are those of John Clarke and the Baptists,
+and the relations of Massachusetts to the northeastern settlements; but
+as it is not my purpose here to make a complete outline of New England
+history, the three cases enumerated will suffice.
+
+The first case shows, in a curious and instructive way, how religious
+dissensions were apt to be complicated with threats of an Indian war on
+the one hand and peril from Great Britain on the other; and as we come
+to realize the triple danger, we can perhaps make some allowances for
+the high-handed measures with which the Puritan governments sometimes
+sought to avert it. [Genesis of the persecuting spirit]
+
+As I have elsewhere tried to show, the genesis of the persecuting spirit
+is to be found in the conditions of primitive society, where "above
+all things the prime social and political necessity is social cohesion
+within the tribal limits, for unless such social cohesion be maintained,
+the very existence of the tribe is likely to be extinguished in
+bloodshed." The persecuting spirit "began to pass away after men
+had become organized into great nations, covering a vast extent of
+territory, and secured by their concentrated military strength against
+the gravest dangers of barbaric attack." [13]
+
+Now as regards these considerations, the Puritan communities in the
+New England wilderness were to some slight extent influenced by such
+conditions as used to prevail in primitive society; and this will help
+us to understand the treatment of the Antinomians and such cases as that
+with which we have now to deal.
+
+Among the supporters of Mrs. Hutchinson, after her arrival at Aquedneck,
+was a sincere and courageous, but incoherent and crotchetty man named
+Samuel Gorton. [Sidenote: Samuel Gorton]
+
+In the denunciatory language of that day he was called a "proud and
+pestilent seducer," or, as the modern newspaper would say, a "crank." It
+is well to make due allowances for the prejudice so conspicuous in the
+accounts given by his enemies, who felt obliged to justify their harsh
+treatment of him. But we have also his own writings from which to form
+an opinion as to his character and views. Lucidity, indeed, was not one
+of his strong points as a writer, and the drift of his argument is not
+always easy to decipher; but he seems to have had some points of contact
+with the Familists, a sect established in the sixteenth century in
+Holland. The Familists held that the essence of religion consists not
+in adherence to any particular creed or ritual, but in cherishing the
+spirit of divine love. The general adoption of this point of view was to
+inaugurate a third dispensation, superior to those of Moses and Christ,
+the dispensation of the Holy Ghost. The value of the Bible lay not so
+much in the literal truth of its texts as in their spiritual import;
+and by the union of believers with Christ they came to share in the
+ineffable perfection of the Godhead. There is much that is modern and
+enlightened in such views, which Gorton seems to some extent to have
+shared. He certainly set little store by ritual observances and
+maintained the equal right of laymen with clergymen to preach the
+gospel. Himself a London clothier, and thanking God that he had not been
+brought up in "the schools of human learning," he set up as a preacher
+without ordination, and styled himself "professor of the mysteries of
+Christ." He seems to have cherished that doctrine of private inspiration
+which the Puritans especially abhorred. It is not likely that he had any
+distinct comprehension of his own views, for distinctness was just what
+they lacked. [14] But they were such as in the seventeenth century could
+not fail to arouse fierce antagonism, and if it was true that wherever
+there was a government Gorton was against it, perhaps that only shows
+that wherever there was a government it was sure to be against him.
+
+In the case of such men as Gorton, however,--and the type is by no
+means an uncommon one,--their temperament usually has much more to do
+with getting them into trouble than their opinions. Gorton's temperament
+was such as to keep him always in an atmosphere of strife. Other
+heresiarchs suffered persecution in Massachusetts, but Gorton was in hot
+water everywhere. His arrival in any community was the signal for an
+immediate disturbance of the peace. His troubles began in Plymouth,
+where the wife of the pastor preferred his teachings to those of her
+husband. In 1638 he fled to Aquedneck, where his first achievement was a
+schism among Mrs. Hutchinson's followers, which ended in some staying to
+found the town of Portsmouth while others went away to found Newport.
+Presently Portsmouth found him intolerable, flogged and banished him,
+and after his departure was able to make up its quarrel with Newport.
+He next made his way with a few followers to Pawtuxet, within the
+jurisdiction of Providence, and now it is the broad-minded and gentle
+Roger Williams who complains of his "bewitching and madding poor
+Providence." The question is here suggested what could it have been
+in Gorton's teaching that enabled him thus to "bewitch" these little
+communities? We may be sure that it could not have been the element of
+modern liberalism suggested in the Familistic doctrines above cited.
+That was the feature then least likely to appeal to the minds of common
+people, and most likely to appeal to Williams. More probably such
+success as Gorton had in winning followers was due to some of the
+mystical rubbish which abounds in his pages and finds in a modern mind
+no doorway through which to enter. [Sidenote: He flees to Aquedneck and
+is banished thence]
+
+Williams disapproved of Gorton, but was true to his principles of
+toleration and would not take part in any attempt to silence him. But in
+1641 we find thirteen leading citizens of Providence, headed by William
+Arnold, [15] sending a memorial to Boston, asking for assistance and
+counsel in regard to this disturber of the peace. How was Massachusetts
+to treat such an appeal? She could not presume to meddle with the affair
+unless she could have permanent jurisdiction over Pawtuxet; otherwise
+she was a mere intruder. How strong a side-light does this little
+incident throw upon the history of the Roman republic, and of all
+relatively strong communities when confronted with the problem of
+preserving order in neighbouring states that are too weak to preserve it
+for themselves! Arnold's argument, in his appeal to Massachusetts, was
+precisely the same as that by which the latter colony excused herself
+for banishing the Antinomians. He simply says that Gorton and his
+company "are not fit persons to be received, and made members of a body
+in so weak a state as our town is in at present;" and he adds, "There is
+no state but in the first place will seek to preserve its own safety and
+peace." Whatever might be the abstract merits of Gorton's opinions, his
+conduct was politically dangerous; and accordingly the jurisdiction over
+Pawtuxet was formally conceded to Massachusetts. Thereupon that colony,
+assuming jurisdiction, summoned Gorton and his men to Boston, to prove
+their title to the lands they occupied. They of course regarded the
+summons as a flagrant usurpation of authority, and instead of obeying
+it they withdrew to Shawomet, on the western shore of Narragansett bay,
+where they bought a tract of land from the principal sachem of the
+Narragansetts, Miantonomo. The immediate rule over this land belonged to
+two inferior chiefs, who ratified the sale at the time, but six months
+afterward disavowed the ratification, on the ground that it had been
+given under duress from their overlord Miantonomo. Here was a state
+of things which might easily bring on an Indian war. The two chiefs
+appealed to Massachusetts for protection, and were accordingly summoned,
+along with Miantonomo, to a hearing at Boston. Here we see how a kind of
+English protectorate over the native tribes had begun to grow up so soon
+after the destruction of the Pequots. Such a result was inevitable.
+After hearing the arguments, the legislature decided to defend the two
+chiefs, provided they would put themselves under the jurisdiction of
+Massachusetts. This was done, while further complaints against Gorton
+came from the citizens of Providence. Gorton and his men were now
+peremptorily summoned to Boston to show cause why they should not
+surrender their land at Shawomet and to answer the charges against them.
+On receiving from Gorton a defiant reply, couched in terms which some
+thought blasphemous, the government of Massachusetts prepared to use
+force. [Sidenote: Providence protests against him] [Sidenote: He flees
+to Shawomet, where he buys land of the Indians]
+
+Meanwhile the unfortunate Miantonomo had rushed upon his doom. The
+annihilation of the Pequots had left the Mohegans and Narragansetts
+contending for the foremost place among the native tribes. Between the
+rival sachems, Uncas and Miantonomo, the hatred was deep and deadly.
+As soon as the Mohegan perceived that trouble was brewing between
+Miantonomo and the government at Boston, he improved the occasion by
+gathering a few Narragansett scalps. Miantonomo now took the war-path
+and was totally defeated by Uncas in a battle on the Great Plain in the
+present township of Norwich. Encumbered with a coat of mail which his
+friend Gorton had given him, Miantonomo was overtaken and captured. By
+ordinary Indian usage he would have been put to death with fiendish
+torments, as soon as due preparations could be made and a fit company
+assembled to gloat over his agony; but Gorton sent a messenger to Uncas,
+threatening dire vengeance if harm were done to his ally. This message
+puzzled the Mohegan chief. The appearance of a schism in the English
+counsels was more than he could quite fathom. When the affair had
+somewhat more fully developed itself, some of the Indians spoke of
+the white men as divided into two rival tribes, the Gortonoges and
+Wattaconoges. [16] Roger Williams tells us that the latter term, applied
+to the men of Boston, meant coat-wearers. Whether it is to be inferred
+that the Gortonoges went about in what in modern parlance would be
+called their "shirt-sleeves," the reader must decide. [Sidenote:
+Miantonomo and Uncas]
+
+In his perplexity Uncas took his prisoner to Hartford, and afterward,
+upon the advice of the governor and council, sent him to Boston, that
+his fate might be determined by the Federal Commissioners who were
+there holding their first regular meeting. It was now the turn of the
+commissioners to be perplexed. According to English law there was no
+good reason for putting Miantonomo to death. The question was whether
+they should interfere with the Indian custom by which his life was
+already forfeit to his captor. The magistrates already suspected the
+Narragansetts of cherishing hostile designs. To set their sachem at
+liberty, especially while the Gorton affair remained unsettled, might be
+dangerous; and it would be likely to alienate Uncas from the English. In
+their embarrassment the commissioners sought spiritual guidance. A synod
+of forty or fifty clergymen, from all parts of New England, was in
+session at Boston, and the question was referred to a committee of five
+of their number. The decision was prompt that Miantonomo must die. He
+was sent back to Hartford to be slain by Uncas, but two messengers
+accompanied him, to see that no tortures were inflicted. A select band
+of Mohegan warriors journeyed through the forest with the prisoner and
+the two Englishmen, until they came to the plain where the battle had
+been fought. Then at a signal from Uncas, the warrior walking behind
+Miantonomo silently lifted his tomahawk and sank it into the brain of
+the victim who fell dead without a groan. Uncas cut a warm slice from
+the shoulder and greedily devoured it, declaring that the flesh of
+his enemy was the sweetest of meat and gave strength to his heart.
+Miantonomo was buried there on the scene of his defeat, which has ever
+since been known as the Sachem's Plain. This was in September, 1643, and
+for years afterward, in that month, parties of Narragansetts used to
+visit the spot and with frantic gestures and hideous yells lament their
+fallen leader. A heap of stones was raised over the grave, and no
+Narragansett came near it without adding to the pile. After many a
+summer had passed and the red men had disappeared from the land, a
+Yankee farmer, with whom thrift prevailed over sentiment, cleared away
+the mound and used the stones for the foundation of his new barn. [17]
+[Sidenote: Death of Miantonomo]
+
+One cannot regard this affair as altogether creditable to the Federal
+Commissioners and their clerical advisers. One of the clearest-headed
+and most impartial students of our history observes that "if the English
+were to meddle in the matter at all, it was their clear duty to enforce
+as far as might be the principles recognized by civilized men. When they
+accepted the appeal made by Uncas they shifted the responsibility from
+the Mohegan chief to themselves." [18] The decision was doubtless based
+purely upon grounds of policy. Miantonomo was put out of the way because
+he was believed to be dangerous. In the thirst for revenge that was
+aroused among the Narragansetts there was an alternative source of
+danger, to which I shall hereafter refer. [19] It is difficult now to
+decide, as a mere question of safe policy, what the English ought to
+have done. The chance of being dragged into an Indian war, through the
+feud between Narragansetts and Mohegans, was always imminent. The policy
+which condemned Miantonomo was one of timidity, and fear is merciless.
+
+The Federal Commissioners heartily approved the conduct of Massachusetts
+toward Gorton, and adopted it in the name of the United Colonies. After
+a formal warning, which passed unheeded, a company of forty men, under
+Edward Johnson of Woburn and two other officers, was sent to Shawomet.
+Some worthy citizens of Providence essayed to play the part of
+mediators, and after some parley the Gortonites offered to submit to
+arbitration. The proposal was conveyed to Boston, and the clergy were
+again consulted. They declared it beneath the dignity of Massachusetts
+to negotiate "with a few fugitives living without law or government,"
+and they would no more compound with Gorton's "blasphemous revilings"
+than they would bargain with the Evil One. The community must be
+"purged" of such wickedness, either by repentance or by punishment. The
+ministers felt that God would hold the community responsible for Gorton
+and visit calamities upon them unless he were silenced. [20] The
+arbitration was refused, Gorton's blockhouse was besieged and captured,
+and the agitator was carried with nine of his followers to Boston, where
+they were speedily convicted of heresy and sedition. Before passing
+judgment the General Court as usual consulted with the clergy who
+recommended a sentence of death. Their advice was adopted by the
+assistants, but the deputies were more merciful, and the heretics
+were sentenced to imprisonment at the pleasure of the court. In this
+difference between the assistants and the deputies, we observe an early
+symptom of that popular revolt against the ascendancy of the clergy
+which was by and by to become so much more conspicuous and effective
+in the affair of the Quakers. Another symptom might be seen in the
+circumstance that so much sympathy was expressed for the Gortonites,
+especially by women, that after some months of imprisonment and abuse
+the heretics were banished under penalty of death. [Sidenote: Trial and
+sentence of the heretics]
+
+Gorton now went to England and laid his tale of woe before the
+parliamentary Board of Commissioners. The Earl of Warwick behaved with
+moderation. He declined to commit himself to an opinion as to the
+merits of the quarrel, but Gorton's title to Shawomet was confirmed. He
+returned to Boston with an order to the government to allow him to pass
+unmolested through Massachusetts, and hereafter to protect him in
+the possession of Shawomet. If this little commonwealth of 15,000
+inhabitants had been a nation as powerful as France, she could not have
+treated the message more haughtily. By a majority of one vote it was
+decided not to refuse so trifling a favour as a passage through the
+country for just this once; but as for protecting the new town of
+Warwick which the Gortonites proceeded to found at Shawomet, although it
+was several times threatened by the Indians, and the settlers appealed
+to the parliamentary order, that order Massachusetts flatly and doggedly
+refused to obey. [21] [Sidenote: Gorton appeals to Parliament]
+
+In the discussions of which these years were so full, "King Winthrop,"
+as his enemy Morton called him, used some very significant language. By
+a curious legal fiction of the Massachusetts charter the colonists were
+supposed to hold their land as in the manor of East Greenwich near
+London, and it was argued that they were represented in Parliament by
+the members of the county or borough which contained that manor, and
+were accordingly subject to the jurisdiction of Parliament. It was
+further argued that since the king had no absolute sovereignty
+independent of Parliament he could not by charter impart any such
+independent sovereignty to others. Winthrop did not dispute these
+points, but observed that the safety of the commonwealth was the supreme
+law, and if in the interests of that safety it should be found necessary
+to renounce the authority of Parliament, the colonists would be
+justified in doing so. [Sidenote: Winthrop's prophetic opinion] [22]
+This was essentially the same doctrine as was set forth ninety-nine
+years later by young Samuel Adams in his Commencement Oration at
+Harvard.
+
+The case of the Presbyterian cabal admits of briefer treatment than that
+of Gorton. There had now come to be many persons in Massachusetts who
+disapproved of the provision which restricted the suffrage to members of
+the Independent or Congregational churches of New England, and in 1646
+the views of these people were presented in a petition to the General
+Court. The petitioners asked "that their civil disabilities might be
+removed, and that all members of the churches of England and Scotland
+might be admitted to communion with the New England churches. If this
+could not be granted they prayed to be released from all civil burdens.
+Should the court refuse to entertain their complaint, they would be
+obliged to bring their case before Parliament." [23] The leading signers
+of this menacing petition were William Vassall, Samuel Maverick, and The
+Presbyterian cabal. Dr. Robert Child. Maverick we have already met. From
+the day when the ships of the first Puritan settlers had sailed past
+his log fortress on Noddle's Island, he had been their enemy; "a man of
+loving and curteous behaviour," says Johnson, "very ready to entertaine
+strangers, yet an enemy to the reformation in hand, being strong for the
+lordly prelatical power." Vassall was not a denizen of Massachusetts,
+but lived in Scituate, in the colony of Plymouth, where there were no
+such restrictions upon the suffrage. Child was a learned physician who
+after a good deal of roaming about the world had lately taken it into
+his head to come and see what sort of a place Massachusetts was.
+Although these names were therefore not such as to lend weight to such a
+petition, their request would seem at first sight reasonable enough.
+At a superficial glance it seems conceived in a modern spirit of
+liberalism. In reality it was nothing of the sort. In England it was
+just the critical moment of the struggle between Presbyterians and
+Independents which had come in to complicate the issues of the great
+civil war. Vassall, Child, and Maverick seem to have been the leading
+spirits in a cabal for the establishment of Presbyterianism in New
+England, and in their petition they simply took advantage of the
+discontent of the disfranchised citizens in Massachusetts in order
+to put in an entering wedge. This was thoroughly understood by the
+legislature of Massachusetts, and accordingly the petition was dismissed
+and the petitioners were roundly fined. Just as Child was about to start
+for England with his grievances, the magistrates overhauled his papers
+and discovered a petition to the parliamentary Board of Commissioners,
+suggesting that Presbyterianism should be established in New England,
+and that a viceroy or governor-general should be appointed to rule
+there. To the men of Massachusetts this last suggestion was a crowning
+horror. It seemed scarcely less than treason. The signers of this
+petition were the same who had signed the petition to the General Court.
+They were now fined still more heavily and imprisoned for six months.
+By and by they found their way, one after another, to London, while the
+colonists sent Edward Winslow, of Plymouth, as an advocate to thwart
+their schemes. Winslow was assailed by Child's brother in a spicy
+pamphlet entitled "New England's Jonas cast up at London," and replied
+after the same sort, entitling his pamphlet "New England's Salamander
+discovered." The cabal accomplished nothing because of the decisive
+defeat of Presbyterianism in England. "Pride's Purge" settled all that.
+The petition of Vassall and his friends was the occasion for the
+meeting of a synod of churches at Cambridge, in order to complete the
+organization of Congregationalism. In 1648 the work of the synod was
+embodied in the famous Cambridge Platform, which adopted the Westminster
+Confession as its creed, carefully defined the powers of the clergy, and
+declared it to be the duty of magistrates to suppress heresy. In 1649
+the General Court laid this platform before the congregations; in
+1651 it was adopted; and this event may be regarded as completing the
+theocratic organization of the Puritan commonwealth in Massachusetts.
+[Sidenote: The Cambridge Platform; deaths of Winthrop and Cotton]
+
+It was immediately preceded and followed by the deaths of the two
+foremost men in that commonwealth. John Winthrop died in 1649 and John
+Cotton in 1652. Both were men of extraordinary power. Of Winthrop it is
+enough to say that under his skilful guidance Massachusetts had been
+able to pursue the daring policy which had characterized the first
+twenty years of her history, and which in weaker hands would almost
+surely have ended in disaster. Of Cotton it may be said that he was the
+most eminent among a group of clergymen who for learning and dialectical
+skill have seldom been surpassed. Neither Winthrop nor Cotton approved
+of toleration upon principle. Cotton, in his elaborate controversy
+with Roger Williams, frankly asserted that persecution is not wrong in
+itself; it is wicked for falsehood to persecute truth, but it is the
+sacred duty of truth to persecute falsehood. This was the theologian's
+view. Winthrop's was that of a man of affairs. They had come to New
+England, he said, in order to make a society after their own model;
+all who agreed with them might come and join that society; those who
+disagreed with them might go elsewhere; there was room enough on the
+American continent. But while neither Winthrop nor Cotton understood the
+principle of religious liberty, at the same time neither of them had the
+temperament which persecutes. Both were men of genial disposition, sound
+common-sense, and exquisite tact. Under their guidance no such
+tragedy would have been possible as that which was about to leave its
+ineffaceable stain upon the annals of Massachusetts.
+
+It was most unfortunate that at this moment the places of these two men
+should have been taken by two as arrant fanatics as ever drew breath.
+For thirteen out of the fifteen years following Winthrop's death, the
+governor of Massachusetts was John Endicott, a sturdy pioneer, whose
+services to the colony had been great. He was honest and conscientious,
+but passionate, domineering, and very deficient in tact. At the same
+time Cotton's successor in position and influence was John Norton, a man
+of pungent wit, unyielding temper, and melancholy mood. He was possessed
+by a morbid fear of Satan, whose hirelings he thought were walking
+up and down over the earth in the visible semblance of heretics and
+schismatics. Under such leaders the bigotry latent in the Puritan
+commonwealth might easily break out in acts of deadly persecution.
+[Sidenote: Endicott and Norton take the lead] [Sidenote: The Quakers and
+their views]
+
+The occasion was not long in coming. Already the preaching of George Fox
+had borne fruit, and the noble sect of Quakers was an object of scorn
+and loathing to all such as had not gone so far as they toward learning
+the true lesson of Protestantism. Of all Protestant sects the Quakers
+went furthest in stripping off from Christianity its non-essential
+features of doctrine and ceremonial. Their ideal was not a theocracy
+but a separation between church and state. They would abolish all
+distinction between clergy and laity, and could not be coaxed or bullied
+into paying tithes. They also refused to render military service, or
+to take the oath of allegiance. In these ways they came at once into
+antagonism both with church and with state. In doctrine their chief
+peculiarity was the assertion of an "Inward Light" by which every
+individual is to be guided in his conduct of life. They did not believe
+that men ceased to be divinely inspired when the apostolic ages came
+to an end, but held that at all times and places the human soul may be
+enlightened by direct communion with its Heavenly Father. Such views
+involved the most absolute assertion of the right of private judgment;
+and when it is added that in the exercise of this right many Quakers
+were found to reject the dogmas of original sin and the resurrection of
+the body, to doubt the efficacy of baptism, and to call in question the
+propriety of Christians turning the Lord's Day into a Jewish Sabbath, we
+see that they had in some respects gone far on the road toward modern
+rationalism. It was not to be expected that such opinions should
+be treated by the Puritans in any other spirit than one of extreme
+abhorrence and dread. The doctrine of the "Inward Light," or of private
+inspiration, was something especially hateful to the Puritan. To the
+modern rationalist, looking at things in the dry light of history,
+it may seem that this doctrine was only the Puritan's own appeal to
+individual judgment, stated in different form; but the Puritan could not
+so regard it. To such a fanatic as Norton this inward light was but
+a reflection from the glare of the bottomless pit, this private
+inspiration was the beguiling voice of the Devil. As it led the Quakers
+to strange and novel conclusions, this inward light seemed to array
+itself in hostility to that final court of appeal for all good
+Protestants, the sacred text of the Bible. The Quakers were accordingly
+regarded as infidels who sought to deprive Protestantism of its only
+firm support. They were wrongly accused of blasphemy in their treatment
+of the Scriptures. Cotton Mather says that the Quakers were in the habit
+of alluding to the Bible as the Word of the Devil. Such charges, from
+passionate and uncritical enemies, are worthless except as they serve to
+explain the bitter prejudice with which the Quakers were regarded. They
+remind one of the silly accusation brought against Wyclif two centuries
+earlier, that he taught his disciples that God ought to obey the Devil;
+[24] and they are not altogether unlike the assumptions of some modern
+theologians who take it for granted that any writer who accepts the
+Darwinian theory must be a materialist. [Sidenote: Endicott and Norton
+take the lead] [Sidenote: The Quakers and their views]
+
+But worthless as Mather's statements are, in describing the views of
+the Quakers, they are valuable as indicating the temper in which these
+disturbers of the Puritan theocracy were regarded. In accusing them of
+rejecting the Bible and making a law unto themselves, Mather simply put
+on record a general belief which he shared. Nor can it be doubted that
+the demeanour of the Quaker enthusiasts was sometimes such as to seem
+to warrant the belief that their anarchical doctrines entailed, as a
+natural consequence, disorderly and disreputable conduct. In those
+days all manifestations of dissent were apt to be violent, and the
+persecution which they encountered was likely to call forth strange and
+unseemly vagaries. When we remember how the Quakers, in their scorn of
+earthly magistrates and princes, would hoot at the governor as he
+walked up the street; how they used to rush into church on Sundays and
+interrupt the sermon with untimely remarks; how Thomas Newhouse once
+came into the Old South Meeting-House with a glass bottle in each hand,
+and, holding them up before the astonished congregation, knocked them
+together and smashed them, with the remark, "Thus will the Lord break
+you all in pieces"; how Lydia Wardwell and Deborah Wilson ran about the
+streets in the primitive costume of Eve before the fall, and called
+their conduct "testifying before the Lord"; we can hardly wonder that
+people should have been reminded of the wretched scenes enacted at
+Munster by the Anabaptists of the preceding century. [Sidenote: Violent
+manifestations of dissent]
+
+Such incidents, however, do not afford the slightest excuse for the
+cruel treatment which the Quakers received in Boston, nor do they go
+far toward explaining it. Persecution began immediately, before the
+new-comers had a chance to behave themselves well or ill. Their mere
+coming to Boston was taken as an act of invasion. It was indeed an
+attack upon the Puritan theocratic idea. Of all the sectaries of that
+age of sects, the Quakers were the most aggressive. There were at one
+time more than four thousand of them in English jails; yet when any of
+them left England, it was less to escape persecution than to preach
+their doctrines far and wide over the earth. Their missionaries found
+their way to Paris, to Vienna; even to Rome, where they testified under
+the very roof of the Vatican. In this dauntless spirit they came to New
+England to convert its inhabitants, or at any rate to establish the
+principle that in whatever community it might please them to stay, there
+they would stay in spite of judge or hangman. At first they came to
+Barbadoes, whence two of their number, Anne Austin and Mary Fisher,
+sailed for Boston. When they landed, on a May morning in 1656, Endicott
+happened to be away from Boston, but the deputy-governor, Richard
+Bellingham, was equal to the occasion. He arrested the two women and
+locked them up in jail, where, for fear they might proclaim their
+heresies to the crowd gathered outside, the windows were boarded up.
+There was no law as yet enacted against Quakers, but a council summoned
+for the occasion pronounced their doctrines blasphemous and devilish.
+The books which the poor women had with them were seized and publicly
+burned, and the women themselves were kept in prison half-starved for
+five weeks until the ship they had come in was ready to return to
+Barbadoes. Soon after their departure Endicott came home. He found fault
+with Bellingham's conduct as too gentle; if he had been there he would
+have had the hussies flogged. [Sidenote: Anne Austin and Mary Fisher]
+
+Five years afterward Mary Fisher went to Adrianople and tried to convert
+the Grand Turk, who treated her with grave courtesy and allowed her to
+prophesy unmolested. This is one of the numerous incidents that, on a
+superficial view of history, might be cited in support of the opinion
+that there has been on the whole more tolerance in the Mussulman than in
+the Christian world. Rightly interpreted, however, the fact has no such
+implication. In Massachusetts the preaching of Quaker doctrines might
+(and did) lead to a revolution; in Turkey it was as harmless as the
+barking of dogs. Governor Endicott was afraid of Mary Fisher; Mahomet
+III. was not.
+
+No sooner had the two women been shipped from Boston than eight other
+Quakers arrived from London. They were at once arrested. While they were
+lying in jail the Federal Commissioners, then in session at Plymouth,
+recommended that laws be forthwith enacted to keep these dreaded
+heretics out of the land. Next year they stooped so far as to seek the
+aid of Rhode Island, the colony which they had refused to admit into
+their confederacy. "They sent a letter to the authorities of that
+colony, signing themselves their loving friends and neighbours, and
+beseeching them to preserve the whole body of colonies against 'such a
+pest' by banishing and excluding all Quakers, a measure to which 'the
+rule of charity did oblige them.'" Roger Williams was then president of
+Rhode Island, and in full accord with his noble spirit was the reply of
+the assembly. "We have no law amongst us whereby to punish any for only
+declaring by words their minds and understandings concerning the things
+and ways of God as to salvation and our eternal condition." As for these
+Quakers we find that where they are "most of all suffered to declare
+themselves freely and only opposed by arguments in discourse, there
+they least of all desire to come." Any breach of the civil law shall be
+punished, but the "freedom of different consciences shall be respected."
+This reply enraged the confederated colonies, and Massachusetts, as the
+strongest and most overbearing, threatened to cut off the trade of
+Rhode Island, which forthwith appealed to Cromwell for protection. The
+language of the appeal is as touching as its broad Christian spirit is
+grand. It recognizes that by stopping trade the men of Massachusetts
+will injure themselves, yet, it goes on to say, "for the safeguard of
+their religion they may seem to neglect themselves in that respect; for
+what will not men do for their God?" But whatever fortune may befall,
+"let us not be compelled to exercise any civil power over men's
+consciences." [25] [Sidenote: Noble conduct of Rhode Island]
+
+There could never, of course, be a doubt as to who drew up this state
+paper. During his last visit to England, three years before, Roger
+Williams had spent several weeks at Sir Harry Vane's country house in
+Lincolnshire, and he had also been intimately associated with Cromwell
+and Milton. The views of these great men were the most advanced of
+that age. They were coming to understand the true principle upon which
+toleration should be based. (See my Excursions of an Evolutionist, pp.
+247, 289-293.) Vane had said in Parliament, "Why should the labours of
+any be suppressed, if sober, though never so different? We now profess
+to seek God, we desire to see light!" [Sidenote: Roger Williams appeals
+to Cromwell]
+
+This Williams called a "heavenly speech." The sentiment it expressed was
+in accordance with the practical policy of Cromwell, and in the appeal
+of the president of Rhode Island to the Lord Protector one hears the
+tone with which friend speaks to friend.
+
+In thus protecting the Quakers, Williams never for a moment concealed
+his antipathy to their doctrines. The author of "George Fox digged out
+of his Burrowes," the sturdy controversialist who in his seventy-third
+year rowed himself in a boat the whole length of Narragansett bay to
+engage in a theological tournament against three Quaker champions, was
+animated by nothing less than the broadest liberalism in his bold reply
+to the Federal Commissioners in 1657. The event showed that under his
+guidance the policy of Rhode Island was not only honourable but wise.
+The four confederated colonies all proceeded to pass laws banishing
+Quakers and making it a penal offence for shipmasters to bring them to
+New England. These laws differed in severity. Those of Connecticut, in
+which we may trace the influence of the younger John Winthrop, were the
+mildest; those of Massachusetts were the most severe, and as Quakers
+kept coming all the more in spite of them, they grew harsher and
+harsher. At first the Quaker who persisted in returning was to be
+flogged and imprisoned at hard labour, next his ears were to be cut off,
+and for a third offence his tongue was to be bored with a hot iron.
+At length in 1658, the Federal Commissioners, sitting at Boston with
+Endicott as chairman, recommended capital punishment. It must be borne
+in mind that the general reluctance toward prescribing or inflicting the
+death penalty was much weaker then than now. On the statute-books there
+were not less than fifteen capital crimes, including such offences as
+idolatry, witchcraft, blasphemy, marriage within the Levitical degrees,
+"presumptuous sabbath-breaking," and cursing or smiting one's parents.
+[26] The infliction of the penalty, however, lay practically very much
+within the discretion of the court, and was generally avoided except in
+cases of murder or other heinous felony. In some of these ecclesiastical
+offences the statute seems to have served the purpose of a threat, and
+was therefore perhaps the more easily enacted. Yet none of the colonies
+except Massachusetts now adopted the suggestion of the Federal
+Commissioners and threatened the Quakers with death. [Sidenote: Laws
+passed against the Quakers]
+
+In Massachusetts the opposition was very strong indeed, and its
+character shows how wide the divergence in sentiment had already become
+between the upper stratum of society and the people in general. This
+divergence was one result of the excessive weight given to the clergy by
+the restriction of the suffrage to church members. One might almost say
+that it was not the people of Massachusetts, after all, that shed
+the blood of the Quakers; it was Endicott and the clergy. The bill
+establishing death as the penalty for returning after banishment was
+passed in the upper house without serious difficulty; but in the lower
+house it was at first defeated. Of the twenty-six deputies fifteen were
+opposed to it, but one of these fell sick and two were intimidated,
+so that finally the infamous measure was passed by a vote of thirteen
+against twelve. Probably it would not have passed but for a hopeful
+feeling that an occasion for putting it into execution would not
+be likely to arise. It was hoped that the mere threat would prove
+effective. Endicott begged the Quakers to keep away, saying earnestly
+that he did not desire their death; but the more resolute spirits
+were not deterred by fear of the gallows. In September, 1659, William
+Robinson, Marmaduke Stevenson, and Mary Dyer, who had come to Boston
+expressly to defy the cruel law, were banished. Mrs. Dyer was a lady
+of good family, wife of the secretary of Rhode Island. She had been an
+intimate friend of Mrs. Hutchinson. While she went home to her husband,
+Stevenson and Robinson went only to Salem and then faced about and came
+back to Boston. Mrs. Dyer also returned. All three felt themselves
+under divine command to resist and defy the persecutors. On the 27th of
+October they were led to the gallows on Boston Common, under escort of
+a hundred soldiers. Many people had begun to cry shame on such
+proceedings, and it was thought necessary to take precautions against a
+tumult. The victims tried to address the crowd, but their voices were
+drowned by the beating of drums. While the Rev. John Wilson railed and
+scoffed at them from the foot of the gallows the two brave men were
+hanged. The halter had been placed upon Mrs. Dyer when her son, who
+had come in all haste from Rhode Island, obtained her reprieve on
+his promise to take her away. The bodies of the two men were denied
+Christian burial and thrown uncovered into a pit. All the efforts of
+husband and son were unable to keep Mrs. Dyer at home. In the following
+spring she returned to Boston and on the first day of June was again
+taken to the gallows. At the last moment she was offered freedom if she
+would only promise to go away and stay, but she refused. "In obedience
+to the will of the Lord I came," said she, "and in his will I abide
+faithful unto death." And so she died. [Sidenote: Executions on Boston
+Common] [Sidenote: Wenlock Christison's defiance and victory]
+
+Public sentiment in Boston was now turning so strongly against the
+magistrates that they began to weaken in their purpose. But there
+was one more victim. In November, 1660, William Leddra returned from
+banishment. The case was clear enough, but he was kept in prison four
+months and every effort was made to induce him to promise to leave the
+colony, but in vain. In the following March he too was put to death. A
+few days before the execution, as Leddra was being questioned in court,
+a memorable scene occurred. Wenlock Christison was one of those who had
+been banished under penalty of death. On his return he made straight for
+the town-house, strode into the court-room, and with uplifted finger
+addressed the judges in words of authority. "I am come here to warn
+you," said he, "that ye shed no more innocent blood." He was instantly
+seized and dragged off to jail. After three months he was brought to
+trial before the Court of Assistants. The magistrates debated for more
+than a fortnight as to what should be done. The air was thick with
+mutterings of insurrection, and they had lost all heart for their
+dreadful work. Not so the savage old man who presided, frowning gloomily
+under his black skull cap. Losing his patience at last, Endicott smote
+the table with fury, upbraided the judges for their weakness, and
+declared himself so disgusted that he was ready to go back to England.
+[27] "You that will not consent, record it," he shouted, as the question
+was again put to vote, "I thank God I am not afraid to give judgment."
+Christison was condemned to death, but the sentence was never executed.
+In the interval the legislature assembled, and the law was modified. The
+martyrs had not died in vain. Their cause was victorious. A revolution
+had been effected. The Puritan ideal of a commonwealth composed of a
+united body of believers was broken down, never again to be restored.
+The principle had been admitted that the heretic might come to
+Massachusetts and stay there.
+
+It was not in a moment, however, that these results were fully realized.
+For some years longer Quakers were fined, imprisoned, and now and then
+tied to the cart's tail and whipped from one town to another. But these
+acts of persecution came to be more and more discountenanced by public
+opinion until at length they ceased.
+
+It was on the 25th of May, 1660, just one week before the martyrdom of
+Mary Dyer, that Charles II. returned to England to occupy his father's
+throne. One of the first papers laid before him was a memorial in behalf
+of the oppressed Quakers in New England. In the course of the following
+year he sent a letter to Endicott and the other New England governors,
+ordering them to suspend proceedings against the Quakers, and if any
+were then in prison, to send them to England for trial. Christison's
+victory had already been won, but the "King's Missive" was now partially
+obeyed by the release of all prisoners. As for sending anybody to
+England for trial, that was something that no New England government
+could ever be made to allow.
+
+Charles's defence of the Quakers was due, neither to liberality
+of disposition nor to any sympathy with them, but rather to his
+inclinations toward Romanism. Unlike in other respects, Quakers and
+Catholics were alike in this, that they were the only sects which the
+Protestant world in general agreed in excluding from toleration. Charles
+wished to secure toleration for Catholics, and he could not prudently
+take steps toward this end without pursuing a policy broad enough to
+diminish persecution in other directions, and from these circumstances
+the Quakers profited. At times there was something almost like a
+political alliance between Quaker and Catholic, as instanced in the
+relations between William Penn and Charles's brother, the Duke of York.
+[Sidenote: The "King's Missive"] [Sidenote: Why Charles II. interfered
+to protect the Quakers]
+
+Besides all this, Charles had good reason to feel that the governments
+of New England were assuming too many airs of sovereignty. There were
+plenty of people at hand to work upon his mind. The friends of Gorton
+and Child and Vassall were loud with their complaints. Samuel Maverick
+swore that the people of New England were all rebels, and he could prove
+it. The king was assured that the Confederacy was "a war combination,
+made by the four colonies when they had a design to throw off their
+dependence on England, and for that purpose." The enemies of the New
+England people, while dilating upon the rebellious disposition of
+Massachusetts, could also remind the king that for several years that
+colony had been coining and circulating shillings and sixpences with the
+name "Massachusetts" and a tree on one side, and the name "New England"
+with the date on the other. There was no recognition of England upon
+this coinage, which was begun in 1652 and kept up for more than thirty
+years. Such pieces of money used to be called "pine-tree shillings";
+but, so far as looks go, the tree might be anything, and an adroit
+friend of New England once gravely assured the king that it was meant
+for the royal oak in which his majesty hid himself after the battle of
+Worcester!
+
+Against the colony of New Haven the king had a special grudge. Two of
+the regicide judges, who had sat in the tribunal which condemned his
+father, escaped to New England in 1660 and were well received there.
+They were gentlemen of high position. Edward Whalley was a cousin of
+Cromwell and Hampden. He had distinguished himself at Naseby and Dunbar,
+and had risen to the rank of lieutenant-general. He had commanded at
+the capture of Worcester, where it is interesting to observe that the
+royalist commander who surrendered to him was Sir Henry Washington, own
+cousin to the grandfather of George Washington. The other regicide,
+William Goffe, as a major-general in Cromwell's army, had won such
+distinction that there were some who pointed to him as the proper person
+to succeed the Lord Protector on the death of the latter. He had married
+Whalley's daughter. Soon after the arrival of these gentlemen, a royal
+order for their arrest was sent to Boston. If they had been arrested and
+sent back to England, their severed heads would soon have been placed
+over Temple Bar. The king's detectives hotly pursued them through the
+woodland paths of New England, and they would soon have been taken but
+for the aid they got from the people. Many are the stories of their
+hairbreadth escapes. Sometimes they took refuge in a cave on a mountain
+near New Haven, sometimes they hid in friendly cellars; and once, being
+hard put to it, they skulked under a wooden bridge, while their pursuers
+on horseback galloped by overhead. After lurking about New Haven and
+Milford for two or three years, on hearing of the expected arrival
+of Colonel Nichols and his commission, they sought a more secluded
+hiding-place near Hadley, a village lately settled far up the
+Connecticut river, within the jurisdiction of Massachusetts. Here the
+avengers lost the trail, the pursuit was abandoned, and the weary
+regicides were presently forgotten. The people of New Haven had been
+especially zealous in shielding the fugitives. Mr. Davenport had not
+only harboured them in his own house, but on the Sabbath before their
+expected arrival he had preached a very bold sermon, openly advising
+his people to aid and comfort them as far as possible. [28] The colony,
+moreover, did not officially recognize the restoration of Charles II. to
+the throne until that event had been commonly known in New England for
+more than a year. For these reasons the wrath of the king was specially
+roused against New Haven, when circumstances combined to enable him at
+once to punish this disloyal colony and deal a blow at the Confederacy.
+We have seen that in restricting the suffrage to church members New
+Haven had followed the example of Massachusetts, but Connecticut had
+not; and at this time there was warm controversy between the two younger
+colonies as to the wisdom Of such a policy. As yet none of the colonies
+save Massachusetts had obtained a charter, and Connecticut was naturally
+anxious to obtain one. Whether through a complaisant spirit connected
+with this desire, or through mere accident, Connecticut had been prompt
+in acknowledging the restoration of Charles II.; and in August, 1661,
+she dispatched the younger Winthrop to England to apply for a charter.
+Winthrop was a man of winning address and of wide culture. His
+scientific tastes were a passport to the favour of the king at a time
+when the Royal Society was being founded, of which Winthrop himself was
+soon chosen a fellow. In every way the occasion was an auspicious one.
+The king looked upon the rise of the New England Confederacy with
+unfriendly eyes. Massachusetts was as yet the only member of the league
+that was really troublesome; and there seemed to be no easier way to
+weaken her than to raise up a rival power by her side, and extend to it
+such privileges as might awaken her jealousy. All the more would such
+a policy be likely to succeed if accompanied by measures of which
+Massachusetts must necessarily disapprove, and the suppression of
+New Haven would be such a measure. [Sidenote: New Haven annexed to
+Connecticut]
+
+In accordance with these views, a charter of great liberality was at
+once granted to Connecticut, and by the same instrument the colony of
+New Haven was deprived of its separate existence and annexed to its
+stronger neighbour. As if to emphasize the motives which had led to this
+display of royal favour toward Connecticut, an equally liberal charter
+was granted to Rhode Island. In the summer of 1664 Charles II. sent a
+couple of ships-of-war to Boston harbour, with 400 troops under command
+of Colonel Richard Nichols, who had been appointed, along with Samuel
+Maverick and two others as royal commissioners, to look after the
+affairs of the New World. Colonel Nichols took his ships to New
+Amsterdam, and captured that important town. After his return the
+commissioners held meetings at Boston, and for a time the Massachusetts
+charter seemed in danger. But the Puritan magistrates were shrewd, and
+months were frittered away to no purpose. Presently the Dutch made war
+upon England, and the king felt it to be unwise to irritate the people
+of Massachusetts beyond endurance. The turbulent state of English
+politics which followed still further absorbed his attention, and New
+England had another respite of several years. [Sidenote: Founding of
+Newark]
+
+In New Haven a party had grown up which was dissatisfied with its
+extreme theocratic policy and approved of the union with Connecticut.
+Davenport and his followers, the founders of the colony, were beyond
+measure disgusted. They spurned "the Christless rule" of the sister
+colony. Many of them took advantage of the recent conquest of New
+Netherland, and a strong party, led by the Rev. Abraham Pierson, of
+Branford, migrated to the banks of the Passaic in June, 1667, and laid
+the foundations of Newark. For some years to come the theocratic idea
+that had given birth to New Haven continued to live on in New Jersey. As
+for Mr. Davenport, he went to Boston and ended his days there. Cotton
+Mather, writing at a later date, when the theocratic scheme of the early
+settlers had been manifestly outgrown and superseded, says of Davenport:
+"Yet, after all, the Lord gave him to see that in this world a
+Church-State was impossible, whereinto there enters nothing which
+defiles."
+
+The theocratic policy, alike in New Haven and in Massachusetts, broke
+down largely through its inherent weakness. It divided the community,
+and created among the people a party adverse to its arrogance and
+exclusiveness. This state of things facilitated the suppression of
+New Haven by royal edict, and it made possible the victory of Wenlock
+Christison in Massachusetts. We can now see the fundamental explanation
+of the deadly hostility with which Endicott and his party regarded the
+Quakers. The latter aimed a fatal blow at the very root of the idea
+which had brought the Puritans to New England. Once admit these heretics
+as citizens, or even as tolerated sojourners, and there was an end of
+the theocratic state consisting of a united body of believers. It was a
+life-and-death struggle, in which no quarter was given; and the Quakers,
+aided by popular discontent with the theocracy, even more than by the
+intervention of the crown, won a decisive victory.
+
+As the work of planting New England took place chiefly in the eleven
+years 1629-1640, during which Charles I. contrived to reign without a
+parliament, so the prosperous period of the New England Confederacy,
+1643-1664, covers the time of the Civil War and the Commonwealth, and
+just laps on to the reign of Charles II. By the summary extinction of
+the separate existence of one of its members for the benefit of another,
+its vigour was sadly impaired. But its constitution was revised so as
+to make it a league of three states instead of four; and the Federal
+Commissioners kept on holding their meetings, though less frequently,
+until the revocation of the Massachusetts charter in 1684. During
+this period a great Indian war occurred, in the course of which this
+concentration of the military strength of New England, imperfect as it
+was, proved itself very useful. In the history of New England, from the
+restoration of the Stuarts until their final expulsion, the two most
+important facts are the military struggle of the newly founded states
+with the Indians, and their constitutional struggle against the British
+government. The troubles and dangers of 1636 were renewed on a much more
+formidable scale, but the strength of the people had waxed greatly in
+the mean time, and the new perils were boldly overcome or skilfully
+warded off; not, however, until the constitution of Massachusetts had
+been violently wrenched out of shape in the struggle, and seeds of
+conflict sown which in the following century were to bear fruit in the
+American Revolution. [Sidenote: Breaking down of the theocratic policy]
+[Sidenote: Weakening of the Confederacy]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+KING PHILIP'S WAR.
+
+
+For eight-and-thirty years after the destruction of the Pequots, the
+intercourse between the English and the Indians was to all outward
+appearance friendly. The policy pursued by the settlers was in the
+main well considered. While they had shown that they could strike with
+terrible force when blows were needed, their treatment of the natives in
+time of peace seems to have been generally just and kind. Except in the
+single case of the conquered Pequot territory, they scrupulously paid
+for every rood of ground on which they settled, and so far as possible
+they extended to the Indians the protection of the law. On these points
+we have the explicit testimony of Josiah Winslow, governor of Plymouth,
+in his report to the Federal Commissioners in May, 1676; and what
+he says about Plymouth seems to have been equally true of the other
+colonies. Says Winslow, "I think I can clearly say that before these
+present troubles broke out, the English did not possess one foot of land
+in this colony but what was fairly obtained by honest purchase of the
+Indian proprietors. Nay, because some of our people are of a covetous
+disposition, and the Indians are in their straits easily prevailed with
+to part with their lands, we first made a law that none should purchase
+or receive of gift any land of the Indians without the knowledge and
+allowance of our Court .... And if at any time they have brought
+complaints before us, they have had justice impartial and speedy, so
+that our own people have frequently complained that we erred on the
+other hand in showing them overmuch favour." The general laws of
+Massachusetts and Connecticut as well as of Plymouth bear out what
+Winslow says, and show us that as a matter of policy the colonial
+governments were fully sensible of the importance of avoiding all
+occasions for quarrel with their savage neighbours. [Sidenote: Puritans
+and Indians]
+
+There can, moreover, be little doubt that the material comfort of the
+Indians was for a time considerably improved by their dealings with the
+white men. Hitherto their want of foresight and thrift had been wont to
+involve them during the long winters in a dreadful struggle with famine.
+Now the settlers were ready to pay liberally for the skin of every
+fur-covered animal the red men could catch; and where the trade thus
+arising did not suffice to keep off famine, instances of generous
+charity were frequent. The Algonquin tribes of New England lived chiefly
+by hunting, but partly by agriculture. They raised beans and corn, and
+succotash was a dish which they contributed to the white man's table.
+They could now raise or buy English vegetables, while from dogs and
+horses, pigs and poultry, oxen and sheep, little as they could avail
+themselves of such useful animals, they nevertheless derived some
+benefit. [29] Better blankets and better knives were brought within
+their reach; and in spite of all the colonial governments could do to
+prevent it, they were to some extent enabled to supply themselves with
+muskets and rum. [Sidenote: Trade with the Indians]
+
+Besides all this trade, which, except in the article of liquor, tended
+to improve the condition of the native tribes, there was on the part of
+the earlier settlers an earnest and diligent effort to convert them
+to Christianity and give them the rudiments of a civilized education.
+Missionary work was begun in 1643 by Thomas Mayhew on the islands of
+Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. The savages at first declared they were
+not so silly as to barter thirty-seven tutelar deities for one, but
+after much preaching and many pow-wows Mayhew succeeded in persuading
+them that the Deity of the white man was mightier than all their
+_manitous._ Whether they ever got much farther than this toward a
+comprehension of the white man's religion may be doubted; but they were
+prevailed upon to let their children learn to read and write, and even
+to set up little courts, in which justice was administered according to
+some of the simplest rules of English law, and from which there lay an
+appeal to the court of Plymouth. In 1646 Massachusetts enacted that the
+elders of the churches should choose two persons each year to go and
+spread the gospel among the Indians. In 1649 Parliament established the
+Society for propagating the Gospel in New England, and presently from
+voluntary contributions the society was able to dispose of an annual
+income of £2000. Schools were set up in which agriculture was taught as
+well as religion. It was even intended that Indians should go to Harvard
+College, and a building was erected for their accommodation, but as none
+came to occupy it, the college printing-press was presently set to work
+there. One solitary Indian student afterward succeeded in climbing to
+the bachelor's degree,--Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck of the class of 1665. It
+was this one success that was marvellous, not the failure of the scheme,
+which vividly shows how difficult it was for the white man of that day
+to understand the limitations of the red man. [Sidenote: Missionary
+work: Thomas Mayhew]
+
+The greatest measure of success in converting the Indians was attained
+by that famous linguist and preacher, the apostle John Eliot. This
+remarkable man was a graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge. He had come
+to Massachusetts in 1631, and in the following year had been settled as
+teacher in the church at Roxbury of which Thomas Welde was pastor. He
+had been distinguished at the university for philological scholarship
+and for linguistic talent--two things not always found in
+connection--and now during fourteen years he devoted such time as he
+could to acquiring a complete mastery of the Algonquin dialect spoken by
+the Indians of Massachusetts bay. To the modern comparative philologist
+his work is of great value. He published not only an excellent Indian
+grammar, but a complete translation of the Bible into the Massachusetts
+language,--a monument of prodigious labour. It is one of the most
+instructive documents in existence for the student of Algonquin speech,
+though the Massachusetts tribe and its language have long been extinct,
+and there are very few scholars living who can read the book. It has
+become one of the curiosities of literature and at auction sales of
+private libraries commands an extremely high price. Yet out of this rare
+book the American public has somehow or other within the last five
+or six years contrived to pick up a word which we shall very likely
+continue to hear for some time to come. In Eliot's Bible, the word which
+means a great chief--such as Joshua, or Gideon, or Joab--is "mugwump."
+
+
+It was in 1646 that Eliot began his missionary preaching at a small
+Indian village near Watertown. President Dunster, of Harvard College,
+and Mr. Shepard, the minister at Cambridge, felt a warm interest in the
+undertaking. These worthy men seriously believed that the aborigines
+of America were the degenerate descendants of the ten lost tribes of
+Israel, and from this strange backsliding it was hoped that they might
+now be reclaimed. With rare eloquence and skill did Eliot devote himself
+to the difficult work of reaching the Indian's scanty intelligence and
+still scantier moral sense. His ministrations reached from the sands of
+Cape Cod to the rocky hillsides of Brookfield. But he soon found that
+single-handed he could achieve but little over so wide an area, and
+accordingly he adopted the policy of colonizing his converts in village
+communities near the English towns, where they might be sequestered from
+their heathen brethren and subjected to none but Christian influences.
+In these communities he hoped to train up native missionaries who might
+thence go and labour among the wild tribes until the whole lump of
+barbarism should be leavened. In pursuance of this scheme a stockaded
+village was built at Natick in 1651 Under the direction of an English
+carpenter the Indians built log-houses for themselves, and most of them
+adopted the English dress. Their simple government was administered by
+tithing-men, or "rulers of tens," chosen after methods prescribed in the
+book of Exodus. Other such communities were formed in the neighbourhoods
+of Concord and Grafton. By 1674 the number of these "praying Indians,"
+as they were called, was estimated at 4000, of whom about 1500 were in
+Eliot's villages, as many more in Martha's Vineyard, 300 in Nantucket,
+and 700 in the Plymouth colony. There seems to be no doubt that these
+Indians were really benefited both materially and morally by the change
+in their life. In theology it is not likely that they reached any higher
+view than that expressed by the Connecticut sachem Wequash who "seeing
+and beholding the mighty power of God in the English forces, how they
+fell upon the Pequots, ... from that time was convinced and persuaded
+that our God was a most dreadful God;" accordingly, says the author of
+"New England's First Fruits," "he became thoroughly reformed according
+to his light." Matters of outward observance, too, the Indians could
+understand; for we read of one of them rebuking an Englishman "for
+profaning the Lord's Day by felling of a tree." The Indian's notions of
+religion were probably confined within this narrow compass; the notions
+of some people that call themselves civilized perhaps do not extend much
+further. [Sidenote: Villages of Christian Indians]
+
+From such facts as those above cited we may infer that the early
+relations of the Puritan settlers to the Algonquin tribes of New England
+were by no means like the relations between white men and red men in
+recent times on our western plains. During Philip's War, as we shall
+see, the Puritan theory of the situation was entirely changed and our
+forefathers began to act in accordance with the frontiersman's doctrine
+that the good Indians are dead Indians. But down to that time it is
+clear that his intention was to deal honourably and gently with his
+tawny neighbour. We sometimes hear the justice and kindness of the
+Quakers in Pennsylvania alleged as an adequate reason for the success
+with which they kept clear of an Indian war. This explanation, however,
+does not seem to be adequate; it does not appear that, on the whole, the
+Puritans were less just and kind than the Quakers in their treatment of
+the red men. The true explanation is rather to be found in the relations
+between the Indian tribes toward the close of the seventeenth century.
+Early in that century the Pennsylvania region had been in the hands
+of the ferocious and powerful Susquehannocks, but in 1672, after a
+frightful struggle of twenty years, this great tribe was swept from the
+face of the earth by the resistless league of the Five Nations. When
+the Quakers came to Pennsylvania in 1682, the only Indians in that
+neighbourhood were the Delawares, who had just been terribly beaten by
+the Five Nations and forced into a treaty by which they submitted to be
+called "women," and to surrender their tomahawks. Penn's famous treaty
+was made with the Delawares as occupants of the land and also with the
+Iroquois league as overlords. [30] Now the great central fact of early
+American history, so far as the relations between white men and red
+men are concerned, is the unshaken friendship of the Iroquois for the
+English. This was the natural consequence of the deadly hostility
+between the Iroquois and the French which began with Champlain's defeat
+of the Mohawks in 1609. During the seventy-three years which intervened
+between the founding of Pennsylvania and the defeat of Braddock there
+was never a moment when the Delawares could have attacked the Quakers
+without incurring the wrath and vengeance of their overlords the Five
+Nations. This was the reason why Pennsylvania was left so long in quiet.
+No better proof could be desired than the fact that in Pontiac's war,
+after the overthrow of the French and when Indian politics had changed,
+no state suffered so much as Pennsylvania from the horrors of Indian
+warfare. [Sidenote: Why Pennsylvania was so long unmolested by the
+Indians]
+
+In New England at the time of Philip's War, the situation was very
+different from what it was between the Hudson and the Susquehanna. The
+settlers were thrown into immediate relations with several tribes whose
+mutual hostility and rivalry was such that it was simply impossible to
+keep on good terms with all at once. Such complicated questions as that
+which involved the English in responsibility for the fate of Miantonomo
+did not arise in Pennsylvania. Since the destruction of the Pequots we
+have observed the Narragansetts and Mohegans contending for the foremost
+place among New England tribes. Of the two rivals the Mohegans were
+the weaker, and therefore courted the friendship of the formidable
+palefaces. The English had no desire to take part in these barbarous
+feuds, but they could not treat the Mohegans well without incurring the
+hostility of the Narragansetts. For thirty years the feeling of the
+latter tribe toward the English had been very unfriendly and would
+doubtless have vented itself in murder but for their recollection of
+the fate of the Pequots. After the loss of their chief Miantonomo their
+attitude became so sullen and defiant that the Federal Commissioners, in
+order to be in readiness for an outbreak, collected a force of 300 men.
+At the first news of these preparations the Narragansetts, overcome with
+terror, sent a liberal tribute of wampum to Boston, and were fain to
+conclude a treaty in which they promised to behave themselves well in
+the future.
+
+It was impossible that this sort of English protectorate over the native
+tribes, which was an inevitable result of the situation, should be other
+than irksome and irritating to the Indians. They could not but see that
+the white man stood there as master, and even in the utter absence
+of provocation, this fact alone must have made them hate him. It is
+difficult, moreover, for the civilized man and the savage to understand
+each other. As a rule the one does not know what the other is thinking
+about. When Mr. Hamilton Gushing a few years ago took some of his Zuni
+friends into a hotel in Chicago, they marvelled at his entering such a
+mighty palace with so little ceremony, and their wonder was heightened
+at the promptness with which "slaves" came running at his beck and call;
+but all at once, on seeing an American eagle over one of the doorways,
+they felt that the mystery was solved. Evidently this palace was the
+communal dwelling of the Eagle Clan of palefaces, and evidently Mr.
+Gushing was a great sachem of this clan, and as such entitled to lordly
+sway there! The Zunis are not savages, but representatives of a remote
+and primitive phase of what Mr. Morgan calls the middle status of
+barbarism. The gulf between their thinking and that of white men is
+wide because there is a wide gulf between the experience of the two.
+[Sidenote: Difficulty of the situation in New England] [Sidenote: It is
+hard for the savage and the civilized man to understand one another]
+
+This illustration may help us to understand an instance in which the
+Indians of New England must inevitably have misinterpreted the actions
+of the white settlers and read them in the light of their uneasy fears
+and prejudices. I refer to the work of the apostle Eliot. His design in
+founding his villages of Christian Indians was in the highest degree
+benevolent and noble; but the heathen Indians could hardly be expected
+to see anything in it but a cunning scheme for destroying them.
+
+Eliot's converts were for the most part from the Massachusetts tribe,
+the smallest and weakest of all. The Plymouth converts came chiefly
+from the tribe next in weakness, the Pokanokets or Wampanoags. The more
+powerful tribes--Narragansetts, Nipmucks, and Mohegans--furnished very
+few converts. When they saw the white intruders gathering members of the
+weakest tribes into villages of English type, and teaching them strange
+gods while clothing them in strange garments, they probably supposed
+that the pale-faces were simply adopting these Indians into their white
+tribe as a means of increasing their military strength. At any rate,
+such a proceeding would be perfectly intelligible to the savage mind,
+whereas the nature of Eliot's design lay quite beyond its ken. As the
+Indians recovered from their supernatural dread of the English, and
+began to regard them as using human means to accomplish their ends,
+they must of course interpret their conduct in such light as savage
+experience could afford. It is one of the commonest things in the world
+for a savage tribe to absorb weak neighbours by adoption, and thus
+increase its force preparatory to a deadly assault upon other
+neighbours. When Eliot in 1657 preached to the little tribe of Podunks
+near Hartford, and asked them if they were willing to accept of Jesus
+Christ as their saviour, their old men scornfully answered No! they had
+parted with most of their land, but they were not going to become the
+white man's servants. A rebuke administered to Eliot by Uncas in 1674
+has a similar implication. When the apostle was preaching one evening in
+a village over which that sachem claimed jurisdiction, an Indian arose
+and announced himself as a deputy of Uncas. Then he said, "Uncas is not
+well pleased that the English should pass over Mohegan river to call
+_his_ Indians to pray to God." [31]
+
+Thus, no matter how benevolent the white man's intentions, he could not
+fail to be dreaded by the Indians as a powerful and ever encroaching
+enemy.
+
+Even in his efforts to keep the peace and prevent tribes from taking the
+warpath without his permission, he was interfering with the red man's
+cherished pastime of murder and pillage. The appeals to the court at
+Plymouth, the frequent summoning of sachems to Boston, to explain
+their affairs and justify themselves against accusers, must have been
+maddening in their effects upon the Indian; for there is one sound
+instinct which the savage has in common with the most progressive
+races, and that is the love of self-government that resents all outside
+interference. All things considered, it is remarkable that peace should
+have been maintained in New England from 1637 to 1675; and probably
+nothing short of the consuming vengeance wrought upon the Pequots could
+have done it. But with the lapse of time the wholesome feeling of dread
+began to fade away, and as the Indians came to use musket instead of bow
+and arrow, their fear of the English grew less, until at length their
+ferocious temper broke forth in an epidemic of fire and slaughter that
+laid waste the land. [Sidenote: It is remarkable that peace should have
+been so long preserved]
+
+Massasoit, chief sachem of the Wampanoags and steadfast ally of the
+Plymouth colonists, died in 1660, leaving two sons, Wamsutta and
+Metacom, or as the English nicknamed them, Alexander and Philip.
+Alexander succeeded to his father's position of savage dignity and
+influence, but his reign was brief. Rumours came to Plymouth that he was
+plotting mischief, and he was accordingly summoned to appear before the
+General Court of that colony and explain himself. He seems to have gone
+reluctantly, but he succeeded in satisfying the magistrates of his
+innocence of any evil designs. Whether he caught cold at Plymouth or
+drank rum as only Indians can, we do not know. At any rate, on starting
+homeward, before he had got clear of English territory, he was seized by
+a violent fever and died. The savage mind knows nothing of pneumonia or
+delirium tremens. It knows nothing of what we call natural death. To
+the savage all death means murder, for like other men he judges of the
+unknown by the known. In the Indian's experience normal death was by
+tomahawk or firebrand; abnormal death (such as we call natural)
+must come either from poison or from witchcraft. So when the honest
+chronicler Hubbard tells us that Philip suspected the Plymouth people of
+poisoning his brother, we can easily believe him. It was long, however,
+before he was ready to taste the sweets of revenge. He schemed and
+plotted in the dark. In one respect the Indian diplomatist is unlike his
+white brethren; he does not leave state-papers behind him to reward
+the diligence and gratify the curiosity of later generations; and
+accordingly it is hard to tell how far Philip was personally responsible
+for the storm which was presently to burst upon New England. [Sidenote:
+Deaths of Massasoit and Alexander] [Sidenote: Philip's designs]
+
+Whether his scheme was as comprehensive as that of Pontiac in 1763,
+whether or not it amounted to a deliberate combination of all red men
+within reach to exterminate the white men, one can hardly say with
+confidence. The figure of Philip, in the war which bears his name, does
+not stand out so prominently as the figure of Pontiac in the later
+struggle. This may be partly because Pontiac's story has been told by
+such a magician as Mr. Francis Parkman. But it is partly because the
+data are too meagre. In all probability, however, the schemes of
+Sassacus the Pequot, of Philip the Wampanoag, and of Pontiac the Ottawa,
+were substantially the same. That Philip plotted with the Narragansetts
+seems certain, and the early events of the war point clearly to a
+previous understanding with the Nipmucks. The Mohegans, on the other
+hand, gave him no assistance, but remained faithful to their white
+allies.
+
+For thirteen years had Philip been chief sachem of his tribe before the
+crisis came. Rumours of his unfriendly disposition had at intervals
+found their way to the ears of the magistrates at Plymouth, but Philip
+had succeeded in setting himself right before them. In 1670 the rumours
+were renewed, and the Plymouth men felt that it was time to strike, but
+the other colonies held them back, and a meeting was arranged between
+Philip and three Boston men at Taunton in April, 1671. There the crafty
+savage expressed humility and contrition for all past offences, and
+even consented to a treaty in which he promised that his tribe should
+surrender all their fire-arms. On the part of the English this was an
+extremely unwise measure, for while it could not possibly be enforced,
+and while it must have greatly increased the irritation of the Indians,
+it was at the same time interpretable as a symptom of fear. With ominous
+scowls and grunts some seventy muskets were given up, but this was all.
+Through the summer there was much uneasiness, and in September Philip
+was summoned to Plymouth with five of his under-sachems, and solemnly
+warned to keep the peace. The savages again behaved with humility and
+agreed to pay a yearly tribute of five wolves' heads and to do no act of
+war without express permission.
+
+For three years things seemed quiet, until late in 1674 the alarm was
+again sounded. Sausamon, a convert from the Massachusetts tribe, had
+studied a little at Harvard College, and could speak and write English
+with facility. He had at one time been employed by Philip as a sort of
+private secretary or messenger, and at other times had preached and
+taught school among the Indian converts at Natick. Sausamon now came to
+Plymouth and informed Governor Winslow that Philip was certainly engaged
+in a conspiracy that boded no good to the English. Somehow or other
+Philip contrived to find out what Sausamon had said, and presently
+coming to Plymouth loudly asseverated his innocence; but the magistrates
+warned him that if they heard any more of this sort of thing his
+arms would surely be seized. A few days after Philip had gone home,
+Sausamon's hat and gun were seen lying on the frozen surface of
+Assowamsett Pond, near Middleborough, and on cutting through the ice his
+body was found with unmistakable marks of beating and strangling. After
+some months the crime was traced to three Wampanoags, who were forthwith
+arrested, tried by a mixed jury of Indians and white men, found guilty,
+and put to death. On the way to the gallows one of them confessed
+that he had stood by while his two friends had pounded and choked the
+unfortunate Sausamon. [Sidenote: Murder of Sausamon]
+
+More alarming reports now came from Swanzey, a pretty village of some
+forty houses not far from Philip's headquarters at Mount Hope. On Sunday
+June 20, while everybody was at church, a party of Indians had stolen
+into the town and set fire to two houses. Messengers were hurried from
+Plymouth and from Boston, to demand the culprits under penalty of
+instant war. As they approached Swanzey the men from Boston saw a sight
+that filled them with horror. The road was strewn with corpses of men,
+women, and children, scorched, dismembered, and mangled with that
+devilish art of which the American Indian is the most finished master.
+The savages had sacked the village the day before, burning the houses
+and slaying the people. Within three days a small force of colonial
+troops had driven Philip from his position at Mount Hope; but while
+they were doing this a party of savages swooped upon Dartmouth, burning
+thirty houses and committing fearful atrocities. Some of their victims
+were flayed alive, or impaled on sharp stakes, or roasted over slow
+fires. Similar horrors were wrought at Middleborough and Taunton; and
+now the misery spread to Massachusetts, where on the 14th of July the
+town of Mendon was attacked by a party of Nipmucks. [Sidenote: Massacres
+at Swanzey and Dartmouth, June, 1675]
+
+At that time the beautiful highlands between Lancaster and the
+Connecticut river were still an untrodden wilderness. On their southern
+slope Worcester and Brookfield were tiny hamlets of a dozen houses each.
+Up the Connecticut valley a line of little villages, from Springfield
+to Northfield, formed the remotest frontier of the English, and their
+exposed position offered tempting opportunities to the Indians. Governor
+Leverett saw how great the danger would be if the other tribes should
+follow the example set by Philip, and Captain Edward Hutchinson was
+accordingly sent to Brookfield to negotiate with the Nipmucks. This
+officer was eldest son of the unfortunate lady whose preaching in Boston
+nearly forty years before had been the occasion of so much strife. Not
+only his mother, but all save one or two of his brothers and sisters
+--and there were not less than twelve of them--had been murdered by
+Indians on the New Netherland border in 1643; now the same cruel fate
+overtook the gallant captain. The savages agreed to hold a parley and
+appointed a time and place for the purpose, but instead of keeping tryst
+they lay in ambush and slew Hutchinson with eight of his men on their
+way to the conference. [Sidenote: Murder of Captain Hutchinson]
+
+Three days afterward Philip, who had found home too hot for him, arrived
+in the Nipmuck country, and on the night of August 2, took part in a
+fierce assault on Brookfield. Thirty or forty men, with some fifty women
+and children--all the inhabitants of the hamlet--took refuge in a large
+house, where they were besieged by 300 savages whose bullets pierced the
+wooden walls again and again. Arrows tipped with burning rags were
+shot into the air in such wise as to fall upon the roof, but they who
+crouched in the garret were watchful and well supplied with water, while
+from the overhanging windows the volleys of musketry were so brisk and
+steady that the screaming savages below could not get near enough to the
+house to set it on fire. For three days the fight was kept up, while
+every other house in the village was destroyed. By this time the Indians
+had contrived to mount some planks on barrels so as to make a kind of
+rude cart which they loaded with tow and chips. They were just about
+setting it on fire and preparing to push it against the house with long
+poles, when they were suddenly foiled by a heavy shower. That noon the
+gallant Simon Willard, ancestor of two presidents of Harvard College, a
+man who had done so much toward building up Concord and Lancaster that
+he was known as the "founder of towns," was on his way from Lancaster to
+Groton at the head of forty-seven horsemen, when he was overtaken by a
+courier with the news from Brookfield. The distance was thirty miles,
+the road scarcely fit to be called a bridle-path, and Willard's years
+were more than threescore-and-ten; but by an hour after sunset he had
+gallopped into Brookfield and routed the Indians who fled to a swamp ten
+miles distant. [Sidenote: Attack on Brookfield]
+
+The scene is now shifted to the Connecticut valley, where on the 25th of
+August Captain Lothrop defeated the savages at Hatfield. On the 1st of
+September simultaneous attacks were made upon Deerfield and Hadley, and
+among the traditions of the latter place is one of the most interesting
+of the stories of that early time. The inhabitants were all in church
+keeping a fast, when the yells of the Indians resounded. Seizing their
+guns, the men rushed out to meet the foe; but seeing the village green
+swarming on every side with the horrid savages, for a moment their
+courage gave way and a panic was imminent; when all at once a stranger
+of reverend aspect and stately form, with white beard flowing on his
+bosom, appeared among them and took command with an air of authority
+which none could gainsay. He bade them charge on the screeching rabble,
+and after a short sharp skirmish the tawny foe was put to flight. When
+the pursuers came together again, after the excitement of the rout,
+their deliverer was not to be found. In their wonder, as they knew not
+whence he came or whither he had gone, many were heard to say that
+an angel had been sent from heaven for their deliverance. It was the
+regicide William Goffe, who from his hiding-place had seen the savages
+stealing down the hillside, and sallied forth to win yet one more
+victory over the hosts of Midian ere death should come to claim him in
+his woodland retreat. Sir Walter Scott has put this pretty story into
+the mouth of Major Bridgenorth in "Peveril of the Peak," and Cooper has
+made use of it in "The Wept of Wish-ton-wish." Like many other romantic
+stories, it rests upon insufficient authority and its truth has been
+called in question. [32] But there seems to be nothing intrinsically
+improbable in the tradition; and a paramount regard for Goffe's personal
+safety would quite account for the studied silence of contemporary
+writers like Hubbard and Increase Mather. [Sidenote: The mysterious
+stranger of Hadley]
+
+This repulse did not check for a moment the activity of the Indians,
+though for a long time we hear nothing more of Philip. On the 2d
+of September they slew eight men at Northfield and on the 4th they
+surrounded and butchered Captain Beers and most of his company of
+thirty-six marching to the relief of that village. The next day but
+one, as Major Robert Treat came up the road with his 100 Connecticut
+soldiers, they found long poles planted by the wayside bearing the heads
+of their unfortunate comrades. They in turn were assaulted, but beat off
+the enemy, and brought away the people of Northfield. That village was
+abandoned, and presently Deerfield shared its fate and the people were
+crowded into Hadley. Yet worse remained to be seen. A large quantity of
+wheat had been left partly threshed at Deerfield, and on the 11th of
+September eighteen wagons were sent up with teamsters and farmers to
+finish the threshing and bring in the grain. They were escorted by
+Captain Lothrop, with his train-band of ninety picked men, known as the
+"Flower of Essex," perhaps the best drilled company in the colony. The
+threshing was done, the wagons were loaded, and the party made a night
+march southward. At seven in the morning, as they were fording a shallow
+stream in the shade of overarching woods, they were suddenly overwhelmed
+by the deadly fire of 700 ambushed Nipmucks, and only eight of them
+escaped to tell the tale. A "black and fatal" day was this, says the
+chronicler, "the saddest that ever befell New England." To this day the
+memory of the slaughter at Bloody Brook survives, and the visitor to
+South Deerfield may read the inscription over the grave in which Major
+Treat's men next day buried all the victims together. The Indians now
+began to feel their power, and on the 5th of October they attacked
+Springfield and burned thirty houses there. [Sidenote: Ambuscade at
+Bloody Brook, September 12]
+
+Things were becoming desperate. For ten weeks, from September 9 to
+November 19, the Federal Commissioners were in session daily in Boston.
+The most eminent of their number, for ability and character, was the
+younger John Winthrop, who was still governor of Connecticut. Plymouth
+was represented by its governor, Josiah Winslow, with the younger
+William Bradford; Massachusetts by William Stoughton, Simon Bradstreet,
+and Thomas Danforth. These strong men were confronted with a difficult
+problem. From Batten's journal, kept during that disastrous summer, we
+learn the state of feeling of excitement in Boston. The Puritans had
+by no means got rid of that sense of corporate responsibility which
+civilized man has inherited from prehistoric ages, and which has been
+one of the principal causes of religious persecution. This sombre
+feeling has prompted men to believe that to spare the heretic is to
+bring down the wrath of God upon the whole community; and now in Boston
+many people stoutly maintained that God had let loose the savages, with
+firebrand and tomahawk, to punish the people of New England for ceasing
+to persecute "false worshippers and especially idolatrous Quakers."
+Quaker meetings were accordingly forbidden under penalty of fine and
+imprisonment. Some harmless Indians were murdered. At Marblehead two
+were assaulted and killed by a crowd of women. There was a bitter
+feeling toward the Christian Indians, many of whom had joined their
+heathen kinsmen in burning and slaying. Daniel Gookin, superintendent of
+the "praying Indians," a gentleman of the highest character, was told
+that it would not be safe to show himself in the streets of Boston.
+Mrs. Mary Pray, of Providence, wrote a letter recommending the total
+extermination of the red men.
+
+The measures adopted by the Commissioners certainly went far toward
+carrying out Mrs. Pray's suggestion. The demeanour of the Narragansetts
+had become very threatening, and their capacity for mischief exceeded
+that of all the other tribes together. In July the Commissioners had
+made a treaty with them, but in October it became known in Boston
+that they were harbouring some of Philip's hostile Indians. When the
+Commissioners sharply called them to account for this, their sachem
+Canonchet, son of Miantonomo, promised to surrender the fugitives
+within ten days. But the ten days passed and nothing was heard from the
+Narragansetts. The victory of their brethren at Bloody Brook had worked
+upon their minds, so that they no longer thought it worth while to keep
+faith with the white men. They had overcome their timidity and were now
+ready to take part in the work of massacre. [33] The Commissioners soon
+learned of their warlike preparations and lost no time in forestalling
+them. The Narragansetts were fairly warned that if they did not at once
+fulfil their promises they must expect the utmost severities of war. A
+thousand men were enlisted for this service and put under command of
+Governor Winslow, and in December they marched against the enemy. The
+redoubtable fighter and lively chronicler Benjamin Church accompanied
+the expedition.
+
+The Indians had fortified themselves on a piece of rising ground, six
+acres in extent, in the middle of a hideous swamp impassable at most
+seasons but now in some places frozen hard enough to afford a precarious
+footing. They were surrounded by rows of tall palisades which formed a
+wall twelve feet in thickness; and the only approach to the single door
+of this stronghold was over the trunk of a felled tree some two feet in
+diameter and slippery with snow and ice. A stout block-house filled with
+sharpshooters guarded this rude bridge, which was raised some five feet
+from the ground. Within the palisaded fortress perhaps not less than
+2000 warriors, with many women and children, awaited the onset of the
+white men, for here had Canonchet gathered together nearly the whole of
+his available force. This was a military mistake. It was cooping up his
+men for slaughter. They would have been much safer if scattered about in
+the wilderness, and could have given the English much more trouble. But
+readily as they acknowledged the power of the white man, they did not
+yet understand it. One man's courage is not another's, and the Indian
+knew little or nothing of that Gothic fury of self-abandonment which
+rushes straight ahead and snatches victory from the jaws of death. His
+fortress was a strong one, and it was no longer, as in the time of the
+Pequots, a strife in which firearms were pitted against bow and arrow.
+Many of the Narragansetts were equipped with muskets and skilled in
+their use, and under such circumstances victory for the English was not
+to be lightly won. [Sidenote: Expedition against the Narragansetts]
+
+On the night of December 18 their little army slept in an open field
+at Pettyquamscott without other blanket than a "moist fleece of snow."
+Thence to the Indian fortress, situated in what is now South Kingston,
+the march was eighteen miles. The morrow was a Sunday, but Winslow
+deemed it imprudent to wait, as food had wellnigh given out. Getting up
+at five o'clock, they toiled through deep snow till they came within
+sight of the Narragansett stronghold early in the afternoon. First came
+the 527 men from Massachusetts, led by Major Appleton, of Ipswich, and
+next the 158 from Plymouth, under Major Bradford; while Major Robert
+Treat, with the 300 from Connecticut, brought up the rear. There were
+985 men in all. As the Massachusetts men rushed upon the slippery bridge
+a deadly volley from the blockhouse slew six of their captains, while
+of the rank and file there were many killed or wounded. Nothing daunted
+they pressed on with great spirit till they forced their way into the
+enclosure, but then the head of their column, overcome by sheer weight
+of numbers in the hand-to-hand fight, was pushed and tumbled out into
+the swamp. Meanwhile some of the Connecticut men had discovered a path
+across the partly frozen swamp leading to a weak spot in the rear, where
+the palisades were thin and few, as undue reliance had been placed upon
+the steep bank crowned with a thick rampart of bushes that had been
+reinforced with clods of turf. In this direction Treat swept along with
+his men in a spirited charge. Before they had reached the spot a heavy
+fire began mowing them down, but with a furious rush they came up, and
+climbing on each other's shoulders, some fought their way over the
+rampart, while others hacked sturdily with axes till such a breach was
+made that all might enter. This was effected just as the Massachusetts
+men had recovered themselves and crossed the treacherous log in a second
+charge that was successful and soon brought the entire English force
+within the enclosure. In the slaughter which filled the rest of that
+Sunday afternoon till the sun went down behind a dull gray cloud, the
+grim and wrathful Puritan, as he swung his heavy cutlass, thought of
+Saul and Agag, and spared not. The Lord had delivered up to him the
+heathen as stubble to his sword. As usual the number of the slain
+is variously estimated. Of the Indians probably not less than 1000
+perished. Some hundreds, however, with Canonchet their leader, saved
+themselves in flight, well screened by the blinding snow-flakes that
+began to fall just after sunset. Within the fortified area had been
+stored the greater part of the Indians' winter supply of corn, and the
+loss of this food was a further deadly blow. Captain Church advised
+sparing the wigwams and using them for shelter, but Winslow seems to
+have doubted the ability of his men to maintain themselves in a position
+so remote from all support. The wigwams with their tubs of corn were
+burned, and a retreat was ordered. Through snowdrifts that deepened
+every moment the weary soldiers dragged themselves along until two hours
+after midnight, when they reached the tiny village of Wickford. Nearly
+one-fourth of their number had been killed or wounded, and many of the
+latter perished before shelter was reached. Forty of these were buried
+at Wickford in the course of the next three days. Of the Connecticut men
+eighty were left upon the swamp and in the breach at the rear of the
+stronghold. Among the spoils which the victors brought away were a
+number of good muskets that had been captured by the Nipmucks in their
+assault upon Deerfield. [Sidenote: Storming of the great swamp fortress,
+December 19]
+
+This headlong overthrow of the Narragansett power completely changed the
+face of things. The question was no longer whether the red men could
+possibly succeed in making New England too hot for the white men, but
+simply how long it would take for the white men to exterminate the red
+men. The shiftless Indian was abandoning his squalid agriculture and
+subsisting on the pillage of English farms; but the resources of the
+colonies, though severely taxed, were by no means exhausted. The dusky
+warriors slaughtered in the great swamp fight could not be replaced;
+but, as Roger Williams told the Indians, there were still ten thousand
+white men who could carry muskets, and should all these be slain, he
+added, with a touch of hyperbole, the Great Father in England could send
+ten thousand more. For the moment Williams seems to have cherished a
+hope that his great influence with the savages might induce them to
+submit to terms of peace while there was yet a remnant to be saved; but
+they were now as little inclined to parley as tigers brought to bay, nor
+was the temper of the colonists a whit less deadly, though it did not
+vent itself in inflicting torture or in merely wanton orgies of cruelty.
+[Sidenote: Effect of the blow]
+
+To the modern these scenes of carnage are painful to contemplate. In the
+wholesale destruction of the Pequots, and to a less degree in that of
+the Narragansetts, the death-dealing power of the white man stands forth
+so terrible and relentless that our sympathy is for a moment called
+out for his victim. The feeling of tenderness toward the weak, almost
+unknown among savages, is one of the finest products of civilization.
+Where murderous emotions are frequently excited, it cannot thrive. Such
+advance in humanity as we have made within recent times is chiefly
+due to the fact that the horrors of war are seldom brought home to
+everybody's door. Either war is conducted on some remote frontier, or if
+armies march through a densely peopled country the conditions of
+modern warfare have made it essential to their efficiency as military
+instruments that depredation and riot should be as far as possible
+checked. Murder and pillage are comparatively infrequent, massacre
+is seldom heard of, and torture is almost or quite as extinct as
+cannibalism. The mass of citizens escape physical suffering, the angry
+emotions are so directed upon impersonal objects as to acquire a strong
+ethical value, and the intervals of strife may find individual soldiers
+of hostile armies exchanging kindly services. Members of a complex
+industrial society, without direct experience of warfare save in this
+mitigated form, have their characters wrought upon in a way that is
+distinctively modern, as they become more and more disinclined to
+violence and cruelty. European historians have noticed, with words
+of praise, the freedom from bloodthirstiness which characterizes the
+American people. Mr. Lecky has more than once remarked upon this humane
+temperament which is so characteristic of our peaceful civilization, and
+which sometimes, indeed, shows the defects of its excellence and tends
+to weaken society by making it difficult to inflict due punishment upon
+the vilest criminals. In respect of this humanity the American of the
+nineteenth century has without doubt improved very considerably upon his
+forefathers of the seventeenth. The England of Cromwell and Milton
+was not, indeed, a land of hard-hearted people as compared with their
+contemporaries. The long experience of internal peace since the War
+of the Roses had not been without its effect; and while the Tudor and
+Stuart periods had atrocities enough, we need only remember what was
+going on at the same time in France and Germany in order to realize how
+much worse it might have been. In England, as elsewhere, however, it
+was, when looked at with our eyes, a rough and brutal time. It was a day
+of dungeons, whipping-posts, and thumbscrews, when slight offenders were
+maimed and bruised and great offenders cut into pieces by sentence of
+court. The pioneers of New England had grown up familiar with such
+things; and among the townspeople of Boston and Hartford in 1675 were
+still many who in youth had listened to the awful news from Magdeburg or
+turned pale over the horrors in Piedmont upon which Milton invoked the
+wrath of Heaven. [Sidenote: Growth of humane sentiment in recent times]
+
+When civilized men are removed from the safeguards of civilization and
+placed in the wilderness amid the hideous dangers that beset human
+existence in a savage state of society, whatever barbarism lies latent
+in them is likely to find many opportunities for showing itself.
+The feelings that stir the meekest of men, as he stands among the
+smouldering embers of his homestead and gazes upon the mangled bodies
+of wife and children, are feelings that he shares with the most
+bloodthirsty savage, and the primary effect of his higher intelligence
+and greater sensitiveness is only to increase their bitterness. The
+neighbour who hears the dreadful story is quick to feel likewise, for
+the same thing may happen to him, and there is nothing so pitiless as
+fear. With the Puritan such gloomy and savage passions seemed to find
+justification in the sacred text from which he drew his rules of life.
+To suppose that one part of the Bible could be less authoritative than
+another would have been to him an incomprehensible heresy; and bound
+between the same covers that included the Sermon on the Mount were tales
+of wholesale massacre perpetrated by God's command. Evidently the
+red men were not stray children of Israel, after all, but rather
+Philistines, Canaanites, heathen, sons of Belial, firebrands of hell,
+demons whom it was no more than right to sweep from the face of the
+earth. Writing in this spirit, the chroniclers of the time were
+completely callous in their accounts of suffering and ruin inflicted
+upon Indians, and, as has elsewhere been known to happen, those who
+did not risk their own persons were more truculent in tone than the
+professional fighters. Of the narrators of the war, perhaps the fairest
+toward the Indian is the doughty Captain Church, while none is more
+bitter and cynical than the Ipswich pastor William Hubbard. [Sidenote:
+Warfare with savages likely to be truculent in character]
+
+While the overthrow of the Narragansetts changed the face of things, it
+was far from putting an end to the war. It showed that when the white
+man could find his enemy he could deal crushing blows, but the Indian
+was not always so easy to find. Before the end of January Winslow's
+little army was partially disbanded for want of food, and its three
+contingents fell back upon Stonington, Boston, and Plymouth. Early in
+February the Federal Commissioners called for a new levy of 600 men to
+assemble at Brookfield, for the Nipmucks were beginning to renew their
+incursions, and after an interval of six months the figure of Philip
+again appears for a moment upon the scene. What he had been doing, or
+where he had been, since the Brookfield fight in August, was never
+known. When in February, 1676, he re-appeared it was still in company
+with his allies the Nipmucks, in their bloody assault upon Lancaster.
+On the 10th of that month at sunrise the Indians came swarming into the
+lovely village. Danger had already been apprehended, the pastor, Joseph
+Rowlandson, the only Harvard graduate of 1652, had gone to Boston to
+solicit aid, and Captain Wadsworth's company was slowly making its
+way over the difficult roads from Marlborough, but the Indians were
+beforehand. Several houses were at once surrounded and set on fire,
+and men, women, and children began falling under the tomahawk. The
+minister's house was large and strongly built, and more than forty
+people found shelter there until at length it took fire and they were
+driven out by the flames. Only one escaped, a dozen or more were slain,
+and the rest, chiefly women and children, taken captive. The Indians
+aimed at plunder as well as destruction; for they were in sore need of
+food and blankets, as well as of powder and ball. Presently, as they saw
+Wadsworth's armed men approaching, they took to flight and got away,
+with many prisoners and a goodly store of provisions. [Sidenote: Attack
+upon Lancaster, February 10, 1676]
+
+Among the captives was Mary Rowlandson, the minister's wife, who
+afterward wrote the story of her sad experiences. The treatment of the
+prisoners varied with the caprice or the cupidity of the captors. Those
+for whom a substantial ransom might be expected fared comparatively
+well; to others death came as a welcome relief. One poor woman with a
+child in her arms was too weak to endure the arduous tramp over the icy
+hillsides, and begged to be left behind, till presently the savages
+lost their patience. They built a fire, and after a kind of demon dance
+killed mother and child with a club and threw the bodies into the
+flames. Such treatment may seem exceptionally merciful, but those modern
+observers who best know the Indian's habits say that he seldom indulges
+in torture except when he has abundance of leisure and a mind quite
+undisturbed. He is an epicure in human agony and likes to enjoy it in
+long slow sips. It is for the end of the march that the accumulation
+of horrors is reserved; the victims by the way are usually despatched
+quickly; and in the case of Mrs. Rowlandson's captors their irregular
+and circuitous march indicates that they were on the alert. Their
+movements seem to have covered much of the ground between Wachusett
+mountain and the Connecticut river. They knew that the white squaw of
+the great medicine man of an English village was worth a heavy ransom,
+and so they treated Mrs. Rowlandson unusually well. She had been
+captured when escaping from the burning house, carrying in her arms her
+little six-year-old daughter. She was stopped by a bullet that grazed
+her side and struck the child. The Indian who seized them placed the
+little girl upon a horse, and as the dreary march began she kept moaning
+"I shall die, mamma." "I went on foot after it," says the mother, "with
+sorrow that cannot be expressed. At length I took it off the horse, and
+carried it in my arms till my strength failed me, and I fell down with
+it .... After this it quickly began to snow, and when night came on they
+stopped. And now down I must sit in the snow, by a little fire, and a
+few boughs behind me, with my sick child in my lap, and calling much for
+water, being now, through the wound, fallen into a violent fever ....
+Oh, may I see the wonderful power of God that my spirit did not utterly
+sink under my affliction; still the Lord upheld me with his gracious and
+merciful spirit." The little girl soon died. For three months the weary
+and heartbroken mother was led about the country by these loathsome
+savages, of whose habits and manners she gives a vivid description. At
+first their omnivorousness astonished her. "Skunks and rattlesnakes, yea
+the very bark of trees" they esteemed as delicacies. "They would pick up
+old bones and cut them in pieces at the joints, ... then boil them and
+drink up the liquor, and then beat the great ends of them in a mortar
+and so eat them." After some weeks of starvation Mrs. Rowlandson herself
+was fain to partake of such viands. One day, having made a cap for one
+of Philip's boys, she was invited to dine with the great sachem. "I
+went," she says, "and he gave me a pancake about as big as two fingers.
+It was made of parched wheat, beaten, and fried in bear's grease; but I
+thought I never tasted pleasanter meat in my life." Early in May she was
+redeemed for 20 pounds, and went to find her husband in Boston, where
+the Old South Church society hired a house for them. [Sidenote: Mrs.
+Rowlandson's narrative]
+
+Such was the experience of a captive whose treatment was, according to
+Indian notions, hospitable. There were few who came off so well. Almost
+every week while she was led hither and thither by the savages. Mrs.
+Rowlandson heard ghastly tales of fire and slaughter. It was a busy
+winter and spring for these Nipmucks. Before February was over, their
+exploit at Lancaster was followed by a shocking massacre at Medfield.
+They sacked and destroyed the towns of Worcester, Marlborough, Mendon,
+and Groton, and even burned some houses in Weymouth, within a dozen
+miles of Boston. Murderous attacks were made upon Sudbury, Chelmsford,
+Springfield, Hatfield, Hadley, Northampton, Wrentham, Andover,
+Bridgewater, Scituate, and Middleborough. On the 18th of April Captain
+Wadsworth, with 70 men, was drawn into an ambush near Sudbury,
+surrounded by 500 Nipmucks, and killed with 50 of his men; six
+unfortunate captives were burned alive over slow fires. But Wadsworth's
+party made the enemy pay dearly for his victory; that afternoon 120
+Nipmucks bit the dust. In such wise, by killing two or three for one,
+did the English wear out and annihilate their adversaries. Just one
+month from that day Captain Turner surprised and slaughtered 300 of
+these warriors near the falls of the Connecticut river which have
+since borne his name, and this blow at last broke the strength of
+the Nipmucks. [Sidenote: Virtual exterminations of the Indians,
+February--August, 1676]
+
+Meanwhile the Narragansetts and Wampanoags had burned the towns of
+Warwick and Providence. After the wholesale ruin of the great "swamp
+fight," Canonchet had still some 600 or 700 warriors left, and with
+these, on the 26th of March, in the neighbourhood of Pawtuxet, he
+surprised a company of 50 Plymouth men under Captain Pierce and slew
+them all, but not until he had lost 140 of his best warriors. Ten days
+later Captain Denison, with his Connecticut company, defeated and
+captured Canonchet, and the proud son of Miantonomo met the same fate
+as his father. He was handed over to the Mohegans and tomahawked. The
+Narragansett sachem had shown such bravery that it seemed, says the
+chronicler Hubbard, as if "some old Roman ghost had possessed the body
+of this western pagan." But next moment this pious clergyman, as if
+ashamed of the classical eulogy just bestowed upon the hated redskin,
+alludes to him as a "damned wretch." [Sidenote: Death of Canonchet]
+
+The fall of Canonchet marked the beginning of the end. In four sharp
+fights in the last week of June, Major Talcott, of Hartford, slew
+from 300 to 400 warriors, being nearly all that were left of the
+Narragansetts; and during the month of July Captain Church patrolled the
+country about Taunton, making prisoners of the Wampanoags. Once more
+King Philip, shorn of his prestige, comes upon the scene. We have seen
+that his agency in these cruel events had been at the outset a potent
+one. Whatever else it may have been, it was at least the agency of the
+match that explodes the powder-cask. Under the conditions of that savage
+society, organized leadership was not to be looked for. In the irregular
+and disorderly series of murdering raids Philip may have been often
+present, but except for Mrs. Rowlandson's narrative we should have known
+nothing of him since the Brookfield fight.
+
+At length in July, 1676, having seen the last of his Nipmuck friends
+overwhelmed, the tattered chieftain showed himself near Bridgewater,
+with a handful of followers. In these his own hunting-grounds some of
+his former friends had become disaffected. The daring and diplomatic
+Church had made his way into the wigwam of Ashawonks, the squaw sachem
+of Saconet, near Little Compton, and having first convinced her that a
+flask of brandy might be tasted without fatal results, followed up his
+advantage and persuaded her to make an alliance with the English. Many
+Indians came in and voluntarily surrendered themselves, in order to
+obtain favourable terms, and some lent their aid in destroying their old
+sachem. Defeated at Taunton, the son of Massasoit was hunted by Church
+to his ancient lair at Bristol Neck and there besieged. His only escape
+was over the narrow isthmus of which the pursuers now took possession,
+and in this dire extremity one of Philip's men presumed to advise his
+chief that the hour for surrender had come. For his unwelcome counsel
+the sachem forthwith lifted his tomahawk and struck him dead at his
+feet. Then the brother of the slain man crept away through the bushes to
+Church's little camp, and offered to guide the white men to the morass
+where Philip lay concealed. At daybreak of August 12 the English
+stealthily advancing beat up their prey. The savages in sudden panic
+rushed from under cover, and as the sachem showed himself running at the
+top of his speed, a ball from an Indian musket pierced his heart, and
+"he fell upon his face in the mud and water, with his gun under him."
+His severed head was sent to Plymouth, where it was mounted on a pole
+and exposed aloft upon the village green, while the meeting-house
+bell summoned the townspeople to a special service of thanksgiving.
+[Sidenote: Death of Philip, August 12]
+
+It may be supposed that in such services at this time a Christian
+feeling of charity and forgiveness was not uppermost. Among the captives
+was a son of Philip, the little swarthy lad of nine years for whom Mrs.
+Rowlandson had made a cap, and the question as to what was to be done
+with him occasioned as much debate as if he had been a Jesse Pomeroy
+[34] or a Chicago anarchist. The opinions of the clergy were, of course,
+eagerly sought and freely vouchsafed. One minister somewhat doubtfully
+urged that "although a precept in Deuteronomy explicitly forbids killing
+the child for the father's sin," yet after all "the children of Saul and
+Achan perished with their parents, though too young to have shared their
+guilt." Thus curiously did this English reverence for precedent, with a
+sort of grim conscientiousness colouring its gloomy wrath, search for
+guidance among the ancient records of the children of Israel. Commenting
+upon the truculent suggestion, Increase Mather, soon to be president of
+Harvard, observed that, "though David had spared the infant Hadad, yet
+it might have been better for his people if he had been less merciful."
+These bloodthirsty counsels did not prevail, but the course that was
+adopted did not lack in harshness. Among the sachems a dozen leading
+spirits were hanged or shot, and hundreds of captives were shipped off
+to the West Indies to be sold into slavery; among these was Philip's
+little son. The rough soldier Church and the apostle Eliot were among
+the few who disapproved of this policy. Church feared it might goad such
+Indians as were still at large to acts of desperation. Eliot, in an
+earnest letter to the Federal Commissioners, observed: "To sell souls
+for money seemeth to me dangerous merchandise." But the plan of
+exporting the captives was adhered to. As slaves they were understood to
+be of little or no value, and sometimes for want of purchasers they were
+set ashore on strange coasts and abandoned. A few were even carried to
+one of the foulest of mediaeval slave-marts, Morocco, where their fate
+was doubtless wretched enough. [Sidenote: Indians sold into slavery]
+
+In spite of Church's doubts as to the wisdom of this harsh treatment,
+it did not prevent the beaten and starving savages from surrendering
+themselves in considerable numbers. To some the Federal Commissioners
+offered amnesty, and the promise was faithfully fulfilled. Among those
+who laid down arms in reliance upon it were 140 Christian Indians, with
+their leader known as James the Printer, because he had been employed at
+Cambridge in setting up the type for Eliot's Bible. Quite early in the
+war it had been discovered that these converted savages still felt the
+ties of blood to be stronger than those of creed. At the attack on
+Mendon, only three weeks after the horrors at Swanzey that ushered in
+the war, it was known that Christian Indians had behaved themselves
+quite as cruelly as their unregenerate brethren. Afterwards they made
+such a record that the jokers and punsters of the day--for such there
+were, even among those sombre Puritans--in writing about the "Praying
+Indians," spelled _praying_ with an _e_. The moral scruples of these
+savages, under the influence of their evangelical training, betrayed
+queer freaks. One of them, says Mrs. Rowlandson, would rather die than
+eat horseflesh, so narrow and scrupulous was his conscience, although it
+was as wide as the whole infernal abyss, when it came to torturing
+white Christians. The student of history may have observed similar
+inconsistencies in the theories and conduct of people more enlightened
+than these poor red men. "There was another Praying Indian," continues
+Mrs. Rowlandson, "who, when he had done all the mischief he could,
+betrayed his own father into the English's hands, thereby to purchase
+his own life; ... and there was another ... so wicked ... as to wear
+a string about his neck, strung with Christian fingers." [Sidenote:
+Conduct of the Christian Indians]
+
+Such incidents help us to comprehend the exasperation of our forefathers
+in the days of King Philip. The month which witnessed his death saw also
+the end of the war in the southern parts of New England; but, almost
+before people had time to offer thanks for the victory, there came news
+of bloodshed on the northeastern frontier. The Tarratines in Maine had
+for some time been infected with the war fever. How far they may have
+been comprehended in the schemes of Philip and Canonchet, it would be
+hard to say. They had attacked settlers on the site of Brunswick as
+early as September, 1675. About the time of Philip's death, Major
+Waldron of Dover had entrapped a party of them by an unworthy stratagem,
+and after satisfying himself that they were accomplices in that
+chieftain's scheme, sent them to Boston to be sold into slavery. A
+terrible retribution was in store for Major Waldron thirteen years
+later. For the present the hideous strife, just ended in southern New
+England, was continued on the northeastern frontier, and there was
+scarcely a village between the Kennebec and the Piscataqua but was laid
+in ashes. [Sidenote: War with the Tarratines, 1676-78]
+
+By midsummer of 1678 the Indians had been everywhere suppressed, and
+there was peace in the land. For three years, since Philip's massacre
+at Swanzey, there had been a reign of terror in New England. Within
+the boundaries of Connecticut, indeed, little or no damage had been
+inflicted, and the troops of that colony, not needed on their own soil,
+did noble service in the common cause.
+
+In Massachusetts and Plymouth, on the other hand, the destruction of
+life and property had been simply frightful. Of ninety towns, twelve had
+been utterly destroyed, while more than forty others had been the scene
+of fire and slaughter. Out of this little society nearly a thousand
+staunch men, including not few of broad culture and strong promise, had
+lost their lives, while of the scores of fair women and poor little
+children that had perished under the ruthless tomahawk, one can hardly
+give an accurate account. Hardly a family throughout the land but was
+in mourning. The war-debt of Plymouth was reckoned to exceed the total
+amount of personal property in the colony; yet although it pinched every
+household for many a year, it was paid to the uttermost farthing; nor
+in this respect were Massachusetts and Connecticut at all behind-hand.
+[Sidenote: Destructiveness of the war]
+
+But while King Philip's War wrought such fearful damage to the English,
+it was for the Indians themselves utter destruction. Most of the
+warriors were slain, and to the survivors, as we have seen, the
+conquerors showed but scant mercy. The Puritan, who conned his Bible so
+earnestly, had taken his hint from the wars of the Jews, and swept
+his New English Canaan with a broom that was pitiless and searching.
+Henceforth the red man figures no more in the history of New England,
+except as an ally of the French in bloody raids upon the frontier. In
+that capacity he does mischief enough for yet a half-century more, but
+from central and southern New England, as an element of disturbance or a
+power to be reckoned with, he disappears forever.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE TYRANNY OF ANDROS.
+
+
+The beginnings of New England were made in the full daylight of modern
+history. It was an age of town records, of registered deeds, of
+contemporary memoirs, of diplomatic correspondence, of controversial
+pamphlets, funeral sermons, political diatribes, specific instructions,
+official reports, and private letters. It was not a time in which
+mythical personages or incredible legends could flourish, and such
+things we do find in the history of New England. There was nevertheless
+a romantic side to this history, enough to envelop some of its
+characters and incidents in a glamour that may mislead the modern
+reader. This wholesale migration from the smiling fields of merry
+England to an unexplored wilderness beyond a thousand leagues of sea was
+of itself a most romantic and thrilling event, and when viewed in the
+light of its historic results it becomes clothed with sublimity. The men
+who undertook this work were not at all free from self-consciousness.
+They believed that they were doing a wonderful thing. They felt
+themselves to be instruments in accomplishing a kind of "manifest
+destiny." Their exodus was that of a chosen people who were at length
+to lay the everlasting foundations of God's kingdom upon earth. Such
+opinions, which took a strong colour from their assiduous study of the
+Old Testament, reacted and disposed them all the more to search its
+pages for illustrations and precedents, and to regard it as an oracle,
+almost as a talisman. In every propitious event they saw a special
+providence, an act of divine intervention to deliver them from the
+snares of an ever watchful Satan. This steadfast faith in an unseen
+ruler and guide was to them a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by
+night. It was of great moral value. It gave them clearness of purpose
+and concentration of strength, and contributed toward making them,
+like the children of Israel, a people of indestructible vitality and
+aggressive energy. At the same time, in the hands of the Puritan
+writers, this feeling was apt to warp their estimates of events and
+throw such a romantic haze about things as seriously to interfere with a
+true historical perspective. [Sidenote: Romantic features in the early
+history of New England]
+
+Among such writings that which perhaps best epitomizes the Puritan
+philosophy is "The Wonder-working Providence of Zion's Saviour in New
+England," by Captain Edward Johnson, one of the principal founders of
+Woburn. It is an extremely valuable history of New England from 1628 to
+1651, and every page is alive with the virile energy of that stirring
+time. With narrative, argument, and apologue, abounding in honesty
+of purpose, sublimity of trust, and grotesqueness of fancy, wherein
+touching tenderness is often alternated with sternness most grim and
+merciless, yet now and then relieved by a sudden gleam of humour,--and
+all in a style that is usually uncouth and harsh, but sometimes bursts
+forth in eloquence worthy of Bunyan,--we are told how the founders of
+New England are soldiers of Christ enlisted in a holy war, and how they
+must "march manfully on till all opposers of Christ's kingly power be
+abolished." "And as for you who are called to sound forth his silver
+trumpets, blow loud and shrill to this chiefest treble tune--for the
+armies of the great Jehovah are at hand." "He standeth not as an idle
+spectator beholding his people's ruth and their enemies' rage, but as an
+actor in all actions, to bring to naught the desires of the wicked, ...
+having also the ordering of every weapon in its first produce, guiding
+every shaft that flies, leading each bullet to his place of settling,
+and weapon to the wound it makes." To men engaged in such a crusade
+against the powers of evil, nothing could seem insignificant or trivial;
+for, as Johnson continues, in truly prophetic phrase, "the Lord Christ
+intends to achieve greater matters by this little handful than the world
+is aware of." [Sidenote: Edward Johnson]
+
+The general sentiment of the early New England writers was like that
+of the "Wonder-working Providence," though it did not always find such
+rhapsodic expression. It has left its impress upon the minds of their
+children's children down to our own time, and has affected the opinions
+held about them by other people. It has had something to do with a
+certain tacit assumption of superiority on the part of New Englanders,
+upon which the men and women of other communities have been heard
+to comment in resentful and carping tones. There has probably never
+existed, in any age or at any spot on the earth's surface, a group of
+people that did not take for granted its own preeminent excellence. Upon
+some such assumption, as upon an incontrovertible axiom, all historical
+narratives, from the chronicles of a parish to the annals of an empire,
+alike proceed. But in New England it assumed a form especially apt to
+provoke challenge. One of its unintentional effects was the setting up
+of an unreal and impossible standard by which to judge the acts and
+motives of the Puritans of the seventeenth century. We come upon
+instances of harshness and cruelty, of narrow-minded bigotry, and
+superstitious frenzy; and feel, perhaps, a little surprised that
+these men had so much in common with their contemporaries. Hence the
+interminable discussion which has been called forth by the history of
+the Puritans, in which the conclusions of the writer have generally been
+determined by circumstances of birth or creed, or perhaps of reaction
+against creed. One critic points to the Boston of 1659 or the Salem of
+1692 with such gleeful satisfaction as used to stir the heart of Thomas
+Paine when he alighted upon an inconsistency in some text of the Bible;
+while another, in the firm conviction that Puritans could do no wrong,
+plays fast and loose with arguments that might be made to justify the
+deeds of a Torquemada. [Sidenote: Acts of the Puritans often judged by a
+wrong standard]
+
+From such methods of criticism it is the duty of historians as far as
+possible to free themselves. If we consider the Puritans in the light
+of their surroundings as Englishmen of the seventeenth century and
+inaugurators of a political movement that was gradually to change for
+the better the aspect of things all over the earth, we cannot fail to
+discern the value of that sacred enthusiasm which led them to regard
+themselves as chosen soldiers of Christ. It was the spirit of the
+"Wonder-working Providence" that hurled the tyrant from his throne at
+Whitehall and prepared the way for the emancipation of modern Europe. No
+spirit less intense, no spirit nurtured in the contemplation of things
+terrestrial, could ever have done it. The political philosophy of a Vane
+or a Sidney could never have done it. The passion for liberty as felt
+by a Jefferson or an Adams, abstracted and generalized from the love
+of particular liberties, was something scarcely intelligible to the
+seventeenth century. The ideas of absolute freedom of thought and
+speech, which we breathe in from childhood, were to the men of that age
+strange and questionable. They groped and floundered among them, very
+much as modern wool growers in Ohio or iron-smelters in Pennsylvania
+flounder and grope among the elementary truths of political economy. But
+the spirit in which the Hebrew prophet rebuked and humbled an idolatrous
+king was a spirit they could comprehend. Such a spirit was sure to
+manifest itself in narrow cramping measures and in ugly acts of
+persecution; but it is none the less to the fortunate alliance of
+that fervid religious enthusiasm with the Englishman's love of
+self-government that our modern freedom owes its existence. [Sidenote:
+Spirit of the Wonder-working Providence]
+
+The history of New England under Charles II. yields abundant proof that
+political liberty is no less indebted in the New World than in the Old
+to the spirit of the "Wonder-working Providence." The theocratic ideal
+which the Puritan sought to put into practice in Massachusetts and
+Connecticut was a sacred institution in faults of the defence of
+which all his faculties were kept perpetually alert. Much as he loved
+self-government he would never have been so swift to detect and so
+stubborn to resist every slightest encroachment on the part of the crown
+had not the loss of self-government involved the imminent danger that
+the ark of the Lord might be abandoned to the worshippers of Dagon.
+It was in Massachusetts, where the theocracy was strongest, that the
+resistance to Charles II. was most dogged and did most to prepare the
+way for the work of achieving political independence a century later.
+Naturally it was in Massachusetts at the same time that the faults
+of the theocracy were most conspicuous. It was there that priestly
+authority most clearly asserted itself in such oppressive acts as are
+always witnessed when too much power is left in the hands of men whose
+primary allegiance is to a kingdom not of this world. Much as we owe to
+the theocracy for warding off the encroachments of the crown, we cannot
+be sorry that it was itself crushed in the process. It was well that
+it did not survive its day of usefulness, and that the outcome of
+the struggle was what has been aptly termed "the emancipation of
+Massachusetts." [Sidenote: Merits and faults of the theocracy]
+
+The basis of the theocratic constitution of this commonwealth was the
+provision by which the exercise of the franchise was made an incident of
+church-membership. Unless a man could take part in the Lord's Supper, as
+administered in the churches of the colony, he could not vote or
+hold office. Church and state, parish and town, were thus virtually
+identified. Here, as in some other aspects of early New England, one is
+reminded of the ancient Greek cities, where the freeman who could
+vote in the market-place or serve his turn as magistrate was the man
+qualified to perform sacrifices to the tutelar deities of the tribe;
+other men might dwell in the city but had no share in making or
+executing its laws. The limitation of civil rights by religious tests is
+indeed one of those common inheritances from the old Aryan world that
+we find again and again cropping out, even down to the exclusion of
+Catholics from the House of Commons from 1562 to 1829. The obvious
+purpose of this policy in England was self-protection; and in like
+manner the restriction of the suffrage in Massachusetts was designed
+to protect the colony against aggressive episcopacy and to maintain
+unimpaired the uniformity of purpose which had brought the settlers
+across the ocean. Under the circumstances there was something to be
+said in behalf of such a measure of self-protection, and the principle
+required but slight extension to cover such cases as the banishment of
+Roger Williams and the Antinomians. There was another side to the case,
+however. From the very outset this exclusive policy was in some ways
+a source of weakness to Massachusetts, though we have seen that the
+indirect effect was to diversify and enrich the political life of New
+England as a whole. [Sidenote: Restriction of the suffrage to church
+members]
+
+At first it led to the departure of the men who founded Connecticut,
+and thereafter the way was certainly open for those who preferred the
+Connecticut policy to go where it prevailed. Some such segregation was
+no doubt effected, but it could not be complete and thorough. Men who
+preferred Boston without the franchise to Hartford with it would remain
+in Massachusetts; and thus the elder colony soon came to possess a
+discontented class of people, always ready to join hand in glove with
+dissenters or mischief-makers, or even with emissaries of the crown. It
+afforded a suggestive commentary upon all attempts to suppress human
+nature by depriving it of a share in political life; instead of keeping
+it inside where you can try conclusions with it fairly, you thrust it
+out to plot mischief in the dark. Within twenty years from the founding
+of Boston the disfranchisement of such citizens as could not participate
+in church-communion had begun to be regarded as a serious political
+grievance. These men were obliged to pay taxes and were liable to be
+called upon for military service against the Indians; and they naturally
+felt that they ought to have a voice in the management of public
+affairs. [Sidenote: It was a source of political discontent]
+
+Besides this fundamental ground of complaint, there were derivative
+grievances. Under the influence of the clergy justice was administered
+in somewhat inquisitorial fashion, there was an uncertainty as to just
+what the law was, a strong disposition to confuse questions of law with
+questions of ethics, and great laxity in the admission and estimation of
+evidence. As early as 1639 people had begun to complain that too much
+power was rested in the discretion of the magistrate, and they clamoured
+for a code of laws; but as Winthrop says, the magistrates and ministers
+were "not very forward in this matter," for they preferred to supplement
+the common law of England by decisions based on the Old Testament rather
+than by a body of statutes. It was not until 1649, after a persistent
+struggle, that the deputies won a decisive victory over the assistants
+and secured for Massachusetts a definite code of laws. In the New Haven
+colony similar theocratic notions led the settlers to dispense with
+trial by jury because they could find no precedent for it in the laws of
+Moses. Here, as in Massachusetts, the inquisitorial administration of
+justice combined with partial disfranchisement to awaken discontent, and
+it was partly for this reason that New Haven fell so easily under the
+sway of Connecticut. [Sidenote: Inquisitorial administration of justice]
+
+In Massachusetts after 1650 the opinion rapidly gained ground that all
+baptized persons of upright and decorous lives ought to be considered,
+for practical purposes, as members of the church, and therefore entitled
+to the exercise of political rights, even though unqualified for
+participation in the Lord's Supper. This theory of church-membership,
+based on what was at that time stigmatized as the "Halfway Covenant,"
+aroused intense opposition. It was the great question of the day. In
+1657 a council was held in Boston, which approved the principle of the
+Halfway Covenant; and as this decision was far from satisfying the
+churches, a synod of all the clergymen in Massachusetts was held five
+years later, to reconsider the great question. The decision of the synod
+substantially confirmed the decision of the council, but there were some
+dissenting voices. Foremost among the dissenters, who wished to retain
+the old theocratic regime in all its strictness, was Charles Chauncey,
+the president of Harvard College, and Increase Mather agreed with him
+at the time, though he afterward saw reason to change his opinion, and
+published two tracts in favour of the Halfway Covenant. Most bitter of
+all toward the new theory of church-membership was, naturally enough,
+Mr. Davenport of New Haven. [Sidenote: The "Halfway Covenant"]
+
+This burning question was the source of angry contentions in the First
+Church of Boston. Its teacher, the learned and melancholy Norton, died
+in 1663, and four years later the aged pastor, John Wilson, followed
+him. In choosing a successor to Wilson the church decided to declare
+itself in opposition to the liberal decision of the synod, and in token
+thereof invited Davenport to come from New Haven to take charge of it.
+Davenport, who was then seventy years old, was disgusted at the recent
+annexation of his colony to Connecticut. He accepted the invitation
+and came to Boston, against the wishes of nearly half of the Boston
+congregation who did not like the illiberal principle which he
+represented. In little more than a year his ministry at Boston was ended
+by death; but the opposition to his call had already proceeded so far
+that a secession from the old church had become inevitable. In 1669
+the advocates of the Halfway Covenant organized themselves into a new
+society under the title of the "Third Church in Boston." A wooden
+meeting-house was built on a lot which had once belonged to the late
+governor Winthrop, in what was then the south part of the town, so that
+the society and its meeting-house became known as the South Church; and
+after a new church founded in Summer Street in 1717 took the name of the
+New South, the church of 1669 came to be further distinguished as the
+Old South. As this church represented a liberal idea which was growing
+in favour with the people, it soon became the most flourishing church
+in America. After sixty years its numbers had increased so that the old
+meeting-house could not contain them; and in 1729 the famous building
+which still stands was erected on the same spot,--a building with a
+grander history than any other on the American continent, unless it be
+that other plain brick building in Philadelphia where the Declaration of
+Independence was adopted and the Federal Constitution framed. [Sidenote:
+Founding of the Old South Church, 1669]
+
+The wrath of the First Church at this secession from its ranks was
+deep and bitter, and for thirteen years it refused to entertain
+ecclesiastical intercourse with the South Church. But by 1682 it had
+become apparent that the king and his friends were meditating an attack
+upon the Puritan theocracy in New England. It had even been suggested,
+in the council for the colonies, that the Church of England should be
+established in Massachusetts, and that none but duly ordained Episcopal
+clergymen should be allowed to solemnize marriages. Such alarming
+suggestions began to impress the various Puritan churches with the
+importance of uniting their forces against the common enemy; and
+accordingly in 1682 the quarrel between the two Boston societies came to
+an end. There was urgent need of all the sympathy and good feeling that
+the community could muster, whereby to cheer itself in the crisis that
+was coming. The four years from 1684 to 1688 were the darkest years in
+the history of New England. Massachusetts, though not lacking in the
+spirit, had not the power to beard the tyrant as she did eighty years
+later. Her attitude toward the Stuarts--as we have seen--had been
+sometimes openly haughty and defiant, sometimes silent and sullen, but
+always independent. At the accession of Charles II. the colonists had
+thought it worth while to send commissioners to England to confer with
+the king and avoid a quarrel. Charles promised to respect their charter,
+but insisted that in return they must take an oath of allegiance to the
+crown, must administer justice in the king's name, and must repeal their
+laws restricting the right of suffrage to church members and prohibiting
+the Episcopal form of worship. [Sidenote: Founding of the Old South
+Church, 1669] [Sidenote: Demands of Charles II.]
+
+When the people of Massachusetts received this message they consented to
+administer justice in the king's name, but all the other matters were
+referred for consideration to a committee, and so they dropped out of
+sight. When the royal commissioners came to Boston in 1664, they were
+especially instructed to ascertain whether Massachusetts had complied
+with the king's demands; but upon this point the legislature stubbornly
+withheld any definite answer, while it frittered away the time in
+trivial altercations with the royal commissioners. The war with Holland
+and the turbulent state of English politics operated for several years
+in favour of this independent attitude of the colonists, though during
+all this time their enemies at court were busy with intrigues and
+accusations. Apart from mere slanders the real grounds of complaint
+were the restriction of the suffrage, whereby members of the Church of
+England were shut out; the claims of the eastern proprietors, heirs
+of Mason and Gorges, whose territory Massachusetts had absorbed;
+the infraction of the navigation laws; and the coinage of pine-tree
+shillings. The last named measure had been forced upon the colonists by
+the scarcity of a circulating medium. Until 1661 Indian wampum had been
+a legal tender, and far into the eighteenth century it remained current
+in small transactions. "In 1693 the ferriage from New York to Brooklyn
+was eight stivers in wampum or a silver twopence." [35] As early as
+1652 Massachusetts had sought to supply the deficiency by the issue of
+shillings and sixpences. It was an affair of convenience and probably
+had no political purpose. The infraction of the navigation laws was a
+more serious matter. "Ships from France, Spain, and the Canaries traded
+directly with Boston, and brought in goods which had never paid duty in
+any English port." [36] The effect of this was to excite the jealousy
+of the merchants in London and other English cities and to deprive
+Massachusetts of the sympathy of that already numerous and powerful
+class of people. [Sidenote: Complaints against Massachusetts]
+
+In 1675, the first year of King Philip's War, the British government
+made up its mind to attend more closely to the affairs of its American
+colonies. It had got the Dutch war off its hands, and could give heed to
+other things. The general supervision of the colonies was assigned to
+a standing committee of the privy council, styled the "Lords of the
+Committee of Trade and Plantations," and henceforth familiarly known
+as the "Lords of Trade." Next year the Lords of Trade sent an agent to
+Boston, with a letter to Governor Leverett about the Mason and Gorges
+claims. Under cover of this errand the messenger was to go about and
+ascertain the sentiments which people in the Kennebec and Piscataqua
+towns, as well as in Boston, entertained for the government of
+Massachusetts. The person to whom this work was entrusted was Edward
+Randolph, a cousin of Robert Mason who inherited the property claim to
+the Piscataqua county. To these men had old John Mason bequeathed his
+deadly feud with Massachusetts, and the fourteen years which Randolph
+now spent in New England were busily devoted to sowing the seeds of
+strife. In 1678 the king appointed him collector and surveyor of customs
+at the port of Boston, with instructions to enforce the navigation laws.
+Randolph was not the man to do unpopular things in such a way as to dull
+the edge of the infliction; he took delight in adding insult to injury.
+He was at once harsh and treacherous. His one virtue was pecuniary
+integrity; he was inaccessible to bribes and did not pick and steal from
+the receipts at the custom-house. In the other relations of life he
+was disencumbered of scruples. His abilities were not great, but his
+industry was untiring, and he pursued his enemies with the tenacity of a
+sleuth-hound. As an excellent British historian observes, "he was one of
+those men who, once enlisted as partisans, lose every other feeling in
+the passion which is engendered of strife." [37] [Sidenote: The Lords of
+Trade] [Sidenote: Edward Randolph]
+
+The arrival of such a man boded no good to Massachusetts. His reception
+at the town-house was a cold one. Leverett liked neither his looks nor
+his message, and kept his peaked hat on while he read the letter; when
+he came to the signature of the king's chief secretary of state, he
+asked, with careless contempt, "Who is this Henry Coventry?" Randolph's
+choking rage found vent in a letter to the king, taking pains to remind
+him that the governor of Massachusetts had once been an officer in
+Cromwell's army. As we read this and think with what ghoulish glee the
+writer would have betrayed Colonel Goffe into the hands of the headsman,
+had any clue been given him, we can quite understand why Hubbard and
+Mather had nothing to say about the mysterious stranger at Hadley.
+Everything that Randolph could think of that would goad and irritate the
+king, he reported in full to London; his letters were specimens of that
+worst sort of lie that is based upon distorted half-truths; and his
+malicious pen but seldom lay idle.
+
+While waiting for the effects of these reports to ripen, Randolph was
+busily intriguing with some of the leading men in Boston who were
+dissatisfied with the policy of the dominant party, and under his
+careful handling a party was soon brought into existence which was ready
+to counsel submission to the royal will. Such was the birth of Toryism
+in New England. The leader of this party was Joseph Dudley, son of
+the grim verse-maker who had come over as lieutenant to Winthrop. The
+younger Dudley was graduated at Harvard in 1665, and proceeded to study
+theology, but soon turned his attention entirely to politics. In 1673 he
+was a deputy from Roxbury in the General Court; in 1675 he took part in
+the storming of the Narragansett fort; in 1677 and the three following
+years he was one of the Federal Commissioners. In character and temper
+he differed greatly from his father. Like the proverbial minister's son
+whose feet are swift toward folly, Joseph Dudley seems to have learned
+in stern bleak years of childhood to rebel against the Puritan theory of
+life. Much of the abuse that has been heaped upon him, as a renegade and
+traitor, is probably undeserved. It does not appear that he ever made
+any pretence of love for the Puritan commonwealth, and there were many
+like him who had as lief be ruled by king as by clergy. But it cannot be
+denied that his suppleness and sagacity went along with a moral nature
+that was weak and vulgar. Joseph Dudley was essentially a self-seeking
+politician and courtier, like his famous kinsman of the previous
+century, Robert, Earl of Leicester. His party in Massachusetts was
+largely made up of men who had come to the colony for commercial
+reasons, and had little or no sympathy with the objects for which it was
+founded. Among them were Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Baptists, who
+were allowed no chance for public worship, as well as many others who,
+like Gallio, cared for none of these things. Their numbers, moreover,
+must have been large, for Boston had grown to be a town of 5000
+inhabitants, the population of Massachusetts was approaching 30,000,
+and, according to Hutchinson, scarcely one grown man in five was a
+church-member qualified to vote or hold office. Such a fact speaks
+volumes as to the change which was coming over the Puritan world. No
+wonder that the clergy had begun to preach about the weeds and tares
+that were overrunning Christ's pleasant garden. No wonder that the
+spirit of revolt against the disfranchising policy of the theocracy was
+ripe. [Sidenote: Joseph Dudley]
+
+It was in 1679, when this weakness of the body politic had been duly
+studied and reported by Randolph, and when all New England was groaning
+under the bereavements and burdens entailed by Philip's war, that the
+Stuart government began its final series of assaults upon Massachusetts.
+The claims of the eastern proprietors, the heirs of Mason and Gorges,
+furnished the occasion. Since 1643 the four Piscataqua towns--Hampton,
+Exeter, Dover, and Portsmouth--had remained under the jurisdiction of
+Massachusetts. After the Restoration the Mason claim had been revived,
+and in 1677 was referred to the chief-justices North and Rainsford.
+Their decision was that Mason's claim had always been worthless as based
+on a grant in which the old Plymouth Company had exceeded its powers.
+They also decided that Massachusetts had no valid claim since the
+charter assigned her a boundary just north of the Merrimack. This
+decision left the four towns subject to none but the king, who forthwith
+in 1679 proceeded to erect them into the royal province of New
+Hampshire, with president and council appointed by the crown, and an
+assembly chosen by the people, but endowed with little authority,--a
+tricksome counterfeit of popular government. Within three years an
+arrogant and thieving ruler, Edward Cranfield, had goaded New Hampshire
+to acts of insurrection. [Sidenote: Royal province of New Hampshire]
+
+To the decisions of the chief-justices Massachusetts must needs submit.
+The Gorges claim led to more serious results. Under Cromwell's rule in
+1652--the same year in which she began coining money--Massachusetts
+had extended her sway over Maine. In 1665 Colonel Nichols and his
+commissioners, acting upon the express instructions of Charles II.,
+took it away from her. In 1668, after the commissioners had gone home,
+Massachusetts coolly took possession again. In 1677 the chief-justices
+decided that the claim of the Gorges family, being based on a grant from
+James I., was valid. Then the young Ferdinando Gorges, grandson of the
+first proprietor, offered to sell the province to the king, who had now
+taken it into his head that he would like to bestow it upon the Duke
+of Monmouth, his favourite son by Lucy Walters. Before Charles had
+responded, Governor Leverett had struck a bargain with Gorges, who ceded
+to Massachusetts all his rights over Maine for L1250 in hard cash. When
+the king heard of this transaction he was furious. He sent a letter to
+Boston, commanding the General Court to surrender the province again on
+repayment of this sum of L1250, and expressing his indignation that
+the people should thus dare to dispose of an important claim off-hand
+without consulting his wishes. In the same letter the colony was
+enjoined to put in force the royal orders of seventeen years before,
+concerning the oath of allegiance, the restriction of the suffrage, and
+the prohibition of the Episcopal form of worship. [Sidenote: The Gorges
+claim]
+
+This peremptory message reached Boston about Christmas, 1679. Leverett,
+the sturdy Ironsides, had died six months before, and his place
+was filled by Simon Bradstreet, a man of moderate powers but great
+integrity, and held in peculiar reverence as the last survivor of those
+that had been chosen to office before leaving England by the leaders of
+the great Puritan exodus. Born in a Lincolnshire village in 1603, he was
+now seventy-six years old. He had taken his degree at Emmanuel College,
+Cambridge, had served as secretary to the Earl of Warwick, and in 1629
+had been appointed member of the board of assistants for the colony
+about to be established on Massachusetts bay. In this position he had
+remained with honour for half a century, while he had also served as
+Federal Commissioner and as agent for the colony in London. His wife,
+who died in 1672, was a woman of quaint learning and quainter verses,
+which her contemporaries admired beyond measure. One of her books was
+republished in London, with the title: "The Tenth Muse, lately sprung up
+in America." John Norton once said that if Virgil could only have heard
+the seraphic poems of Anne Bradstreet, he would have thrown his heathen
+doggerel into the fire. She was sister of Joseph Dudley, and evidently
+inherited this rhyming talent, such as it was, from her father. Governor
+Bradstreet belonged to the moderate party who would have been glad to
+extend the franchise, but he did not go with his brother-in-law in
+subservience to the king. [Sidenote: Simon Bradstreet and his wife]
+
+When the General Court assembled, in May, 1680, the full number of
+eighteen assistants appeared, for the first time in the history of the
+colony, and in accordance with an expressed wish of the king. They
+were ready to yield in trifles, but not in essentials. After wearisome
+discussion, the answer to the royal letter was decided on. It stated in
+vague and unsatisfactory terms that the royal orders of 1662 either had
+been carried out already or would be in good time, while to the demand
+for the surrender of Maine no reply whatever was made, save that "they
+were heartily sorry that any actings of theirs should be displeasing
+to his Majesty." After this, when Randolph wrote home that the king's
+letters were of no more account in Massachusetts than an old London
+Gazette, he can hardly be accused of stretching the truth. Randolph kept
+busily at work, and seems to have persuaded the Bishop of London that
+if the charter could be annulled, episcopacy might be established in
+Massachusetts as in England. In February, 1682, a letter came from the
+king demanding submission and threatening legal proceedings against the
+charter. Dudley was then sent as agent to London, and with him was sent
+a Mr. Richards, of the extreme clerical party, to watch him. [Sidenote:
+Massachusetts answers the king]
+
+Meanwhile the king's position at home had been changing. He had made
+up his mind to follow his father's example and try the experiment of
+setting his people at defiance and governing without a parliament. This
+could not be done without a great supply of money. Louis XIV. had
+plenty of money, for there was no constitution in France to prevent his
+squeezing what he wanted out of the pockets of an oppressed people.
+France was thriving greatly now, for Colbert had introduced a
+comparatively free system of trade between the provinces and inaugurated
+an era of prosperity soon to be cut short by the expulsion of the
+Huguenots. Louis could get money enough for the asking, and would be
+delighted to foment civil disturbances in England, so as to tie the
+hands of the only power which at that moment could interfere with his
+seizing Alsace and Lorraine and invading Flanders. The pretty Louise de
+Keroualle Duchess of Portsmouth, with her innocent baby face and heart
+as cold as any reptile's, was the French Delilah chosen to shear the
+locks of the British Samson. By such means and from such motives a
+secret treaty was made in February, 1681, by which Louis agreed to pay
+Charles 2,000,000 livres down, and 500,000 more in each of the next two
+years, on condition that he should summon no more parliaments within
+that time. This bargain for securing the means of overthrowing the laws
+and liberties of England was, on the part of Charles II., an act no less
+reprehensible than some of those for which his father had gone to the
+block. But Charles could now afford for a while to wreak his evil will.
+He had already summoned a parliament for the 21st of March, to meet at
+Oxford within the precincts of the subservient university, and out of
+reach of the high-spirited freemen of London. He now forced a quarrel
+with the new parliament and dissolved it within a week. A joiner named
+Stephen College, who had spoken his mind too freely in the taverns at
+Oxford with regard to these proceedings, was drawn and quartered. The
+Whig leader Lord Shaftesbury was obliged to flee to Holland. In the
+absence of a parliament the only power of organized resistance to the
+king's tyranny resided in the corporate governments of the chartered
+towns. The charter of London was accordingly attacked by a writ of
+_quo warranto_, and in June, 1683, the time-serving judges declared it
+confiscated. George Jeffreys, a low drunken fellow whom Charles had made
+Lord Chief Justice, went on a circuit through the country; and, as Roger
+North says, "made all the charters, like the walls of Jericho, fall down
+before him, and returned laden with surrenders, the spoils of towns."
+At the same time a terrible blow was dealt at two of the greatest Whig
+families in England. Lord William Russell, son of the Earl of Bedford,
+and Algernon Sidney, younger son of the Earl of Leicester, two of the
+purest patriots and ablest liberal leaders of the day, were tried on a
+false charge of treason and beheaded. [Sidenote: Secret treaty between
+Charles II. and Louis XIV] [Sidenote: Shameful proceedings in England]
+
+By this quick succession of high-handed measures, the friends of law and
+liberty were for a moment disconcerted and paralyzed. In the frightful
+abasement of the courts of justice which these events so clearly showed,
+the freedom of Englishmen seemed threatened in its last stronghold. The
+doctrine of passive obedience to monarchs was preached in the pulpits
+and inculcated by the university of Oxford, which ordered the works of
+John Milton to be publicly burned. Sir Robert Filmer wrote that "not
+only in human laws, but even in divine, a thing may by the king be
+commanded contrary to law, and yet obedience to such a command is
+necessary." Charles felt so strong that in 1684 he flatly refused to
+summon a parliament.
+
+It was not long before the effects of all this were felt in New England.
+The mission of Dudley and his colleague was fruitless. They returned to
+Boston, and Randolph, who had followed them to London, now followed them
+back, armed with a writ of _quo warranto_ which he was instructed not to
+serve until he should have given Massachusetts one more chance to humble
+herself in the dust. Should she modify her constitution to please a
+tyrant or see it trampled under foot? Recent events in England served
+for a solemn warning; for the moment the Tories were silenced; perhaps
+after all, the absolute rule of a king was hardly to be preferred to the
+sway of the Puritan clergy; the day when the House of Commons sat still
+and wept seemed to have returned. A great town-meeting was held in the
+Old South Meeting-House, and the moderator requested all who were for
+surrendering the charter to hold up their hands. Not a hand was lifted,
+and out from the throng a solitary voice exclaimed, with deep-drawn
+breath, "The Lord be praised!" Then arose Increase Mather, president
+of Harvard College, and reminded them how their fathers did win this
+charter, and should they deliver it up unto the spoiler who demanded it
+"even as Ahab required Naboth's vineyard, Oh! their children would be
+bound to curse them." Such was the attitude of Massachusetts, and when
+it was known in London, the blow was struck. For technical reasons
+Randolph's writ was not served; but on the 21st of June a decree in
+chancery annulled the charter of Massachusetts. [Sidenote: Massachusetts
+refuses to surrender her charter] [Sidenote: It is annulled by degree of
+chancery, June 21, 1684]
+
+To appreciate the force of this blow we must pause for a moment and
+consider what it involved. The right to the soil of North America had
+been hitherto regarded in England, on the strength of the discoveries of
+the Cabots, as an appurtenance to the crown of Henry VII.,--as something
+which descended from father to son like the palace at Hampton Court or
+the castle at Windsor, but which the sovereign might alienate by his
+voluntary act just as he might sell or give away a piece of his royal
+domain in England. Over this vast territory it was doubtful how far
+Parliament was entitled to exercise authority, and the rights of
+Englishmen settled there had theoretically no security save in the
+provisions of the various charters by which the crown had delegated its
+authority to individual proprietors or to private companies. It was thus
+on the charter granted by Charles I. to the Company of Massachusetts Bay
+that not only the cherished political and ecclesiastical institutions
+of the colony, but even the titles of individuals to their lands and
+houses, were supposed to be founded. By the abrogation of the charter,
+all rights and immunities that had been based upon it were at once swept
+away, and every rood of the soil of Massachusetts became the personal
+property of the Stuart king, who might, if he should possess the will
+and the power, turn out all the present occupants or otherwise deal with
+them as trespassers. Such at least was the theory of Charles II., and
+to show that he meant to wreak his vengeance with no gentle hand, he
+appointed as his viceroy the brutal Percy Kirke,--a man who would have
+no scruples about hanging a few citizens without trial, should occasion
+require it. [Sidenote: Effect of annulling the charter]
+
+But in February, 1685, just as Charles seemed to be getting everything
+arranged to his mind, a stroke of apoplexy carried him off the scene,
+and his brother ascended the throne. Monmouth's rebellion, and the
+horrible cruelties that followed, kept Colonel Kirke busy in England
+through the summer, and left the new king scant leisure to think about
+America. Late in the autumn, having made up his mind that he could not
+spare such an exemplary knave as Kirke, James II. sent over Sir Edmund
+Andros. In the mean time the government of Massachusetts had been
+administered by Dudley, who showed himself willing to profit by the
+misfortunes of his country. Andros had long been one of James's
+favourites. He was the dull and dogged English officer such as one often
+meets, honest enough and faithful to his master, neither cruel nor
+rapacious, but coarse in fibre and wanting in tact. Some years
+before, when governor of New York, he had a territorial dispute with
+Connecticut, and now cherished a grudge against the people of New
+England, so that, from James's point of view, he was well fitted to be
+their governor. James wished to abolish all the local governments
+in America, and unite them, as far as possible, under a single
+administration. With Plymouth there could be no trouble; she had never
+had a charter, but had existed on sufferance from the outset. In 1687
+the charters of Rhode Island and Connecticut were rescinded, but the
+decrees were not executed in due form. In October of that year Andros
+went to Hartford, to seize the Connecticut charter but it was not
+surrendered. While Sir Edmund was bandying threats with stout Robert
+Treat, the queller of Indians and now governor of Connecticut, in the
+course of their evening conference the candles were suddenly blown out,
+and when after some scraping of tinder they were lighted again the
+document was nowhere to be found, for Captain Wadsworth had carried
+it away and hidden it in the hollow trunk of a mighty oak tree.
+Nevertheless for the moment the colony was obliged to submit to the
+tyrant. Next day the secretary John Allyn wrote "Finis" on the colonial
+records and shut up the book. Within another twelvemonth New York and
+New Jersey were added to the viceroyalty of Andros; so that all the
+northern colonies from the forests of Maine to the Delaware river were
+thus brought under the arbitrary rule of one man, who was responsible to
+no one but the king for whatever he might take it into his head to do.
+[Sidenote: Sir Edmund Andros] [Sidenote: The Charter Oak]
+
+The vexatious character of the new government was most strongly felt at
+Boston where Andros had his headquarters. Measures were at once taken
+for the erection of an Episcopal church, and meantime the royal order
+was that one of the principal meeting-houses should be seized for the
+use of the Church of England. This was an ominous beginning. In the
+eyes of the people it was much more than a mere question of disturbing
+Puritan prejudices. They had before them the experience of Scotland
+during the past ten years, the savage times of "Old Mortality," the
+times which had seen the tyrannical prelate, on the lonely moor, begging
+in vain for his life, the times of Drumclog and Bothwell Brigg, of
+Claverhouse and his flinty-hearted troopers, of helpless women tied to
+stakes on the Solway shore and drowned by inches in the rising tide.
+What had happened in one part of the world might happen in another, for
+the Stuart policy was the same. It aimed not at securing toleration but
+at asserting unchecked supremacy. Its demand for an inch was the prelude
+to its seizing an ell, and so our forefathers understood it. Sir
+Edmund's formal demand for the Old South Meeting-House was flatly
+refused, but on Good Friday, 1687, the sexton was frightened into
+opening it, and thenceforward Episcopal services were held there
+alternately with the regular services until the overthrow of Andros. The
+pastor, Samuel Willard, was son of the gallant veteran who had rescued
+the beleaguered people of Brookfield in King Philip's war. Amusing
+passages occurred between him and Sir Edmund, who relished the
+pleasantry of keeping minister and congregation waiting an hour or
+two in the street on Sundays before yielding to them the use of their
+meeting-house. More kindly memories of the unpopular governor are
+associated with the building of the first King's Chapel on the spot
+where its venerable successor now stands. The church was not finished
+until after Sir Edmund had taken his departure, but Lady Andros, who
+died in February, 1688, lies in the burying-ground hard by. Her gentle
+manners had won all hearts. For the moment, we are told, one touch of
+nature made enemies kin, and as Sir Edmund walked to the townhouse
+"many a head was bared to the bereaved husband that before had remained
+stubbornly covered to the exalted governor." [38] [Sidenote: Episcopal
+services in Boston] [Sidenote: Founding of the King's Chapel, 1689]
+
+The despotic rule of Andros was felt in more serious ways than in the
+seizing upon a meetinghouse. Arbitrary taxes were imposed, encroachments
+were made upon common lands as in older manorial times, and the writ of
+_habeas corpus_ was suspended. Dudley was appointed censor of the press,
+and nothing was allowed to be printed without his permission. All the
+public records of the late New England governments were ordered to be
+brought to Boston, whither it thus became necessary to make a tedious
+journey in order to consult them. All deeds and wills were required
+to be registered in Boston, and excessive fees were charged for the
+registry. It was proclaimed that all private titles to land were to be
+ransacked, and that whoever wished to have his title confirmed must pay
+a heavy quit-rent, which under the circumstances amounted to blackmail.
+The General Court was abolished. The power of taxation was taken from
+the town-meetings and lodged with the governor. Against this crowning
+iniquity the town of Ipswich, led by its sturdy pastor, John Wise, made
+protest. In response Mr. Wise was thrown into prison, fined £50, and
+suspended from the ministry. A notable and powerful character was this
+John Wise. One of the broadest thinkers and most lucid writers of his
+time, he seems like a forerunner of the liberal Unitarian divines of
+the nineteenth century. His "Vindication of the Government of the New
+England Churches," published in 1717, was a masterly exposition of the
+principles of civil government, and became "a text book of liberty for
+our Revolutionary fathers, containing some of the notable expressions
+that are used in the Declaration of Independence." [Sidenote: Tyranny]
+[Sidenote: John Wise of Ipswich]
+
+It was on the trial of Mr. Wise in October, 1687, that Dudley openly
+declared that the people of New England had now no further privileges
+left them than not to be sold for slaves. Such a state of things in the
+valley of the Euphrates would not have attracted comment; the peasantry
+of central Europe would have endured it until better instructed; but in
+an English community it could not last long. If James II. had remained
+upon the throne, New England would surely have soon risen in rebellion
+against Andros. But the mother country had by this time come to repent
+the fresh lease of life which she had granted to the Stuart dynasty
+after Cromwell's death. Tired of the disgraceful subservience of her
+Court to the schemes of Louis XIV., tired of fictitious plots and
+judicial murders, tired of bloody assizes and declarations of indulgence
+and all the strange devices of Stuart tyranny, England endured the
+arrogance of James but three years, and then drove him across the
+Channel, to get such consolation as he might from his French paymaster
+and patron. On the 4th of April, 1689, the youthful John Winslow brought
+to Boston the news of the landing of the Prince of Orange in England.
+For the space of two weeks there was quiet and earnest deliberation
+among the citizens, as the success of the Prince's enterprise was not
+yet regarded as assured. But all at once, on the morning of the 18th,
+the drums beat to arms, the signal-fire was lighted on Beacon Hill, a
+meeting was held at the Town-House, militia began to pour in from the
+country, and Andros, summoned to surrender, was fain to beseech Mr.
+Willard and the other ministers to intercede for him. But the ministers
+refused. Next day the Castle was surrendered, the Rose frigate riding in
+the harbour was seized and dismantled, and Andros was arrested as he was
+trying to effect his escape disguised in woman's clothes. Dudley and the
+other agents of tyranny were also imprisoned, and thus the revolution
+was accomplished. It marks the importance which the New England colonies
+were beginning to attain, that, before the Prince of Orange had fully
+secured the throne, he issued a letter instructing the people of Boston
+to preserve decorum and acquiesce yet a little longer in the government
+of Andros, until more satisfactory arrangements could be made. But
+Increase Mather, who was then in London on a mission in behalf of New
+England, judiciously prevented this letter of instructions from being
+sent. The zeal of the people outstripped the cautious policy of the
+new sovereign, and provisional governments, in accordance with the old
+charters, were at once set up in the colonies lately ruled by Andros.
+Bradstreet now in his eighty-seventh year was reinstated as governor of
+Massachusetts. Five weeks after this revolution in Boston the order to
+proclaim King William and Queen Mary was received, amid such rejoicings
+as had never before been seen in that quiet town, for it was believed
+that self-government would now be guaranteed to New England. [Sidenote:
+Fall of James II.] [Sidenote: Insurrection in Boston, and overthrow of
+Andros, April 18, 1689]
+
+This hope was at least so far realized that from the most formidable
+dangers which had threatened it, New England was henceforth secured.
+The struggle with the Stuarts was ended, and by this second revolution
+within half a century the crown had received a check from which it never
+recovered. There were troubles yet in store for England, but no more
+such outrages as the judicial murders of Russell and Sidney. New England
+had still a stern ordeal to go through, but never again was she to be
+so trodden down and insulted as in the days of Andros. The efforts of
+George III. to rule Englishmen despotically were weak as compared with
+those of the Stuarts. In his time England had waxed strong enough to
+curb the tyrant, America had waxed strong enough to defy and disown him.
+After 1689 the Puritan no longer felt that his religion was in danger,
+and there was a reasonable prospect that charters solemnly granted him
+would be held sacred. William III. was a sovereign of modern type, from
+whom freedom of thought and worship had nothing to fear. In his theology
+he agreed, as a Dutch Calvinist, more nearly with the Puritans than with
+the Church of England. At the same time he had no great liking for so
+much independence of thought and action as New England had exhibited. In
+the negotiations which now definitely settled the affairs of this part
+of the world, the intractable behaviour of Massachusetts was borne in
+mind and contrasted with the somewhat less irritating attitude of
+the smaller colonies. It happened that the decree which annulled the
+charters of Rhode Island and Connecticut had not yet been formally
+enrolled. It was accordingly treated as void, and the old charters were
+allowed to remain in force. They were so liberal that no change in
+them was needed at the time of the Revolution, so that Connecticut was
+governed under its old charter until 1818, and Rhode Island until 1842.
+[Sidenote: Effects of the Revolution of 1689]
+
+There was at this time a disposition on the part of the British
+government to unite all the northern colonies under a single
+administration. The French in Canada were fast becoming rivals to be
+feared; and the wonderful explorations of La Salle, bringing the St.
+Lawrence into political connection with the Mississippi, had at length
+foreshadowed a New France in the rear of all the English colonies,
+aiming at the control of the centre of the continent and eager to
+confine the English to the sea-board. Already the relations of position
+which led to the great Seven Years' War were beginning to shape
+themselves; and the conflict between France and England actually broke
+out in 1689, as soon as Louis XIV.'s hired servant, James II., was
+superseded by William III. as king of England and head of a Protestant
+league. [Sidenote: Need for union among all the northern colonies]
+
+In view of this new state of affairs, it was thought desirable to unite
+the northern English colonies under one head, so far as possible, in
+order to secure unity of military action. But natural prejudices had to
+be considered. The policy of James II. had aroused such bitter feeling
+in America that William must needs move with caution. Accordingly he did
+not seek to unite New York with New England, and he did not think it
+worth while to carry out the attack which James had only begun upon
+Connecticut and Rhode Island. As for New Hampshire, he seems to have
+been restrained by what in the language of modern politics would be
+called "pressure," brought to bear by certain local interests. [39]
+But in the case of the little colony founded by the Pilgrims of the
+Mayflower there was no obstacle. She was now annexed to Massachusetts,
+which also received not only Maine but even Acadia, just won from the
+French; so that, save for the short break at Portsmouth, the coast of
+Massachusetts now reached all the way from Martha's Vineyard to the Gulf
+of St. Lawrence. [Sidenote: Plymouth, Maine, and Acadia, annexed to
+Massachusetts]
+
+But along with this great territorial extension there went some
+curtailment of the political privileges of the colony. By the new
+charter of 1692 the right of the people to be governed by a legislature
+of their own choosing was expressly confirmed. The exclusive right of
+this legislature to impose taxes was also confirmed. But henceforth no
+qualification of church-membership, but only a property qualification,
+was to be required of voters; the governor was to be appointed by the
+crown instead of being elected by the people; and all laws passed by
+the legislature were to be sent to England for royal approval. These
+features of the new charter,--the extension, or if I may so call it, the
+_secularization_ of the franchise, the appointment of the governor
+by the crown, and the power of veto which the crown expressly
+reserved,--were grave restrictions upon the independence which
+Massachusetts had hitherto enjoyed. Henceforth her position was to be
+like that of the other colonies with royal governors. But her history
+did not thereby lose its interest or significance, though it became,
+like the history of most of the colonies, a dismal record of
+irrepressible bickerings between the governor appointed by the crown and
+the legislature elected by the people. In the period that began in 1692
+and ended in 1776, the movements of Massachusetts, while restricted
+and hampered, were at the same time forced into a wider orbit. She was
+brought into political sympathy with Virginia. While two generations
+of men were passing across the scene, the political problems of
+Massachusetts were assimilated to those of Virginia. In spite of all
+the other differences, great as they were, there was a likeness in the
+struggles between the popular legislature and the royal governor which
+subordinated them all. It was this similarity of experience, during
+the eighteenth century, that brought these two foremost colonies into
+cordial alliance during the struggle against George III., and thus made
+it possible to cement all the colonies together in the mighty nation
+whose very name is fraught with so high and earnest a lesson to
+mankind,--the UNITED STATES! [Sidenote: Massachusetts becomes a royal
+province]
+
+For such a far-reaching result, the temporary humiliation of
+Massachusetts was a small price to pay. But it was not until long after
+the accession of William III. that things could be seen in these grand
+outlines. With his coronation began the struggle of seventy years
+between France and England, far grander than the struggle between Rome
+and Carthage, two thousand years earlier, for primacy in the world,
+for the prerogative of determining the future career of mankind. That
+warfare, so fraught with meaning, was waged as much upon American as
+upon European ground; and while it continued, it was plainly for the
+interest of the British government to pursue a conciliatory policy
+toward its American colonies, for without their wholehearted assistance
+it could have no hope of success. As soon as the struggle was ended, and
+the French power in the colonial world finally overthrown, the perpetual
+quarrels between the popular legislatures and the royal governors led
+immediately to the Stamp Act and the other measures of the British
+government that brought about the American revolution. People sometimes
+argue about that revolution as if it had no past behind it and was
+simply the result of a discussion over abstract principles. [Sidenote:
+Seeds of the American Revolution already sown]
+
+We can now see that while the dispute involved an abstract principle of
+fundamental importance to mankind, it was at the same time for Americans
+illustrated by memories sufficiently concrete and real. James Otis
+in his prime was no further distant from the tyranny of Andros than
+middle-aged men of to-day are distant from the Missouri Compromise. The
+sons of men cast into jail along with John Wise may have stood silent in
+the moonlight on Griffin's Wharf and looked on while the contents of the
+tea-chests were hurled into Boston harbour. In the events we have here
+passed in review, it may be seen, so plainly that he who runs may read,
+how the spirit of 1776 was foreshadowed in 1689.
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.
+
+
+An interesting account of the Barons' War and the meeting of the first
+House of Commons is given in Prothero's _Simon de Montfort_, London,
+1877. For Wyclif and the Lollards, see Milman's _Latin Christianity_,
+vol. vii.
+
+The ecclesiastical history of the Tudor period may best be studied in
+the works of John Strype, to wit, _Historical Memorials_, 6 vols.;
+_Annals of the Reformation_, 7 vols.; _Lives of Cranmer, Parker,
+Whitgift, etc._, Oxford, 1812-28. See also _Burnet's History of the
+Reformation of the Church of England_, 3 vols., London, 1679-1715;
+Neal's _History of the Puritans_, London, 1793; Tulloch, _Leaders of the
+Reformation_, Boston, 1859. A vast mass of interesting information is
+to be found in _The Zurich Letters, comprising the Correspondence
+of Several English Bishops, and Others, with some of the Helvetian
+Reformers_, published by the Parker Society, 4 vols., Cambridge, Eng.,
+1845-46. Hooker's _Ecclesiastical Polity_ was published in London, 1594;
+a new edition, containing two additional books, the first complete
+edition, was published in 1622.
+
+For the general history of England in the seventeenth century, there are
+two modern works which stand far above all others,--Gardiner's _History
+of England_, 10 vols., London, 1883-84; and Masson's _Life of Milton,
+narrated in connection with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary
+History of his Time_, 6 vols., Cambridge, Eng., 1859-80. These are
+books of truly colossal erudition, and written in a spirit of judicial
+fairness. Mr. Gardiner's ten volumes cover the forty years from the
+accession of James I. to the beginning of the Civil War, 1603-1643. Mr.
+Gardiner has lately published the first two volumes of his history of
+the Civil War, and it is to be hoped that he will not stop until he
+reaches the accession of William and Mary. Indeed, such books as his
+ought never to stop. My friend and colleague, Prof. Hosmer, tells me
+that Mr. Gardiner is a lineal descendant of Cromwell and Ireton. His
+little book, _The Puritan Revolution_, in the "Epochs of History"
+series, is extremely useful, and along with it one should read Airy's
+_The English Restoration and Louis XIV_., in the same series, New York,
+1889. The best biography of Cromwell is by Mr. Allanson Picton, London,
+1882; see also Frederic Harrison's _Cromwell_, London, 1888, an
+excellent little book. Hosmer's _Young Sir Henry Vane_, Boston, 1888,
+should be read in the same connection; and one should not forget
+Carlyle's _Cromwell_. See also Tulloch, _English Puritanism and its
+Leaders_, 1861, and _Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in
+England in the Seventeenth Century_, 1872; Skeats, _History of the
+Free Churches of England_, London, 1868; Mountfield, _The Church and
+Puritans_, London, 1881. Dexter's _Congregationalism of the Last Three
+Hundred Years_, New York, 1880, is a work of monumental importance.
+
+On the history of New England the best general works are Palfrey,
+_History of New England_, 4 vols., Boston, 1858-75; and Doyle, _The
+English in America--The Puritan Colonies_, 2 vols., London, 1887. In
+point of scholarship Dr. Palfrey's work is of the highest order, and
+it is written in an interesting style. Its only shortcoming is that it
+deals somewhat too leniently with the faults of the Puritan theocracy,
+and looks at things too exclusively from a Massachusetts point of view.
+It is one of the best histories yet written in America. Mr. Doyle's work
+is admirably fair and impartial, and is based throughout upon a careful
+study of original documents. The author is a Fellow of All Souls
+College, Oxford, and has apparently made American history his specialty.
+His work on the Puritan colonies is one of a series which when completed
+will cover the whole story of English colonization in America. I have
+looked in vain in his pages for any remark or allusion indicating that
+he has ever visited America, and am therefore inclined to think that he
+has not done so. He now and then makes a slight error such as would
+not be likely to be made by a native of New England, but this is very
+seldom. The accuracy and thoroughness of its research, its judicial
+temper, and its philosophical spirit make Mr. Doyle's book in some
+respects the best that has been written about New England.
+
+Among original authorities we may begin by citing John Smith's
+_Description of New England_, 1616, and _New England's Trial_, 1622,
+contained in Arber's new edition of Smith's works, London, 1884.
+Bradford's narrative of the founding of Plymouth was for a long time
+supposed to be lost. Nathaniel Morton's _New England's Memorial_,
+published in 1669, was little more than an abridgment of it. After two
+centuries Bradford's manuscript was discovered, and an excellent edition
+by Mr. Charles Deane was published in the _Massachusetts Historical
+Collections_, 4th series, vol. iii., 1856. Edward Winslow's _Journal of
+the Proceedings of the English Plantation settled at Plymouth_, 1622,
+and _Good News from New England_, 1624, are contained, with other
+valuable materials, in Young's _Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers_,
+Boston, 1844. See also Shurtleff and Pulsifer, _Records of Plymouth_,
+12 vols., ending with the annexation of the colony to Massachusetts in
+1692; Prince's _Chronological History of New England_, ed. Drake, 1852;
+and in this connection Hunter's _Founders of New Plymouth_, London,
+1854; Steele's _Life of Brewster_, Philadelphia, 1857; Goodwin's
+_Pilgrim Republic_, Boston, 1887; Bacon's _Genesis of the New England
+Churches_, New York, 1874; Baylies's _Historical Memoir_, 1830;
+Thacher's _History of the Town of Plymouth_, 1832.
+
+Sir Ferdinando Gorges wrote a _Briefe Narration of the Originall
+Undertakings of the advancement of plantations into the parts of
+America, especially showing the beginning, progress, and continuance
+of that of New England_, London, 1658, contained in his grandson's
+collection entitled _America Painted to the Life_. Thomas Morton, of
+Merrymount, gave his own view of the situation in his _New English
+Canaan_, which has been edited for the Prince Society, with great
+learning, by C.F. Adams. Samuel Maverick also had his say in a valuable
+pamphlet entitled _A Description of New England_, which has only come
+to light since 1875 and has been edited by Mr. Deane. Maverick is, of
+course, hostile to the Puritans. See also Lechford's _Plain Dealing in
+New England_, ed. J.H. Trumbull, 1867.
+
+The earliest history of Massachusetts is by Winthrop himself, a work of
+priceless value. In 1790, nearly a century and a half after the author's
+death, it was published at Hartford. The best edition is that of 1853.
+In 1869 a valuable life of Winthrop was published by his descendant
+Robert Winthrop. Hubbard's _History of New England_ (_Mass. Hist.
+Coll._, 2d series, vols. v., vi.) is drawn largely from Winthrop and
+from Nathaniel Morton. There is much that is suggestive in William
+Wood's _New England's Prospect_, 1634, and Edward Johnson's
+_Wonder-working Providence of Zion's Saviour in New England_, 1654; the
+latter has been ably edited by W.F. Poole, Andover, 1867. The records
+of the Massachusetts government, from its founding in 1629 down to the
+overthrow of the charter in 1684, were edited by Dr. Shurtleff in 6
+vols. quarto, 1853-54; and among the documents in the British Record
+Office, published since 1855, three volumes--_Calendar of State Papers_,
+_Colonial America_, vol. i., 1574-1660; vol. v., 1661-1668; vol. vii.,
+1669--are especially useful. Of the later authorities the best is
+Hutchinson's _History of Massachusetts Bay_, the first volume of which,
+coming down to 1689, was published in Boston in 1764. The second volume,
+continuing the narrative to 1749, was published in 1767. The third
+volume, coming down to 1774, was found among the illustrious author's
+MSS. after his death, and was published in London in 1828. Hutchinson
+had access to many valuable documents since lost, and his sound judgment
+and critical acumen deserve the highest praise. In 1769 he published
+a volume of _Original Papers_, illustrating the period covered by the
+first volume of his history. Many priceless documents perished in the
+shameful sacking of his house by the Boston rioters, Aug. 26, 1765. The
+second volume of Hutchinson's _History_ was continued to 1764 by G.R.
+Minot, 2 vols., 1798, and to 1820 by Alden Bradford, 3 vols., 1822-29.
+Of recent works, the best is Barry's _History of Massachusetts_, 3
+vols., 1855-57. Many original authorities are collected in Young's
+_Chronicles of Massachusetts_, Boston, 1846. Cotton Mather's _Magnolia
+Christi Americana_, London, 1702 (reprinted in 1820 and 1853), though
+crude and uncritical, is full of interest.
+
+Many of the early Massachusetts documents relate to Maine. Of later
+books, especial mention should be made of Folsom's _History of Saco and
+Biddeford_, Saco, 1830; Willis's _History of Portland_, 2 vols., 1831-33
+(2d ed. 1865); _Memorial Volume of the Popham Celebration_, Portland,
+1862; Chamberlain's _Maine, Her Place in History_, Augusta, 1877. On New
+Hampshire the best general work is Belknap's _History of New Hampshire_,
+3 vols., Phila., 1784-92; the appendix contains many original
+documents, and others are to be found in the _New Hampshire Historical
+Collections_, 8 vols., 1824-66.
+
+The _Connecticut Colonial Records_ are edited by Dr. J.H. Trumbull,
+12 vols., 1850-82. The _Connecticut Historical Society's Collections_,
+1860-70, are of much value. The best general work is Trumbull's _History
+of Connecticut_, 2 vols., Hartford, 1797. See also Stiles's _Ancient
+Windsor_, 2 vols., 1859-63; Cothren's _Ancient Woodbury_, 3 vols.,
+1854-79. Of the Pequot War we have accounts by three of the principal
+actors. Mason's _History of the Pequod War_ is in the _Mass. Hist.
+Coll._, 2d series, vol. viii.; Underhill's _News from America_ is in the
+3d series, vol. vi.; and Lyon Gardiner's narrative is in the 3d series,
+vol. iii. In the same volume with Underhill is contained _A True
+Relation of the late Battle fought in New England between the English
+and the Pequod Savages_, by Philip Vincent, London, 1638. The _New Haven
+Colony Records_ are edited by C.J. Hoadly, 2 vols., Hartford, 1857-58.
+See also the _New Haven Historical Society's Papers_, 3 vols., 1865-80;
+Lambert's _History of New Haven_, 1838; Atwater's _History of New
+Haven_, 1881; Levermore's _Republic of New Haven_, Baltimore, 1886;
+Johnston's _Connecticut_, Boston, 1887. The best account of the Blue
+Laws is by J.H. Trumbull, _The True Blue Laws of Connecticut and New
+Haven, and the False Blue Laws invented by the Rev. Samuel Peters_,
+etc., Hartford, 1876. See also Hinman's _Blue Laws of New Haven Colony_,
+Hartford, 1838; Barber's _History and Antiquities of New Haven_, 1831;
+Peters's _History of Connecticut_, London, 1781. The story of the
+regicides is set forth in Stiles's _History of the Three Judges_ [the
+third being Colonel Dixwell], Hartford, 1794; see also the _Mather
+Papers_ in _Mass. Hist. Coll._, 4th series, vol. viii.
+
+_The Rhode Island Colonial Records_ are edited by J.R. Bartlett, 7
+vols., 1856-62. One of the best state histories ever written is that
+of S.G. Arnold, _History of the State of Rhode Island and Providence
+Plantations_, 2 vols., New York, 1859-60. Many valuable documents are
+reprinted in the _Rhode Island Historical Society's Collections_. The
+_History of New England, with particular reference to the denomination
+called Baptists_, by Rev. Isaac Backus, 3 vols., 1777-96, has much
+that is valuable relating to Rhode Island. The series of _Rhode Island
+Historical Tracts_, issued since 1878 by Mr. S.S. Rider, is of great
+merit. Biographies of Roger Williams have been written by J.D. Knowles,
+1834; by William Gammell, 1845; and by Romeo Elton, 1852. Williams's
+works have been republished by the Narragansett Club in 6 vols., 1866.
+The first volume contains the valuable _Key to the Indian Languages of
+America_, edited by Dr. Trumbull. Williams's views of religious liberty
+are set forth in his _Bloudy Tenent of Persecution_, London, 1644; to
+which John Cotton replied in _The Bloudy Tenent washed and made White in
+the Blood of the Lamb_, London, 1647; Williams's rejoinder was entitled
+_The Bloudy Tenent made yet more Bloudy through Mr. Cotton's attempt
+to Wash it White_, London, 1652. The controversy was conducted on both
+sides with a candour and courtesy rare in that age. The titles of
+Williams's other principal works, _George Fox digged out of his
+Burrowes_, Boston, 1676; _Hireling Ministry none of Christ's_, London,
+1652; and _Christenings make not Christians_, 1643; sufficiently
+indicate their character. The last-named tract was discovered in the
+British Museum by Dr. Dexter and edited by him in Rider's _Tracts_,
+No. xiv., 1881. The treatment of Roger Williams by the government
+of Massachusetts is thoroughly discussed in Dexter's _As to Roger
+Williams_, Boston, 1876. See also G.E. Ellis on "The Treatment of
+Intruders and Dissentients by the Founders of Massachusetts," in _Lowell
+Lectures_, Boston, 1869.
+
+The case of Mrs. Hutchinson is treated, from a hostile and somewhat
+truculent point of view, in Thomas Welde's pamphlet entitled _A Short
+Story of the Rise, Reign, and Ruin of Antinomians, Familists, and
+Libertines that infected the Churches of New England_, London, 1644. It
+was answered in an anonymous pamphlet entitled _Mercurius Americanus_,
+republished for the Prince Society, Boston, 1876, with prefatory notice
+by C.H. Bell. Cotton's view of the theocracy may be seen in his _Milk
+for Babes, drawn out of the Breasts of both Testaments_, London, 1646;
+_Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven_; and _Way of the Congregational
+Churches Cleared_, London, 1648. See also Thomas Hooker's _Survey of the
+Summe of Church Discipline_, London, 1648. The intolerant spirit of the
+time finds quaint and forcible expression in Nathaniel Ward's satirical
+book, _The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam_, 1647.
+
+For the Gorton controversy the best original authorities are his own
+book entitled _Simplicitie's Defence against Sevenheaded Polity_,
+London, 1646; and Winslow's answer entitled _Hypocracie Unmasked_,
+London, 1646. See also Mackie's _Life of Samuel Gorton_, Boston, 1845,
+and Brayton's _Defence of Samuel Gorton_, in Rider's _Tracts_, No. xvii.
+
+For the early history of the Quakers, see Robert Barclay's _Inner Life
+of the Religious Societies of the Commonwealth_, London, 1876,--an
+admirable book. See also _New England a Degenerate Plant_, 1659;
+Bishop's _New England judged by the Spirit of the Lord_, 1661; Sewel's
+_History of the Quakers_, 1722; Besse's _Sufferings of the Quakers_,
+1753; _The Popish Inquisition newly erected in New England_, London,
+1659; _The Secret Works of a Cruel People made Manifest_, 1659; and the
+pamphlet of the martyrs Stevenson and Robinson, entitled _A Call from
+Death to Life_, 1660. John Norton's view of the case was presented in
+his book, _The Heart of New England Rent at the Blasphemies of the
+Present Generation_, London, 1660. See also J.S. Pike's _New Puritan_,
+New York, 1879; Hallowell's _Pioneer Quakers_, Boston, 1887; and his
+_Quaker Invasion of Massachusetts_, Boston, 1883; Brooks Adams, _The
+Emancipation of Massachusetts_, Boston, 1887; Ellis, _The Puritan Age
+and Rule_, Boston, 1888.
+
+Some additional light upon the theocratic idea may be found in a
+treatise by the apostle Eliot, _The Christian Commonwealth; or, the
+Civil Polity of the Rising Kingdom of Jesus Christ_, London, 1659. An
+account of Eliot's missionary work is given in _The Day breaking, if not
+the Sun rising, of the Gospel with the Indians in New England_, London,
+1647; and _The Glorious Progress of the Gospel amongst the Indians in
+New England_, 1649. See also Shepard's _Clear Sunshine of the Gospel
+breaking forth upon the Indians_, 1648; and Whitfield's _Light appearing
+more and more towards the Perfect Day_, 1651.
+
+The principal authority for Philip's war is Hubbard's _Present State of
+New England, being a Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians_, 1677.
+Church's _Entertaining Passages relating to Philip's War_, published in
+1716, and republished in 1865, with notes by Mr. Dexter, is a charming
+book. See also Mrs. Rowlandson's _True History_, Cambridge, Mass.,
+1682; Mather's _Brief History of the War_, 1676; Drake's _Old Indian
+Chronicle_, Boston, 1836; Gookin's _Historical Collections of the
+Indians in New England_, 1674; and _Account of the Doings and Sufferings
+of the Christian Indians_, in _Archchaeologia Americana_, vol. ii.
+Batten's _Journal_ is the diary of a citizen of Boston, sent to England,
+and it now in MS. among the _Colonial Papers_. Mrs. Mary Pray's letter
+(Oct. 20, 1675) is in _Mass. Hist. Coll._, 5th series, vol. i. p. 105.
+
+The great storehouse of information for the Andros period is the _Andros
+Tracts_, 3 vols., edited for the Prince Society by W.H. Whitmore. See
+also Sewall's _Diary, Mass. Hist. Coll._, 5th series, vols. v.--viii.
+Sewall has been appropriately called the Puritan Pepys. His book is a
+mirror of the state of society in Massachusetts at the time when it was
+beginning to be felt that the old theocratic idea had been tried in the
+balance and found wanting. There is a wonderful charm in such a book. It
+makes one feel as if one had really "been there" and taken part in the
+homely scenes, full of human interest, which it so naively portrays.
+Anne Bradstreet's works have been edited by J.H. Ellis, Charlestown,
+1867.
+
+For further references and elaborate bibliographical discussions, see
+Winsor's _Narrative and Critical History of America_, vol. iii.; and his
+_Memorial History of Boston_, 4 vols., Boston, 1880. There is a good
+account of the principal New England writers of the seventeenth century,
+with illustrative extracts, in Tyler's _History of American Literature_,
+2 vols., New York, 1878. For extracts see also the first two volumes of
+Stedman and Hutchinson's _Library of American Literature_, New York,
+1888.
+
+In conclusion I would observe that town histories, though seldom written
+in a philosophical spirit and apt to be quite amorphous in structure,
+are a mine of wealth for the philosophic student of history.
+
+
+
+
+NOTES:
+
+
+[1] Milman, _Lat. Christ._ vii. 395.
+
+[2] Gardiner, _The Puritan Revolution_, p. 12.
+
+[3] Green, _History of the English People_, iii. 47.
+
+[4] Steele's _Life of Brewster,_ p. 161.
+
+[5] Gardiner, _Puritan Revolution_, p. 50.
+
+[6] It is now 204 years since a battle has been fought in England. The
+last was Sedgmoor in 1685. For four centuries, since Bosworth, in 1485,
+the English people have lived in peace in their own homes, except for
+the brief episode of the Great Rebellion, and Monmouth's slight affair.
+This long peace, unparalleled in history, has powerfully influenced the
+English and American character for good. Since the Middle Ages most
+English warfare has been warfare at a distance, and that does not
+nourish the brutal passions in the way that warfare at home does.
+An instructive result is to be seen in the mildness of temper which
+characterized the conduct of our stupendous Civil War. Nothing like it
+was ever seen before.
+
+[7] Picton's _Cromwell_, pp. 61, 67; Gardiner, _Puritan Revolution_, p.
+72.
+
+[8] Quincy, History of Harvard University, ii. 654.
+
+[9] C.F. Adams, _Sir Christopher Gardiner, Knight_, p. 31.
+
+[10] The compact drawn up in the Mayflower's cabin was not, in the
+strict sense a constitution, which is a document defining and limiting
+the functions of government. Magna Charta partook of the nature of
+a written constitution, as far as it went, but it did not create a
+government.
+
+[11] See Johnston's Connecticut, p. 321, a very brilliant book.
+
+[12] See the passionate exclamation of Endicott, below, p. 190.
+
+[13] Excursions of an Evolutionist: pp. 250, 255.
+
+[14] A glimmer of light upon Gorton may be got from reading the
+title-page of one of his books: "AN INCORRUPTIBLE KEY, composed of the
+CX PSALME, wherewith you may open the Rest of the Holy Scriptures;
+Turning itself only according to the Composure and Art of that Lock, of
+the Closure and Secresie of that great Mystery of God manifest in the
+Flesh, but justified only by the Spirit, which it evidently openeth
+and revealeth, out of Fall and Resurrection, Sin and Righteousness,
+Ascension and Descension, Height and Depth, First and Last, Beginning
+and Ending, Flesh and Spirit, Wisdome and Foolishnesse, Strength
+and Weakness, Mortality and Immortality, Jew and Gentile, Light and
+Darknesse, Unity and Multiplication, Fruitfulness and Barrenness, Curse
+and Blessing, Man and Woman, Kingdom and Priesthood, Heaven and Earth,
+Allsufficiency and Deficiency, God and Man. And out of every Unity made
+up of twaine, it openeth that great two-leafed Gate, which is the sole
+Entrie into the City of God, of New Jerusalem, _into which none but the
+King of glory can enter_; and as that Porter openeth the Doore of the
+Sheepfold, _by which whosoever entreth is the Shepheard of the Sheep_;
+See Isa. 45. 1. Psal. 24. 7, 8, 9, 10. John 10. 1, 2, 3; Or, (according
+to the Signification of the Word translated _Psalme_,) it is a
+Pruning-Knife, to lop off from the Church of Christ all superfluous
+Twigs _of earthly and carnal Commandments_, Leviticall Services or
+Ministery, and fading and vanishing Priests, or Ministers, who are taken
+away and cease, and are not established and confirmed by Death, as
+holding no Correspondency with the princely Dignity, Office, and
+Ministry of our _Melchisedek_, who is the only Minister and Ministry of
+the Sanctuary, and of that true Tabernacle which the Lord pitcht, and
+not Man. For it supplants the Old Man, and implants the New; abrogates
+the Old Testament or Covenant, and confirms the New, unto a thousand
+Generations, or in Generations forever. By Samuel Gorton, _Gent._,
+and at the time of penning hereof, in the Place of Judicature (upon
+Aquethneck, alias Road Island) of Providence Plantations in the
+Nanhyganset Bay, New England. Printed in the Yeere 1647."
+
+[15] Father of Benedict Arnold, afterward governor of Rhode Island, and
+owner of the stone windmill (apparently copied from one in Chesterton,
+Warwickshire) which was formerly supposed by some antiquarians to be a
+vestige of the Northmen. Governor Benedict Arnold was great-grandfather
+of the traitor.
+
+[16] _Gorton, Simplicitie's Defence against Seven-headed Policy_, p. 88.
+
+[17] De Forest, _History of the Indians of Connecticut_, Hartford, 1850,
+p. 198.
+
+[18] Doyle, _Puritan Colonies_, i. 324.
+
+[19] See below, p. 222, note.
+
+[20] See my _Excursions of an Evolutionist,_ pp. 239-242, 250-255,
+286-289.
+
+[21] Gorton's life at Warwick, after all these troubles, seems to have
+been quiet and happy. He died in 1677 at a great age. In 1771 Dr. Ezra
+Stiles visited, in Providence, his last surviving disciple, born in
+1691. This old man said that Gorton wrote in heaven, and none can
+understand his books except those who live in heaven while on earth.
+
+[22] Doyle, _Puritan Colonies_,: i. 369.
+
+[23] Doyle, i.: 372.
+
+[24] Milman, _Latin Christianity_, vii. 390.
+
+[25] Doyle, ii. 133, 134; Rhode Island Records, i. 377, 378.
+
+[26] Colonial Laws of Massachusetts, pp. 14-16; Levermore's Republic of
+New Haven, p. 153.
+
+[27] See my remarks above, p. 145.
+
+[28] The daring passage in the sermon is thus given in Bacon's
+_Historical Discourses_, New Haven, 1838: "Withhold not countenance,
+entertainment, and protection from the people of God--whom men may call
+fools and fanatics--if any such come to you from other countries,
+as from France or England, or any other place. Be not forgetful to
+entertain strangers. Remember those that are in bonds, as bound with
+them. The Lord required this of Moab, saying, 'Make thy shadow as the
+night in the midst of the noonday; hide the outcasts; bewray not him
+that wandereth. Let mine outcasts dwell with thee, Moab; be thou a
+covert to them from the face of the spoiler.' Is it objected--'But so I
+may expose myself to be spoiled or troubled'? He, therefore, to remove
+this objection, addeth, 'For the extortioner is at an end, the spoiler
+ceaseth, the oppressors are consumed out of the land.' While we are
+attending to our duty in owning and harbouring Christ's witnesses, God
+will be providing for their and our safety, by destroying those that
+would destroy his people."
+
+[29] Palfrey, _History of New England,_ in. 138-140.
+
+[30] See Parkman, _Conspiracy of Pontiac_, i. 80-85.
+
+[31] De Forest, _History of the Indians of Connecticut,_ pp. 252, 257.
+
+[32] The story rests chiefly upon the statements of Hutchinson, an
+extremely careful and judicious writer, and not in the least what
+the French call a _gobemouche_. Goffe kept a diary which came into
+Hutchinson's possession, and was one of the priceless manuscripts that
+perished in the infamous sacking of his house by the Boston mob of
+August 26, 1765. What light that diary might have thrown upon the matter
+can never be known. Hutchinson was born in 1711, only thirty-six years
+after the event, so that his testimony is not so very far removed from
+that of a contemporary. Whalley seems to have died in Hadley shortly
+before 1675, and Goffe deemed it prudent to leave that neighbourhood in
+1676. His letters to Increase Mather are dated from "Ebenezer," i. e.,
+wherever in his roamings he set up his Ebenezer. One of these letters,
+dated September 8, 1676, shows that his Ebenezer was then set up in
+Hartford, where probably he died about 1679 In 1676 the arrival of
+Edward Randolph (see below, p. 256) renewed the peril of the regicide
+judge, and his sudden removal from his skilfully contrived hiding-place
+at Hadley might possibly have been due to his having exposed himself
+to recognition in the Indian fight. Possibly even the supernatural
+explanation might have been started, with a touch of Yankee humour, as
+a blind. The silence of Mather and Hubbard was no more remarkable than
+some of the other ingenious incidents which had so long served to
+conceal the existence of this sturdy and crafty man. The reasons for
+doubting the story are best stated by Mr. George Sheldon of Deerfield,
+in _Hist.-Genealogical Register_, October, 1874.
+
+[33] If Philip was half the diplomatist that he is represented in
+tradition, he never would have gone into such a war without assurance of
+Narragansett help. Canonchet was a far more powerful sachem than Philip,
+and played a more conspicuous part in the war. May we not suppose that
+Canonchet's desire to avenge his father's death was one of the principal
+incentives to the war; that Philip's attack upon Swanzey was a premature
+explosion; and that Canonchet then watched the course of events for a
+while before making up his mind whether to abandon Philip or support
+him?
+
+[34] A wretched little werewolf who some few years ago, being then a lad
+of fourteen or fifteen years, most cruelly murdered two or three
+young children, just to amuse himself with their dying agonies. The
+misdirected "humanitarianism," which in our country makes every murderer
+an object of popular sympathy, prevailed to save this creature from
+the gallows. Massachusetts has lately witnessed a similar instance of
+misplaced clemency in the case of a vile woman who had poisoned eight or
+ten persons, including some of her own children, in order to profit
+by their life insurance. Such instances help to explain the prolonged
+vitality of "Judge Lynch," and sometimes almost make one regret the days
+in old England when William Probert, after escaping in 1824 as "king's
+evidence," from the Thurtell affair, got caught and hanged within a
+twelvemonth for horse-stealing. Any one who wishes to study the results
+of allowing criminality to survive and propagate itself should read
+Dugdale's The Jukes; Hereditary Crime, New York, 1877.
+
+[35] Weeden, _Indian Money as a Factor in New England Civilization_,
+Johns Hopkins University Studies, II. viii., ix. p. 30.
+
+[36] Doyle, ii. 253.
+
+[37] Doyle, _Puritan Colonies_, ii. 254.
+
+[38] The quotation is from an unpublished letter of Rev. Robert
+Ratcliffe to the Bishop of London, cited in an able article in the
+_Boston Herald_, January 4, 1888. I have not seen the letter.
+
+[39] Doyle, _Puritan Colonies_, ii. 379, 380.
+
+
+
+
+
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+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+  <head>
+    <meta content="pg2html (binary v0.17)" name="linkgenerator" />
+    <title>
+      The Beginnings of New England, by John Fiske
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
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+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    .indent5   { margin-left: 5%;}
+    .indent10  { margin-left: 10%;}
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+                font-variant: normal; font-style: normal;
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+                border: 1px solid; padding: 0.3em;text-indent: 0em;}
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+    p.pfirst, p.noindent {text-indent: 0}
+    span.dropcap         { float: left; margin: 0 0.1em 0 0; line-height: 0.8 }
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Beginnings of New England, by John Fiske
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Beginnings of New England
+       Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty
+
+Author: John Fiske
+
+Release Date: June 28, 2004 [EBook #12767]
+Last Updated: February 14, 2019
+
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW ENGLAND ***
+
+
+
+Etext produced by Charles Franks and PG Distributed Proofreaders
+
+HTML file produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW ENGLAND
+    </h1>
+    <h3>
+      Or The Puritan Theocracy In Its Relations To Civil And Religious Liberty
+    </h3>
+    <h2>
+      By John Fiske
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      1892
+    </h3>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        "The Lord Christ intends to achieve greater matters by this little
+        handful than the world is aware of." EDWARD JOHNSON, <i>Wonder-Working
+        Providence of Zion's Saviour in New England</i> 1654
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      To
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      MY DEAR CLASSMATES,
+    </h3>
+    <h3>
+      BENJAMIN THOMPSON FROTHINGHAM,
+    </h3>
+    <h3>
+      WILLIAM AUGUSTUS WHITE,
+    </h3>
+    <h3>
+      AND
+    </h3>
+    <h3>
+      FREDERIC CROMWELL,
+    </h3>
+    <h3>
+      I DEDICATE THIS BOOK.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_PREF" id="link2H_PREF"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PREFACE.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      This book contains the substance of the lectures originally given at the
+      Washington University, St. Louis, in May, 1887, in the course of my annual
+      visit to that institution as University Professor of American History. The
+      lectures were repeated in the following month of June at Portland, Oregon,
+      and since then either the whole course, or one or more of the lectures,
+      have been given in Boston, Newton, Milton, Chelsea, New Bedford, Lowell,
+      Worcester, Springfield, and Pittsfield, Mass.; Farmington, Middletown, and
+      Stamford, Conn.; New York, Brooklyn, and Tarrytown, N.Y.; Philadelphia and
+      Ogontz, Pa.; Wilmington, Del.; Chicago, 111.; San Francisco and Oakland,
+      Cal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this sketch of the circumstances which attended the settlement of New
+      England, I have purposely omitted many details which in a formal history
+      of that period would need to be included. It has been my aim to give the
+      outline of such a narrative as to indicate the principles at work in the
+      history of New England down to the Revolution of 1689. When I was writing
+      the lectures I had just been reading, with much interest, the work of my
+      former pupil, Mr. Brooks Adams, entitled "The Emancipation of
+      Massachusetts."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the specific conclusions set forth in that book I found myself often
+      agreeing, but it seemed to me that the general aspect of the case would be
+      considerably modified and perhaps somewhat more adequately presented by
+      enlarging the field of view. In forming historical judgments a great deal
+      depends upon our perspective. Out of the very imperfect human nature which
+      is so slowly and painfully casting off the original sin of its inheritance
+      from primeval savagery, it is scarcely possible in any age to get a result
+      which will look quite satisfactory to the men of a riper and more
+      enlightened age. Fortunately we can learn something from the stumblings of
+      our forefathers, and a good many things seem quite clear to us to-day
+      which two centuries ago were only beginning to be dimly discerned by a few
+      of the keenest and boldest spirits. The faults of the Puritan theocracy,
+      which found its most complete development in Massachusetts, are so glaring
+      that it is idle to seek to palliate them or to explain them away. But if
+      we would really understand what was going on in the Puritan world of the
+      seventeenth century, and how a better state of things has grown out of it,
+      we must endeavour to distinguish and define the elements of wholesome
+      strength in that theocracy no less than its elements of crudity and
+      weakness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first chapter, on "The Roman Idea and the English Idea," contains a
+      somewhat more developed statement of the points briefly indicated in the
+      thirteenth section (pp. 85-95) of "The Destiny of Man." As all of the
+      present book, except the first chapter, was written here under the shadow
+      of the Washington University, I take pleasure in dating it from this
+      charming and hospitable city where I have passed some of the most
+      delightful hours of my life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      St. Louis, April 15, 1889.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <b>CONTENTS</b>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_PREF"> PREFACE. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_TOC"> DETAILED CONTENTS. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW ENGLAND. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER I. &mdash; THE ROMAN IDEA AND THE ENGLISH
+      IDEA. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER II. &mdash; THE PURITAN EXODUS. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER III. &mdash; THE PLANTING OF NEW ENGLAND.
+      </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER IV. &mdash; THE NEW ENGLAND CONFEDERACY.
+      </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER V. &mdash; KING PHILIP'S WAR. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER VI. &mdash; THE TYRANNY OF ANDROS. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0010"> BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_NOTE"> NOTES: </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_TOC" id="link2H_TOC"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      DETAILED CONTENTS CONTENTS.
+    </h2>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        CHAPTER I. <br /> THE ROMAN IDEA AND THE ENGLISH IDEA. <br /> When did the
+        Roman Empire come to an end? ... 1-3 <br /> Meaning of Odovakar's work
+        ... 3 <br /> The Holy Roman Empire ... 4, 5 <br /> Gradual shifting of
+        primacy from the men who spoke Latin, and their <br /> descendants, to
+        the men who speak English ... 6-8 <br /> Political history is the history
+        of nation-making ... 8, 9 <br /> The ORIENTAL method of nation-making; <i>conquest
+        without incorporation</i> <br /> ... 9 <br /> Illustrations from eastern
+        despotisms ... 10 <br /> And from the Moors in Spain ... 11 <br /> The
+        ROMAN method of nation-making; <i>conquest with incorporation, but <br />
+        without representation</i> ... 12 <br /> Its slow development ... 13
+        <br /> Vices in the Roman system. ... 14 <br /> Its fundamental defect ...
+        15 <br /> It knew nothing of political power delegated by the people to
+        <br /> representatives ... 16 <br /> And therefore the expansion of its
+        dominion ended in a centralized <br /> Despotism ... 16 <br /> Which
+        entailed the danger that human life might come to stagnate in <br />
+        Europe, as it had done in Asia ... 17 <br /> The danger was warded off by
+        the Germanic invasions, which, however, <br /> threatened to undo the
+        work which the Empire had done in organizing <br /> European society ...
+        17 <br /> But such disintegration was prevented by the sway which the
+        Roman Church <br /> had come to exercise over the European mind ... 18
+        <br /> The wonderful thirteenth century ... 19 <br /> The ENGLISH method
+        of nation-making; <i>incorporation with representation</i> <br /> ... 20
+        <br /> Pacific tendencies of federalism ... 21 <br /> Failure of Greek
+        attempts at federation ... 22 <br /> Fallacy of the notion that republics
+        must be small ... 23 <br /> "It is not the business of a government to
+        support its people, but of <br /> the people to support their government"
+        ... 24 <br /> Teutonic March-meetings and representative assemblies ...
+        25 <br /> Peculiarity of the Teutonic conquest of Britain ... 26, 27
+        <br /> Survival and development of the Teutonic representative assembly
+        in <br /> England ... 28 <br /> Primitive Teutonic institutions less
+        modified in England than in Germany <br /> ... 29 <br /> Some effects of
+        the Norman conquest of England ... 30 <br /> The Barons' War and the
+        first House of Commons ... 31 <br /> Eternal vigilance is the price of
+        liberty ... 32 <br /> Conflict between Roman Idea and English Idea begins
+        to become clearly <br /> visible in the thirteenth century ... 33 <br />
+        Decline of mediaeval Empire and Church with the growth of modern <br />
+        nationalities ... 34 <br /> Overthrow of feudalism, and increasing power
+        of the crown ... 35 <br /> Formidable strength of the Roman Idea ... 36
+        <br /> Had it not been for the Puritans, political liberty would probably
+        have <br /> disappeared from the world ... 37 <br /> Beginnings of
+        Protestantism in the thirteenth century ... 38 <br /> The Cathari, or
+        Puritans of the Eastern Empire ... 39 <br /> The Albigenses ... 40 <br />
+        Effects of persecution; its feebleness in England ... 41 <br /> Wyclif
+        and the Lollards ... 42 <br /> Political character of Henry VIII.'s
+        revolt against Rome ... 43 <br /> The yeoman Hugh Latimer ... 44 <br />
+        The moment of Cromwell's triumph was the most critical moment in history
+        <br /> ... 45 <br /> Contrast with France; fate of the Huguenots ... 46,
+        47 <br /> Victory of the English Idea ... 48 <br /> Significance of the
+        Puritan Exodus ... 49 <br /> CHAPTER II. <br /> THE PURITAN EXODUS. <br />
+        Influence of Puritanism upon modern Europe ... 50, 51 <br /> Work of the
+        Lollards ... 52 <br /> They made the Bible the first truly popular
+        literature in England ... <br /> 53, 54 <br /> The English version of the
+        Bible ... 54, 55 <br /> Secret of Henry VIII.'s swift success in his
+        revolt against Rome ... 56 <br /> Effects of the persecution under Mary
+        ... 57 <br /> Calvin's theology in its political bearings ... 58, 59
+        <br /> Elizabeth's policy and its effects ... 60, 61 <br /> Puritan
+        sea-rovers ... 61 <br /> Geographical distribution of Puritanism in
+        England; it was strongest in <br /> the eastern counties ... 62 <br />
+        Preponderance of East Anglia in the Puritan exodus ... 63 <br /> Familiar
+        features of East Anglia to the visitor from New England ... 64 <br />
+        Puritanism was not intentionally allied with liberalism ... 65 <br />
+        Robert Brown and the Separatists ... 66 <br /> Persecution of the
+        Separatists ... 67 <br /> Recantation of Brown; it was reserved for
+        William Brewster to take the <br /> lead in the Puritan exodus ... 68
+        <br /> James Stuart, and his encounter with Andrew Melville ... 69 <br />
+        What James intended to do when he became King of England ... 70 <br />
+        His view of the political situation, as declared in the conference at
+        <br /> Hampton Court ... 71 <br /> The congregation of Separatists at
+        Scrooby ... 72 <br /> The flight to Holland, and settlement at Leyden in
+        1609 ... 73 <br /> Systematic legal toleration in Holland ... 74 <br />
+        Why the Pilgrims did not stay there; they wished to keep up their <br />
+        distinct organization and found a state ... 74 <br /> And to do this they
+        must cross the ocean, because European territory was <br /> all
+        preoccupied ... 75 <br /> The London and Plymouth companies ... 75 <br />
+        First explorations of the New England coast; Bartholomew Gosnold (1602),
+        <br /> and George Weymouth (1605) ... 76 <br /> The Popham colony (1607)
+        ... 77 <br /> Captain John Smith gives to New England its name (1614) ...
+        78 <br /> The Pilgrims at Leyden decide to make a settlement near the
+        Delaware <br /> river ... 79 <br /> How King James regarded the enterprise
+        ... 80 <br /> Voyage of the Mayflower; she goes astray and takes the
+        Pilgrims to Cape <br /> Cod bay ... 81 <br /> Founding of the Plymouth
+        colony (1620) ... 82, 83 <br /> Why the Indians did not molest the
+        settlers ... 84, 85 <br /> The chief interest of this beginning of the
+        Puritan exodus lies not so <br /> much in what it achieved as in what it
+        suggested ... 86, 87 <br /> CHAPTER III. <br /> THE PLANTING OF NEW
+        ENGLAND. <br /> Sir Ferdinando Gorges and the Council for New England ...
+        88, 89 <br /> Wessagusset and Merrymount ... 90, 91 <br /> The Dorchester
+        adventurers ... 92 <br /> John White wishes to raise a bulwark against
+        the Kingdom of Antichrist <br /> ... 93 <br /> And John Endicott
+        undertakes the work of building it ... 94 <br /> Conflicting grants sow
+        seeds of trouble; the Gorges and Mason claims ... <br /> 94, 95 <br />
+        Endicott's arrival in New England, and the founding of Salem ... 95
+        <br /> The Company of Massachusetts Bay; Francis Higginson takes a
+        powerful <br /> reinforcement to Salem ... 96 <br /> The development of
+        John White's enterprise into the Company of <br /> Massachusetts Bay
+        coincided with the first four years of the reign of <br /> Charles I ...
+        97 <br /> Extraordinary scene in the House of Commons (June 5, 1628) ...
+        98, 99 <br /> The King turns Parliament out of doors (March 2, 1629) ...
+        100 <br /> Desperate nature of the crisis ... 100, 101 <br /> The meeting
+        at Cambridge (Aug. 26, 1629), and decision to transfer the <br /> charter
+        of the Massachusetts Bay Company, and the government established <br />
+        under it, to New England ... 102 <br /> Leaders of the great migration;
+        John Winthrop ... 102 <br /> And Thomas Dudley ... 103 <br /> Founding of
+        Massachusetts; the schemes of Gorges overwhelmed ... 104 <br />
+        Beginnings of American constitutional history; the question as to <br />
+        self-government raised at Watertown ... 105 <br /> Representative system
+        established ... 106 <br /> Bicameral assembly; story of the stray pig ...
+        107 <br /> Ecclesiastical polity; the triumph of Separatism ... 108 <br />
+        Restriction of the suffrage to members of the Puritan congregational
+        <br /> churches ... 109 <br /> Founding of Harvard College ... 110 <br />
+        Threefold danger to the New England settlers in 1636:&mdash; <br /> 1.
+        From the King, who prepares to attack the charter, but is foiled by
+        <br /> dissensions at home ... 111-113 <br /> 2. From religious
+        dissensions; Roger Williams ... 114-116 <br /> Henry Vane and Anne
+        Hutchinson ... 116-119 <br /> Beginnings of New Hampshire and Rhode
+        Island ... 119-120 <br /> 3. From the Indians; the Pequot supremacy ...
+        121 <br /> First movements into the Connecticut valley, and disputes with
+        the Dutch <br /> settlers of New Amsterdam ... 122, 123 <br /> Restriction
+        of the suffrage leads to disaffection in Massachusetts; <br /> profoundly
+        interesting opinions of Winthrop and Hooker ... 123, 124 <br />
+        Connecticut pioneers and their hardships ... 125 <br /> Thomas Hooker,
+        and the founding of Connecticut ... 120 <br /> The Fundamental Orders of
+        Connecticut (Jan 14, 1639); the first written <br /> constitution that
+        created a government ... 127 <br /> Relations of Connecticut to the
+        genesis of the Federal Union ... 128 <br /> Origin of the Pequot War;
+        Sassacus tries to unite the Indian tribes in a <br /> crusade against the
+        English ... 129, 130 <br /> The schemes of Sassacus are foiled by Roger
+        Williams ... 130 <br /> The Pequots take the war path alone ... 131 <br />
+        And are exterminated ... 132-134 <br /> John Davenport, and the founding
+        of New Haven ... 135 <br /> New Haven legislation, and legend of the
+        "Blue Laws" ... 136 <br /> With the meeting of the Long Parliament, in
+        1640, the Puritan exodus <br /> comes to its end ... 137 <br /> What might
+        have been ... 138, 391 <br /> CHAPTER IV. &mdash; THE NEW ENGLAND
+        CONFEDERACY. <br /> The Puritan exodus was purely and exclusively English
+        ... 140 <br /> And the settlers were all thrifty and prosperous; chiefly
+        country <br /> squires and yeomanry of the best and sturdiest type ...
+        141, 142 <br /> In all history there has been no other instance of
+        colonization so <br /> exclusively effected by picked and chosen men ...
+        143 <br /> What, then, was the principle of selection? The migration was
+        not <br /> intended to promote what we call religious liberty ... 144,
+        145 <br /> Theocratic ideal of the Puritans ... 146 <br /> The impulse
+        which sought to realize itself in the Puritan ideal was an <br /> ethical
+        impulse ... 147 <br /> In interpreting Scripture, the Puritan appealed to
+        his Reason ... 148, <br /> 149 <br /> Value of such perpetual theological
+        discussion as was carried on in <br /> early New England ... 150, 151
+        <br /> Comparison with the history of Scotland ... 152 <br /> Bearing of
+        these considerations upon the history of the New England <br />
+        confederacy ... 153 <br /> The existence of so many colonies (Plymouth,
+        Massachusetts, Connecticut, <br /> New Haven, Rhode Island, the
+        Piscataqua towns, etc.) was due to <br /> differences of opinion on
+        questions in which men's religious ideas were <br /> involved ... 154
+        <br /> And this multiplication of colonies led to a notable and
+        significant <br /> attempt at confederation ... 155 <br /> Turbulence of
+        dissent in Rhode Island ... 156 <br /> The Earl of Warwick, and his Board
+        of Commissioners ... 157 <br /> Constitution of the Confederacy ... 158
+        <br /> It was only a league, not a federal union ... 159 <br /> Its
+        formation involved a tacit assumption of sovereignty ... 160 <br /> The
+        fall of Charles I. brought up, for a moment, the question as to the
+        <br /> supremacy of Parliament over the colonies ... 161 <br /> Some
+        interesting questions ... 162 <br /> Genesis of the persecuting spirit
+        ... 163 <br /> Samuel Gorton and his opinions ... 163-165 <br /> He flees
+        to Aquedneck and is banished thence ... 166 <br /> Providence protests
+        against him ... 167 <br /> He flees to Shawomet, where he buys land of
+        the Indians ... 168 <br /> Miantonomo and Uncas ... 169, 170 <br /> Death
+        of Miantonomo ... 171 <br /> Edward Johnson leads an expedition against
+        Shawomet ... 172 <br /> Trial and sentence of the heretics ... 173 <br />
+        Winthrop declares himself in a prophetic opinion ... 174 <br /> The
+        Presbyterian cabal ... 175-177 <br /> The Cambridge Platform; deaths of
+        Winthrop and Cotton ... 177 <br /> Views of Winthrop and Cotton as to
+        toleration in matters of Religion ... <br /> 178 <br /> After their death,
+        the leadership in Massachusetts was in the hands of <br /> Endicott and
+        Norton ... 179 <br /> The Quakers; their opinions and behavior ...
+        179-181 <br /> Violent manifestations of dissent ... 182 <br /> Anne
+        Austin and Mary Fisher; how they were received in Boston ... 183 <br />
+        The confederated colonies seek to expel the Quakers; noble attitude of
+        <br /> Rhode Island ... 184 <br /> Roger Williams appeals to his friend,
+        Oliver Cromwell ... 185 <br /> The "heavenly speech" of Sir Harry Vane
+        ... 185 <br /> Laws passed against the Quakers ... 186 <br /> How the
+        death penalty was regarded at that time in New England ... 187 <br />
+        Executions of Quakers on Boston Common ... 188, 189 <br /> Wenlock
+        Christison's defiance and victory ... 189, 190 <br /> The "King's
+        Missive" ... 191 <br /> Why Charles II. interfered to protect the Quakers
+        ... 191 <br /> His hostile feeling toward the New England governments ...
+        192 <br /> The regicide judges, Goffe and Whalley ... 193, 194 <br /> New
+        Haven annexed to Connecticut ... 194, 195 <br /> Abraham Pierson, and the
+        founding of Newark ... 196 <br /> Breaking-down of the theocratic policy
+        ... 197 <br /> Weakening of the Confederacy ... 198 <br /> CHAPTER V.
+        &mdash; KING PHILIP'S WAR. <br /> Relations between the Puritan settlers
+        and the Indians ... 199 <br /> Trade with the Indians ... 200 <br />
+        Missionary work; Thomas Mayhew ... 201 <br /> John Eliot and his
+        translation of the Bible ... 202 <br /> His preaching to the Indians ...
+        203 <br /> His villages of Christian Indians ... 204 <br /> The Puritan's
+        intention was to deal gently and honourably with the red <br /> men ...
+        205 <br /> Why Pennsylvania was so long unmolested by the Indians ...
+        205, 206 <br /> Difficulty of the situation in New England ... 207 <br />
+        It is hard for the savage and the civilized man to understand one <br />
+        another ... 208 <br /> How Eliot's designs must inevitably have been
+        misinterpreted by the <br /> Indians ... 209 <br /> It is remarkable that
+        peace should have been so long preserved ... 210 <br /> Deaths of
+        Massasoit and his son Alexander ... 211 <br /> Very little is known about
+        the nature of Philip's designs ... 212 <br /> The meeting at Taunton ...
+        213 <br /> Sausamon informs against Philip ... 213 <br /> And is murdered
+        ... 214 <br /> Massacres at Swanzey and Dartmouth ... 214 <br /> Murder of
+        Captain Hutchinson ... 215 <br /> Attack on Brookfield, which is relieved
+        by Simon Willard ... 216 <br /> Fighting in the Connecticut valley; the
+        mysterious stranger at Hadley <br /> ... 217, 218 <br /> Ambuscade at
+        Bloody Brook ... 219 <br /> Popular excitement in Boston ... 220 <br />
+        The Narragansetts prepare to take the war-path ... 221 <br /> And
+        Governor Winslow leads an army against them ... 222, 223 <br /> Storming
+        of the great swamp fortress ... 224 <br /> Slaughter of the Indians ...
+        225 <br /> Effect of the blow ... 226 <br /> Growth of the humane
+        sentiment in recent times, due to the fact that the <br /> horrors of war
+        are seldom brought home to everybody's door ... 227, 228 <br /> Warfare
+        with savages is likely to be truculent in character ... 229 <br /> Attack
+        upon Lancaster ... 230 <br /> Mrs. Rowlandson's narrative ... 231-233
+        <br /> Virtual extermination of the Indians (February to August, 1676)
+        ... 233, <br /> 234 <br /> Death of Canonchet ... 234 <br /> Philip pursued
+        by Captain Church ... 235 <br /> Death of Philip ... 236 <br /> Indians
+        sold into slavery ... 237 <br /> Conduct of the Christian Indians ... 238
+        <br /> War with the Tarratines ... 239 <br /> Frightful destruction of
+        life and property ... 240 <br /> Henceforth the red man figures no more
+        in the history of New England, <br /> except in frontier raids under
+        French guidance ... 241 <br /> CHAPTER VI. <br /> THE TYRANNY OF ANDROS.
+        <br /> Romantic features in the early history of New England ... 242
+        <br /> Captain Edward Johnson, of Woburn, and his book on "The
+        Wonder-working <br /> Providence of Zion's Saviour in New England" ...
+        243,244 <br /> Acts of the Puritans often judged by an unreal and
+        impossible standard <br /> ... 245 <br /> Spirit of the "Wonder-working
+        Providence" ... 246 <br /> Merits and faults of the Puritan theocracy ...
+        247 <br /> Restriction of the suffrage to church members ... 248 <br /> It
+        was a source of political discontent ... 249 <br /> Inquisitorial
+        administration of justice ... 250 <br /> The "Half way Covenant" ... 251
+        <br /> Founding of the Old South church ... 252 <br /> Unfriendly
+        relations between Charles II and Massachusetts ... 253 <br /> Complaints
+        against Massachusetts ... 254 <br /> The Lords of Trade ... 255 <br />
+        Arrival of Edward Randolph in Boston ... 256 <br /> Joseph Dudley and the
+        beginnings of Toryism in New England ... 257, 258 <br /> Charles II.
+        erects the four Piscataqua towns into the royal province of <br /> New
+        Hampshire ... 259 <br /> And quarrels with Massachusetts over the
+        settlement of the Gorges claim <br /> to the Maine district ... 260 <br />
+        Simon Bradstreet and his verse-making wife ... 261 <br /> Massachusetts
+        answers the king's peremptory message ... 262 <br /> Secret treaty
+        between Charles II. and Louis XIV ... 263 <br /> Shameful proceedings in
+        England ... 264 <br /> Massachusetts refuses to surrender her charter;
+        and accordingly it is <br /> annulled by decree of chancery, June 21,
+        1684 ... 265 <br /> Effect of annulling the charter ... 266 <br /> Death
+        of Charles II, accession of James II., and appointment of Sir <br />
+        Edmund Andros as viceroy over New England, with despotic powers ... 267
+        <br /> The charter oak ... 268 <br /> Episcopal services in Boston ...
+        268, 269 <br /> Founding of the King's Chapel ... 269 <br /> The tyranny
+        ... 270 <br /> John Wise of Ipswich ... 271 <br /> Fall of James II ...
+        271 <br /> Insurrection in Boston, and overthrow of Andros ... 272 <br />
+        Effects of the Revolution of 1689 ... 273 <br /> Need for union among all
+        the northern colonies ... 274 <br /> Plymouth, Maine, and Acadia annexed
+        to Massachusetts ... 275 <br /> Which becomes a royal province ... 276
+        <br /> And is thus brought into political sympathy with Virginia ... 276
+        <br /> The seeds of the American Revolution were already sown, and the
+        spirit <br /> of 1776 was foreshadowed in 1689 ... 277, 278 <br />
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW ENGLAND.
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER I. &mdash; THE ROMAN IDEA AND THE ENGLISH IDEA.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It used to be the fashion of historians, looking superficially at the
+      facts presented in chronicles and tables of dates, without analyzing and
+      comparing vast groups of facts distributed through centuries, or even
+      suspecting the need for such analysis and comparison, to assign the date
+      476 A.D. as the moment at which the Roman Empire came to an end. It was in
+      that year that the soldier of fortune, Odovakar, commander of the Herulian
+      mercenaries in Italy, sent the handsome boy Romulus, son of Orestes,
+      better known as "little Augustus," from his imperial throne to the
+      splendid villa of Lucullus near Naples, and gave him a yearly pension of
+      $35,000 [6,000 solidi] to console him for the loss of a world. As 324
+      years elapsed before another emperor was crowned at Rome, and as the
+      political headship of Europe after that happy restoration remained upon
+      the German soil to which the events of the eighth century had shifted it,
+      nothing could seem more natural than the habit which historians once had,
+      of saying that the mighty career of Rome had ended, as it had begun, with
+      a Romulus. Sometimes the date 476 was even set up as a great landmark
+      dividing modern from ancient history. For those, however, who took such a
+      view, it was impossible to see the events of the Middle Ages in their true
+      relations to what went before and what came after. It was impossible to
+      understand what went on in Italy in the sixth century, or to explain the
+      position of that great Roman power which had its centre on the Bosphorus,
+      which in the code of Justinian left us our grandest monument of Roman law,
+      and which for a thousand years was the staunch bulwark of Europe against
+      the successive aggressions of Persian, Saracen, and Turk. It was equally
+      impossible to understand the rise of the Papal power, the all-important
+      politics of the great Saxon and Swabian emperors, the relations of
+      mediaeval England to the Continental powers, or the marvellously
+      interesting growth of the modern European system of nationalities.
+      [[Sidenote: When did the Roman Empire come to an end?]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Since the middle of the nineteenth century the study of history has
+      undergone changes no less sweeping than those which have in the same time
+      affected the study of the physical sciences. Vast groups of facts
+      distributed through various ages and countries have been subjected to
+      comparison and analysis, with the result that they have not only thrown
+      fresh light upon one another, but have in many cases enabled us to recover
+      historic points of view that had long been buried in oblivion. Such an
+      instance was furnished about twenty-five years ago by Dr. Bryce's
+      epoch-making work on the Holy Roman Empire. Since then historians still
+      recognize the importance of the date 476 as that which left the Bishop of
+      Rome the dominant personage in Italy, and marked the shifting of the
+      political centre of gravity from the Palatine to the Lateran. This was one
+      of those subtle changes which escape notice until after some of their
+      effects have attracted attention. The most important effect, in this
+      instance, realized after three centuries, was not the overthrow of Roman
+      power in the West, but its indefinite extension and expansion. The men of
+      476 not only had no idea that they were entering upon a new era, but least
+      of all did they dream that the Roman Empire had come to an end, or was
+      ever likely to. Its cities might be pillaged, its provinces overrun, but
+      the supreme imperial power itself was something without which the men of
+      those days could not imagine the world as existing. It must have its
+      divinely ordained representative in one place if not in another. If the
+      throne in Italy was vacant, it was no more than had happened before; there
+      was still a throne at Constantinople, and to its occupant Zeno the Roman
+      Senate sent a message, saying that one emperor was enough for both ends of
+      the earth, and begging him to confer upon the gallant Odovakar the title
+      of patrician, and entrust the affairs of Italy to his care. So when
+      Sicambrian Chlodwig set up his Merovingian kingdom in northern Gaul, he
+      was glad to array himself in the robe of a Roman consul, and obtain from
+      the eastern emperor a formal ratification of his rule.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      [Transcriber's note: page missing in original.] still survives in
+      political methods and habits of thought that will yet be long in dying
+      out. With great political systems, as with typical forms of organic life,
+      the processes of development and of extinction are exceedingly slow, and
+      it is seldom that the stages can be sharply marked by dates. The processes
+      which have gradually shifted the seat of empire until the prominent part
+      played nineteen centuries ago by Rome and Alexandria, on opposite sides of
+      the Mediterranean, has been at length assumed by London and New York, on
+      opposite sides of the Atlantic, form a most interesting subject of study.
+      But to understand them, one must do much more than merely catalogue the
+      facts of political history; one must acquire a knowledge of the drifts and
+      tendencies of human thought and feeling and action from the earliest ages
+      to the times in which we live. In covering so wide a field we cannot of
+      course expect to obtain anything like complete results. In order to make a
+      statement simple enough to be generally intelligible, it is necessary to
+      pass over many circumstances and many considerations that might in one way
+      and another qualify what we have to say. Nevertheless it is quite possible
+      for us to discern, in their bold general outlines, some historic truths of
+      supreme importance. In contemplating the salient features of the change
+      which has now for a long time been making the world more English and less
+      Roman, we shall find not only intellectual pleasure and profit but
+      practical guidance. For in order to understand this slow but mighty
+      change, we must look a little into that process of nation-making which has
+      been going on since prehistoric ages and is going on here among us to-day,
+      and from the recorded experience of men in times long past we may gather
+      lessons of infinite value for ourselves and for our children's children.
+      As in all the achievements of mankind it is only after much weary
+      experiment and many a heart-sickening failure that success is attained, so
+      has it been especially with nation-making. Skill in the political art is
+      the fruit of ages of intellectual and moral discipline; and just as
+      picture-writing had to come before printing and canoes before steamboats,
+      so the cruder political methods had to be tried and found wanting, amid
+      the tears and groans of unnumbered generations, before methods less crude
+      could be put into operation. In the historic survey upon which we are now
+      to enter, we shall see that the Roman Empire represented a crude method of
+      nation-making which began with a masterful career of triumph over earlier
+      and cruder methods, but has now for several centuries been giving way
+      before a more potent and satisfactory method. And just as the merest
+      glance at the history of Europe shows us Germanic peoples wresting the
+      supremacy from Rome, so in this deeper study we shall discover a grand and
+      far-reaching Teutonic Idea of political life overthrowing and supplanting
+      the Roman Idea. Our attention will be drawn toward England as the
+      battle-ground and the seventeenth century as the critical moment of the
+      struggle; we shall see in Puritanism the tremendous militant force that
+      determined the issue; and when our perspective has thus become properly
+      adjusted, we shall begin to realize for the first time how truly wonderful
+      was the age that witnessed the Beginnings of New England. We have long had
+      before our minds the colossal figure of Roman Julius as "the foremost man
+      of all this world," but as the seventeenth century recedes into the past
+      the figure of English Oliver begins to loom up as perhaps even more
+      colossal. In order to see these world-events in their true perspective,
+      and to make perfectly clear the manner in which we are to estimate them,
+      we must go a long distance away from them. We must even go back, as nearly
+      as may be, to the beginning of things. [[Sidenote: Gradual shifting of
+      primacy from the men who spoke Latin, and their descendants, to the men
+      who speak English]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If we look back for a moment to the primitive stages of society, we may
+      picture to ourselves the surface of the earth sparsely and scantily
+      covered with wandering tribes of savages, rude in morals and manners,
+      narrow and monotonous in experience, sustaining life very much as lower
+      animals sustain it, by gathering wild fruits or slaying wild game, and
+      waging chronic warfare alike with powerful beasts and with rival tribes of
+      men. [[Sidenote: Political history is the history of nation-making]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the widest sense the subject of political history is the description of
+      the processes by which, under favourable circumstances, innumerable such
+      primitive tribes have become welded together into mighty nations, with
+      elevated standards of morals and manners, with wide and varied experience,
+      sustaining life and ministering to human happiness by elaborate arts and
+      sciences, and putting a curb upon warfare by limiting its scope,
+      diminishing its cruelty, and interrupting it by intervals of peace. The
+      story, as laid before us in the records of three thousand years, is
+      fascinating and absorbing in its human interest for those who content
+      themselves with the study of its countless personal incidents, and neglect
+      its profound philosophical lessons. But for those who study it in the
+      scientific spirit, the human interest of its details becomes still more
+      intensely fascinating and absorbing. Battles and coronations, poems and
+      inventions, migrations and martyrdoms, acquire new meanings and awaken new
+      emotions as we begin to discern their bearings upon the solemn work of
+      ages that is slowly winning for humanity a richer and more perfect life.
+      By such meditation upon men's thoughts and deeds is the understanding
+      purified, till we become better able to comprehend our relations to the
+      world and the duty that lies upon each of us to shape his conduct rightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the welding together of primitive shifting tribes into stable and
+      powerful nations, we can seem to discern three different methods that have
+      been followed at different times and places, with widely different
+      results. In all cases the fusion has been effected by war, but it has gone
+      on in three broadly contrasted ways. The first of these methods, which has
+      been followed from time immemorial in the Oriental world, may be roughly
+      described as <i>conquest without incorporation.</i> A tribe grows to
+      national dimensions by conquering and annexing its neighbours, without
+      admitting them to a share in its political life. Probably there is always
+      at first some incorporation, or even perhaps some crude germ of federative
+      alliance; but this goes very little way,&mdash;only far enough to fuse
+      together a few closely related tribes, agreeing in speech and habits, into
+      a single great tribe that can overwhelm its neighbours. In early society
+      this sort of incorporation cannot go far without being stopped by some
+      impassable barrier of language or religion. After reaching that point, the
+      conquering tribe simply annexes its neighbours and makes them its slaves.
+      It becomes a superior caste, ruling over vanquished peoples, whom it
+      oppresses with frightful cruelty, while living on the fruits of their toil
+      in what has been aptly termed Oriental luxury. Such has been the origin of
+      many eastern despotisms, in the valleys of the Nile and Euphrates, and
+      elsewhere. Such a political structure admits of a very considerable
+      development of material civilization, in which gorgeous palaces and
+      artistic temples may be built, and perhaps even literature and scholarship
+      rewarded, with money wrung from millions of toiling wretches. There is
+      that sort of brutal strength in it, that it may endure for many long ages,
+      until it comes into collision with some higher civilization. Then it is
+      likely to end in sudden collapse, because the fighting quality of the
+      people has been destroyed. Populations that have lived for centuries in
+      fear of impalement or crucifixion, and have known no other destination for
+      the products of their labour than the clutches of the omnipresent
+      tax-gatherer, are not likely to furnish good soldiers. A handful of
+      freemen will scatter them like sheep, as the Greeks did twenty-three
+      centuries ago at Kynaxa, as the English did the other day at Tel el-Kebir.
+      On the other hand, where the manliness of the vanquished people is not
+      crushed, the sway of the conquerors who cannot enter into political union
+      with them is likely to be cast off, as in the case of the Moors in Spain.
+      There was a civilization in many respects admirable. It was eminent for
+      industry, science, art, and poetry; its annals are full of romantic
+      interest; it was in some respects superior to the Christian system which
+      supplanted it; in many ways it contributed largely to the progress of the
+      human race; and it was free from some of the worst vices of Oriental
+      civilizations. Yet because of the fundamental defect that between the
+      Christian Spaniard and his Mussulman conqueror there could be no political
+      fusion, this brilliant civilization was doomed. During eight centuries of
+      more or less extensive rule in the Spanish peninsula, the Moor was from
+      first to last an alien, just as after four centuries the Turk is still an
+      alien in the Balkan peninsula. The natural result was a struggle that
+      lasted age after age till it ended in the utter extermination of one of
+      the parties, and left behind it a legacy of hatred and persecution that
+      has made the history of modern Spain a dismal record of shame and
+      disaster. [[Sidenote: The Oriental method of nation-making]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this first method of nation-making, then, which we may call the
+      Oriental method, one now sees but little to commend. It was better than
+      savagery, and for a long time no more efficient method was possible, but
+      the leading peoples of the world have long since outgrown it; and although
+      the resulting form of political government is the oldest we know and is
+      not yet extinct, it nevertheless has not the elements of permanence.
+      Sooner or later it will disappear, as savagery is disappearing, as the
+      rudest types of inchoate human society have disappeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The second method by which nations have been made may be called the Roman
+      method; and we may briefly describe it as <i>conquest with incorporation,
+      but without representation</i>. The secret of Rome's wonderful strength
+      lay in the fact that she incorporated the vanquished peoples into her own
+      body politic. In the early time there was a fusion of tribes going on in
+      Latium, which, if it had gone no further, would have been similar to the
+      early fusion of Ionic tribes in Attika or of Iranian tribes in Media. But
+      whereas everywhere else this political fusion soon stopped, in the Roman
+      world it went on. One after another Italian tribes and Italian towns were
+      not merely overcome but admitted to a share in the political rights and
+      privileges of the victors. By the time this had gone on until the whole
+      Italian peninsula was consolidated under the headship of Rome, the result
+      was a power incomparably greater than any other that the world had yet
+      seen. Never before had so many people been brought under one government
+      without making slaves of most of them. Liberty had existed before, whether
+      in barbaric tribes or in Greek cities. Union had existed before, in
+      Assyrian or Persian despotisms. Now liberty and union were for the first
+      time joined together, with consequences enduring and stupendous. The whole
+      Mediterranean world was brought under one government; ancient barriers of
+      religion, speech, and custom were overthrown in every direction; and
+      innumerable barbarian tribes, from the Alps to the wilds of northern
+      Britain, from the Bay of Biscay to the Carpathian mountains, were more or
+      less completely transformed into Roman citizens, protected by Roman law,
+      and sharing in the material and spiritual benefits of Roman civilization.
+      Gradually the whole vast structure became permeated by Hellenic and Jewish
+      thought, and thus were laid the lasting foundations of modern society, of
+      a common Christendom, furnished with a common stock of ideas concerning
+      man's relation to God and the world, and acknowledging a common standard
+      of right and wrong. This was a prodigious work, which raised human life to
+      a much higher plane than that which it had formerly occupied, and endless
+      gratitude is due to the thousands of steadfast men who in one way or
+      another devoted their lives to its accomplishment. [[Sidenote: The Roman
+      method of nation-making]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This Roman method of nation-making had nevertheless its fatal
+      shortcomings, and it was only very slowly, moreover, that it wrought out
+      its own best results. It was but gradually that the rights and privileges
+      of Roman citizenship were extended over the whole Roman world, and in the
+      mean time there were numerous instances where conquered provinces seemed
+      destined to no better fate than had awaited the victims of Egyptian or
+      Assyrian conquest. The rapacity and cruelty of Caius Verres could hardly
+      have been outdone by the worst of Persian satraps; but there was a
+      difference. A moral sense and political sense had been awakened which
+      could see both the wickedness and the folly of such conduct. The voice of
+      a Cicero sounded with trumpet tones against the oppressor, who was brought
+      to trial and exiled for deeds which under the Oriental system, from the
+      days of Artaxerxes to those of the Grand Turk, would scarcely have called
+      forth a reproving word. It was by slow degrees that the Roman came to
+      understand the virtues of his own method, and learned to apply it
+      consistently until the people of all parts of the empire were, in theory
+      at least, equal before the law. In theory, I say, for in point of fact
+      there was enough of viciousness in the Roman system to prevent it from
+      achieving permanent success. Historians have been fond of showing how the
+      vitality of the whole system was impaired by wholesale slave-labour, by
+      the false political economy which taxes all for the benefit of a few, by
+      the debauching view of civil office which regards it as private perquisite
+      and not as public trust, and&mdash;worst of all, perhaps&mdash;by the
+      communistic practice of feeding an idle proletariat out of the imperial
+      treasury. The names of these deadly social evils are not unfamiliar to
+      American ears. Even of the last we have heard ominous whispers in the
+      shape of bills to promote mendicancy under the specious guise of fostering
+      education or rewarding military services. And is it not a striking
+      illustration of the slowness with which mankind learns the plainest
+      rudiments of wisdom and of justice, that only in the full light of the
+      nineteenth century, and at the cost of a terrible war, should the most
+      intelligent people on earth have got rid of a system of labour devised in
+      the crudest ages of antiquity and fraught with misery to the employed,
+      degradation to the employers, and loss to everybody? [[Sidenote: Its slow
+      development]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These evils, we see, in one shape or another, have existed almost
+      everywhere; and the vice of the Roman system did not consist in the fact
+      that under it they were fully developed, but in the fact that it had no
+      adequate means of overcoming them. Unless helped by something supplied
+      from outside the Roman world, civilization must have succumbed to these
+      evils, the progress of mankind must have been stopped. What was needed was
+      the introduction of a fierce spirit of personal liberty and local
+      self-government. The essential vice of the Roman system was that it had
+      been unable to avoid weakening the spirit of personal independence and
+      crushing out local self-government among the peoples to whom it had been
+      applied. It owed its wonderful success to joining Liberty with Union, but
+      as it went on it found itself compelled gradually to sacrifice Liberty to
+      Union, strengthening the hands of the central government and enlarging its
+      functions more and more, until by and by the political life of the several
+      parts had so far died away that, under the pressure of attack from
+      without, the Union fell to pieces and the whole political system had to be
+      slowly and painfully reconstructed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now if we ask why the Roman government found itself thus obliged to
+      sacrifice personal liberty and local independence to the paramount
+      necessity of holding the empire together, the answer will point us to the
+      essential and fundamental vice of the Roman method of nation-making. It
+      lacked the principle of representation. The old Roman world knew nothing
+      of representative assemblies. [[Sidenote: It knew nothing of
+      representation]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Its senates were assemblies of notables, constituting in the main an
+      aristocracy of men who had held high office; its popular assemblies were
+      primary assemblies,&mdash;town-meetings. There was no notion of such a
+      thing as political power delegated by the people to representatives who
+      were to wield it away from home and out of sight of their constituents.
+      The Roman's only notion of delegated power was that of authority delegated
+      by the government to its generals and prefects who discharged at a
+      distance its military and civil functions. When, therefore, the Roman
+      popular government, originally adapted to a single city, had come to
+      extend itself over a large part of the world, it lacked the one
+      institution by means of which government could be carried on over so vast
+      an area without degenerating into despotism. [[Sidenote: And therefore
+      ended in despotism]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even could the device of representation have occurred to the mind of some
+      statesman trained in Roman methods, it would probably have made no
+      difference. Nobody would have known how to use it. You cannot invent an
+      institution as you would invent a plough. Such a notion as that of
+      representative government must needs start from small beginnings and grow
+      in men's minds until it should become part and parcel of their mental
+      habits. For the want of it the home government at Rome became more and
+      more unmanageable until it fell into the hands of the army, while at the
+      same time the administration of the empire became more and more
+      centralized; the people of its various provinces, even while their social
+      condition was in some respects improved, had less and less voice in the
+      management of their local affairs, and thus the spirit of personal
+      independence was gradually weakened. This centralization was greatly
+      intensified by the perpetual danger of invasion on the northern and
+      eastern frontiers, all the way from the Rhine to the Euphrates. Do what it
+      would, the government must become more and more a military despotism, must
+      revert toward the Oriental type. The period extending from the third
+      century before Christ to the third century after was a period of
+      extraordinary intellectual expansion and moral awakening; but when we
+      observe the governmental changes introduced under the emperor Diocletian
+      at the very end of this period, we realize how serious had been the
+      political retrogression, how grave the danger that the stream of human
+      life might come to stagnate in Europe, as it had long since stagnated in
+      Asia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two mighty agents, cooperating in their opposite ways to prevent any such
+      disaster, were already entering upon the scene. The first was the
+      colonization of the empire by Germanic tribes already far advanced beyond
+      savagery, already somewhat tinctured with Roman civilization, yet at the
+      same time endowed with an intense spirit of personal and local
+      independence. With this wholesome spirit they were about to refresh and
+      revivify the empire, but at the risk of undoing its work of political
+      organization and reducing it to barbarism. The second was the
+      establishment of the Roman church, an institution capable of holding
+      European society together in spite of a political disintegration that was
+      widespread and long-continued. While wave after wave of Germanic
+      colonization poured over romanized Europe, breaking down old
+      boundary-lines and working sudden and astonishing changes on the map,
+      setting up in every quarter baronies, dukedoms, and kingdoms fermenting
+      with vigorous political life; while for twenty generations this salutary
+      but wild and dangerous work was going on, there was never a moment when
+      the imperial sway of Rome was quite set aside and forgotten, there was
+      never a time when union of some sort was not maintained through the
+      dominion which the church had established over the European mind. When we
+      duly consider this great fact in its relations to what went before and
+      what came after, it is hard to find words fit to express the debt of
+      gratitude which modern civilization owes to the Roman Catholic church.
+      When we think of all the work, big with promise of the future, that went
+      on in those centuries which modern writers in their ignorance used once to
+      set apart and stigmatize as the "Dark Ages"; when we consider how the
+      seeds of what is noblest in modern life were then painfully sown upon the
+      soil which imperial Rome had prepared; when we think of the various work
+      of a Gregory, a Benedict, a Boniface, an Alfred, a Charlemagne; we feel
+      that there is a sense in which the most brilliant achievements of pagan
+      antiquity are dwarfed in comparison with these. Until quite lately,
+      indeed, the student of history has had his attention too narrowly confined
+      to the ages that have been preeminent for literature and art&mdash;the
+      so-called classical ages&mdash;and thus his sense of historical
+      perspective has been impaired. When Mr. Freeman uses Gregory of Tours as a
+      text-book, he shows that he realizes how an epoch may be none the less
+      portentous though it has not had a Tacitus to describe it, and certainly
+      no part of history is more full of human interest than the troubled period
+      in which the powerful streams of Teutonic life pouring into Roman Europe
+      were curbed in their destructiveness and guided to noble ends by the
+      Catholic church. Out of the interaction between these two mighty agents
+      has come the political system of the modern world. The moment when this
+      interaction might have seemed on the point of reaching a complete and
+      harmonious result was the glorious thirteenth century, the culminating
+      moment of the Holy Roman Empire. Then, as in the times of Caesar or
+      Trajan, there might have seemed to be a union among civilized men, in
+      which the separate life of individuals and localities was not submerged.
+      In that golden age alike of feudal system, of empire, and of church, there
+      were to be seen the greatest monarchs, in fullest sympathy with their
+      peoples, that Christendom has known,&mdash;an Edward I., a St. Louis, a
+      Frederick II. Then when in the pontificates of Innocent III. and his
+      successors the Roman church reached its apogee, the religious yearnings of
+      men sought expression in the sublimest architecture the world has seen.
+      Then Aquinas summed up in his profound speculations the substance of
+      Catholic theology, and while the morning twilight of modern science might
+      be discerned in the treatises of Roger Bacon, while wandering minstrelsy
+      revealed the treasures of modern speech, soon to be wrought under the
+      hands of Dante and Chaucer into forms of exquisite beauty, the sacred
+      fervour of the apostolic ages found itself renewed in the tender and
+      mystic piety of St. Francis of Assisi. It was a wonderful time, but after
+      all less memorable as the culmination of mediaeval empire and mediaeval
+      church than as the dawning of the new era in which we live to-day, and in
+      which the development of human society proceeds in accordance with more
+      potent methods than those devised by the genius of pagan or Christian
+      Rome. [[Sidenote: The German invaders and the Roman church] [[Sidenote:
+      The wonderful thirteenth century]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the origin of these more potent methods we must look back to the early
+      ages of the Teutonic people; for their development and application on a
+      grand scale we must look chiefly to the history of that most Teutonic of
+      peoples in its institutions, though perhaps not more than half-Teutonic in
+      blood, the English, with their descendants in the New World. The third
+      method of nation-making may be called the Teutonic or preeminently the
+      English method. It differs from the Oriental and Roman methods which we
+      have been considering in a feature of most profound significance; it
+      contains the principle of representation. For this reason, though like all
+      nation-making it was in its early stages attended with war and conquest,
+      it nevertheless does not necessarily require war and conquest in order to
+      be put into operation. Of the other two methods war was an essential part.
+      In the typical Oriental nation, such as Assyria or Persia, we see a
+      conquering tribe holding down a number of vanquished peoples, and treating
+      them like slaves: here the nation is very imperfectly made, and its
+      government is subject to sudden and violent changes. In the Roman empire
+      we see a conquering people hold sway over a number of vanquished peoples,
+      but instead of treating them like slaves, it gradually makes them its
+      equals before the law; here the resulting political body is much more
+      nearly a nation, and its government is much more stable. A Lydian of the
+      fifth century before Christ felt no sense of allegiance to the Persian
+      master who simply robbed and abused him; but the Gaul of the fifth century
+      after Christ was proud of the name of Roman and ready to fight for the
+      empire of which he was a citizen. We have seen, nevertheless, that for
+      want of representation the Roman method failed when applied to an immense
+      territory, and the government tended to become more and more despotic, to
+      revert toward the Oriental type. Now of the English or Teutonic method, I
+      say, war is not an essential part; for where representative government is
+      once established, it is possible for a great nation to be formed by the
+      peaceful coalescence of neighbouring states, or by their union into a
+      federal body. An instance of the former was the coalescence of England and
+      Scotland effected early in the eighteenth century after ages of mutual
+      hostility; for instances of the latter we have Switzerland and the United
+      States. Now federalism, though its rise and establishment may be
+      incidentally accompanied by warfare, is nevertheless in spirit pacific.
+      Conquest in the Oriental sense is quite incompatible with it; conquest in
+      the Roman sense is hardly less so. At the close of our Civil War there
+      were now and then zealous people to be found who thought that the southern
+      states ought to be treated as conquered territory, governed by prefects
+      sent from Washington, and held down by military force for a generation or
+      so. Let us hope that there are few to-day who can fail to see that such a
+      course would have been fraught with almost as much danger as the secession
+      movement itself. At least it would have been a hasty confession, quite
+      uncalled for and quite untrue, that American federalism had thus far
+      proved itself incompetent,&mdash;that we had indeed preserved our national
+      unity, but only at the frightful cost of sinking to a lower plane of
+      national life. [[Sidenote: The English method of nation-making]
+      [[Sidenote: Pacific tendencies of federalism]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But federalism, with its pacific implications, was not an invention of the
+      Teutonic mind. The idea was familiar to the city communities of ancient
+      Greece, which, along with their intense love of self-government, felt the
+      need of combined action for warding off external attack. In their Achaian
+      and Aitolian leagues the Greeks made brilliant attempts toward founding a
+      nation upon some higher principle than that of mere conquest, and the
+      history of these attempts is exceedingly interesting and instructive. They
+      failed for lack of the principle of representation, which was practically
+      unknown to the world until introduced by the Teutonic colonizers of the
+      Roman empire. Until the idea of power delegated by the people had become
+      familiar to men's minds in its practical bearings, it was impossible to
+      create a great nation without crushing out the political life in some of
+      its parts. Some centre of power was sure to absorb all the political life,
+      and grow at the expense of the outlying parts, until the result was a
+      centralized despotism. Hence it came to be one of the commonplace
+      assumptions of political writers that republics must be small, that free
+      government is practicable only in a confined area, and that the only
+      strong and durable government, capable of maintaining order throughout a
+      vast territory, is some form of absolute monarchy. [[Sidenote: Fallacy of
+      the notion that republics must be small]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was quite natural that people should formerly have held this opinion,
+      and it is indeed not yet quite obsolete, but its fallaciousness will
+      become more and more apparent as American history is better understood.
+      Our experience has now so far widened that we can see that despotism is
+      not the strongest but wellnigh the weakest form of government; that
+      centralized administrations, like that of the Roman empire, have fallen to
+      pieces, not because of too much but because of too little freedom; and
+      that the only perdurable government must be that which succeeds in
+      achieving national unity on a grand scale, without weakening the sense of
+      personal and local independence. For in the body politic this spirit of
+      freedom is as the red corpuscles in the blood; it carries the life with
+      it. It makes the difference between a society of self-respecting men and
+      women and a society of puppets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Your nation may have art, poetry, and science, all the refinements of
+      civilized life, all the comforts and safeguards that human ingenuity can
+      devise; but if it lose this spirit of personal and local independence, it
+      is doomed and deserves its doom. As President Cleveland has well said, it
+      is not the business of a government to support its people, but of the
+      people to support their government; and once to lose sight of this vital
+      truth is as dangerous as to trifle with some stealthy narcotic poison. Of
+      the two opposite perils which have perpetually threatened the welfare of
+      political society&mdash;anarchy on the one hand, loss of self-government
+      on the other&mdash;Jefferson was right in maintaining that the latter is
+      really the more to be dreaded because its beginnings are so terribly
+      insidious. Many will understand what is meant by a threat of secession,
+      where few take heed of the baneful principle involved in a Texas
+      Seed-bill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That the American people are still fairly alive to the importance of these
+      considerations, is due to the weary ages of struggle in which our
+      forefathers have manfully contended for the right of self-government. From
+      the days of Arminius and Civilis in the wilds of lower Germany to the days
+      of Franklin and Jefferson in Independence Hall, we have been engaged in
+      this struggle, not without some toughening of our political fibre, not
+      without some refining of our moral sense. Not among our English
+      forefathers only, but among all the peoples of mediaeval and modern Europe
+      has the struggle gone on, with various and instructive results. In all
+      parts of romanized Europe invaded and colonized by Teutonic tribes,
+      self-government attempted to spring up. What may have been the origin of
+      the idea of representation we do not know; like most origins, it seems
+      lost in the prehistoric darkness. Wherever we find Teutonic tribes
+      settling down over a wide area, we find them holding their primary
+      assemblies, usually their annual March-meetings, like those in which Mr.
+      Hosea Biglow and others like him have figured. Everywhere, too, we find
+      some attempt at representative assemblies, based on the principle of the
+      three estates, clergy, nobles, and commons. But nowhere save in England
+      does the representative principle become firmly established, at first in
+      county-meetings, afterward in a national parliament limiting the powers of
+      the national monarch as the primary tribal assembly had limited the powers
+      of the tribal chief. It is for this reason that we must call the method of
+      nation-making by means of a representative assembly the English method.
+      While the idea of representation was perhaps the common property of the
+      Teutonic tribes, it was only in England that it was successfully put into
+      practice and became the dominant political idea. We may therefore agree
+      with Dr. Stubbs that in its political development England is the most
+      Teutonic of all European countries,&mdash;the country which in becoming a
+      great nation has most fully preserved the local independence so
+      characteristic of the ancient Germans. The reasons for this are
+      complicated, and to try to assign them all would needlessly encumber our
+      exposition. But there is one that is apparent and extremely instructive.
+      There is sometimes a great advantage in being able to plant political
+      institutions in a virgin soil, where they run no risk of being modified or
+      perhaps metamorphosed through contact with rival institutions. In America
+      the Teutonic idea has been worked out even more completely than in
+      Britain; and so far as institutions are concerned, our English forefathers
+      settled here as in an empty country. They were not obliged to modify their
+      political ideas so as to bring them into harmony with those of the
+      Indians; the disparity in civilization was so great that the Indians were
+      simply thrust aside, along with the wolves and buffaloes. [[Sidenote:
+      Teutonic March-meetings and representative assemblies]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This illustration will help us to understand the peculiar features of the
+      Teutonic settlement of Britain. Whether the English invaders really slew
+      all the romanized Kelts who dwelt in the island, except those who found
+      refuge in the mountains of Cumberland, Wales, and Cornwall, or fled across
+      the channel to Brittany, we need not seek to decide. It is enough to point
+      out one respect in which the Teutonic conquest was immeasurably more
+      complete in Britain than in any other part of the empire. Everywhere else
+      the tribes who settled upon Roman soil&mdash;the Goths, Vandals, Suevi,
+      and Burgundians&mdash;were christianized, and so to some extent romanized,
+      before they came to take possession. Even the more distant Franks had been
+      converted to Christianity before they had completed their conquest of
+      Gaul. Everywhere except in Britain, therefore, the conquerors had already
+      imbibed Roman ideas, and the authority of Rome was in a certain sense
+      acknowledged. There was no break in the continuity of political events. In
+      Britain, on the other hand, there was a complete break, so that while on
+      the continent the fifth and sixth centuries are seen in the full midday
+      light of history, in Britain they have lapsed into the twilight of
+      half-legendary tradition. The Saxon and English tribes, coming from the
+      remote wilds of northern Germany, whither Roman missionaries had not yet
+      penetrated, still worshipped Thor and Wodan; and their conquest of Britain
+      was effected with such deadly thoroughness that Christianity was destroyed
+      there, or lingered only in sequestered nooks. A land once christianized
+      thus actually fell back into paganism, so that the work of converting it
+      to Christianity had to be done over again. From the landing of heathen
+      Hengest on the isle of Thanet to the landing of Augustine and his monks on
+      the same spot, one hundred and forty-eight years elapsed, during which
+      English institutions found time to take deep root in British soil with
+      scarcely more interference, as to essential points, than in American soil
+      twelve centuries afterward. [[Sidenote: Peculiarity of the Teutonic
+      conquest of Britain]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The century and a half between 449 and 597 is therefore one of the most
+      important epochs in the history of the people that speak the English
+      language. Before settling in Britain our forefathers had been tribes in
+      the upper stages of barbarism; now they began the process of coalescence
+      into a nation in which the principle of self-government should be retained
+      and developed. The township and its town-meeting we find there, as later
+      in New England. The county-meeting we also find, while the county is a
+      little state in itself and not a mere administrative district. And in this
+      county-meeting we may observe a singular feature, something never seen
+      before in the world, something destined to work out vaster political
+      results than Caesar ever dreamed of. This county-meeting is not a primary
+      assembly; all the freemen from all the townships cannot leave their homes
+      and their daily business to attend it. Nor is it merely an assembly of
+      notables, attended by the most important men of the neighbourhood. It is a
+      representative assembly, attended by select men from each township. We may
+      see in it the germ of the British parliament and of the American congress,
+      as indeed of all modern legislative bodies, for it is a most suggestive
+      commentary upon what we are saying that in all other countries which have
+      legislatures, they have been copied, within quite recent times, from
+      English or American models. We can seldom if ever fix a date for the
+      beginning of anything, and we can by no means fix a date for the beginning
+      of representative assemblies in England. We can only say that where we
+      first find traces of county organization, we find traces of
+      representation. Clearly, if the English conquerors of Britain had left the
+      framework of Roman institutions standing there, as it remained standing in
+      Gaul, there would have been great danger of this principle of
+      representation not surviving. It would most likely have been crushed in
+      its callow infancy. The conquerors would insensibly have fallen into the
+      Roman way of doing things, as they did in Gaul. [[Sidenote: Survival and
+      development of Teutonic representative assembly in England]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the start, then, we find the English nationality growing up under
+      very different conditions from those which obtained in other parts of
+      Europe. So far as institutions are concerned, Teutonism was less modified
+      in England than in the German fatherland itself, For the gradual conquest
+      and Christianization of Germany which began with Charles the Great, and
+      went on until in the thirteenth century the frontier had advanced eastward
+      to the Vistula, entailed to a certain extent the romanization of Germany.
+      For a thousand years after Charles the Great, the political head of
+      Germany was also the political head of the Holy Roman Empire, and the
+      civil and criminal code by which the daily life of the modern German
+      citizen is regulated is based upon the jurisprudence of Rome. Nothing,
+      perhaps, could illustrate more forcibly than this sheer contrast the
+      peculiarly Teutonic character of English civilization. Between the eighth
+      and the eleventh centuries, when the formation of English nationality was
+      approaching completion, it received a fresh and powerful infusion of
+      Teutonism in the swarms of heathen Northmen or Danes who occupied the
+      eastern coasts, struggled long for the supremacy, and gradually becoming
+      christianized, for a moment succeeded in seizing the crown. Of the
+      invasion of partially romanized Northmen from Normandy which followed soon
+      after, and which has so profoundly affected English society and English
+      speech, we need notice here but two conspicuous features. First, it
+      increased the power of the crown and the clergy, brought all England more
+      than ever under one law, and strengthened the feeling of nationality. It
+      thus made England a formidable military power, while at the same time it
+      brought her into closer relations with continental Europe than she had
+      held since the fourth century. Secondly, by superposing a new feudal
+      nobility as the upper stratum of society, it transformed the Old-English
+      thanehood into the finest middle-class of rural gentry and yeomanry that
+      has ever existed in any country; a point of especial interest to
+      Americans, since it was in this stratum of society that the two most
+      powerful streams of English migration to America&mdash;the Virginia stream
+      and the New England stream&mdash;alike had their source. [[Sidenote:
+      Primitive Teutonic institutions less modified in England than in Germany]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By the thirteenth century the increasing power and pretensions of the
+      crown, as the unification of English nationality went on, brought about a
+      result unlike anything known on the continent of Europe; it brought about
+      a resistless coalition between the great nobles, the rural gentry and
+      yeomanry, and the burghers of the towns, for the purpose of curbing
+      royalty, arresting the progress of centralization, and setting up
+      representative government on a truly national scale. This grand result was
+      partly due to peculiar circumstances which had their origin in the Norman
+      conquest; but it was largely due to the political habits generated by long
+      experience of local representative assemblies,&mdash;habits which made it
+      comparatively easy for different classes of society to find their voice
+      and use it for the attainment of ends in common. On the continent of
+      Europe the encroaching sovereign had to contend with here and there an
+      arrogant vassal, here and there a high-spirited and rebellious town; in
+      England, in this first great crisis of popular government, he found
+      himself confronted by a united people. The fruits of the grand combination
+      were <i>first</i>, the wresting of Magna Charta from King John in 1215,
+      and <i>secondly</i>, the meeting of the first House of Commons in 1265.
+      Four years of civil war were required to secure these noble results. The
+      Barons' War, of the years 1263 to 1267, was an event of the same order of
+      importance as the Great Rebellion of the seventeenth century and the
+      American Revolution; and among the founders of that political freedom
+      which is enjoyed to-day by all English-speaking people, the name of Simon
+      de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, deserves a place in our grateful
+      remembrance beside the names of Cromwell and Washington. Simon's great
+      victory at Lewes in 1264 must rank with Naseby and Yorktown. The work
+      begun by his House of Commons was the same work that has continued to go
+      on without essential interruption down to the days of Cleveland and
+      Gladstone. The fundamental principle of political freedom is "no taxation
+      without representation"; you must not take a farthing of my money without
+      consulting my wishes as to the use that shall be made of it. Only when
+      this principle of justice was first practically recognized, did government
+      begin to divorce itself from the primitive bestial barbaric system of
+      tyranny and plunder, and to ally itself with the forces that in the
+      fulness of time are to bring peace on earth and good will to men. Of all
+      dates in history, therefore, there is none more fit to be commemorated
+      than 1265; for in that year there was first asserted and applied at
+      Westminster, on a national scale, that fundamental principle of "no
+      taxation without representation," that innermost kernel of the English
+      Idea, which the Stamp Act Congress defended at New York exactly five
+      hundred years afterward. When we think of these dates, by the way, we
+      realize the import of the saying that in the sight of the Lord a thousand
+      years are but as a day, and we feel that the work of the Lord cannot be
+      done by the listless or the slothful. So much time and so much strife by
+      sea and land has it taken to secure beyond peradventure the boon to
+      mankind for which Earl Simon gave up his noble life on the field of
+      Evesham! Nor without unremitting watchfulness can we be sure that the day
+      of peril is yet past. From kings, indeed, we have no more to fear; they
+      have come to be as spooks and bogies of the nursery. But the gravest
+      dangers are those which present themselves in new forms, against which
+      people's minds have not yet been fortified with traditional sentiments and
+      phrases. The inherited predatory tendency of men to seize upon the fruits
+      of other people's labour is still very strong, and while we have nothing
+      more to fear from kings, we may yet have trouble enough from commercial
+      monopolies and favoured industries, marching to the polls their hordes of
+      bribed retainers. Well indeed has it been said that eternal vigilance is
+      the price of liberty. God never meant that in this fair but treacherous
+      world in which He has placed us we should earn our salvation without
+      steadfast labour. [Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To return to Earl Simon, we see that it was just in that wonderful
+      thirteenth century, when the Roman idea of government might seem to have
+      been attaining its richest and most fruitful development, that the richer
+      and more fruitful English idea first became incarnate in the political
+      constitution of a great and rapidly growing nation. It was not long before
+      the struggle between the Roman Idea and the English Idea, clothed in
+      various forms, became the dominating issue in European history. We have
+      now to observe the rise of modern nationalities, as new centres of
+      political life, out of the various provinces of the Roman world. In the
+      course of this development the Teutonic representative assembly is at
+      first everywhere discernible, in some form or other, as in the Spanish
+      Cortes or the States-General of France, but on the continent it generally
+      dies out. Only in such nooks as Switzerland and the Netherlands does it
+      survive. In the great nations it succumbs before the encroachments of the
+      crown. The comparatively novel Teutonic idea of power delegated by the
+      people to their representatives had not become deeply enough rooted in the
+      political soil of the continent; and accordingly we find it more and more
+      disused and at length almost forgotten, while the old and deeply rooted
+      Roman idea of power delegated by the governing body to its lieutenants and
+      prefects usurps its place. Let us observe some of the most striking
+      features of this growth of modern nationalities. [[Sidenote: Conflict
+      between Roman Idea and English Idea begins to become clearly visible in
+      the thirteenth century]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The reader of medieval history cannot fail to be impressed with the
+      suddenness with which the culmination of the Holy Roman Empire, in the
+      thirteenth century, was followed by a swift decline. The imperial position
+      of the Hapsburgs was far less splendid than that of the Hohenstauffen; it
+      rapidly became more German and less European, until by and by people began
+      to forget what the empire originally meant. The change which came over the
+      papacy was even more remarkable. The grandchildren of the men who had
+      witnessed the spectacle of a king of France and a king of England humbled
+      at the feet of Innocent III., the children of the men who had found the
+      gigantic powers of a Frederick II. unequal to the task of curbing the
+      papacy, now beheld the successors of St. Peter carried away to Avignon,
+      there to be kept for seventy years under the supervision of the kings of
+      France. Henceforth the glory of the papacy in its political aspect was to
+      be but the faint shadow of that with which it had shone before. This
+      sudden change in its position showed that the medieval dream of a
+      world-empire was passing away, and that new powers were coming uppermost
+      in the shape of modern nationalities with their national sovereigns. So
+      long as these nationalities were in the weakness of their early formation,
+      it was possible for pope and emperor to assert, and sometimes to come near
+      maintaining, universal supremacy. But the time was now at hand when kings
+      could assert their independence of the pope, while the emperor was fast
+      sinking to be merely one among kings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As modern kingdoms thus grew at the expense of empire and papacy above, so
+      they also grew at the expense of feudal dukedoms, earldoms, and baronies
+      below. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were as fatal to feudalism
+      as to world-empire and world-church. A series of wars occurring at this
+      time were especially remarkable for the wholesale slaughter of the feudal
+      nobility, whether on the field or under the headsman's axe. This was a
+      conspicuous feature of the feuds of the Trastamare in Spain, of the
+      English invasions of France, followed by the quarrel between Burgundians
+      and Armagnacs, and of the great war of the Roses in England. So
+      thorough-going was the butchery in England, for example, that only
+      twenty-nine lay peers could be found to sit in the first parliament of
+      Henry VII in 1485. The old nobility was almost annihilated, both in person
+      and in property; for along with the slaughter there went wholesale
+      confiscation, and this added greatly to the disposable wealth of the
+      crown. The case was essentially similar in France and Spain. In all three
+      countries the beginning of the sixteenth century saw the power of the
+      crown increased and increasing. Its vast accessions of wealth made it more
+      independent of legislative assemblies, and at the same time enabled it to
+      make the baronage more subservient in character by filling up the vacant
+      places with new creations of its own. Through the turbulent history of the
+      next two centuries, we see the royal power aiming at unchecked supremacy
+      and in the principal instances attaining it except in England. Absolute
+      despotism was reached first in Spain, under Philip II.; in France it was
+      reached a century later, under Louis XIV.; and at about the same time in
+      the hereditary estates of Austria; while over all the Italian and German
+      soil of the disorganized empire, except among the glaciers of Switzerland
+      and the dykes of the Netherlands, the play of political forces had set up
+      a host of petty tyrannies which aped the morals and manners of the great
+      autocrats at Paris and Madrid and Vienna. [[Sidenote: Increasing power of
+      the crown]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As we look back over this growth of modern monarchy, we cannot but be
+      struck with the immense practical difficulty of creating a strong
+      nationality without sacrificing self-government. Powerful, indeed, is the
+      tendency toward over-centralization, toward stagnation, toward political
+      death. Powerful is the tendency to revert to the Roman, if not to the
+      Oriental method. As often as we reflect upon the general state of things
+      at the end of the seventeenth century&mdash;the dreadful ignorance and
+      misery which prevailed among most of the people of continental Europe, and
+      apparently without hope of remedy&mdash;so often must we be impressed anew
+      with the stupendous significance of the part played by self-governing
+      England in overcoming dangers which have threatened the very existence of
+      modern civilization. It is not too much to say that in the seventeenth
+      century the entire political future of mankind was staked upon the
+      questions that were at issue in England. To keep the sacred flame of
+      liberty alive required such a rare and wonderful concurrence of conditions
+      that, had our forefathers then succumbed in the strife, it is hard to
+      imagine how or where the failure could have been repaired. Some of these
+      conditions we have already considered; let us now observe one of the most
+      important of all. Let us note the part played by that most tremendous of
+      social forces, religious sentiment, in its relation to the political
+      circumstances which we have passed in review. If we ask why it was that
+      among modern nations absolute despotism was soonest and most completely
+      established in Spain, we find it instructive to observe that the
+      circumstances under which the Spanish monarchy grew up, during centuries
+      of deadly struggle with the Mussulman, were such as to enlist the
+      religious sentiment on the side of despotic methods in church and state.
+      It becomes interesting, then, to observe by contrast how it was that in
+      England the dominant religious sentiment came to be enlisted on the side
+      of political freedom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In such an inquiry we have nothing to do with the truth or falsity of any
+      system of doctrines, whether Catholic or Protestant. The legitimate
+      purposes of the historian do not require him to intrude upon the province
+      of the theologian. Our business is to trace the sequence of political
+      cause and effect. Nor shall we get much help from crude sweeping
+      statements which set forth Catholicism as invariably the enemy and
+      Protestantism as invariably the ally of human liberty. The Catholic has a
+      right to be offended at statements which would involve a Hildebrand or a
+      St. Francis in the same historical judgment with a Sigismund or a
+      Torquemada. The character of ecclesiastical as of all other institutions
+      has varied with the character of the men who have worked them and the
+      varying needs of the times and places in which they have been worked; and
+      our intense feeling of the gratitude we owe to English Puritanism need in
+      nowise diminish the enthusiasm with which we praise the glorious work of
+      the mediaeval church. It is the duty of the historian to learn how to
+      limit and qualify his words of blame or approval; for so curiously is
+      human nature compounded of strength and weakness that the best of human
+      institutions are likely to be infected with some germs of vice or folly.
+      [[Sidenote: Beginnings of Protestantism in the thirteenth century]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of no human institution is this more true than of the great medieval
+      church of Gregory and Innocent when viewed in the light of its claims to
+      unlimited temporal and spiritual sovereignty. In striking down the
+      headship of the emperors, it would have reduced Europe to a sort of
+      Oriental caliphate, had it not been checked by the rising spirit of
+      nationality already referred to. But there was another and even mightier
+      agency coming in to curb its undue pretensions to absolute sovereignty.
+      That same thirteenth century which witnessed the culmination of its power
+      witnessed also the first bold and determined manifestation of the
+      Protestant temper of revolt against spiritual despotism. It was long
+      before this that the earliest Protestant heresy had percolated into
+      Europe, having its source, like so many other heresies, in that eastern
+      world where the stimulating thought of the Greeks busied itself with the
+      ancient theologies of Asia. From Armenia in the eighth century came the
+      Manichaean sect of Paulicians into Thrace, and for twenty generations
+      played a considerable part in the history of the Eastern Empire. In the
+      Bulgarian tongue they were known as Bogomilians, or men constant in
+      prayer. In Greek they were called Cathari, or "Puritans." They accepted
+      the New Testament, but set little store by the Old; they laughed at
+      transubstantiation, denied any mystical efficiency to baptism, frowned
+      upon image-worship as no better than idolatry, despised the intercession
+      of saints, and condemned the worship of the Virgin Mary. As for the symbol
+      of the cross, they scornfully asked, "If any man slew the son of a king
+      with a bit of wood, how could this piece of wood be dear to the king?"
+      Their ecclesiastical government was in the main presbyterian, and in
+      politics they showed a decided leaning toward democracy. They wore long
+      faces, looked askance at frivolous amusements, and were terribly in
+      earnest. Of the more obscure pages of mediaeval history, none are fuller
+      of interest than those in which we decipher the westward progress of these
+      sturdy heretics through the Balkan peninsula into Italy, and thence into
+      southern France, where toward the end of the twelfth century we find their
+      ideas coming to full blossom in the great Albigensian heresy. It was no
+      light affair to assault the church in the days of Innocent III. The
+      terrible crusade against the Albigenses, beginning in 1207, was the joint
+      work of the most powerful of popes and one of the most powerful of French
+      kings. On the part of Innocent it was the stamping out of a revolt that
+      threatened the very existence of the Catholic hierarchy; on the part of
+      Philip Augustus it was the suppression of those too independent vassals
+      the Counts of Toulouse, and the decisive subjection of the southern
+      provinces to the government at Paris. Nowhere in European history do we
+      read a more frightful story than that which tells of the blazing fires
+      which consumed thousand after thousand of the most intelligent and thrifty
+      people in France. It was now that the Holy Inquisition came into
+      existence, and after forty years of slaughter these Albigensian Cathari or
+      Puritans seemed exterminated. The practice of burning heretics, first
+      enacted by statute in Aragon in 1197, was adopted in most parts of Europe
+      during the thirteenth century, but in England not until the beginning of
+      the fifteenth. The Inquisition was never established in England. Edward
+      II. attempted to introduce it in 1311 for the purpose of suppressing the
+      Templars, but his utter failure showed that the instinct of
+      self-government was too strong in the English people to tolerate the
+      entrusting of so much power over men's lives to agents of the papacy.
+      Mediaeval England was ignorant and bigoted enough, but under a
+      representative government which so strongly permeated society, it was
+      impossible to set the machinery of repression to work with such deadly
+      thoroughness as it worked under the guidance of Roman methods. When we
+      read the history of persecution in England, the story in itself is
+      dreadful enough; but when we compare it with the horrors enacted in other
+      countries, we arrive at some startling results. During the two centuries
+      of English persecution, from Henry IV. to James I., some 400 persons were
+      burned at the stake, and three-fourths of these cases occurred in 1555-57,
+      the last three years of Mary Tudor. Now in a single province of Spain, in
+      the single year 1482, about 2000 persons were burned. The lowest estimates
+      of the number slain for heresy in the Netherlands in the course of the
+      sixteenth century place it at 75,000. Very likely such figures are in many
+      cases grossly exaggerated. But after making due allowance for this, the
+      contrast is sufficiently impressive. In England the persecution of
+      heretics was feeble and spasmodic, and only at one moment rose to anything
+      like the appalling vigour which ordinarily characterized it in countries
+      where the Inquisition was firmly established. Now among the victims of
+      religious persecution must necessarily be found an unusual proportion of
+      men and women more independent than the average in their thinking, and
+      more bold than the average in uttering their thoughts. The Inquisition was
+      a diabolical winnowing machine for removing from society the most flexible
+      minds and the stoutest hearts; and among every people in which it was
+      established for a length of time it wrought serious damage to the national
+      character. It ruined the fair promise of Spain, and inflicted incalculable
+      detriment upon the fortunes of France. No nation could afford to deprive
+      itself of such a valuable element in its political life as was furnished
+      in the thirteenth century by the intelligent and sturdy Cathari of
+      southern Gaul. [[Sidenote: The Cathari, or Puritans of the Eastern Empire]
+      [[Sidenote: The Albigenses] [[Sidenote: Effects of persecution; its
+      feebleness in England]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The spirit of revolt against the hierarchy, though broken and repressed
+      thus terribly by the measures of Innocent III., continued to live on
+      obscurely in sequestered spots, in the mountains of Savoy, and Bosnia, and
+      Bohemia, ready on occasion to spring into fresh and vigorous life. In the
+      following century Protestant ideas were rapidly germinating in England,
+      alike in baron's castle, in yeoman's farmstead, in citizen's shop, in the
+      cloistered walks of the monastery. Henry Knighton, writing in the time of
+      Richard II., declares, with the exaggeration of impatience, that every
+      second man you met was a Lollard, or "babbler," for such was the nickname
+      given to these free-thinkers, of whom the most eminent was John Wyclif,
+      professor at Oxford, and rector of Lutterworth, greatest scholar of the
+      age. [[Sidenote: Wyclif and the Lollards]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The career of this man is a striking commentary upon the difference
+      between England and continental Europe in the Middle Ages. Wyclif denied
+      transubstantiation, disapproved of auricular confession, opposed the
+      payment of Peter's pence, taught that kings should not be subject to
+      prelates, translated the Bible into English and circulated it among the
+      people, and even denounced the reigning pope as Antichrist; yet he was not
+      put to death, because there was as yet no act of parliament for the
+      burning of heretics, and in England things must be done according to the
+      laws which the people had made. <a href="#linknote-1" name="linknoteref-1"
+      id="linknoteref-1"><small>1</small></a> Pope Gregory XI. issued five bulls
+      against him, addressed to the king, the archbishop of Canterbury, and the
+      university of Oxford; but their dictatorial tone offended the national
+      feeling, and no heed was paid to them. Seventeen years after Wyclif's
+      death, the statute for burning heretics was passed, and the persecution of
+      Lollards began. It was feeble and ineffectual, however. Lollardism was
+      never trampled out in England as Catharism was trampled out in France.
+      Tracts of Wyclif and passages from his translation of the Bible were
+      copied by hand and secretly passed about to be read on Sundays in the
+      manor-house, or by the cottage fireside after the day's toil was over. The
+      work went on quietly, but not the less effectively, until when the papal
+      authority was defied by Henry VIII., it soon became apparent that England
+      was half-Protestant already. It then appeared also that in this
+      Reformation there were two forces cooperating,&mdash;the sentiment of
+      national independence which would not brook dictation from Rome, and the
+      Puritan sentiment of revolt against the hierarchy in general. The first
+      sentiment had found expression again and again in refusals to pay tribute
+      to Rome, in defiance of papal bulls, and in the famous statutes of <i>praemunire</i>,
+      which made it a criminal offence to acknowledge any authority in England
+      higher than the crown. The revolt of Henry VIII. was simply the carrying
+      out of these acts of Edward I. and Edward III. to their logical
+      conclusion. It completed the detachment of England from the Holy Roman
+      Empire, and made her free of all the world. Its intent was political
+      rather than religious. Henry, who wrote against Martin Luther, was far
+      from wishing to make England a Protestant country. Elizabeth, who differed
+      from her father in not caring a straw for theology, was by temperament and
+      policy conservative. Yet England could not cease to be Papist without
+      ceasing in some measure to be Catholic; nor could she in that day carry on
+      war against Spain without becoming a leading champion of Protestantism.
+      The changes in creed and ritual wrought by the government during this
+      period were cautious and skilful; and the resulting church of England,
+      with its long line of learned and liberal divines, has played a noble part
+      in history. [[Sidenote: Political character of Henry VIII's revolt against
+      Rome]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But along with this moderate Protestantism espoused by the English
+      government, as consequent upon the assertion of English national
+      independence, there grew up the fierce uncompromising democratic
+      Protestantism of which the persecuted Lollards had sown the seeds. This
+      was not the work of government. [[Sidenote: The yeoman, Hugh Latimer]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By the side of Henry VIII. stands the sublime figure of Hugh Latimer, most
+      dauntless of preachers, the one man before whose stern rebuke the
+      headstrong and masterful Tudor monarch quailed. It was Latimer that
+      renewed the work of Wyclif. and in his life as well as in his martyrdom,&mdash;to
+      use his own words of good cheer uttered while the fagots were kindling
+      around him,&mdash;lighted "such a candle in England as by God's grace
+      shall never be put out." This indomitable man belonged to that
+      middle-class of self-governing, self-respecting yeomanry that has been the
+      glory of free England and free America. He was one of the sturdy race that
+      overthrew French chivalry at Crecy and twice drove the soldiery of a
+      tyrant down the slope of Bunker Hill. In boyhood he worked on his father's
+      farm and helped his mother to milk the thirty kine; he practised archery
+      on the village green, studied in the village school, went to Cambridge,
+      and became the foremost preacher of Christendom. Now the most thorough and
+      radical work of the English Reformation was done by this class of men of
+      which Latimer was the type. It was work that was national in its scope,
+      arousing to fervent heat the strong religious and moral sentiment of the
+      people, and hence it soon quite outran the cautious and conservative
+      policy of the government, and tended to introduce changes extremely
+      distasteful to those who wished to keep England as nearly Catholic as was
+      consistent with independence of the pope. Hence before the end of
+      Elizabeth's reign, we find the crown set almost as strongly against
+      Puritanism as against Romanism. Hence, too, when under Elizabeth's
+      successors the great decisive struggle between despotism and liberty was
+      inaugurated, we find all the tremendous force of this newly awakened
+      religious enthusiasm cooperating with the English love of self-government
+      and carrying it under Cromwell to victory. From this fortunate alliance of
+      religious and political forces has come all the noble and fruitful work of
+      the last two centuries in which men of English speech have been labouring
+      for the political regeneration of mankind. But for this alliance of
+      forces, it is quite possible that the fateful seventeenth century might
+      have seen despotism triumphant in England as on the continent of Europe,
+      and the progress of civilization indefinitely arrested. [[Sidenote: The
+      moment of Cromwell's triumph was the most critical moment in history]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In illustration of this possibility, observe what happened in France at
+      the very time when the victorious English tendencies were shaping
+      themselves in the reign of Elizabeth. In France there was a strong
+      Protestant movement, but it had no such independent middle-class to
+      support it as that which existed in England; nor had it been able to
+      profit by such indispensable preliminary work as that which Wyclif had
+      done; the horrible slaughter of the Albigenses had deprived France of the
+      very people who might have played a part in some way analogous to that of
+      the Lollards. Consequently the Protestant movement in France failed to
+      become a national movement. Against the wretched Henry III who would have
+      temporized with it, and the gallant Henry IV who honestly espoused it, the
+      oppressed peasantry and townsmen made common cause by enlisting under the
+      banner of the ultra-Catholic Guises. The mass of the people saw nothing in
+      Protestantism but an idea favoured by the aristocracy and which they could
+      not comprehend. Hence the great king who would have been glad to make
+      France a Protestant country could only obtain his crown by renouncing his
+      religion, while seeking to protect it by his memorable Edict of Nantes.
+      But what a generous despot could grant, a bigoted despot might revoke; and
+      before another century had elapsed, the good work done by Henry IV. was
+      undone by Louis XIV., the Edict of Nantes was set aside, the process of
+      casting out the most valuable political element in the community was
+      carried to completion, and seven percent of the population of France was
+      driven away and added to the Protestant populations of northern Germany
+      and England and America. The gain to these countries and the damage to
+      France was far greater than the mere figures would imply; for in
+      determining the character of a community a hundred selected men and women
+      are more potent than a thousand men and women taken at random. Thus while
+      the Reformation in France reinforced to some extent the noble army of
+      freemen, its triumphs were not to be the triumphs of Frenchmen, but of the
+      race which has known how to enlist under its banner the forces that fight
+      for free thought, free speech, and self-government, and all that these
+      phrases imply. [[Sidenote: Contrast with France; fate of the Huguenots]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In view of these facts we may see how tremendous was the question at stake
+      with the Puritans of the seventeenth century. Everywhere else the Roman
+      idea seemed to have conquered or to be conquering, while they seemed to be
+      left as the forlorn hope of the human race. But from the very day when
+      Oliver Cromwell reached forth his mighty arm to stop the persecutions in
+      Savoy, the victorious English idea began to change the face of things. The
+      next century saw William Pitt allied with Frederick of Prussia to save the
+      work of the Reformation in central Europe and set in motion the train of
+      events that were at last to make the people of the Teutonic fatherland a
+      nation. At that same moment the keenest minds in France were awaking to
+      the fact that in their immediate neighbourhood, separated from them only
+      by a few miles of salt water, was a country where people were equal in the
+      eye of the law. It was the ideas of Locke and Milton, of Vane and Sidney,
+      that, when transplanted into French soil, produced that violent but
+      salutary Revolution which has given fresh life to the European world. And
+      contemporaneously with all this, the American nation came upon the scene,
+      equipped as no other nation had ever been, for the task of combining
+      sovereignty with liberty, indestructible union of the whole with
+      indestructible life in the parts. The English idea has thus come to be
+      more than national, it has become imperial. It has come to rule, and it
+      has come to stay. [[Sidenote: Victory of the English Idea]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We are now in a position to answer the question when the Roman Empire came
+      to an end, in so far as it can be answered at all. It did not come to its
+      end at the hands of an Odovakar in the year 476, or of a Mahomet II in
+      1453, or of a Napoleon in 1806. It has been coming to its end as the Roman
+      idea of nation-making has been at length decisively overcome by the
+      English idea. For such a fact it is impossible to assign a date, because
+      it is not an event but a stage in the endless procession of events. But we
+      can point to landmarks on the way. Of movements significant and prophetic
+      there have been many. The whole course of the Protestant reformation, from
+      the thirteenth century to the nineteenth, is coincident with the transfer
+      of the world's political centre of gravity from the Tiber and the Rhine to
+      the Thames and the Mississippi. The whole career of the men who speak
+      English has within this period been the most potent agency in this
+      transfer. In these gigantic processes of evolution we cannot mark
+      beginnings or endings by years, hardly even by centuries. But among the
+      significant events which prophesied the final triumph of the English over
+      the Roman idea, perhaps the most significant&mdash;the one which marks
+      most incisively the dawning of a new era&mdash;was the migration of
+      English Puritans across the Atlantic Ocean, to repeat in a new environment
+      and on a far grander scale the work which their forefathers had wrought in
+      Britain. The voyage of the Mayflower was not in itself the greatest event
+      in this migration; but it serves to mark the era, and it is only when we
+      study it in the mood awakened by the general considerations here set forth
+      that we can properly estimate the historic importance of the great Puritan
+      Exodus. [[Sidenote: Significance of the Puritan Exodus]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER II. &mdash; THE PURITAN EXODUS.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In the preceding chapter I endeavoured to set forth and illustrate some of
+      the chief causes which have shifted the world's political centre of
+      gravity from the Mediterranean and the Rhine to the Atlantic and the
+      Mississippi; from the men who spoke Latin to the men who speak English. In
+      the course of the exposition we began to catch glimpses of the wonderful
+      significance of the fact that&mdash;among the people who had first
+      suggested the true solution of the difficult problem of making a powerful
+      nation without sacrificing local self-government&mdash;when the supreme
+      day of trial came, the dominant religious sentiment was arrayed on the
+      side of political freedom and against political despotism. If we consider
+      merely the territorial area which it covered, or the numbers of men slain
+      in its battles, the war of the English parliament against Charles I. seems
+      a trivial affair when contrasted with the gigantic but comparatively
+      insignificant work of barbarians like Jinghis or Tamerlane. But if we
+      consider the moral and political issues involved, and the influence of the
+      struggle upon the future welfare of mankind, we soon come to see that
+      there never was a conflict of more world-wide importance than that from
+      which Oliver Cromwell came out victorious. It shattered the monarchical
+      power in England at a time when monarchical power was bearing down all
+      opposition in the other great countries of Europe. It decided that
+      government by the people and for the people should not then perish from
+      the earth. It placed free England in a position of such moral advantage
+      that within another century the English Idea of political life was able to
+      react most powerfully upon continental Europe. It was the study of English
+      institutions by such men as Montesquieu and Turgot, Voltaire and Rousseau,
+      that gave shape and direction to the French Revolution. That violent but
+      wholesome clearing of the air, that tremendous political and moral
+      awakening, which ushered in the nineteenth century in Europe, had its
+      sources in the spirit which animated the preaching of Latimer, the song of
+      Milton, the solemn imagery of Bunyan, the political treatises of Locke and
+      Sidney, the political measures of Hampden and Pym. The noblest type of
+      modern European statesmanship, as represented by Mazzini and Stein, is the
+      spiritual offspring of seventeenth-century Puritanism. To speak of Naseby
+      and Marston Moor as merely English victories would be as absurd as to
+      restrict the significance of Gettysburg to the state of Pennsylvania. If
+      ever there were men who laid down their lives in the cause of all mankind,
+      it was those grim old Ironsides whose watchwords were texts from Holy
+      Writ, whose battle-cries were hymns of praise. [[Sidenote: Influence of
+      Puritanism upon modern Europe]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was to this unwonted alliance of intense religious enthusiasm with the
+      instinct of self-government and the spirit of personal independence that
+      the preservation of English freedom was due. When James I. ascended the
+      English throne, the forces which prepared the Puritan revolt had been
+      slowly and quietly gathering strength among the people for at least two
+      centuries. The work which Wyclif had begun in the fourteenth century had
+      continued to go on in spite of occasional spasmodic attempts to destroy it
+      with the aid of the statute passed in 1401 for the burning of heretics.
+      The Lollards can hardly be said at any time to have constituted a sect,
+      marked off from the established church by the possession of a system of
+      doctrines held in common. The name by which they were known was a nickname
+      which might cover almost any amount of diversity in opinion, like the
+      modern epithets "free-thinker" and "agnostic." The feature which
+      characterized the Lollards in common was a bold spirit of inquiry which
+      led them, in spite of persecution, to read Wyclif's English Bible and call
+      in question such dogmas and rites of the church as did not seem to find
+      warrant in the sacred text. Clad in long robes of coarse red wool,
+      barefoot, with pilgrim's staff in hand, the Lollard preachers fared to and
+      fro among the quaint Gothic towns and shaded hamlets, setting forth the
+      word of God wherever they could find listeners, now in the parish church
+      or under the vaulted roof of the cathedral, now in the churchyard or
+      market-place, or on some green hillside. During the fifteenth century
+      persecution did much to check this open preaching, but passages from
+      Wyclif's tracts and texts from the Bible were copied by hand and passed
+      about among tradesmen and artisans, yeomen and plough-boys, to be pondered
+      over and talked about and learned by heart. It was a new revelation to the
+      English people, this discovery of the Bible. Christ and his disciples
+      seemed to come very near when the beautiful story of the gospels was first
+      read in the familiar speech of every-day life. Heretofore they might well
+      have seemed remote and unreal, just as the school-boy hardly realizes that
+      the Cato and Cassius over whom he puzzles in his Latin lessons were once
+      living men like his father and neighbours, and not mere nominatives
+      governing a verb, or ablatives of means or instrument. Now it became
+      possible for the layman to contrast the pure teachings of Christ with the
+      doctrines and demeanour of the priests and monks to whom the spiritual
+      guidance of Englishmen had been entrusted. Strong and self-respecting men
+      and women, accustomed to manage their own affairs, could not but be
+      profoundly affected by the contrast. [[Sidenote: Work of the Lollards]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While they were thus led more and more to appeal to the Bible as the
+      divine standard of right living and right thinking, at the same time they
+      found in the sacred volume the treasures of a most original and noble
+      literature unrolled before them; stirring history and romantic legend,
+      cosmical theories and priestly injunctions, profound metaphysics and pithy
+      proverbs, psalms of unrivalled grandeur and pastorals of exquisite
+      loveliness, parables fraught with solemn meaning, the mournful wisdom of
+      the preacher, the exultant faith of the apostle, the matchless eloquence
+      of Job and Isaiah, the apocalyptic ecstasy of St. John. At a time when
+      there was as yet no English literature for the common people, this untold
+      wealth of Hebrew literature was implanted in the English mind as in a
+      virgin soil. Great consequences have flowed from the fact that the first
+      truly popular literature in England&mdash;the first which stirred the
+      hearts of all classes of people, and filled their minds with ideal
+      pictures and their every-day speech with apt and telling phrases&mdash;
+      was the literature comprised within the Bible. The superiority of the
+      common English version of the Bible, made in the reign of James I., over
+      all other versions, is a fact generally admitted by competent critics. The
+      sonorous Latin of the Vulgate is very grand, but in sublimity of fervour
+      as in the unconscious simplicity of strength it is surpassed by the
+      English version, which is scarcely if at all inferior to the original,
+      while it remains to-day, and will long remain, the noblest monument of
+      English speech. The reason for this is obvious. The common English version
+      of the Bible was made by men who were not aiming at literary effect, but
+      simply gave natural expression to the feelings which for several
+      generations had clustered around the sacred text. They spoke with the
+      voice of a people, which is more than the voice of the most highly gifted
+      man. They spoke with the voice of a people to whom the Bible had come to
+      mean all that it meant to the men who wrote it. To the Englishmen who
+      listened to Latimer, to the Scotchmen who listened to Knox, the Bible more
+      than filled the place which in modern times is filled by poem and essay,
+      by novel and newspaper and scientific treatise. To its pages they went for
+      daily instruction and comfort, with its strange Semitic names they
+      baptized their children, upon its precepts, too often misunderstood and
+      misapplied, they sought to build up a rule of life that might raise them
+      above the crude and unsatisfying world into which they were born.
+      [[Sidenote: The English version of the Bible]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would be wrong to accredit all this awakening of spiritual life in
+      England to Wyclif and the Lollards, for it was only after the Bible, in
+      the translations of Tyndall and Coverdale, had been made free to the whole
+      English people in the reign of Edward VI. that its significance began to
+      be apparent; and it was only a century later, in the time of Cromwell and
+      Milton, that its full fruition was reached. It was with the Lollards,
+      however, that the spiritual awakening began and was continued until its
+      effects, when they came, were marked by surprising maturity and
+      suddenness. Because the Lollards were not a clearly defined sect, it was
+      hard to trace the manifold ramifications of their work. During the
+      terrible Wars of the Roses, contemporary chroniclers had little or nothing
+      to say about the labours of these humble men, which seemed of less
+      importance than now, when we read them in the light of their world-wide
+      results. From this silence some modern historians have carelessly inferred
+      that the nascent Protestantism of the Lollards had been extinguished by
+      persecution under the Lancastrian kings, and was in nowise continuous with
+      modern English Protestantism. Nothing could be more erroneous. The extent
+      to which the Lollard leaven had permeated all classes of English society
+      was first clearly revealed when Henry VIII. made his domestic affairs the
+      occasion for a revolt against the Papacy. Despot and brute as he was in
+      many ways, Henry had some characteristics which enabled him to get on well
+      with his people. He not only represented the sentiment of national
+      independence, but he had a truly English reverence for the forms of law.
+      In his worst acts he relied upon the support of his Parliament, which he
+      might in various ways cajole or pack, but could not really enslave. In his
+      quarrel with Rome he could have achieved but little, had he not happened
+      to strike a chord of feeling to which the English people, trained by this
+      slow and subtle work of the Lollards, responded quickly and with a
+      vehemence upon which he had not reckoned. As if by magic, the fabric of
+      Romanism was broken to pieces in England, monasteries were suppressed and
+      their abbots hanged, the authority of the Pope was swept away, and there
+      was no powerful party, like that of the Guises in France to make such
+      sweeping measures the occasion for civil war. The whole secret of Henry's
+      swift success lay in the fact that the English people were already more
+      than half Protestant in temper, and needed only an occasion for declaring
+      themselves. Hence, as soon as Catholic Henry died, his youthful son found
+      himself seated on the throne of a Protestant nation. The terrible but
+      feeble persecution which followed under Mary did much to strengthen the
+      extreme Protestant sentiment by allying it with the outraged feeling of
+      national independence. The bloody work of the grand-daughter of Ferdinand
+      and Isabella, the doting wife of Philip II., was rightly felt to be
+      Spanish work; and never, perhaps, did England feel such a sense of relief
+      as on the auspicious day which welcomed to the throne the great Elizabeth,
+      an Englishwoman in every fibre, and whose mother withal was the daughter
+      of a plain country gentleman. But the Marian persecution not only
+      increased the strength of the extreme Protestant sentiment, but indirectly
+      it supplied it with that Calvinistic theology which was to make it
+      indomitable. Of the hundreds of ministers and laymen who fled from England
+      in 1555 and the two following years, a great part found their way to
+      Geneva, and thus came under the immediate personal influence of that man
+      of iron who taught the very doctrines for which their souls were craving,
+      and who was then at the zenith of his power. [[Sidenote: Secret of Henry
+      VIII.'s swift success in his revolt against Rome] [[Sidenote: Effects of
+      the persecution under Mary]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among all the great benefactors of mankind the figure of Calvin is perhaps
+      the least attractive. He was, so to speak, the constitutional lawyer of
+      the Reformation, with vision as clear, with head as cool, with soul as
+      dry, as any old solicitor in rusty black that ever dwelt in chambers in
+      Lincoln's Inn. His sternness was that of the judge who dooms a criminal to
+      the gallows. His theology had much in it that is in striking harmony with
+      modern scientific philosophy, and much in it, too, that the descendants of
+      his Puritan converts have learned to loathe as sheer diabolism. It is hard
+      for us to forgive the man who burned Michael Servetus, even though it was
+      the custom of the time to do such things and the tender-hearted
+      Melanchthon found nothing to blame in it. It is not easy to speak of
+      Calvin with enthusiasm, as it comes natural to speak of the genial,
+      whole-souled, many-sided, mirth-and-song-loving Luther. Nevertheless it
+      would be hard to overrate the debt which mankind owe to Calvin. The
+      spiritual father of Coligny, of William the Silent, and of Cromwell must
+      occupy a foremost rank among the champions of modern democracy. Perhaps
+      not one of the mediaeval popes was more despotic in temper than Calvin;
+      but it is not the less true that the promulgation of his theology was one
+      of the longest steps that mankind have taken toward personal freedom.
+      Calvinism left the individual man alone in the presence of his God. His
+      salvation could not be wrought by priestly ritual, but only by the grace
+      of God abounding in his soul; and wretched creature that he felt himself
+      to be, through the intense moral awakening of which this stern theology
+      was in part the expression, his soul was nevertheless of infinite value,
+      and the possession of it was the subject of an everlasting struggle
+      between the powers of heaven and the powers of hell. In presence of the
+      awful responsibility of life, all distinctions of rank and fortune
+      vanished; prince and pauper were alike the helpless creatures of Jehovah
+      and suppliants for his grace. Calvin did not originate these doctrines; in
+      announcing them he was but setting forth, as he said, the Institutes of
+      the Christian religion; but in emphasizing this aspect of Christianity, in
+      engraving it upon men's minds with that keen-edged logic which he used
+      with such unrivalled skill, Calvin made them feel, as it had perhaps never
+      been felt before, the dignity and importance of the individual human soul.
+      It was a religion fit to inspire men who were to be called upon to fight
+      for freedom, whether in the marshes of the Netherlands or on the moors of
+      Scotland. In a church, moreover, based upon such a theology there was no
+      room for prelacy. Each single church tended to become an independent
+      congregation of worshippers, constituting one of the most effective
+      schools that has ever existed for training men in local self-government.
+      [[Sidenote: Calvin's theology in its political bearings]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When, therefore, upon the news of Elizabeth's accession to the throne, the
+      Protestant refugees made their way back to England, they came as
+      Calvinistic Puritans. Their stay upon the Continent had been short, but it
+      had been just enough to put the finishing touch upon the work that had
+      been going on since the days of Wyclif. Upon such men and their theories
+      Elizabeth could not look with favour. With all her father's despotic
+      temper, Elizabeth possessed her mother's fine tact, and she represented so
+      grandly the feeling of the nation in its life-and-death-struggle with
+      Spain and the pope, that never perhaps in English history has the crown
+      wielded so much real power as during the five-and-forty years of her
+      wonderful reign.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day Elizabeth asked a lady of the court how she contrived to retain
+      her husband's affection. The lady replied that "she had confidence in her
+      husband's understanding and courage, well founded on her own steadfastness
+      not to offend or thwart, but to cherish and obey, whereby she did persuade
+      her husband of her own affection, and in so doing did command his." "Go
+      to, go to, mistress," cried the queen, "You are wisely bent, I find. After
+      such sort do I keep the good will of all my husbands, my good people; for
+      if they did not rest assured of some special love towards them, they would
+      not readily yield me such good obedience." <a href="#linknote-2"
+      name="linknoteref-2" id="linknoteref-2"><small>2</small></a> Such a theory
+      of government might work well in the hands of an Elizabeth, and in the
+      circumstances in which England was then placed; but it could hardly be
+      worked by a successor. The seeds of revolt were already sown. The
+      disposition to curb the sovereign was growing and would surely assert
+      itself as soon as it should have some person less loved and respected than
+      Elizabeth to deal with. The queen in some measure foresaw this, and in the
+      dogged independence and uncompromising enthusiasm of the Puritans she
+      recognized the rock on which the monarchy might dash itself into pieces.
+      She therefore hated the Puritans, and persecuted them zealously with one
+      hand, while circumstances forced her in spite of herself to aid and abet
+      them with the other. She could not maintain herself against Spain without
+      helping the Dutch and the Huguenots; but every soldier she sent across the
+      channel came back, if he came at all, with his head full of the doctrines
+      of Calvin; and these stalwart converts were reinforced by the refugees
+      from France and the Netherlands who came flocking into English towns to
+      set up their thrifty shops and hold prayer-meetings in their humble
+      chapels. To guard the kingdom against the intrigues of Philip and the
+      Guises and the Queen of Scots, it was necessary to choose the most zealous
+      Protestants for the most responsible positions, and such men were more
+      than likely to be Calvinists and Puritans. Elizabeth's great ministers,
+      Burleigh, Walsingham, and Nicholas Bacon, were inclined toward Puritanism;
+      and so were the naval heroes who won the most fruitful victories of that
+      century, by shattering the maritime power of Spain and thus opening the
+      way for Englishmen to colonize North America. If we would realize the
+      dangers that would have beset the Mayflower and her successors but for the
+      preparatory work of these immortal sailors, we must remember the dreadful
+      fate of Ribault and his Huguenot followers in Florida, twenty-three years
+      before that most happy and glorious event, the destruction of the Spanish
+      Armada. But not even the devoted men and women who held their
+      prayer-meetings in the Mayflower's cabin were more constant in prayer or
+      more assiduous in reading the Bible than the dauntless rovers, Drake and
+      Hawkins, Gilbert and Cavendish. In the church itself, too, the Puritan
+      spirit grew until in 1575-83 it seized upon Grindal, archbishop of
+      Canterbury, who incurred the queen's disfavour by refusing to meddle with
+      the troublesome reformers or to suppress their prophesyings. By the end of
+      the century the majority of country gentlemen and of wealthy merchants in
+      the towns had become Puritans, and the new views had made great headway in
+      both universities, while at Cambridge they had become dominant.
+      [[Sidenote: Elizabeth's policy, and its effects] [[Sidenote: Puritan
+      Sea-rovers]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This allusion to the universities may serve to introduce the very
+      interesting topic of the geographical distribution of Puritanism in
+      England. No one can study the history of the two universities without
+      being impressed with the greater conservatism of Oxford, and the greater
+      hospitality of Cambridge toward new ideas. Possibly the explanation may
+      have some connection with the situation of Cambridge upon the East Anglian
+      border. The eastern counties of England have often been remarked as rife
+      in heresy and independency. For many generations the coast region between
+      the Thames and the Humber was a veritable <i>litus haereticum.</i>
+      Longland, bishop of Lincoln in 1520, reported Lollardism as especially
+      vigorous and obstinate in his diocese, where more than two hundred
+      heretics were once brought before him in the course of a single
+      visitation. It was in Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, and among
+      the fens of Ely, Cambridge, and Huntingdon, that Puritanism was strongest
+      at the end of the sixteenth century. It was as member and leading spirit
+      of the Eastern Counties Association that Oliver Cromwell began his
+      military career; and in so far as there was anything sectional in the
+      struggle between Charles I. and the Long Parliament, it was a struggle
+      which ended in the victory of east over west. East Anglia was from first
+      to last the one region in which the supremacy of Parliament was
+      unquestionable and impregnable, even after the strength of its population
+      had been diminished by sending some thousands of picked men and women to
+      America. While every one of the forty counties of England was represented
+      in the great Puritan exodus, the East Anglian counties contributed to it
+      far more than all the rest. Perhaps it would not be far out of the way to
+      say that two-thirds of the American people who can trace their ancestry to
+      New England might follow it back to the East Anglian shires of the
+      mother-country; one-sixth might follow it to those southwestern countries&mdash;Devonshire,
+      Dorset, and Somerset&mdash;which so long were foremost in maritime
+      enterprise; one-sixth to other parts of England. I would not insist upon
+      the exactness of such figures, in a matter where only a rough
+      approximation is possible; but I do not think they overstate the East
+      Anglian preponderance. It was not by accident that the earliest counties
+      of Massachusetts were called Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, or that Boston
+      in Lincolnshire gave its name to the chief city of New England. The native
+      of Connecticut or Massachusetts who wanders about rural England to-day
+      finds no part of it so homelike as the cosy villages and smiling fields
+      and quaint market towns as he fares leisurely and in not too straight a
+      line from Ipswich toward Hull. Countless little unobtrusive features
+      remind him of home. The very names on the sign-boards over the sleepy
+      shops have an unwontedly familiar look. In many instances the homestead
+      which his forefathers left, when they followed Winthrop or Hooker to
+      America, is still to be found, well-kept and comfortable; the ancient
+      manor-house built of massive unhewn stone, yet in other respects much like
+      the New England farmhouse, with its long sloping roof and gable end toward
+      the road, its staircase with twisted balusters running across the shallow
+      entry-way, its low ceilings with their sturdy oaken beams, its spacious
+      chimneys, and its narrow casements from which one might have looked out
+      upon the anxious march of Edward IV. from Ravenspur to the field of
+      victory at Barnet in days when America was unknown. Hard by, in the little
+      parish church which has stood for perhaps a thousand years, plain enough
+      and bleak enough to suit the taste of the sternest Puritan, one may read
+      upon the cold pavement one's own name and the names of one's friends and
+      neighbours in startling proximity, somewhat worn and effaced by the
+      countless feet that have trodden there. And yonder on the village green
+      one comes with bated breath upon the simple inscription which tells of
+      some humble hero who on that spot in the evil reign of Mary suffered death
+      by fire. Pursuing thus our interesting journey, we may come at last to the
+      quiet villages of Austerfield and Scrooby, on opposite banks of the river
+      Idle, and just at the corner of the three shires of Lincoln, York, and
+      Nottingham. It was from this point that the Puritan exodus to America was
+      begun. [[Sidenote: Puritanism was strongest in the eastern counties]
+      [[Sidenote: Preponderance of East Anglia in the Puritan exodus]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not, however, in the main stream of Puritanism, but in one of its
+      obscure rivulets that this world-famous movement originated. During the
+      reign of Elizabeth it was not the purpose of the Puritans to separate
+      themselves from the established church of which the sovereign was the
+      head, but to remain within it and reform it according to their own
+      notions. For a time they were partially successful in this work,
+      especially in simplifying the ritual and in giving a Calvinistic tinge to
+      the doctrines. In doing this they showed no conscious tendency toward
+      freedom of thought, but rather a bigotry quite as intense as that which
+      animated the system against which they were fighting. The most advanced
+      liberalism of Elizabeth's time was not to be found among the Puritans, but
+      in the magnificent treatise on "Ecclesiastical Polity" by the churchman
+      Richard Hooker. But the liberalism of this great writer, like that of
+      Erasmus a century earlier, was not militant enough to meet the sterner
+      demands of the time. It could not then ally itself with the democratic
+      spirit, as Puritanism did. It has been well said that while Luther was the
+      prophet of the Reformation that has been, Erasmus was the prophet of the
+      Reformation that is to come, and so it was to some extent with the
+      Puritans and Hooker. The Puritan fight against the hierarchy was a
+      political necessity of the time, something without which no real and
+      thorough reformation could then be effected. In her antipathy to this
+      democratic movement, Elizabeth vexed and tormented the Puritans as far as
+      she deemed it prudent; and in the conservative temper of the people she
+      found enough support to prevent their transforming the church as they
+      would have liked to do. Among the Puritans themselves, indeed, there was
+      no definite agreement on this point. Some would have stopped short with
+      Presbyterianism, while others held that "new presbyter was but old priest
+      writ large," and so pressed on to Independency. It was early in
+      Elizabeth's reign that the zeal of these extreme brethren, inflamed by
+      persecution, gave rise to the sect of Separatists, who flatly denied the
+      royal supremacy over ecclesiastical affairs, and asserted the right to set
+      up churches of their own, with pastors and elders and rules of discipline,
+      independent of queen or bishop. [[Sidenote: Puritanism was not
+      intentionally allied with liberalism]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1567 the first congregation of this sort, consisting of about a hundred
+      persons assembled in a hall in Anchor Lane in London, was forcibly broken
+      up and thirty-one of the number were sent to jail and kept there for
+      nearly a year. By 1576 the Separatists had come to be recognized as a
+      sect, under the lead of Robert Brown, a man of high social position,
+      related to the great Lord Burleigh. Brown fled to Holland, where he
+      preached to a congregation of English exiles, and wrote books which were
+      smuggled into England and privately circulated there, much to the disgust,
+      not only of the queen, but of all parties, Puritans as well as High
+      Churchmen. The great majority of Puritans, whose aim was not to leave the
+      church, but to stay in it and control it, looked with dread and
+      disapproval upon these extremists who seemed likely to endanger their
+      success by forcing them into deadly opposition to the crown. Just as in
+      the years which ushered in our late Civil War, the opponents of the
+      Republicans sought to throw discredit upon them by confusing them with the
+      little sect of Abolitionists; and just as the Republicans, in resenting
+      the imputation, went so far as to frown upon the Abolitionists, so that in
+      December, 1860, men who had just voted for Mr. Lincoln were ready to join
+      in breaking up "John Brown meetings" in Boston; so it was with religious
+      parties in the reign of Elizabeth. The opponents of the Puritans pointed
+      to the Separatists, and cried, "See whither your anarchical doctrines are
+      leading!" and in their eagerness to clear themselves of this insinuation,
+      the leading Puritans were as severe upon the Separatists as anybody. It is
+      worthy of note that in both instances the imputation, so warmly resented,
+      was true. Under the pressure of actual hostilities the Republicans did
+      become Abolitionists, and in like manner, when in England it came to
+      downright warfare the Puritans became Separatists. But meanwhile it fared
+      ill with the little sect which everybody hated and despised. Their
+      meetings were broken up by mobs. In an old pamphlet describing a "tumult
+      in Fleet Street, raised by the disorderly preachment, pratings, and
+      prattlings of a swarm of Separatists," one reads such sentences as the
+      following: "At length they catcht one of them alone, but they kickt him so
+      vehemently as if they meant to beat him into a jelly. It is ambiguous
+      whether they have kil'd him or no, but for a certainty they did knock him
+      about as if they meant to pull him to pieces. I confesse it had been no
+      matter if they had beaten the whole tribe in the like manner." For their
+      leaders the penalty was more serious. The denial of the queen's
+      ecclesiastical supremacy could be treated as high treason, and two of
+      Brown's friends, convicted of circulating his books, were sent to the
+      gallows. In spite of these dangers Brown returned to England in 1585.
+      William the Silent had lately been murdered, and heresy in Holland was not
+      yet safe from the long arm of the Spaniard. Brown trusted in Lord
+      Burleigh's ability to protect him, but in 1588, finding himself in
+      imminent danger, he suddenly recanted and accepted a comfortable living
+      under the bishops who had just condemned him. His followers were already
+      known as Brownists; henceforth their enemies took pains to call them so
+      and twit them with holding doctrines too weak for making martyrs.
+      [[Sidenote: Robert Brown and the Separatists]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The flimsiness of Brown's moral texture prevented him from becoming the
+      leader in the Puritan exodus to New England. That honour was reserved for
+      William Brewster, son of a country gentleman who had for many years been
+      postmaster at Scrooby. The office was then one of high responsibility and
+      influence. After taking his degree at Cambridge, Brewster became private
+      secretary to Sir William Davison, whom he accompanied on his mission to
+      the Netherlands. When Davison's public career came to an end in 1587,
+      Brewster returned to Scrooby, and soon afterward succeeded his father as
+      postmaster, in which position he remained until 1607. During the interval
+      Elizabeth died, and James Stuart came from Scotland to take her place on
+      the throne. [[Sidenote: William Brewster]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The feelings with which the late queen had regarded Puritanism were mild
+      compared with the sentiments entertained by her successor. For some years
+      he had been getting worsted in his struggle with the Presbyterians of the
+      northern kingdom. His vindictive memory treasured up the day when a mighty
+      Puritan preacher had in public twitched him by the sleeve and called him
+      "God's silly vassal." "I tell you, sir," said Andrew Melville on that
+      occasion, "there are two kings and two kingdoms in Scotland. There is
+      Christ Jesus the King, and his kingdom the Kirk, whose subject James VI.
+      is, and of whose kingdom not a king, nor a lord, nor a head, but a member.
+      And they whom Christ hath called to watch over his kirk and govern his
+      spiritual kingdom have sufficient power and authority so to do both
+      together and severally." In this bold and masterful speech we have the
+      whole political philosophy of Puritanism, as in a nutshell. Under the
+      guise of theocratic fanaticism, and in words as arrogant as ever fell from
+      priestly lips, there was couched the assertion of the popular will against
+      despotic privilege. Melville could say such things to the king's face and
+      walk away unharmed, because there stood behind him a people fully aroused
+      to the conviction that there is an eternal law of God, which kings no less
+      than scullions must obey. <a href="#linknote-3" name="linknoteref-3"
+      id="linknoteref-3"><small>3</small></a> Melville knew this full well, and
+      so did James know it in the bitterness of his heart. He would have no such
+      mischievous work in England. He despised Elizabeth's grand national policy
+      which his narrow intellect could not comprehend. He could see that in
+      fighting Spain and aiding Dutchmen and Huguenots she was strengthening the
+      very spirit that sought to pull monarchy down. In spite of her faults,
+      which were neither few nor small, the patriotism of that fearless woman
+      was superior to any personal ambition. It was quite otherwise with James.
+      He was by no means fearless, and he cared more for James Stuart than for
+      either England or Scotland. He had an overweening opinion of his skill in
+      kingcraft. In coming to Westminster it was his policy to use his newly
+      acquired power to break down the Puritan party in both kingdoms and to
+      fasten episcopacy upon Scotland. In pursuing this policy he took no heed
+      of English national sentiment, but was quite ready to defy and insult it,
+      even to the point of making&mdash;before children who remembered the
+      Armada had yet reached middle age&mdash;an alliance with the hated
+      Spaniard. In such wise James succeeded in arraying against the monarchical
+      principle the strongest forces of English life,&mdash;the sentiment of
+      nationality, the sentiment of personal freedom, and the uncompromising
+      religious fervour of Calvinism; and out of this invincible combination of
+      forces has been wrought the nobler and happier state of society in which
+      we live to-day. [[Sidenote: James Stuart and Andrew Melville]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Scarcely ten months had James been king of England when he invited the
+      leading Puritan clergymen to meet himself and the bishops in a conference
+      at Hampton Court, as he wished to learn what changes they would like to
+      make in the government and ritual of the church. In the course of the
+      discussion he lost his temper and stormed, as was his wont. [[Sidenote:
+      King James's view of the political situation]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The mention of the word "presbytery" lashed him into fury. "A Scottish
+      presbytery," he cried, "agreeth as well with a monarchy as God and the
+      Devil. Then Jack and Tom and Will and Dick shall meet, and at their
+      pleasures censure me and my council and all our proceedings .... Stay, I
+      pray you, for one seven years, before you demand that from me, and if then
+      you find me pursy and fat, and my windpipes stuffed, I will perhaps
+      hearken to you .... Until you find that I grow lazy, let that alone." One
+      of the bishops declared that in this significant tirade his Majesty spoke
+      by special inspiration from Heaven! The Puritans saw that their only hope
+      lay in resistance. If any doubt remained, it was dispelled by the vicious
+      threat with which the king broke up the conference. "I will <i>make</i>
+      them conform," said he, "or I will harry them out of the land."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These words made a profound sensation in England, as well they might, for
+      they heralded the struggle which within half a century was to deliver up
+      James's son to the executioner. The Parliament of 1604 met in angrier mood
+      than any Parliament which had assembled at Westminster since the
+      dethronement of Richard II. Among the churches non-conformity began more
+      decidedly to assume the form of secession. The key-note of the conflict
+      was struck at Scrooby. Staunch Puritan as he was, Brewster had not
+      hitherto favoured the extreme measures of the Separatists. Now he withdrew
+      from the church, and gathered together a company of men and women who met
+      on Sundays for divine service in his own drawing-room at Scrooby Manor. In
+      organizing this independent Congregationalist society, Brewster was
+      powerfully aided by John Robinson, a native of Lincolnshire. Robinson was
+      then thirty years of age, and had taken his master's degree at Cambridge
+      in 1600. He was a man of great learning and rare sweetness of temper, and
+      was moreover distinguished for a broad and tolerant habit of mind too
+      seldom found among the Puritans of that day. Friendly and unfriendly
+      writers alike bear witness to his spirit of Christian charity and the
+      comparatively slight value which he attached to orthodoxy in points of
+      doctrine; and we can hardly be wrong in supposing that the comparatively
+      tolerant behaviour of the Plymouth colonists, whereby they were contrasted
+      with the settlers of Massachusetts, was in some measure due to the abiding
+      influence of the teachings of this admirable man. Another important member
+      of the Scrooby congregation was William Bradford, of the neighbouring
+      village of Austerfield, then a lad of seventeen years, but already
+      remarkable for maturity of intelligence and weight of character. Afterward
+      governor of Plymouth for nearly thirty years, he became the historian of
+      his colony; and to his picturesque chronicle, written in pure and vigorous
+      English, we are indebted for most that we know of the migration that
+      started from Scrooby and ended in Plymouth. [[Sidenote: The congregation
+      of Separatists at Scrooby]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in 1606&mdash;two years after King James's truculent threat&mdash;that
+      this independent church of Scrooby was organized. Another year had not
+      elapsed before its members had suffered so much at the hands of officers
+      of the law, that they began to think of following the example of former
+      heretics and escaping to Holland. After an unsuccessful attempt in the
+      autumn of 1607, they at length succeeded a few months later in
+      accomplishing their flight to Amsterdam, where they hoped to find a home.
+      But here they found the English exiles who had preceded them so fiercely
+      involved in doctrinal controversies, that they decided to go further in
+      search of peace and quiet. This decision, which we may ascribe to
+      Robinson's wise counsels, served to keep the society of Pilgrims from
+      getting divided and scattered. They reached Leyden in 1609, just as the
+      Spanish government had sullenly abandoned the hopeless task of conquering
+      the Dutch, and had granted to Holland the Twelve Years Truce. During
+      eleven of these twelve years the Pilgrims remained in Leyden, supporting
+      themselves by various occupations, while their numbers increased from 300
+      to more than 1000. Brewster opened a publishing house, devoted mainly to
+      the issue of theological books. Robinson accepted a professorship in the
+      university, and engaged in the defence of Calvinism against the attacks of
+      Episcopius, the successor of Arminius. The youthful Bradford devoted
+      himself to the study of languages,&mdash;Dutch, French, Latin, Greek, and
+      finally Hebrew; wishing, as he said, to "see with his own eyes the ancient
+      oracles of God in all their native beauty." During their sojourn in Leyden
+      the Pilgrims were introduced to a strange and novel spectacle,&mdash;the
+      systematic legal toleration of all persons, whether Catholic or
+      Protestant, who called themselves followers of Christ. Not that there was
+      not plenty of intolerance in spirit, but the policy inaugurated by the
+      idolized William the Silent held it in check by law. All persons who came
+      to Holland, and led decorous lives there, were protected in their opinions
+      and customs. By contemporary writers in other countries this eccentric
+      behaviour of the Dutch government was treated with unspeakable scorn. "All
+      strange religions flock thither," says one; it is "a common harbour of all
+      heresies," a "cage of unclean birds," says another; "the great mingle
+      mangle of religion," says a third. <a href="#linknote-4"
+      name="linknoteref-4" id="linknoteref-4"><small>4</small></a> In spite of
+      the relief from persecution, however, the Pilgrims were not fully
+      satisfied with their new home. The expiration of the truce with Spain
+      might prove that this relief was only temporary; and at any rate, complete
+      toleration did not fill the measure of their wants. Had they come to
+      Holland as scattered bands of refugees, they might have been absorbed into
+      the Dutch population, as Huguenot refugees have been absorbed in Germany,
+      England, and America. But they had come as an organized community, and
+      absorption into a foreign nation was something to be dreaded. They wished
+      to preserve their English speech and English traditions, keep up their
+      organization, and find some favoured spot where they might lay the
+      corner-stone of a great Christian state. The spirit of nationality was
+      strong in them; the spirit of self-government was strong in them; and the
+      only thing which could satisfy these feelings was such a migration as had
+      not been seen since ancient times, a migration like that of Phokaians to
+      Massilia or Tyrians to Carthage. [[Sidenote: The flight to Holland]
+      [[Sidenote: Why the Pilgrims did not stay there]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was too late in the world's history to carry out such a scheme upon
+      European soil. Every acre of territory there was appropriated. The only
+      favourable outlook was upon the Atlantic coast of America, where English
+      cruisers had now successfully disputed the pretensions of Spain, and where
+      after forty years of disappointment and disaster a flourishing colony had
+      at length been founded in Virginia. The colonization of the North American
+      coast had now become part of the avowed policy of the British government.
+      In 1606 a great joint-stock company was formed for the establishment of
+      two colonies in America. The branch which was to take charge of the
+      proposed southern colony had its headquarters in London; the management of
+      the northern branch was at Plymouth in Devonshire. Hence the two branches
+      are commonly spoken of as the London and Plymouth companies. The former
+      was also called the Virginia Company, and the latter the North Virginia
+      Company, as the name of Virginia was then loosely applied to the entire
+      Atlantic coast north of Florida. The London Company had jurisdiction from
+      34 degrees to 38 degrees north latitude; the Plymouth Company had
+      jurisdiction from 45 degrees down to 41 degrees; the intervening
+      territory, between 38 degrees and 41 degrees was to go to whichever
+      company should first plant a self-supporting colony. The local government
+      of each colony was to be entrusted to a council resident in America and
+      nominated by the king; while general supervision over both colonies was to
+      be exercised by a council resident in England. [[Sidenote: The London and
+      Plymouth companies]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In pursuance of this general plan, though with some variations in detail,
+      the settlement of Jamestown had been begun in 1607, and its success was
+      now beginning to seem assured. On the other hand all the attempts which
+      had been made to the north of the fortieth parallel had failed miserably.
+      As early as 1602 Bartholomew Gosnold, with 32 men, had landed on the
+      headland which they named Cape Cod from the fish found thereabouts in
+      great numbers. This was the first English name given to any spot in that
+      part of America, and so far as known these were the first Englishmen that
+      ever set foot there. They went on and gave names to Martha's Vineyard and
+      the Elizabeth Islands in Buzzard's Bay; and on Cuttyhunk they built some
+      huts with the intention of remaining, but after a month's experience they
+      changed their mind and went back to England. Gosnold's story interested
+      other captains, and on Easter Sunday, 1605, George Weymouth set sail for
+      North Virginia, as it was called. He found Cape Cod and coasted northward
+      as far as the Kennebec river, up which he sailed for many miles. Weymouth
+      kidnapped five Indians and carried them to England, that they might learn
+      the language and acquire a wholesome respect for the arts of civilization
+      and the resistless power of white men. His glowing accounts of the
+      spacious harbours, the abundance of fish and game, the noble trees, the
+      luxuriant herbage, and the balmy climate, aroused general interest in
+      England, and doubtless had some influence upon the formation, in the
+      following year, of the great joint-stock company just described. The
+      leading spirit of the Plymouth Company was Sir John Popham, chief-justice
+      of England, and he was not disposed to let his friends of the southern
+      branch excel him in promptness. Within three months after the founding of
+      Jamestown, a party of 120 colonists, led by the judge's kinsman George
+      Popham, landed at the mouth of the Kennebec, and proceeded to build a rude
+      village of some fifty cabins, with storehouse, chapel, and block-house.
+      When they landed in August they doubtless shared Weymouth's opinion of the
+      climate. These Englishmen had heard of warm countries like Italy and cold
+      countries like Russia; harsh experience soon taught them that there are
+      climates in which the summer of Naples may alternate with the winter of
+      Moscow. The president and many others fell sick and died. News came of the
+      death of Sir John Popham in England, and presently the weary and
+      disappointed settlers abandoned their enterprise and returned to their old
+      homes. Their failure spread abroad in England the opinion that North
+      Virginia was uninhabitable by reason of the cold, and no further attempts
+      were made upon that coast until in 1614 it was visited by Captain John
+      Smith. [[Sidenote: First exploration of the New England coast]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The romantic career of this gallant and garrulous hero did not end with
+      his departure from the infant colony at Jamestown. By a curious destiny
+      his fame is associated with the beginnings of both the southern and the
+      northern portions of the United States. To Virginia Smith may be said to
+      have given its very existence as a commonwealth; to New England he gave
+      its name. In 1614 he came over with two ships to North Virginia, explored
+      its coast minutely from the Penobscot river to Cape Cod, and thinking it a
+      country of such extent and importance as to deserve a name of its own,
+      rechristened it New England. On returning home he made a very good map of
+      the coast and dotted it with English names suggested by Prince Charles. Of
+      these names Cape Elizabeth, Cape Ann, Charles River, and Plymouth still
+      remain where Smith placed them. In 1615 Smith again set sail for the New
+      World, this time with a view to planting a colony under the auspices of
+      the Plymouth Company, but his talent for strange adventures had not
+      deserted him. He was taken prisoner by a French fleet, carried hither and
+      thither on a long cruise, and finally set ashore at Rochelle, whence,
+      without a penny in his pocket, he contrived to make his way back to
+      England. Perhaps Smith's life of hardship may have made him prematurely
+      old. After all his wild and varied experience he was now only in his
+      thirty-seventh year, but he does not seem to have gone on any more
+      voyages. The remaining sixteen years of his life were spent quietly in
+      England in writing books, publishing maps, and otherwise stimulating the
+      public interest in the colonization of the New World. But as for the rocky
+      coast of New England, which he had explored and named, he declared that he
+      was not so simple as to suppose that any other motive than riches would
+      "ever erect there a commonwealth or draw company from their ease and
+      humours at home, to stay in New England." [[Sidenote: John Smith]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this opinion, however, the bold explorer was mistaken. Of all
+      migrations of peoples the settlement of New England is preeminently the
+      one in which the almighty dollar played the smallest part, however
+      important it may since have become as a motive power. It was left for
+      religious enthusiasm to achieve what commercial enterprise had failed to
+      accomplish. By the summer of 1617 the Pilgrim society at Leyden had
+      decided to send a detachment of its most vigorous members to lay the
+      foundations of a Puritan state in America. There had been much discussion
+      as to the fittest site for such a colony. Many were in favour of Guiana,
+      which Sir Walter Raleigh had described in such glowing colours; but it was
+      thought that the tropical climate would be ill-suited to northern men of
+      industrious and thrifty habit, and the situation, moreover, was
+      dangerously exposed to the Spaniards. Half a century had scarcely elapsed
+      since the wholesale massacre of Huguenots in Florida. Virginia was then
+      talked of, but Episcopal ideas had already taken root there. New England,
+      on the other hand, was considered too cold. Popham's experience was not
+      encouraging. But the country about the Delaware river afforded an
+      opportunity for erecting an independent colony under the jurisdiction of
+      the London Company, and this seemed the best course to pursue. Sir Edwin
+      Sandys, the leading spirit in the London Company, was favourably inclined
+      toward Puritans, and through him negotiations were begun. Capital to the
+      amount of £7000 was furnished by seventy merchant adventurers in England,
+      and the earnings of the settlers were to be thrown into a common stock
+      until these subscribers should have been remunerated. A grant of land was
+      obtained from the London Company, and the king was asked to protect the
+      emigrants by a charter, but this was refused. James, however, made no
+      objections to their going, herein showing himself less of a bigot than
+      Louis XIV. in later days, who would not suffer a Huguenot to set foot in
+      Canada, though France was teeming with Huguenots who would have been glad
+      enough to go. When James inquired how the colonists expected to support
+      themselves, some one answered, most likely by fishing. "Very good," quoth
+      the king, "it was the Apostles' own calling." He declared that no one
+      should molest them so long as they behaved themselves properly. From this
+      unwonted urbanity it would appear that James anticipated no trouble from
+      the new colony. A few Puritans in America could not do much to annoy him,
+      and there was of course a fair chance of their perishing, as so many other
+      colonizers had perished. [[Sidenote: The Pilgrims at Leyden decide to make
+      a settlement near the Delaware river]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The congregation at Leyden did not think it wise to cut loose from Holland
+      until they should have secured a foothold in America. It was but an
+      advance guard that started out from Delft haven late in July, 1620, in the
+      rickety ship Speedwell, with Brewster and Bradford, and sturdy Miles
+      Standish, a trained soldier whose aid was welcome, though he does not seem
+      to have belonged to the congregation. Robinson remained at Leyden, and
+      never came to America. After a brief stop at Southampton, where they met
+      the Mayflower with friends from London, the Pilgrims again set sail in the
+      two ships. The Speedwell sprang a leak, and they stopped at Dartmouth for
+      repairs. Again they started, and had put three hundred miles of salt water
+      between themselves and Land's End, when the Speedwell leaked so badly that
+      they were forced to return. When they dropped anchor at Plymouth in
+      Devonshire, about twenty were left on shore, and the remainder, exactly
+      one hundred in number, crowded into the Mayflower and on the 6th of
+      September started once more to cross the Atlantic. The capacity of the
+      little ship was 180 tons, and her strength was but slight. In a fierce
+      storm in mid-ocean a mainbeam amidships was wrenched and cracked, and but
+      for a huge iron screw which one of the passengers had brought from Delft,
+      they might have gone to the bottom. The foul weather prevented any
+      accurate calculation of latitude and longitude, and they were so far out
+      in their reckoning that when they caught sight of land on the 9th of
+      November, it was to Cape Cod that they had come. Their patent gave them no
+      authority to settle here, as it was beyond the jurisdiction of the London
+      Company. They turned their prow southward, but encountering perilous
+      shoals and a stiff headwind they desisted and sought shelter in Cape Cod
+      bay. On the 11th they decided to find some place of abode in this
+      neighbourhood, anticipating no difficulty in getting a patent from the
+      Plymouth Company, which was anxious to obtain settlers. For five weeks
+      they stayed in the ship while little parties were exploring the coast and
+      deciding upon the best site for a town. It was purely a coincidence that
+      the spot which they chose had already received from John Smith the name of
+      Plymouth, the beautiful port in Devonshire from which the Mayflower had
+      sailed. [[Sidenote: Founding of Plymouth]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was not much to remind them of home in the snow-covered coast on
+      which they landed. They had hoped to get their rude houses built before
+      the winter should set in, but the many delays and mishaps had served to
+      bring them ashore in the coldest season. When the long winter came to an
+      end, fifty-one of the hundred Pilgrims had died,&mdash;a mortality even
+      greater than that before which the Popham colony had succumbed. But
+      Brewster spoke truth when he said, "It is not with us as with men whom
+      small things can discourage or small discontentments cause to wish
+      themselves at home again." At one time the living were scarcely able to
+      bury the dead; only Brewster, Standish, and five other hardy ones were
+      well enough to get about. At first they were crowded under a single roof,
+      and as glimpses were caught of dusky savages skulking among the trees, a
+      platform was built on the nearest hill and a few cannon were placed there
+      in such wise as to command the neighbouring valleys and plains. By the end
+      of the first summer the platform had grown to a fortress, down from which
+      to the harbour led a village street with seven houses finished and others
+      going up. Twenty-six acres had been cleared, and a plentiful harvest
+      gathered in; venison, wild fowl, and fish were easy to obtain. When
+      provisions and fuel had been laid in for the ensuing winter, Governor
+      Bradford appointed a day of Thanksgiving. Town-meetings had already been
+      held, and a few laws passed. The history of New England had begun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This had evidently been a busy summer for the forty-nine survivors. On the
+      9th of November, the anniversary of the day on which they had sighted
+      land, a ship was descried in the offing. She was the Fortune, bringing
+      some fifty more of the Leyden company. It was a welcome reinforcement, but
+      it diminished the rations of food that could be served during the winter,
+      for the Fortune was not well supplied. When she set sail for England, she
+      carried a little cargo of beaver-skins and choice wood for wainscoting to
+      the value of L500 sterling, as a first instalment of the sum due to the
+      merchant adventurers. But this cargo never reached England, for the
+      Fortune was overhauled by a French cruiser and robbed of everything worth
+      carrying away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For two years more it was an anxious and difficult time for the new
+      colony. By 1624 its success may be said to have become assured. That the
+      Indians in the neighbourhood had not taken advantage of the distress of
+      the settlers in that first winter, and massacred every one of them, was
+      due to a remarkable circumstance. Early in 1617 a frightful pestilence had
+      swept over New England and slain, it is thought, more than half the Indian
+      population between the Penobscot river and Narragansett bay. Many of the
+      Indians were inclined to attribute this calamity to the murder of two or
+      three white fishermen the year before. They had not got over the
+      superstitious dread with which the first sight of white men had inspired
+      them, and now they believed that the strangers held the demon of the
+      plague at their disposal and had let him loose upon the red men in revenge
+      for the murders they had committed. This wholesome delusion kept their
+      tomahawks quiet for a while. When they saw the Englishmen establishing
+      themselves at Plymouth, they at first held a powwow in the forest, at
+      which the new-comers were cursed with all the elaborate ingenuity that the
+      sorcery of the medicine-men could summon for so momentous an occasion; but
+      it was deemed best to refrain from merely human methods of attack. It was
+      not until the end of the first winter that any of them mustered courage to
+      visit the palefaces. Then an Indian named Samoset, who had learned a
+      little English from fishermen and for his own part was inclined to be
+      friendly, came one day into the village with words of welcome. He was so
+      kindly treated that presently Massasoit, principal sachem of the
+      Wampanoags, who dwelt between Narragansett and Cape Cod bays, came with a
+      score of painted and feathered warriors and squatting on a green rug and
+      cushions in the governor's log-house smoked the pipe of peace, while
+      Standish with half-a-dozen musketeers stood quietly by. An offensive and
+      defensive alliance was then and there made between King Massasoit and King
+      James, and the treaty was faithfully kept for half a century. Some time
+      afterward, when Massasoit had fallen sick and lay at death's door, his
+      life was saved by Edward Winslow, who came to his wigwam and skilfully
+      nursed him. Henceforth the Wampanoag thought well of the Pilgrim. The
+      powerful Narragansetts, who dwelt on the farther side of the bay, felt
+      differently, and thought it worth while to try the effect of a threat. A
+      little while after the Fortune had brought its reinforcement, the
+      Narragansett sachem Canonicus sent a messenger to Plymouth with a bundle
+      of newly-made arrows wrapped in a snake-skin. The messenger threw it in at
+      the governor's door and made off with unseemly haste. Bradford understood
+      this as a challenge, and in this he was confirmed by a friendly Wampanoag.
+      The Narragansetts could muster 2000 warriors, for whom forty or fifty
+      Englishmen, even with firearms, were hardly a fair match; but it would not
+      do to show fear. Bradford stuffed the snake-skin with powder and bullets,
+      and sent it back to Canonicus, telling him that if he wanted war he might
+      come whenever he liked and get his fill of it. When the sachem saw what
+      the skin contained, he was afraid to touch it or have it about, and
+      medicine-men, handling it no doubt gingerly enough, carried it out of his
+      territory. [[Sidenote: Why the colony was not attacked by the Indians]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a fortunate miscalculation that brought the Pilgrims to New
+      England. Had they ventured upon the lands between the Hudson and the
+      Delaware, they would probably have fared worse. They would soon have come
+      into collision with the Dutch, and not far from that neighbourhood dwelt
+      the Susquehannocks, at that time one of the most powerful and ferocious
+      tribes on the continent. For the present the new-comers were less likely
+      to be molested in the Wampanoag country than anywhere else. In the course
+      of the year 1621 they obtained their grant from the Plymouth Company. This
+      grant was not made to them directly but to the joint-stock company of
+      merchant adventurers with whom they were associated. But the alliance
+      between the Pilgrims and these London merchants was not altogether
+      comfortable; there was too much divergence between their aims. In 1627 the
+      settlers, wishing to be entirely independent, bought up all the stock and
+      paid for it by instalments from the fruits of their labour. By 1633 they
+      had paid every penny, and become the undisputed owners of the country they
+      had occupied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such was the humble beginning of that great Puritan exodus from England to
+      America which had so much to do with founding and peopling the United
+      States. These Pilgrims of the Mayflower were but the pioneers of a mighty
+      host. Historically their enterprise is interesting not so much for what it
+      achieved as for what it suggested. Of itself the Plymouth colony could
+      hardly have become a wealthy and powerful state. Its growth was extremely
+      slow. After ten years its numbers were but three hundred. In 1643, when
+      the exodus had come to an end, and the New England Confederacy was formed,
+      the population of Plymouth was but three thousand. In an established
+      community, indeed, such a rate of increase would be rapid, but it was not
+      sufficient to raise in New England a power which could overcome Indians
+      and Dutchmen and Frenchmen, and assert its will in opposition to the
+      crown. It is when we view the founding of Plymouth in relation to what
+      came afterward, that it assumes the importance which belongs to the
+      beginning of a new era.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We have thus seen how it was that the political aspirations of James I.
+      toward absolute sovereignty resulted in the beginnings of the Puritan
+      exodus to America. In the next chapter we shall see how the still more
+      arbitrary policy of his ill-fated son all at once gave new dimensions to
+      that exodus and resulted in the speedy planting of a high-spirited and
+      powerful New England.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER III. &mdash; THE PLANTING OF NEW ENGLAND.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When Captain George Weymouth in the summer of 1605 sailed into the harbour
+      of Plymouth in Devonshire, with his five kidnapped savages and his glowing
+      accounts of the country since known as New England, the garrison of that
+      fortified seaport was commanded by Sir Ferdinando Gorges. The Christian
+      name of this person now strikes us as rather odd, but in those days it was
+      not so uncommon in England, and it does not necessarily indicate a Spanish
+      or Italian ancestry for its bearer. Gorges was a man of considerable
+      ability, but not of high character. On the downfall of his old patron the
+      Earl of Essex he had contrived to save his own fortunes by a course of
+      treachery and ingratitude. He had served in the Dutch war against Spain,
+      and since 1596 had been military governor of Plymouth. The sight of
+      Weymouth's Indians and the recital of his explorations awakened the
+      interest of Gorges in the colonization of North America. He became one of
+      the most active members of the Plymouth, or North Virginia, Company
+      established in the following year. It was he who took the leading part in
+      fitting out the two ships with which John Smith started on his
+      unsuccessful expedition in 1615. In the following years he continued to
+      send out voyages of exploration, became largely interested in the
+      fisheries, and at length in 1620 succeeded in obtaining a new patent for
+      the Plymouth Company, by which it was made independent of the London
+      Company, its old yoke-fellow and rival. This new document created a
+      corporation of forty patentees who, sitting in council as directors of
+      their enterprise, were known as the Council for New England. The president
+      of this council was King James's unpopular favourite the Duke of
+      Buckingham, and its most prominent members were the earls of Pembroke and
+      Lenox, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, and Shakespeare's friend the Earl of
+      Southampton. This council was empowered to legislate for its American
+      territory, to exercise martial law there and expel all intruders, and to
+      exercise a monopoly of trade within the limits of the patent. Such
+      extensive powers, entrusted to a company of which Buckingham was the head,
+      excited popular indignation, and in the great struggle against monopolies
+      which was then going on, the Plymouth Company did not fail to serve as a
+      target for attacks. It started, however, with too little capital to enter
+      upon schemes involving immediate outlay, and began almost from the first
+      to seek to increase its income by letting or selling portions of its
+      territory, which extended from the latitude of Philadelphia to that of
+      Quebec, thus encroaching upon regions where Holland and France were
+      already gaining a foothold. It was from this company that the merchant
+      adventurers associated with the Mayflower Pilgrims obtained their new
+      patent in the summer of 1621, and for the next fifteen years all settlers
+      in New England based their claims to the soil upon territorial rights
+      conveyed to them by the Plymouth Company. The grants, however, were often
+      ignorantly and sometimes unscrupulously made, and their limits were so
+      ill-defined that much quarrelling ensued. [[Sidenote: Sir Ferdinando
+      Gorges, and the Council for New England]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the years immediately following the voyage of the Mayflower,
+      several attempts at settlement were made about the shores of Massachusetts
+      bay. One of the merchant adventurers, Thomas Weston, took it into his head
+      in 1622 to separate from his partners and send out a colony of seventy men
+      on his own account. These men made a settlement at Wessagusset, some
+      twenty-five miles north of Plymouth. They were a disorderly, thriftless
+      rabble, picked up from the London streets, and soon got into trouble with
+      the Indians; after a year they were glad to get back to England as best
+      they could, and in this the Plymouth settlers willingly aided them. In
+      June of that same year 1622 there arrived on the scene a picturesque but
+      ill understood personage, Thomas Morton, "of Clifford's Inn, Gent.," as he
+      tells on the title-page of his quaint and delightful book, the "New
+      English Canaan." Bradford disparagingly says that he "had been a kind of
+      petie-fogger of Furnifell's Inn"; but the churchman Samuel Maverick
+      declares that he was a "gentleman of good qualitie." He was an agent of
+      Sir Ferdinando Gorges, and came with some thirty followers to make the
+      beginnings of a royalist and Episcopal settlement in the Massachusetts
+      bay. He was naturally regarded with ill favour by the Pilgrims as well as
+      by the later Puritan settlers, and their accounts of him will probably
+      bear taking with a grain or two of salt. [[Sidenote: Wessagusset and
+      Merrymount]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1625 there came one Captain Wollaston, with a gang of indented white
+      servants, and established himself on the site of the present town of
+      Quincy. Finding this system of industry ill suited to northern
+      agriculture, he carried most of his men off to Virginia, where he sold
+      them. Morton took possession of the site of the settlement, which he
+      called Merrymount. There, according to Bradford, he set up a "schoole of
+      athisme," and his men did quaff strong waters and comport themselves "as
+      if they had anew revived and celebrated the feasts of ye Roman Goddes
+      Flora, or the beastly practices of ye madd Bachanalians." Charges of
+      atheism have been freely hurled about in all ages. In Morton's case the
+      accusation seems to have been based upon the fact that he used the Book of
+      Common Prayer. His men so far maintained the ancient customs of merry
+      England as to plant a Maypole eighty feet high, about which they frolicked
+      with the redskins, while furthermore they taught them the use of firearms
+      and sold them muskets and rum. This was positively dangerous, and in the
+      summer of 1628 the settlers at Merrymount were dispersed by Miles
+      Standish. Morton was sent to England, but returned the next year, and
+      presently again repaired to Merrymount.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By this time other settlements were dotted about the coast. There were a
+      few scattered cottages or cabins at Nantasket and at the mouth of the
+      Piscataqua, while Samuel Maverick had fortified himself on Noddle's
+      Island, and William Blackstone already lived upon the Shawmut peninsula,
+      since called Boston. These two gentlemen were no friends to the Puritans;
+      they were churchmen and representatives of Sir Ferdinando Gorges.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The case was very different with another of these earliest settlements,
+      which deserves especial mention as coming directly in the line of
+      causation which led to the founding of Massachusetts by Puritans. For some
+      years past the Dorchester adventurers&mdash;a small company of merchants
+      in the shire town of Dorset&mdash;had been sending vessels to catch fish
+      off the New England coast. In 1623 these men conceived the idea of
+      planting a small village as a fishing station, and setting up a church and
+      preacher therein, for the spiritual solace of the fishermen and sailors.
+      In pursuance of this scheme a small party occupied Cape Ann, where after
+      two years they got into trouble with the men of Plymouth. Several grants
+      and assignments had made it doubtful where the ownership lay, and although
+      this place was not near their own town, the men of Plymouth claimed it.
+      The dispute was amicably arranged by Roger Conant, an independent settler
+      who had withdrawn from Plymouth because he did not fully sympathize with
+      the Separatist views of the people there. The next step was for the
+      Dorchester adventurers to appoint Conant as their manager, and the next
+      was for them to abandon their enterprise, dissolve their partnership, and
+      leave the remnant of the little colony to shift for itself. The settlers
+      retained their tools and cattle, and Conant found for them a new and safer
+      situation at Naumkeag, on the site of the present Salem. So far little
+      seemed to have been accomplished; one more seemed added to the list of
+      failures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the excellent John White, the Puritan rector of Trinity Church in
+      Dorchester, had meditated carefully about these things. He saw that many
+      attempts at colonization had failed because they made use of unfit
+      instruments, "a multitude of rude ungovernable persons, the very scum of
+      the land." So Virginia had failed in its first years, and only succeeded
+      when settled by worthy and industrious people under a strong government.
+      The example of Plymouth, as contrasted with Wessagusset, taught a similar
+      lesson. We desire, said White, "to raise a bulwark against the kingdom of
+      Antichrist." Learn wisdom, my countrymen, from the ruin which has befallen
+      the Protestants at Rochelle and in the Palatinate; learn "to avoid the
+      plague while it is foreseen, and not to tarry as they did till it overtook
+      them." The Puritan party in England was numerous and powerful, but the day
+      of strife was not far off and none might foretell its issue. Clearly it
+      was well to establish a strong and secure retreat in the New World, in
+      case of disaster in the Old. What had been done at Plymouth by a few men
+      of humble means might be done on a much greater scale by an association of
+      leading Puritans, including men of wealth and wide social influence. Such
+      arguments were urged in timely pamphlets, of one of which White is
+      supposed to have been the author. The matter was discussed in London, and
+      inquiry was made whether fit men could be found "to engage their persons
+      in the voyage." "It fell out that among others they lighted at last on
+      Master Endicott, a man well known to divers persons of good note, who
+      manifested much willingness to accept of the offer as soon as it was
+      tendered." All were thereby much encouraged, the schemes of White took
+      definite shape, and on the 19th of March, 1628, a tract of land was
+      obtained from the Council for New England, consisting of all the territory
+      included between three miles north of the Merrimack and three miles south
+      of the Charles in one direction, and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in
+      the other. [[Sidenote: John White and his noble scheme]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This liberal grant was made at a time when people still supposed the
+      Pacific coast to be not far west of Henry Hudson's river. The territory
+      was granted to an association of six gentlemen, only one of whom&mdash;John
+      Endicott&mdash;figures conspicuously in the history of New England. The
+      grant was made in the usual reckless style, and conflicted with various
+      patents which had been issued before. In 1622 Gorges and John Mason had
+      obtained a grant of all the land between the rivers Kennebec and
+      Merrimack, and the new grant encroached somewhat upon this. The difficulty
+      seems to have been temporarily adjusted by some sort of compromise which
+      restricted the new grant to the Merrimack, for in 1629 we find Mason's
+      title confirmed to the region between that river and the Piscataqua, while
+      later on Gorges appears as proprietor of the territory between the
+      Piscataqua and the Kennebec. A more serious difficulty was the claim of
+      Robert Gorges, son of Sir Ferdinando. That young man had in 1623 obtained
+      a grant of some 300 square miles in Massachusetts, and had gone to look
+      after it, but had soon returned discouraged to England and shortly
+      afterward died. But his claim devolved upon his surviving brother, John
+      Gorges, and Sir Ferdinando, in consenting to the grant to Endicott and his
+      friends, expressly reserved the rights of his sons. No such reservation,
+      however, was mentioned in the Massachusetts charter, and the colonists
+      never paid the slightest heed to it. In these conflicting claims were sown
+      seeds of trouble which bore fruit for more than half a century. In such
+      cases actual possession is apt to make nine points in the law, and
+      accordingly Endicott was sent over, as soon as possible, with sixty
+      persons, to reinforce the party at Naumkeag and supersede Conant as its
+      leader. On Endicott's arrival in September, 1628, the settlers were at
+      first inclined to dispute his authority, but they were soon conciliated,
+      and in token of this amicable adjustment the place was called by the
+      Hebrew name of Salem, or "peace." [[Sidenote: Conflicting grants sow seeds
+      of trouble] [[Sidenote: John Endicot and the founding of Salem]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile Mr. White and the partners in England were pushing things
+      vigorously. Their scheme took a wider scope. They were determined to
+      establish something more than a trading company. From Charles I. it was
+      sometimes easy to get promises because he felt himself under no obligation
+      to keep them. In March, 1629, a royal charter was granted, creating a
+      corporation, under the legal style of the Governor and Company of
+      Massachusetts Bay in New England. The affairs of this corporate body were
+      to be managed by a governor, deputy-governor, and a council of eighteen
+      assistants, to be elected annually by the company. They were empowered to
+      make such laws as they liked for their settlers, provided they did not
+      contravene the laws of England,&mdash;a proviso susceptible of much
+      latitude of interpretation. The place where the company was to hold its
+      meetings was not mentioned in the charter. The law-officers of the crown
+      at first tried to insert a condition that the government must reside in
+      England, but the grantees with skilful argument succeeding in preventing
+      this. Nothing was said in the charter about religious liberty, for a
+      twofold reason: the crown would not have granted it, and it was not what
+      the grantees wanted; such a provision would have been liable to hamper
+      them seriously in carrying out their scheme. They preferred to keep in
+      their own hands the question as to how much or how little religious
+      liberty they should claim or allow. Six small ships were presently fitted
+      out, and upon them were embarked 300 men, 80 women, and 26 children, with
+      140 head of cattle, 40 goats, and abundance of arms, ammunition, and
+      tools. The principal leader of this company was Francis Higginson, of St.
+      John's College, Cambridge, rector of a church in Leicestershire, who had
+      been deprived of his living for non-conformity. With him were associated
+      two other ministers, also graduates of Cambridge. All three were members
+      of the council. By the arrival of this company at Salem, Endicott now
+      became governor of a colony larger than any yet started in New England,&mdash;larger
+      than Plymouth after its growth of nearly nine years. [[Sidenote: The
+      Company of Massachusetts Bay]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The time was at length ripe for that great Puritan exodus of which the
+      voyage of the Mayflower had been the premonitory symptom. The grand crisis
+      for the Puritans had come, the moment when decisive action could no longer
+      be deferred. It was not by accident that the rapid development of John
+      White's enterprise into the Company of Massachusetts Bay coincided exactly
+      with the first four years of the reign of Charles I. They were years well
+      fitted to bring such a scheme to quick maturity. The character of Charles
+      was such as to exacerbate the evils of his father's reign. James could
+      leave some things alone in the comfortable hope that all would by and by
+      come out right, but Charles was not satisfied without meddling everywhere.
+      Both father and son cherished some good intentions; both were sincere
+      believers in their narrow theory of kingcraft. For wrong-headed obstinacy,
+      utter want of tact, and bottomless perfidy, there was little to choose
+      between them. The humorous epitaph of the grandson "whose word no man
+      relies on" might have served for them all. But of this unhappy family
+      Charles I. was eminently the dreamer. He lived in a world of his own, and
+      was slow in rendering thought into action; and this made him rely upon the
+      quick-witted but unwise and unscrupulous Buckingham, <a href="#linknote-5"
+      name="linknoteref-5" id="linknoteref-5"><small>5</small></a> who was silly
+      enough to make feeble attempts at unpopular warfare without consulting
+      Parliament. During each of Charles's first four years there was an angry
+      session of Parliament, in which, through the unwillingness of the popular
+      leaders to resort to violence, the king's policy seemed able to hold its
+      ground. Despite all protest the king persisted in levying strange taxes
+      and was to some extent able to collect them. Men who refused to pay
+      enforced loans were thrown into jail and the writ of <i>habeas corpus</i>
+      was denied them. Meanwhile the treatment of Puritans became more and more
+      vexatious. It was clear enough that Charles meant to become an absolute
+      monarch, like Louis XIII., but Parliament began by throwing all the blame
+      upon the unpopular minister and seeking to impeach him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the 5th of June, 1628, the House of Commons presented the most
+      extraordinary spectacle, perhaps in all its history. The famous Petition
+      of Right had been Passed by both Houses, and the royal answer had just
+      been received. Its tone was that of gracious assent, but it omitted the
+      necessary legal formalities, and the Commons well knew what this meant.
+      They were to be tricked with sweet words, and the petition was not to
+      acquire the force of a statute. How was it possible to deal with such a
+      slippery creature? There was but one way of saving the dignity of the
+      throne without sacrificing the liberty of the people, and that was to hold
+      the king's ministers responsible to Parliament, in anticipation of modern
+      methods. It was accordingly proposed to impeach the Duke of Buckingham
+      before the House of Lords. The Speaker now "brought an imperious message
+      from the king, ... warning them ... that he would not tolerate any
+      aspersion upon his ministers." Nothing daunted by this, Sir John Eliot
+      arose to lead the debate, when the Speaker called him to order in view of
+      the king's message. "Amid a deadly stillness" Eliot sat down and burst
+      into tears. For a moment the House was overcome with despair. Deprived of
+      all constitutional methods of redress, they suddenly saw yawning before
+      them the direful alternative&mdash;slavery or civil war. Since the day of
+      Bosworth a hundred and fifty years had passed without fighting worthy of
+      mention on English soil, such an era of peace as had hardly ever before
+      been seen on the earth; now half the nation was to be pitted against the
+      other half, families were to be divided against themselves, as in the
+      dreadful days of the Roses, and with what consequences no one could
+      foresee. "Let us sit in silence," quoth Sir Dudley Digges, "we are
+      miserable, we know not what to do!" Nay, cried Sir Nathaniel Rich, "we <i>must</i>
+      now speak, or forever hold our peace." Then did grim Mr. Prynne and Sir
+      Edward Coke mingle their words with sobs, while there were few dry eyes in
+      the House. Presently they found their voices, and used them in a way that
+      wrung from the startled king his formal assent to the Petition of Right.
+      [[Sidenote: Remarkable scene in the House of Commons]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is something strangely pathetic and historically significant <a
+      href="#linknote-6" name="linknoteref-6" id="linknoteref-6"><small>6</small></a>
+      in the emotion of these stern, fearless men. The scene was no less
+      striking on the 2d of the following March, when, "amid the cries and
+      entreaties of the Speaker held down in his chair by force," while the
+      Usher of the Black Rod was knocking loudly at the bolted door, and the
+      tramp of the king's soldiers was heard in the courtyard, Eliot's clear
+      voice rang out the defiance that whoever advised the levy of tonnage and
+      poundage without a grant from Parliament, or whoever voluntarily paid
+      those duties, was to be counted an enemy to the kingdom and a betrayer of
+      its liberties. As shouts of "Aye, aye," resounded on every side, "the
+      doors were flung open, and the members poured forth in a throng." The
+      noble Eliot went to end his days in the Tower, and for eleven years no
+      Parliament sat again in England. <a href="#linknote-7" name="linknoteref-7"
+      id="linknoteref-7"><small>7</small></a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in one and the same week that Charles I. thus began his experiment
+      of governing without a Parliament, and that he granted a charter to the
+      Company of Massachusetts Bay. He was very far, as we shall see, from
+      realizing the import of what he was doing. To the Puritan leaders it was
+      evident that a great struggle was at hand. Affairs at home might well seem
+      desperate, and the news from abroad was not encouraging. It was only four
+      months since the surrender of Rochelle had ended the existence of the
+      Huguenots as an armed political party. They had now sunk into the
+      melancholy condition of a tolerated sect which may at any moment cease to
+      be tolerated. In Germany the terrible Thirty Years War had just reached
+      the darkest moment for the Protestants. Fifteen months were yet to pass
+      before the immortal Gustavus was to cross the Baltic and give to the
+      sorely harassed cause of liberty a fresh lease of life. The news of the
+      cruel Edict of Restitution in this same fateful month of March, 1629,
+      could not but give the English Puritans great concern. Everywhere in
+      Europe the champions of human freedom seemed worsted. They might well
+      think that never had the prospect looked so dismal; and never before, as
+      never since, did the venture of a wholesale migration to the New World so
+      strongly recommend itself as the only feasible escape from a situation
+      that was fast becoming intolerable. Such were the anxious thoughts of the
+      leading Puritans in the spring of 1629, and in face of so grave a problem
+      different minds came naturally to different conclusions. Some were for
+      staying in England to fight it out to the bitter end; some were for
+      crossing the ocean to create a new England in the wilderness. Either task
+      was arduous enough, and not to be achieved without steadfast and sober
+      heroism. [[Sidenote: Desperate nature of the crisis]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the 26th of August twelve gentlemen, among the most eminent in the
+      Puritan party, held a meeting at Cambridge, and resolved to lead a
+      migration to New England, provided the charter of the Massachusetts Bay
+      Company and the government established under it could be transferred to
+      that country. On examination it appeared that no legal obstacle stood in
+      the way. Accordingly such of the old officers as did not wish to take part
+      in the emigration resigned their places, which were forthwith filled by
+      these new leaders. For governor the choice fell upon John Winthrop, a
+      wealthy gentleman from Groton in Suffolk, who was henceforth to occupy the
+      foremost place among the founders of New England. Winthrop was at this
+      time forty-one years of age, having been born in the memorable year of the
+      Armada. He was a man of remarkable strength and beauty of character, grave
+      and modest, intelligent and scholarlike, intensely religious and endowed
+      with a moral sensitiveness that was almost morbid, yet liberal withal in
+      his opinions and charitable in disposition. When his life shall have been
+      adequately written, as it never has been, he will be recognized as one of
+      the very noblest figures in American history. From early youth he had that
+      same power of winning confidence and commanding respect for which
+      Washington was so remarkable; and when he was selected as the Moses of the
+      great Puritan exodus, there was a wide-spread feeling that extraordinary
+      results were likely to come of such an enterprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In marked contrast to Winthrop stands the figure of the man associated
+      with him as deputy-governor. Thomas Dudley came of an ancient family, the
+      history of which, alike in the old and in the new England, has not been
+      altogether creditable. He represented the elder branch of that Norman
+      family, to the younger branch of which belonged the unfortunate husband of
+      Lady Jane Grey and the unscrupulous husband of Amy Robsart. There was,
+      however, very little likeness to Elizabeth's gay lover in grim Thomas
+      Dudley. His Puritanism was bleak and stern, and for Christian charity he
+      was not eminent. He had a foible for making verses, and at his death there
+      was found in his pocket a poem of his, containing a quatrain wherein the
+      intolerance of that age is neatly summed up:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Let men of God in courts and churches watch O'er such as do a Toleration
+      hatch, Lest that ill egg bring forth a cockatrice To poison all with
+      heresy and vice."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such was the spirit of most of the Puritans of that day, but in the
+      manifestation of it there were great differences, and here was the strong
+      contrast between Dudley and Winthrop,&mdash;a contrast which shows itself
+      in their portraits. In that of Dudley we see the typical narrow-minded,
+      strait-laced Calvinist for whom it is so much easier to entertain respect
+      than affection. In that of Winthrop we see a face expressive of what was
+      finest in the age of Elizabeth,&mdash;the face of a spiritual brother of
+      Raleigh and Bacon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The accession of two men so important as Winthrop and Dudley served to
+      bring matters speedily to a crisis. Their embarkation in April, 1630, was
+      the signal for a general movement on the part of the English Puritans.
+      Before Christmas of that year seventeen ships had come to New England,
+      bringing more than 1000 passengers. This huge wave of immigration quite
+      overwhelmed and bore away the few links of possession by which Gorges had
+      thus far kept his hold upon the country. In January, 1629, John Gorges had
+      tried to assert the validity of his late brother's claim by executing
+      conveyances covering portions of it. One of these was to John Oldham, a
+      man who had been harshly treated at Plymouth, and might be supposed very
+      ready to defend his rights against settlers of the Puritan company. Gorges
+      further maintained that he retained possession of the country through the
+      presence of his brother's tenants, Blackstone, Maverick, Walford, and
+      others on the shores of the bay. In June, 1629, Endicott had responded by
+      sending forward some fifty persons from Salem to begin the settlement of
+      Charlestown. Shortly before Winthrop's departure from England, Gorges had
+      sent that singular personage Sir Christopher Gardiner to look after his
+      interests in the New World, and there he was presently found established
+      near the mouth of the Neponset river, in company with "a comly yonge woman
+      whom he caled his cousin." But these few claimants were now at once lost
+      in the human tide which poured over Charlestown, Boston, Newtown,
+      Watertown, Roxbury, and Dorchester. The settlement at Merrymount was again
+      dispersed, and Morton sent back to London; Gardiner fled to the coast of
+      Maine and thence sailed for England in 1632. The Puritans had indeed
+      occupied the country in force.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here on the very threshold we are confronted by facts which show that not
+      a mere colonial plantation, but a definite and organized state was in
+      process of formation. The emigration was not like that of Jamestown or of
+      Plymouth. It sufficed at once to make the beginnings of half a dozen
+      towns, and the question as to self-government immediately sprang up. Early
+      in 1631 a tax of £60 was assessed upon the settlements, in order to pay
+      for building frontier fortifications at Newtown. This incident was in
+      itself of small dimensions, as incidents in newly founded states are apt
+      to be. But in its historic import it may serve to connect the England of
+      John Hampden with the New England of Samuel Adams. The inhabitants of
+      Watertown at first declined to pay this tax, which was assessed by the
+      Board of Assistants, on the ground that English freemen cannot rightfully
+      be taxed save by their own consent. This protest led to a change in the
+      constitution of the infant colony, and here, at once, we are introduced to
+      the beginnings of American constitutional history. At first it was thought
+      that public business could be transacted by a primary assembly of all the
+      freemen in the colony meeting four times in the year; but the number of
+      freemen increased so fast that this was almost at once (in October, 1630)
+      found to be impracticable. The right of choosing the governor and making
+      the laws was then left to the Board of Assistants; and in May, 1631, it
+      was further decided that the assistants need not be chosen afresh every
+      year, but might keep their seats during good behaviour or until ousted by
+      special vote of the freemen. If the settlers of Massachusetts had been
+      ancient Greeks or Romans, this would have been about as far as they could
+      go in the matter; the choice would have been between a primary assembly
+      and an assembly of notables. It is curious to see Englishmen passing from
+      one of these alternatives to the other. But it was only for a moment. The
+      protest of the Watertown men came in time to check these proceedings,
+      which began to have a decidedly oligarchical look. To settle the immediate
+      question of the tax, two deputies were sent from each settlement to advise
+      with the Board of Assistants; while the power of choosing each year the
+      governor and assistants was resumed by the freemen. Two years later, in
+      order to reserve to the freemen the power of making laws without
+      interfering too much with the ordinary business of life, the colonists
+      fell back upon the old English rural plan of electing deputies or
+      representatives to a general court. [[Sidenote: The question as to
+      self-government raised at Watertown]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At first the deputies sat in the same chamber with the assistants, but at
+      length in 1644 they were formed into a second chamber with increased
+      powers, and the way in which this important constitutional change came
+      about is worth remembering, as an illustration of the smallness of the
+      state which so soon was to play a great part in history. As Winthrop puts
+      it, "there fell out a great business upon a very small occasion." To a
+      certain Captain Keayne, of Boston, a rich man deemed to be hard and
+      overbearing toward the poor, there was brought a stray pig, whereof he
+      gave due public notice through the town-crier, yet none came to claim it
+      till after he had killed a pig of his own which he kept in the same stye
+      with the stray. A year having passed by, a poor woman named Sherman came
+      to see the stray and to decide if it were one that she had lost. Not
+      recognizing it as hers, she forthwith laid claim to the slaughtered pig.
+      The case was brought before the elders of the church of Boston, who
+      decided that the woman was mistaken. Mrs. Sherman then accused the captain
+      of theft, and brought the case before a jury, which exonerated the
+      defendant with £3 costs. The captain then sued Mrs. Sherman for defamation
+      of character and got a verdict for £40 damages, a round sum indeed to
+      assess upon the poor woman. But long before this it had appeared that she
+      had many partisans and supporters; it had become a political question, in
+      which the popular protest against aristocracy was implicated. Not yet
+      browbeaten, the warlike Mrs. Sherman appealed to the General Court. The
+      length of the hearing shows the importance which was attached to the case.
+      After seven days of discussion, the vote was taken. Seven assistants and
+      eight deputies approved the former decisions, two assistants and fifteen
+      deputies condemned them, while seven deputies refrained from voting. In
+      other words, Captain Keayne has a decided majority among the more
+      aristocratic assistants, while Mrs. Sherman seemed to prevail with the
+      more democratic deputies. Regarding the result as the vote of a single
+      body, the woman had a plurality of two; regarding it as the vote of a
+      double body, her cause had prevailed in the lower house, but was lost by
+      the veto of the upper. No decision was reached at the time, but after a
+      year of discussion the legislature was permanently separated into two
+      houses, each with a veto power upon the other; and this was felt to be a
+      victory for the assistants. As for the ecclesiastical polity of the new
+      colony, it had begun to take shape immediately upon the arrival of
+      Endicott's party at Salem. The clergymen, Samuel Skelton and Francis
+      Higginson, consecrated each other, and a church covenant and confession of
+      faith were drawn up by Higginson. Thirty persons joining in this covenant
+      constituted the first church in the colony; and several brethren appointed
+      by this church proceeded formally to ordain the two ministers by the
+      laying on of hands. In such simple wise was the first Congregational
+      church in Massachusetts founded. The simple fact of removal from England
+      converted all the Puritan emigrants into Separatists, as Robinson had
+      already predicted. Some, however, were not yet quite prepared for so
+      radical a measure. These proceedings gave umbrage to two of the Salem
+      party, who attempted forthwith to set up a separate church in conformity
+      with episcopal models. A very important question was thus raised at once,
+      but it was not allowed to disturb the peace of the colony. Endicott was a
+      man of summary methods. He immediately sent the two malcontents back to
+      England; and thus the colonial church not only seceded from the national
+      establishment, but the principle was virtually laid down that the
+      Episcopal form of worship would not be tolerated in the colony. For the
+      present such a step was to be regarded as a measure of self-defence on the
+      part of the colonists. Episcopacy to them meant actual and practical
+      tyranny&mdash;the very thing they had crossed the ocean expressly to get
+      away from&mdash;and it was hardly to be supposed that they would encourage
+      the growth of it in their new home. One or two surpliced priests,
+      conducting worship in accordance with the Book of Common Prayer, might in
+      themselves be excellent members of society; but behind the surpliced
+      priest the colonist saw the intolerance of Laud and the despotism of the
+      Court of High Commission. In 1631 a still more searching measure of
+      self-protection was adopted. It was decided that "no man shall be admitted
+      to the freedom of this body politic, but such as are members of some of
+      the churches within the limits of the same." Into the merits of this
+      measure as illustrating the theocratic ideal of society which the Puritans
+      sought to realize in New England, we shall inquire hereafter. At present
+      we must note that, as a measure of self-protection, this decree was
+      intended to keep out of the new community all emissaries of Strafford and
+      Laud, as well as such persons as Morton and Gardiner and other agents of
+      Sir Ferdinando Gorges.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By the year 1634 the scheme of the Massachusetts Company had so far
+      prospered that nearly 4000 Englishmen had come over, and some twenty
+      villages on or near the shores of the bay had been founded. The building
+      of permanent houses, roads, fences, and bridges had begun to go on quite
+      briskly; farms were beginning to yield a return for the labour of the
+      husbandman; lumber, furs, and salted fish were beginning to be sent to
+      England in exchange for manufactured articles; 4000 goats and 1500 head of
+      cattle grazed in the pastures, and swine innumerable rooted in the
+      clearings and helped to make ready the land for the ploughman. Political
+      meetings were held, justice was administered by magistrates after old
+      English precedents, and church services were performed by a score of
+      clergymen, nearly all graduates of Cambridge, though one or two had their
+      degrees from Oxford, and nearly all of whom had held livings in the Church
+      of England. The most distinguished of these clergymen, John Cotton, in his
+      younger days a Fellow and Tutor of Emmanuel College, had for more than
+      twenty years been rector of St. Botolph's, when he left the most
+      magnificent parish church in England to hold service in the first rude
+      meeting-house of the new Boston. From Emmanuel College came also Thomas
+      Hooker and John Harvard. Besides these clergymen, so many of the leading
+      persons concerned in the emigration were university men that it was not
+      long before a university began to seem indispensable to the colony. In
+      1636 the General Court appropriated £400 toward the establishment of a
+      college at Newtown. In 1638 John Harvard, dying childless, bequeathed his
+      library and the half of his estate to the new college, which the Court
+      forthwith ordered to be called by his name; while in honour of the mother
+      university the name of the town was changed to Cambridge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It has been said that the assembly which decreed the establishment of
+      Harvard College was "the first body in which the people, by their
+      representatives, ever gave their own money to found a place of education."
+      <a href="#linknote-8" name="linknoteref-8" id="linknoteref-8"><small>8</small></a>
+      The act was a memorable one if we have regard to all the circumstances of
+      the year in which it was done. On every side danger was in the air.
+      Threatened at once with an Indian war, with the enmity of the home
+      government, and with grave dissensions among themselves, the year 1636 was
+      a trying one indeed for the little community of Puritans, and their
+      founding a college by public taxation just at this time is a striking
+      illustration of their unalterable purpose to realize, in this new home,
+      their ideal of an educated Christian society. [[Sidenote: Threefold danger
+      in the year 1636]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That the government of Charles I. should view with a hostile eye the
+      growth of a Puritan state in New England is not at all surprising. (1.
+      From the king, who prepares to attack the infant colony but is fueled by
+      dissensions at home.) The only fit ground for wonder would seem to be that
+      Charles should have been willing at the outset to grant a charter to the
+      able and influential Puritans who organized the Company of Massachusetts
+      Bay. Probably, however, the king thought at first that it would relieve
+      him at home if a few dozen of the Puritan leaders could be allowed to
+      concentrate their minds upon a project of colonization in America. It
+      might divert attention for a moment from his own despotic schemes. Very
+      likely the scheme would prove a failure and the Massachusetts colony incur
+      a fate like that of Roanoke Island; and at all events the wealth of the
+      Puritans might better be sunk in a remote and perilous enterprise than
+      employed at home in organizing resistance to the crown. Such, very likely,
+      may have been the king's motive in granting the Massachusetts charter two
+      days after turning his Parliament out of doors. But the events of the last
+      half-dozen years had come to present the case in a new light. The young
+      colony was not languishing. It was full of sturdy life; it had wrought
+      mischief to the schemes of Gorges; and what was more, it had begun to take
+      unheard-of liberties with things ecclesiastical and political. Its example
+      was getting to be a dangerous one. It was evidently worth while to put a
+      strong curb upon Massachusetts. Any promise made to his subjects Charles
+      regarded as a promise made under duress which he was quite justified in
+      breaking whenever it suited his purpose to do so. Enemies of Massachusetts
+      were busy in England. Schismatics from Salem and revellers from Merrymount
+      were ready with their tales of woe, and now Gorges and Mason were
+      vigorously pressing their territorial claims. They bargained with the
+      king. In February, 1635, the moribund Council for New England surrendered
+      its charter and all its corporate rights in America, on condition that the
+      king should disregard all the various grants by which these rights had
+      from time to time been alienated, and should divide up the territory of
+      New England in severalty among the members of the Council. In pursuance of
+      this scheme Gorges and Mason, together with half a dozen noblemen, were
+      allowed to parcel out New England among themselves as they should see fit.
+      In this way the influence of the Marquis of Hamilton, with the Earls of
+      Arundel, Surrey, Carlisle, and Stirling, might be actively enlisted
+      against the Massachusetts Company. A writ of <i>quo warranto</i> was
+      brought against it; and it was proposed to send Sir Ferdinando to govern
+      New England with viceregal powers like those afterward exercised by
+      Andros.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a moment the danger seemed alarming; but, as Winthrop says, "the Lord
+      frustrated their design." It was noted as a special providence that the
+      ship in which Gorges was to sail was hardly off the stocks when it fell to
+      pieces. Then the most indefatigable enemy of the colony, John Mason,
+      suddenly died. The king issued his famous writ of ship-money and set all
+      England by the ears; and, to crown all, the attempt to read the Episcopal
+      liturgy at St. Giles's church in Edinburgh led straight to the Solemn
+      League and Covenant. Amid the first mutterings of the Great Rebellion the
+      proceedings against Massachusetts were dropped, and the unheeded colony
+      went on thriving in its independent course. Possibly too some locks at
+      Whitehall may have been turned with golden keys, <a href="#linknote-9"
+      name="linknoteref-9" id="linknoteref-9"><small>9</small></a> for the
+      company was rich, and the king was ever open to such arguments. But when
+      the news of his evil designs had first reached Boston the people of the
+      infant colony showed no readiness to yield to intimidation. In their
+      measures there was a decided smack of what was to be realized a hundred
+      and forty years later. Orders were immediately issued for fortifying
+      Castle Island in the harbour and the heights at Charlestown and
+      Dorchester. Militia companies were put in training, and a beacon was set
+      up on the highest hill in Boston, to give prompt notice to all the
+      surrounding country of any approaching enemy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While the ill will of the home government thus kept the colonists in a
+      state of alarm, there were causes of strife at work at their very doors,
+      of which they were fain to rid themselves as soon as possible. Among all
+      the Puritans who came to New England there is no more interesting figure
+      than the learned, quick-witted pugnacious Welshman, Roger Williams. He was
+      over-fond of logical subtleties and delighted in controversy. There was
+      scarcely any subject about which he did not wrangle, from the sinfulness
+      of persecution to the propriety of women wearing veils in church. Yet,
+      with all this love of controversy, there has perhaps never lived a more
+      gentle and kindly soul. Within five years from the settlement of
+      Massachusetts this young preacher had announced the true principles of
+      religious liberty with a clearness of insight quite remarkable in that
+      age. Roger Williams had been aided in securing an education by the great
+      lawyer Sir Edward Coke, and had lately taken his degree at Pembroke
+      College, Cambridge; but the boldness with which he declared his opinions
+      had aroused the hostility of Laud, and in 1631 he had come over to
+      Plymouth, whence he removed two years later to Salem, and became pastor of
+      the church there. The views of Williams, if logically carried out,
+      involved the entire separation of church from state, the equal protection
+      of all forms of religious faith, the repeal of all laws compelling
+      attendance on public worship, the abolition of tithes and of all forced
+      contributions to the support of religion. Such views are to-day quite
+      generally adopted by the more civilized portions of the Protestant world;
+      but it is needless to say that they were not the views of the seventeenth
+      century, in Massachusetts or elsewhere. For declaring such opinions as
+      these on the continent of Europe, anywhere except in Holland, a man like
+      Williams would in that age have run great risk of being burned at the
+      stake. In England, under the energetic misgovernment of Laud, he would
+      very likely have had to stand in the pillory with his ears cropped, or
+      perhaps, like Bunyan and Baxter, would have been sent to jail. In
+      Massachusetts such views were naturally enough regarded as anarchical, but
+      in Williams's case they were further complicated by grave political
+      imprudence. He wrote a pamphlet in which he denied the right of the
+      colonists to the lands which they held in New England under the king's
+      grant. He held that the soil belonged to the Indians, that the settlers
+      could only obtain a valid title to it by purchase from them, and that the
+      acceptance of a patent from a mere intruder, like the king, was a sin
+      requiring public repentance. This doctrine was sure to be regarded in
+      England as an attack upon the king's supremacy over Massachusetts, and at
+      the same time an incident occurred in Salem which made it all the more
+      unfortunate. The royal colours under which the little companies of militia
+      marched were emblazoned with the red cross of St. George. The
+      uncompromising Endicott loathed this emblem as tainted with Popery, and
+      one day he publicly defaced the flag of the Salem company by cutting out
+      the cross. The enemies of Massachusetts misinterpreted this act as a
+      defiance aimed at the royal authority, and they attributed it to the
+      teachings of Williams. In view of the king's unfriendliness these were
+      dangerous proceedings. Endicott was summoned before the General Court at
+      Boston, where he was publicly reprimanded and declared incapable of
+      holding office for a year. A few months afterward, in January, 1636,
+      Williams was ordered by the General Court to come to Boston and embark in
+      a ship that was about to set sail for England. But he escaped into the
+      forest, and made his way through the snow to the wigwam of Massasoit. He
+      was a rare linguist, and had learned to talk fluently in the language of
+      the Indians, and now he passed the winter in trying to instill into their
+      ferocious hearts something of the gentleness of Christianity. In the
+      spring he was privately notified by Winthrop that if he were to steer his
+      course to Narragansett bay he would be secure from molestation; and such
+      was the beginning of the settlement of Providence. [[Sidenote: From
+      religious dissensions; Roger Williams]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Shortly before the departure of Williams, there came to Boston one of the
+      greatest Puritan statesmen of that heroic age, the younger Henry Vane. It
+      is pleasant to remember that the man and Anne who did so much to overthrow
+      the tyranny of Strafford, who brought the military strength of Scotland to
+      the aid of the hard-pressed Parliament, who administered the navy with
+      which Blake won his astonishing victories, who dared even withstand
+      Cromwell at the height of his power when his measures became too violent,&mdash;it
+      is pleasant to remember that this admirable man was once the chief
+      magistrate of an American commonwealth. It is pleasant for a Harvard man
+      to remember that as such he presided over the assembly that founded our
+      first university. Thorough republican and enthusiastic lover of liberty,
+      he was spiritually akin to Jefferson and to Samuel Adams. Like Williams he
+      was a friend to toleration, and like Williams he found Massachusetts an
+      uncomfortable home. In 1636 he was only twenty-four years of age, "young
+      in years," and perhaps not yet "in sage counsel old." He was chosen
+      governor for that year, and his administration was stormy. Among those
+      persons who had followed Mr. Cotton from Lincolnshire was Mrs. Anne
+      Hutchinson, a very bright and capable lady, if perhaps somewhat impulsive
+      and indiscreet. She had brought over with her, says Winthrop, "two
+      dangerous errors: first, that the person of the Holy Ghost dwells in a
+      justified person; second, that no sanctification can help to evidence to
+      us our justification." Into the merits of such abstruse doctrines it is
+      not necessary for the historian to enter. One can hardly repress a smile
+      as one reflects how early in the history of Boston some of its
+      characteristic social features were developed. It is curious to read of
+      lectures there in 1636, lectures by a lady, and transcendentalist lectures
+      withal! Never did lectures in Boston arouse greater excitement than Mrs.
+      Hutchinson's. Many of her hearers forsook the teachings of the regular
+      ministers, to follow her. [[Sidenote: Henry Vane and Anne Hutchinson]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was very effectively supported by her brother-in-law, Mr. Wheelwright,
+      an eloquent preacher, and for a while she seemed to be carrying everything
+      before her. She won her old minister Mr. Cotton, she won the stout soldier
+      Captain Underhill, she won Governor Vane himself; while she incurred the
+      deadly hatred of such men as Dudley and Cotton's associate John Wilson.
+      The church at Boston was divided into two hostile camps. The sensible
+      Winthrop marvelled at hearing men distinguished "by being under a covenant
+      of grace or a covenant of works, as in other countries between Protestants
+      and Papists," and he ventured to doubt whether any man could really tell
+      what the difference was. The theological strife went on until it
+      threatened to breed civil disaffection among the followers of Mrs.
+      Hutchinson. A peculiar bitterness was given to the affair, from the fact
+      that she professed to be endowed with the spirit of prophecy and taught
+      her partisans that it was their duty to follow the biddings of a
+      supernatural light; and there was nothing which the orthodox Puritan so
+      steadfastly abhorred as the anarchical pretence of living by the aid of a
+      supernatural light. In a strong and complex society the teachings of Mrs.
+      Hutchinson would have awakened but a languid speculative interest, or
+      perhaps would have passed by unheeded. In the simple society of
+      Massachusetts in 1636, physically weak and as yet struggling for very
+      existence, the practical effect of such teachings may well have been
+      deemed politically dangerous. When things came to such a pass that the
+      forces of the colony were mustered for an Indian campaign and the men of
+      Boston were ready to shirk the service because they suspected their
+      chaplain to be "under a covenant of works," it was naturally thought to be
+      high time to put Mrs. Hutchinson down. In the spring of 1637 Winthrop was
+      elected governor, and in August Vane returned to England. His father had
+      at that moment more influence with the king than any other person except
+      Strafford, and the young man had indiscreetly hinted at an appeal to the
+      home government for the protection of the Antinomians, as Mrs.
+      Hutchinson's followers were called. But an appeal from America to England
+      was something which Massachusetts would no more tolerate in the days of
+      Winthrop than in the days of Hancock and Adams. Soon after Vane's
+      departure, Mrs. Hutchinson and her friends were ordered to leave the
+      colony. It was doubtless an odious act of persecution, yet of all such
+      acts which stain the history of Massachusetts in the seventeenth century,
+      it is just the one for which the plea of political necessity may really be
+      to some extent accepted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We now begin to see how the spreading of the New England colonization, and
+      the founding of distinct communities, was hastened by these differences of
+      opinion on theological questions or on questions concerning the relations
+      between church and state. Of Mrs. Hutchinson's friends and adherents, some
+      went northward, and founded the towns of Exeter and Hampton. Some time
+      before Portsmouth and Dover had been settled by followers of Mason and
+      Gorges. In 1641 these towns were added to the domain of Massachusetts, and
+      so the matter stood until 1679, when we shall see Charles II. marking them
+      off as a separate province, under a royal government. Such were the
+      beginnings of New Hampshire. Mrs. Hutchinson herself, however, with the
+      rest of her adherents, bought the island of Aquedneck from the Indians,
+      and settlements were made at Portsmouth and Newport. After a quarter of a
+      century of turbulence, these settlements coalesced with Williams's colony
+      at Providence, and thus was formed the state of Rhode Island. After her
+      husband's death in 1642, Mrs. Hutchinson left Aquedneck and settled upon
+      some land to the west of Stamford and supposed to be within the territory
+      of the New Netherlands. There in the following year she was cruelly
+      murdered by Indians, together with nearly all her children and servants,
+      sixteen victims in all. One of her descendants was the illustrious Thomas
+      Hutchinson, the first great American historian, and last royal governor of
+      Massachusetts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the dangers arising from the ill-will of the crown, and from these
+      theological quarrels, there was added the danger of a general attack by
+      the savages. Down to this time, since the landing of the Pilgrims at
+      Plymouth, the settlers of New England had been in no way molested by the
+      natives. Massasoit's treaty with the Pilgrims was scrupulously observed on
+      both sides, and kept the Wampanoags quiet for fifty-four years. The
+      somewhat smaller tribe which took its name from the <i>Massawachusett</i>,
+      or Great Hill, of Milton, kept on friendly terms with the settlers about
+      Boston, because these red men coveted the powerful aid of the white
+      strangers in case of war with their hereditary foes the Tarratines, who
+      dwelt in the Piscataqua country. It was only when the English began to
+      leave these coast regions and press into the interior that trouble arose.
+      The western shores of Narragansett bay were possessed by the numerous and
+      warlike tribe of that name, which held in partial subjection the Nyantics
+      near Point Judith. To the west of these, and about the Thames river, dwelt
+      the still more formidable Pequots, a tribe which for bravery and ferocity
+      asserted a preeminence in New England not unlike that which the Iroquois
+      league of the Mohawk valley was fast winning over all North America east
+      of the Mississippi. North of the Pequots, the squalid villages of the
+      Nipmucks were scattered over the beautiful highlands that stretch in long
+      ridges from Quinsigamond to Nichewaug, and beyond toward blue Monadnock.
+      Westward, in the lower Connecticut valley, lived the Mohegans, a small but
+      valiant tribe, now for some time held tributary to their Pequot cousins,
+      and very restive under the yoke. The thickly wooded mountain ranges
+      between the Connecticut and the Hudson had few human inhabitants. These
+      hundred miles of crag and forest were a bulwark none too wide or strong
+      against the incursions of the terrible Mohawks, whose name sent a shiver
+      of fear throughout savage New England, and whose forbearance the Nipmucks
+      and Mohegans were fain to ensure by a yearly payment of blackmail. Each
+      summer there came two Mohawk elders, secure in the dread that Iroquois
+      prowess had everywhere inspired; and up and down the Connecticut valley
+      they seized the tribute of weapons and wampum, and proclaimed the last
+      harsh edict issued from the savage council at Onondaga. The scowls that
+      greeted their unwelcome visits were doubtless nowhere fiercer than among
+      the Mohegans, thus ground down between Mohawk and Pequot as between the
+      upper and the nether millstone. [[Sidenote: From the Indians: the Pequot
+      supremacy]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among the various points in which civilized man surpasses the savage none
+      is more conspicuous than the military brute force which in the highest
+      civilization is always latent though comparatively seldom exerted. The
+      sudden intrusion of English warfare into the Indian world of the
+      seventeenth century may well have seemed to the red men a supernatural
+      visitation, like the hurricane or the earthquake. The uncompromising
+      vigour with which the founders of Massachusetts carried on their work was
+      viewed in some quarters with a dissatisfaction which soon thrust the
+      English migration into the very heart of the Indian country.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first movement, however, was directed against the encroachments of the
+      New Netherlands. In October, 1634, some men of Plymouth, led by William
+      Holmes, sailed up the Connecticut river, and, after bandying threats with
+      a party of Dutch who had built a rude fort on the site of Hartford, passed
+      on and fortified themselves on the site of Windsor. Next year Governor Van
+      Twiller sent a company of seventy men to drive away these intruders, but
+      after reconnoitring the situation the Dutchmen thought it best not to make
+      an attack. Their little stronghold at Hartford remained unmolested by the
+      English, and, in order to secure the communication between this advanced
+      outpost and New Amsterdam, Van Twiller decided to build another fort at
+      the mouth of the river, but this time the English were beforehand. Rumours
+      of Dutch designs may have reached the ears of Lord Say and Sele and Lord
+      Brooke&mdash;"fanatic Brooke," as Scott calls him in "Marmion"&mdash;who
+      had obtained from the Council for New England a grant of territory on the
+      shores of the Sound. These noblemen chose as their agent the younger John
+      Winthrop, son of the Massachusetts governor, and this new-comer arrived
+      upon the scene just in time to drive away Van Twiller's vessel and build
+      an English fort which in honour of his two patrons he called "Say-Brooke."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Had it not been for seeds of discontent already sown in Massachusetts, the
+      English hold upon the Connecticut valley might perhaps have been for a few
+      years confined to these two military outposts at Windsor and Saybrook. But
+      there were people in Massachusetts who did not look with favour upon the
+      aristocratic and theocratic features in its polity. The provision that
+      none but church-members should vote or hold office was by no means
+      unanimously approved. We see it in the course of another generation
+      putting altogether too much temporal power into the hands of the clergy,
+      and we can trace the growth of the opposition to it until in the reign of
+      Charles II. it becomes a dangerous source of weakness to Massachusetts. At
+      the outset the opposition seems to have been strongest in Dorchester,
+      Newtown, and Watertown. When the Board of Assistants undertook to secure
+      for themselves permanency of tenure, together with the power of choosing
+      the governor and making the laws, these three towns sent deputies to
+      Boston to inspect the charter and see if it authorized any such stretch of
+      power. They were foremost in insisting that representatives chosen by the
+      towns must have a share in the general government. Men who held such
+      opinions were naturally unwilling to increase the political weight of the
+      clergy, who, during these early disputes and indeed until the downfall of
+      the charter, were inclined to take aristocratic views and to sympathize
+      with the Board of Assistants. Cotton declared that democracy was no fit
+      government either for church or for commonwealth, and the majority of the
+      ministers agreed with him. Chief among those who did not was the learned
+      and eloquent Thomas Hooker, pastor of the church at Newtown. When
+      Winthrop, in a letter to Hooker, defended the restriction of the suffrage
+      on the ground that "the best part is always the least, and of that best
+      part the wiser part is always the lesser;" Hooker replied that "in matters
+      which concern the common good, a general council, chosen by all, to
+      transact businesses which concern all, I conceive most suitable to rule
+      and most safe for relief of the whole." It is interesting to meet, on the
+      very threshold of American history, with such a lucid statement of the
+      strongly contrasted views which a hundred and fifty years later were to be
+      represented on a national scale by Hamilton and Jefferson. There were many
+      in Newtown who took Hooker's view of the matter; and there, as also in
+      Watertown and Dorchester, which in 1633 took the initiative in framing
+      town governments with selectmen, a strong disposition was shown to evade
+      the restrictions upon the suffrage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While such things were talked about in the summer of 1633 the adventurous
+      John Oldham was making his way through the forest and over the mountains
+      into the Connecticut valley, and when he returned to the coast his glowing
+      accounts set some people to thinking. Two years afterward a few pioneers
+      from Dorchester pushed through the wilderness as far as the Plymouth men's
+      fort at Windsor, while a party from Watertown went farther and came to a
+      halt upon the site of Wethersfield. A larger party, bringing cattle and
+      such goods as they could carry, set out in the autumn and succeeded in
+      reaching Windsor. Their winter supplies were sent around by water to meet
+      them, but early in November the ships had barely passed the Saybrook fort
+      when they found the river blocked with ice and were obliged to return to
+      Boston. The sufferings of the pioneers, thus cut off from the world, were
+      dreadful. Their cattle perished, and they were reduced to a diet of acorns
+      and ground-nuts. Some seventy of them, walking on the frozen river to
+      Saybrook, were so fortunate as to find a crazy little sloop jammed in the
+      ice. They succeeded in cutting her adrift, and steered themselves back to
+      Boston. Others surmounted greater obstacles in struggling back through the
+      snow over the region which the Pullman car now traverses, regardless of
+      seasons, in three hours. A few grim heroes, the nameless founders of a
+      noble commonwealth, stayed on the spot and defied starvation. In the next
+      June, 1636, the Newtown congregation, a hundred or more in number, led by
+      their sturdy pastor, and bringing with them 160 head of cattle, made the
+      pilgrimage to the Connecticut valley. Women and children took part in this
+      pleasant summer journey; Mrs. Hooker, the pastor's wife, being too ill to
+      walk, was carried on a litter. Thus, in the memorable year in which our
+      great university was born, did Cambridge become, in the true Greek sense
+      of a much-abused word, the <i>metropolis</i> or "mother town" of Hartford.
+      The migration at once became strong in numbers. During the past
+      twelvemonth a score of ships had brought from England to Massachusetts
+      more than 3000 souls, and so great an accession made further movement
+      easy. Hooker's pilgrims were soon followed by the Dorchester and Watertown
+      congregations, and by the next May 800 people were living in Windsor,
+      Hartford, and Wethersfield. As we read of these movements, not of
+      individuals, but of organic communities, united in allegiance to a church
+      and its pastor, and fervid with the instinct of self-government, we seem
+      to see Greek history renewed, but with centuries of added political
+      training. For one year a board of commissioners from Massachusetts
+      governed the new towns, but at the end of that time the towns chose
+      representatives and held a General Court at Hartford, and thus the
+      separate existence of Connecticut was begun. As for Springfield, which was
+      settled about the same time by a party from Roxbury, it remained for some
+      years doubtful to which state it belonged. At the opening session of the
+      General Court, May 31,1638, Mr. Hooker preached a sermon of wonderful
+      power, in which he maintained that "the foundation of authority is laid in
+      the free consent of the people," "that the choice of public magistrates
+      belongs unto the people by God's own allowance," and that "they who have
+      power to appoint officers and magistrates have the right also to set the
+      bounds and limitations of the power and place unto which they call them."
+      On the 14th of January, 1639, all the freemen of the three towns assembled
+      at Hartford and adopted a written constitution in which the hand of the
+      great preacher is clearly discernible. It is worthy of note that this
+      document contains none of the conventional references to a "dread
+      sovereign" or a "gracious king," nor the slightest allusion to the British
+      or any other government outside of Connecticut itself, nor does it
+      prescribe any condition of church-membership for the right of suffrage. It
+      was the first written constitution known to history, that created a
+      government, <a href="#linknote-10" name="linknoteref-10"
+      id="linknoteref-10"><small>10</small></a> and it marked the beginnings of
+      American democracy, of which Thomas Hooker deserves more than any other
+      man to be called the father. The government of the United States today is
+      in lineal descent more nearly related to that of Connecticut than to that
+      of any of the other thirteen colonies. The most noteworthy feature of the
+      Connecticut republic was that it was a federation of independent towns,
+      and that all attributes of sovereignty not expressly granted to the
+      General Court remained, as of original right, in the towns. Moreover,
+      while the governor and council were chosen by a majority vote of the whole
+      people, and by a suffrage that was almost universal, there was for each
+      township an equality of representation in the assembly. <a
+      href="#linknote-11" name="linknoteref-11" id="linknoteref-11"><small>11</small></a>
+      This little federal republic was allowed to develop peacefully and
+      normally; its constitution was not violently wrenched out of shape like
+      that of Massachusetts at the end of the seventeenth century. It silently
+      grew till it became the strongest political structure on the continent, as
+      was illustrated in the remarkable military energy and the unshaken
+      financial credit of Connecticut during the Revolutionary War; and in the
+      chief crisis of the Federal Convention of 1787 Connecticut, with her
+      compromise which secured equal state representation in one branch of the
+      national government and popular representation in the other, played the
+      controlling part. [[Sidenote: Connecticut Pioneers] [[Sidenote: The first
+      written constitution]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before the little federation of towns had framed its government, it had
+      its Indian question to dispose of. Three years before the migration led by
+      Hooker, a crew of eight traders, while making their way up the river to
+      the Dutch station on the site of Hartford, had been murdered by a party of
+      Indians subject to Sassacus, chief sachem of the Pequots. Negotiations
+      concerning this outrage had gone on between Sassacus and the government at
+      Boston, and the Pequots had promised to deliver up the murderers, but had
+      neglected to do so. In the summer of 1636 some Indians on Block Island
+      subject to the Narragansetts murdered the pioneer John Oldham, who was
+      sailing on the Sound, and captured his little vessel. At this, says
+      Underhill, "God stirred up the hearts" of Governor Vane and the rest of
+      the magistrates. They were determined to make an end of the Indian
+      question and show the savages that such things would not be endured. First
+      an embassy was sent to Canonicus and his nephew Miantonomo, chief sachems
+      of the Narragansetts, who hastened to disclaim all responsibility for the
+      murder, and to throw the blame entirely upon the Indians of the island.
+      Vane then sent out three vessels under command of Endicott, who ravaged
+      Block Island, burning wigwams, sinking canoes, and slaying dogs, for the
+      men had taken to the woods. Endicott then crossed to the mainland to
+      reckon with the Pequots. He demanded the surrender of the murderers, with
+      a thousand fathoms of wampum for damages; and not getting a satisfactory
+      answer, he attacked the Indians, killed a score of them, seized their ripe
+      corn, and burned and spoiled what he could. But such reprisals served only
+      to enrage the red men. Lyon Gardiner, commander of the Saybrook fort,
+      complained to Endicott: "You come hither to raise these wasps about my
+      ears; then you will take wing and flee away." The immediate effect was to
+      incite Sassacus to do his utmost to compass the ruin of the English. The
+      superstitious awe with which the white men were at first regarded had been
+      somewhat lessened by familiar contact with them, as in Aesop's fable of
+      the fox and the lion. The resources of Indian diplomacy were exhausted in
+      the attempt to unite the Narragansett warriors with the Pequots in a grand
+      crusade against the white men. Such a combination could hardly have been
+      as formidable as that which was effected forty years afterward in King
+      Philip's war; for the savages had not as yet become accustomed to
+      firearms, and the English settlements did not present so many points
+      exposed to attack; but there is no doubt that it might have wrought
+      fearful havoc. We can, at any rate, find no difficulty in comprehending
+      the manifold perplexity of the Massachusetts men at this time, threatened
+      as they were at once by an Indian crusade, by the machinations of a
+      faithless king, and by a bitter theological quarrel at home, in this
+      eventful year when they laid aside part of their incomes to establish
+      Harvard College. [[Sidenote: Origin of the Pequot War]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The schemes of Sassacus were unsuccessful. The hereditary enmity of the
+      Narragansetts toward their Pequot rivals was too strong to be lightly
+      overcome. Roger Williams, taking advantage of this feeling, so worked upon
+      the minds of the Narragansett chiefs that in the autumn of 1636 they sent
+      an embassy to Boston and made a treaty of alliance with the English. The
+      Pequots were thus left to fight out their own quarrel; and had they still
+      been separated from the English by the distance between Boston and the
+      Thames river, the feud might very likely have smouldered until the drift
+      of events had given a different shape to it. But as the English had in
+      this very year thrown out their advanced posts into the lower Connecticut
+      valley, there was clearly no issue from the situation save in deadly war.
+      All through the winter of 1636-37 the Connecticut towns were kept in a
+      state of alarm by the savages. Men going to their work were killed and
+      horribly mangled. A Wethersfield man was kidnapped and roasted alive.
+      Emboldened by the success of this feat, the Pequots attacked Wethersfield,
+      massacred ten people, and carried away two girls. [[Sidenote: Sassacus is
+      foiled by Roger Williams] [[Sidenote: The Pequots take the warpath alone]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Wrought up to desperation by these atrocities, the Connecticut men
+      appealed to Massachusetts and Plymouth for aid, and put into service
+      ninety of their own number, under command of John Mason, an excellent and
+      sturdy officer who had won golden opinions from Sir Thomas Fairfax, under
+      whom he had served in the Netherlands. It took time to get men from
+      Boston, and all that Massachusetts contributed to the enterprise at its
+      beginning was that eccentric daredevil John Underhill, with a force of
+      twenty men. Seventy friendly Mohegans, under their chief Uncas, eager to
+      see vengeance wrought upon their Pequot oppressors, accompanied the
+      expedition. From the fort at Saybrook this little company set sail on the
+      twentieth of May, 1637, and landed in brilliant moonlight near Point
+      Judith, where they were reinforced by four hundred Narragansetts and
+      Nyantics. From this point they turned westward toward the stronghold of
+      the Pequots, near the place where the town of Stonington now stands. As
+      they approached the dreaded spot the courage of the Indian allies gave
+      out, and they slunk behind, declaring that Sassacus was a god whom it was
+      useless to think of attacking. The force with which Mason and Underhill
+      advanced to the fray consisted of just seventy-seven Englishmen. Their
+      task was to assault and carry an entrenched fort or walled village
+      containing seven hundred Pequots. The fort was a circle of two or three
+      acres in area, girdled by a palisade of sturdy sapling-trunks, set firm
+      and deep into the ground, the narrow interstices between them serving as
+      loopholes wherefrom to reconnoitre any one passing by and to shoot at
+      assailants. At opposite sides of this stronghold were two openings barely
+      large enough to let any one go through. Within this enclosure were the
+      crowded wigwams. The attack was skilfully managed, and was a complete
+      surprise. A little before daybreak Mason, with sixteen men, occupied one
+      of the doors, while Underhill made sure of the other. The Indians in panic
+      sought first one outlet and then the other, and were ruthlessly shot down,
+      whichever way they turned. A few succeeded in breaking loose, but these
+      were caught and tomahawked by the Indian allies, who, though afraid to
+      take the risks of the fight, were ready enough to help slay the fugitives.
+      The English threw firebrands among the wigwams, and soon the whole village
+      was in a light blaze, and most of the savages suffered the horrible death
+      which they were so fond of inflicting upon their captives. Of the seven
+      hundred Pequots in the stronghold, but five got away with their lives. All
+      this bloody work had been done in less than an hour, and of the English
+      there had been two killed and sixteen wounded. It was the end of the
+      Pequot nation. Of the remnant which had not been included in this
+      wholesale slaughter, most were soon afterwards destroyed piecemeal in a
+      running fight which extended as far westward as the site of Fairfield.
+      Sassacus fled across the Hudson river to the Mohawks, who slew him and
+      sent his scalp to Boston, as a peace-offering to the English. The few
+      survivors were divided between the Mohegans and Narragansetts and adopted
+      into those tribes. Truly the work was done with Cromwellian thoroughness.
+      The tribe which had lorded it so fiercely over the New England forests was
+      all at once wiped out of existence. So terrible a vengeance the Indians
+      had never heard of. If the name of Pequot had hitherto been a name of
+      terror, so now did the Englishmen win the inheritance of that deadly
+      prestige. Not for eight-and-thirty years after the destruction of the
+      Pequots, not until a generation of red men had grown up that knew not
+      Underhill and Mason, did the Indian of New England dare again to lift his
+      hand against the white man. [[Sidenote: And are exterminated]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such scenes of wholesale slaughter are not pleasant reading in this milder
+      age. But our forefathers felt that the wars of Canaan afforded a sound
+      precedent for such cases; and, indeed, if we remember what the soldiers of
+      Tilly and Wallenstein were doing at this very time in Germany, we shall
+      realize that the work of Mason and Underhill would not have been felt by
+      any one in that age to merit censure or stand in need of excuses. As a
+      matter of practical policy the annihilation of the Pequots can be
+      condemned only by those who read history so incorrectly as to suppose that
+      savages, whose business is to torture and slay, can always be dealt with
+      according to the methods in use between civilized peoples. A mighty
+      nation, like the United States, is in honour bound to treat the red man
+      with scrupulous justice and refrain from cruelty in punishing his
+      delinquencies. But if the founders of Connecticut, in confronting a danger
+      which threatened their very existence, struck with savage fierceness, we
+      cannot blame them. The world is so made that it is only in that way that
+      the higher races have been able to preserve themselves and carry on their
+      progressive work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The overthrow of the Pequots was a cardinal event in the planting of New
+      England. It removed the chief obstacle to the colonization of the
+      Connecticut coast, and brought the inland settlements into such unimpeded
+      communication with those on tide-water as to prepare the way for the
+      formation of the New England confederacy. Its first fruits were seen in
+      the direction taken by the next wave of migration, which ended the Puritan
+      exodus from England to America. About a month after the storming of the
+      palisaded village there arrived in Boston a company of wealthy London
+      merchants, with their families. The most prominent among them, Theophilus
+      Eaton, was a member of the Company of Massachusetts Bay. Their pastor,
+      John Davenport, was an eloquent preacher and a man of power. He was a
+      graduate of Oxford, and in 1624 had been chosen vicar of St. Stephen's
+      parish, in Coleman street, London. When he heard that Cotton and Hooker
+      were about to sail for America, he sought earnestly to turn them from what
+      he deemed the error of their ways, but instead he became converted himself
+      and soon incurred the especial enmity of Laud, so that it became necessary
+      for him to flee to Amsterdam. In 1636 he returned to England, and in
+      concert with Eaton organized a scheme of emigration that included men from
+      Yorkshire, Hertfordshire, and Kent. The leaders arrived in Boston in the
+      midst of the Antinomian disputes, and although Davenport won admiration
+      for his skill in battling with heresy, he may perhaps have deemed it
+      preferable to lead his flock to some new spot in the wilderness where such
+      warfare might not be required. The merchants desired a fine harbour and
+      good commercial situation, and the reports of the men who returned from
+      hunting the Pequots told them of just such a spot at Quinnipiack on Long
+      Island Sound. Here they could carry out their plan of putting into
+      practice a theocratic ideal even more rigid than that which obtained in
+      Massachusetts, and arrange their civil as well as ecclesiastical affairs
+      in accordance with rules to be obtained from a minute study of the
+      Scriptures. [[Sidenote: The colony of New Haven]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the spring of 1638 the town of New Haven was accordingly founded. The
+      next year a swarm from this new town settled Milford, while another party,
+      freshly arrived from England, made the beginnings of Guilford. In 1640
+      Stamford was added to the group, and in 1643 the four towns were united
+      into the republic of New Haven, to which Southold, on Long Island, and
+      Branford were afterwards added. As being a confederation of independent
+      towns, New Haven resembled Connecticut. In other respects the differences
+      between the two reflected the differences between Davenport and Hooker;
+      the latter was what would now be called more radical than Winthrop or
+      Cotton, the former was more conservative. In the New Haven colony none but
+      church-members could vote, and this measure at the outset disfranchised
+      more than half the settlers in New Haven town, nearly half in Guilford,
+      and less than one fifth in Milford. This result was practically less
+      democratic than in Massachusetts where it was some time before the
+      disfranchisement attained such dimensions. The power of the clergy reached
+      its extreme point in New Haven, where each of the towns was governed by
+      seven ecclesiastical officers known as "pillars of the church." These
+      magistrates served as judges, and trial by jury was dispensed with,
+      because no authority could be found for it in the laws of Moses. The
+      legislation was quaint enough, though the famous "Blue Laws" of New Haven,
+      which have been made the theme of so many jests at the expense of our
+      forefathers, never really existed. The story of the Blue Laws was first
+      published in 1781 by the Rev. Samuel Peters, a Tory refugee in London, who
+      took delight in horrifying our British cousins with tales of wholesale
+      tarring and feathering done by the patriots of the Revolution. In point of
+      strict veracity Dr. Peters reminds one of Baron Munchausen; he declares
+      that the river at Bellows Falls flows so fast as to float iron crowbars,
+      and he gravely describes sundry animals who were evidently cousins to the
+      Jabberwok. The most famous passage of his pretended code is that which
+      enacts that "no woman shall kiss her child on the Sabbath," and that "no
+      one shall play on any instrument of music except the drum, trumpet, or
+      jewsharp." [[Sidenote: Legend of the "Blue Laws"]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the Long Parliament met in 1640, the Puritan exodus to New England
+      came to an end. During the twenty years which had elapsed since the voyage
+      of the Mayflower, the population had grown to 26,000 souls. Of this number
+      scarcely 500 had arrived before 1629. It is a striking fact, since it
+      expresses a causal relation and not a mere coincidence, that the eleven
+      years, 1629-1640, during which Charles I. governed England without a
+      parliament, were the same eleven years that witnessed the planting of New
+      England. For more than a century after this there was no considerable
+      migration to this part of North America. Puritan England now found
+      employment for all its energies and all its enthusiasm at home. The
+      struggle with the king and the efforts toward reorganization under
+      Cromwell were to occupy it for another score of years, and then, by the
+      time of the Restoration the youthful creative energy of Puritanism had
+      spent itself. The influence of this great movement was indeed destined to
+      grow wider and deeper with the progress of civilization, but after 1660
+      its creative work began to run in new channels and assume different forms.
+      [[Sidenote: End of the Puritan exodus]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is curious to reflect what might have been the result, to America and
+      to the world, had things in England gone differently between 1620 and
+      1660. Had the policy of James and Charles been less formidable, the
+      Puritan exodus might never have occurred, and the Virginian type of
+      society, varied perhaps by a strong Dutch infusion, might have become
+      supreme in America. The western continent would have lost in richness and
+      variety of life, and it is not likely that Europe would have made a
+      corresponding gain, for the moral effect of the challenge, the struggle,
+      and the overthrow of monarchy in England was a stimulus sorely needed by
+      neighbouring peoples. It is not always by avoiding the evil, it is rather
+      by grappling with it and conquering it that character is strengthened and
+      life enriched, and there is no better example of this than the history of
+      England in the seventeenth century.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the other hand, if the Stuart despotism had triumphed in England, the
+      Puritan exodus would doubtless have been swelled to huge dimensions. New
+      England would have gained strength so quickly that much less irritation
+      than she actually suffered between 1664 and 1689 would probably have
+      goaded her into rebellion. The war of independence might have been waged a
+      century sooner than it was. It is not easy to point to any especial
+      advantage that could have come to America from this; one is rather
+      inclined to think of the peculiarly valuable political training of the
+      eighteenth century that would have been lost. Such surmises are for the
+      most part idle. But as concerns Europe, it is plain to be seen, for
+      reasons stated in my first chapter, that the decisive victory of Charles
+      I. would have been a calamity of the first magnitude. It would have been
+      like the Greeks losing Marathon or the Saracens winning Tours, supposing
+      the worst consequences ever imagined in those hypothetical cases to have
+      been realized. Or taking a more contracted view, we can see how England,
+      robbed of her Puritan element, might still have waxed in strength, as
+      France has done in spite of losing the Huguenots; but she could not have
+      taken the proud position that she has come to occupy as mother of nations.
+      Her preeminence since Cromwell's time has been chiefly due to her
+      unrivalled power of planting self-supporting colonies, and that power has
+      had its roots in English self-government. It is the vitality of the
+      English Idea that is making the language of Cromwell and Washington
+      dominant in the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IV. &mdash; THE NEW ENGLAND CONFEDERACY.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The Puritan exodus to New England, which came to an end about 1640, was
+      purely and exclusively English. There was nothing in it that came from the
+      continent of Europe, nothing that was either Irish or Scotch, very little
+      that was Welsh. As Palfrey says, the population of 26,000 that had been
+      planted in New England by 1640 "thenceforward continued to multiply on its
+      own soil for a century and a half, in remarkable seclusion from other
+      communities." During the whole of this period New England received but few
+      immigrants; and it was not until after the Revolutionary War that its
+      people had fairly started on their westward march into the state of New
+      York and beyond, until now, after yet another century, we find some of
+      their descendants dwelling in a homelike Salem and a Portland of charming
+      beauty on the Pacific coast. Three times between the meeting of the Long
+      Parliament and the meeting of the Continental Congress did the New England
+      colonies receive a slight infusion of non-English blood. In 1652, after
+      his victories at Dunbar and Worcester, Cromwell sent 270 of his Scottish
+      prisoners to Boston, where the descendants of some of them still dwell.
+      After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, 150 families of
+      Huguenots came to Massachusetts. And finally in 1719, 120 Presbyterian
+      families came over from the north of Ireland, and settled at Londonderry
+      in New Hampshire, and elsewhere. In view of these facts it may be said
+      that there is not a county in England of which the population is more
+      purely English than the population of New England at the end of the
+      eighteenth century. From long and careful research, Mr. Savage, the
+      highest authority on this subject, concludes that more than 98 in 100 of
+      the New England people at that time could trace their origin to England in
+      the narrowest sense, excluding even Wales. As already observed, every
+      English shire contributed something to the emigration, but there was a
+      marked preponderance of people from the East Anglian counties. [[Sidenote:
+      The exodus was purely English]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The population of New England was nearly as homogeneous in social
+      condition as it was in blood. The emigration was preeminent for its
+      respectability. Like the best part of the emigration to Virginia, it
+      consisted largely of country squires and yeomen. The men who followed
+      Winthrop were thrifty and prosperous in their old homes from which their
+      devotion to an idea made them voluntary exiles. They attached so much
+      importance to regular industry and decorous behaviour that for a long time
+      the needy and shiftless people who usually make trouble in new colonies
+      were not tolerated among them. Hence the early history of New England is
+      remarkably free from those scenes of violence and disorder which have so
+      often made hideous the first years of new communities. Of negro slaves
+      there were very few, and these were employed wholly in domestic service;
+      there were not enough of them to affect the industrial life of New England
+      or to be worth mentioning as a class. Neither were there many of the
+      wretched people, kidnapped from the jails and slums of English sea-ports,
+      such as in those early days when negro labour was scarce, were sent by
+      ship-loads to Virginia, to become the progenitors of the "white trash."
+      There were a few indented white servants, usually of the class known as
+      "redemptioners," or immigrants who voluntarily bound themselves to service
+      for a stated time in order to defray the cost of their voyage from Europe.
+      At a later time there were many of these "redemptioners" in the middle
+      colonies, but in New England they were very few; and as no stigma of
+      servitude was attached to manual labour, they were apt at the end of their
+      terms of service to become independent farmers; thus they ceased to be
+      recognizable as a distinct class of society. Nevertheless the common
+      statement that no traces of the "mean white" are to be found in New
+      England is perhaps somewhat too sweeping. Interspersed among those
+      respectable and tidy mountain villages, once full of such vigorous life,
+      one sometimes comes upon little isolated groups of wretched hovels whose
+      local reputation is sufficiently indicated by such terse epithets as
+      "Hardscrabble" or "Hell-huddle." Their denizens may in many instances be
+      the degenerate offspring of a sound New England stock, but they sometimes
+      show strong points of resemblance to that "white trash" which has come to
+      be a recognizable strain of the English race; and one cannot help
+      suspecting that while the New England colonies made every effort to keep
+      out such riff raff, it may nevertheless have now and then crept in.
+      However this may be, it cannot be said that this element ever formed a
+      noticeable feature in the life of colonial New England. As regards their
+      social derivation, the settlers of New England were homogeneous in
+      character to a remarkable degree, and they were drawn from the sturdiest
+      part of the English stock. In all history there has been no other instance
+      of colonization so exclusively effected by picked and chosen men. The
+      colonists knew this, and were proud of it, as well they might be. It was
+      the simple truth that was spoken by William Stoughton when he said, in his
+      election sermon of 1688: "God sifted a whole nation, that He might send
+      choice grain into the wilderness." [[Sidenote: Respectable character of
+      the emigration]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This matter comes to have more than a local interest, when we reflect that
+      the 26,000 New Englanders of 1640 have in two hundred and fifty years
+      increased to something like 15,000,000. From these men have come at least
+      one-fourth of the present population of the United States. Striking as
+      this fact may seem, it is perhaps less striking than the fact of the
+      original migration when duly considered. In these times, when great
+      steamers sail every day from European ports, bringing immigrants to a
+      country not less advanced in material civilization than the country which
+      they leave, the daily arrival of a thousand new citizens has come to be a
+      commonplace event. But in the seventeenth century the transfer of more
+      than twenty thousand well-to-do people within twenty years from their
+      comfortable homes in England to the American wilderness was by no means a
+      commonplace event. It reminds one of the migrations of ancient peoples,
+      and in the quaint thought of our forefathers it was aptly likened to the
+      exodus of Israel from the Egyptian house of bondage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this migration a principle of selection was at work which insured an
+      extraordinary uniformity of character and of purpose among the settlers.
+      To this uniformity of purpose, combined with complete homogeneity of race,
+      is due the preponderance early acquired by New England in the history of
+      the American people. In view of this, it is worth while to inquire what
+      were the real aims of the settlers of New England. What was the common
+      purpose which brought these men together in their resolve to create for
+      themselves new homes in the wilderness?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is a point concerning which there has been a great deal of popular
+      misapprehension, and there has been no end of nonsense talked about it. It
+      has been customary first to assume that the Puritan migration was
+      undertaken in the interests of religious liberty, and then to upbraid the
+      Puritans for forgetting all about religious liberty as soon as people came
+      among them who disagreed with their opinions. But this view of the case is
+      not supported by history. It is quite true that the Puritans were
+      chargeable with gross intolerance; but it is not true that in this they
+      were guilty of inconsistency. The notion that they came to New England for
+      the purpose of establishing religious liberty, in any sense in which we
+      should understand such a phrase, is entirely incorrect. It is neither more
+      nor less than a bit of popular legend. If we mean by the phrase "religious
+      liberty" a state of things in which opposite or contradictory opinions on
+      questions of religion shall exist side by side in the same community, and
+      in which everybody shall decide for himself how far he will conform to the
+      customary religious observances, nothing could have been further from
+      their thoughts. There is nothing they would have regarded with more
+      genuine abhorrence. If they could have been forewarned by a prophetic
+      voice of the general freedom&mdash;or, as they would have termed it,
+      license&mdash;of thought and behaviour which prevails in this country
+      to-day, they would very likely have abandoned their enterprise in despair.
+      <a href="#linknote-12" name="linknoteref-12" id="linknoteref-12"><small>12</small></a>
+      The philosophic student of history often has occasion to see how God is
+      wiser than man. In other words, he is often brought to realize how
+      fortunate it is that the leaders in great historic events cannot foresee
+      the remote results of the labours to which they have zealously consecrated
+      their lives. It is part of the irony of human destiny that the end we
+      really accomplish by striving with might and main is apt to be something
+      quite different from the end we dreamed of as we started on our arduous
+      labour. So it was with the Puritan settlers of New England. The religious
+      liberty that we enjoy to-day is largely the consequence of their work; but
+      it is a consequence that was unforeseen, while the direct and conscious
+      aim of their labours was something that has never been realized, and
+      probably never will be. [[Sidenote: The migration was not intended to
+      promote what we call religious liberty]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The aim of Winthrop and his friends in coming to Massachusetts was the
+      construction of a theocratic state which should be to Christians, under
+      the New Testament dispensation, all that the theocracy of Moses and Joshua
+      and Samuel had been to the Jews in Old Testament days. They should be to
+      all intents and purposes freed from the jurisdiction of the Stuart king,
+      and so far as possible the text of the Holy Scriptures should be their
+      guide both in weighty matters of general legislation and in the shaping of
+      the smallest details of daily life. In such a scheme there was no room for
+      religious liberty as we understand it. No doubt the text of the Scriptures
+      may be interpreted in many ways, but among these men there was a
+      substantial agreement as to the important points, and nothing could have
+      been further from their thoughts than to found a colony which should
+      afford a field for new experiments in the art of right living. The state
+      they were to found was to consist of a united body of believers;
+      citizenship itself was to be co-extensive with church-membership; and in
+      such a state there was apparently no more room for heretics than there was
+      in Rome or Madrid. This was the idea which drew Winthrop and his followers
+      from England at a time when&mdash;as events were soon to show&mdash;they
+      might have stayed there and defied persecution with less trouble than it
+      cost them to cross the ocean and found a new state. [[Sidenote: Theocratic
+      ideal of the Puritans]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such an ideal as this, considered by itself and apart from the concrete
+      acts in which it was historically manifested, may seem like the merest
+      fanaticism. But we cannot dismiss in this summary way a movement which has
+      been at the source of so much that is great in American history: mere
+      fanaticism has never produced such substantial results. Mere fanaticism is
+      sure to aim at changing the constitution of human society in some
+      essential point, to undo the work of evolution, and offer in some
+      indistinctly apprehended fashion to remodel human life. But in these
+      respects the Puritans were intensely conservative. The impulse by which
+      they were animated was a profoundly ethical impulse&mdash;the desire to
+      lead godly lives, and to drive out sin from the community&mdash;the same
+      ethical impulse which animates the glowing pages of Hebrew poets and
+      prophets, and which has given to the history and literature of Israel
+      their commanding influence in the world. The Greek, says Matthew Arnold,
+      held that the perfection of happiness was to have one's thoughts hit the
+      mark; but the Hebrew held that it was to serve the Lord day and night. It
+      was a touch of this inspiration that the Puritan caught from his earnest
+      and reverent study of the sacred text, and that served to justify and
+      intensify his yearning for a better life, and to give it the character of
+      a grand and holy ideal. Yet with all this religious enthusiasm, the
+      Puritan was in every fibre a practical Englishman with his full share of
+      plain common-sense. He avoided the error of mediaeval anchorites and
+      mystics in setting an exaggerated value upon otherworldliness. In his
+      desire to win a crown of glory hereafter he did not forget that the
+      present life has its simple duties, in the exact performance of which the
+      welfare of society mainly consists. He likewise avoided the error of
+      modern radicals who would remodel the fundamental institutions of property
+      and of the family, and thus disturb the very groundwork of our ethical
+      ideals. The Puritan's ethical conception of society was simply that which
+      has grown up in the natural course of historical evolution, and which in
+      its essential points is therefore intelligible to all men, and approved by
+      the common-sense of men, however various may be the terminology&mdash;whether
+      theological or scientific&mdash;in which it is expounded. For these
+      reasons there was nothing essentially fanatical or impracticable in the
+      Puritan scheme: in substance it was something that great bodies of men
+      could at once put into practice, while its quaint and peculiar form was
+      something that could be easily and naturally outgrown and set aside.
+      [[Sidenote: The impulse which sought to realize itself in the Puritan
+      ideal was an ethical impulse]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet another point in which the Puritan scheme of a theocratic society was
+      rational and not fanatical was its method of interpreting the Scriptures.
+      That method was essentially rationalistic in two ways. First, the Puritan
+      laid no claim to the possession of any peculiar inspiration or divine
+      light whereby he might be aided in ascertaining the meaning of the sacred
+      text; but he used his reason just as he would in any matter of business,
+      and he sought to convince, and expected to be convinced, by rational
+      argument, and by nothing else. Secondly, it followed from this denial of
+      any peculiar inspiration that there was no room in the Puritan
+      commonwealth for anything like a priestly class, and that every individual
+      must hold his own opinions at his own personal risk. The consequences of
+      this rationalistic spirit have been very far-reaching. In the conviction
+      that religious opinion must be consonant with reason, and that religious
+      truth must be brought home to each individual by rational argument, we may
+      find one of the chief causes of that peculiarly conservative yet flexible
+      intelligence which has enabled the Puritan countries to take the lead in
+      the civilized world of today. Free discussion of theological questions,
+      when conducted with earnestness and reverence, and within certain
+      generally acknowledged limits, was never discountenanced in New England.
+      On the contrary, there has never been a society in the world in which
+      theological problems have been so seriously and persistently discussed as
+      in New England in the colonial period. The long sermons of the clergymen
+      were usually learned and elaborate arguments of doctrinal points,
+      bristling with quotations from the Bible, or from famous books of
+      controversial divinity, and in the long winter evenings the questions thus
+      raised afforded the occasion for lively debate in every household. The
+      clergy were, as a rule, men of learning, able to read both Old and New
+      Testaments in the original languages, and familiar with the best that had
+      been talked and written, among Protestants at least, on theological
+      subjects. They were also, for the most part, men of lofty character, and
+      they were held in high social esteem on account of their character and
+      scholarship, as well as on account of their clerical position. But in
+      spite of the reverence in which they were commonly held, it would have
+      been a thing quite unheard of for one of these pastors to urge an opinion
+      from the pulpit on the sole ground of his personal authority or his
+      superior knowledge of Scriptural exegesis. The hearers, too, were quick to
+      detect novelties or variations in doctrine; and while there was perhaps no
+      more than the ordinary human unwillingness to listen to a new thought
+      merely because of its newness, it was above all things needful that the
+      orthodox soundness of every new suggestion should be thoroughly and
+      severely tested. This intense interest in doctrinal theology was part and
+      parcel of the whole theory of New England life; because, as I have said,
+      it was taken for granted that each individual must hold his own opinions
+      at his own personal risk in the world to come. Such perpetual discussion,
+      conducted, under such a stimulus, afforded in itself no mean school of
+      intellectual training. Viewed in relation to the subsequent mental
+      activity of New England, it may be said to have occupied a position
+      somewhat similar to that which the polemics of the medieval schoolmen
+      occupied in relation to the European thought of the Renaissance, and of
+      the age of Hobbes and Descartes. At the same time the Puritan theory of
+      life lay at the bottom of the whole system of popular education in New
+      England. According to that theory, it was absolutely essential that every
+      one should be taught from early childhood how to read and understand the
+      Bible. So much instruction as this was assumed to be a sacred duty which
+      the community owed to every child born within its jurisdiction. In
+      ignorance, the Puritans maintained, lay the principal strength of popery
+      in religion as well as of despotism in politics; and so, to the best of
+      their lights, they cultivated knowledge with might and main. But in this
+      energetic diffusion of knowledge they were unwittingly preparing the
+      complete and irreparable destruction of the theocratic ideal of society
+      which they had sought to realize by crossing the ocean and settling in New
+      England. This universal education, and this perpetual discussion of
+      theological questions, were no more compatible with rigid adherence to the
+      Calvinistic system than with submission to the absolute rule of Rome. The
+      inevitable result was the liberal and enlightened Protestantism which is
+      characteristic of the best American society at the present day, and which
+      is continually growing more liberal as it grows more enlightened&mdash;a
+      Protestantism which, in the natural course of development, is coming to
+      realize the noble ideal of Roger Williams, but from the very thought of
+      which such men as Winthrop and Cotton and Endicott would have shrunk with
+      dismay. [[Sidenote: In interpreting Scripture, the Puritan appealed to his
+      reason] [[Sidenote: Value of theological discussion]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this connection it is interesting to note the similarity between the
+      experience of the Puritans in New England and in Scotland with respect to
+      the influence of their religious theory of life upon general education.
+      Nowhere has Puritanism, with its keen intelligence and its iron tenacity
+      of purpose, played a greater part than it has played in the history of
+      Scotland. And one need not fear contradiction in saying that no other
+      people in modern times, in proportion to their numbers, have achieved so
+      much in all departments of human activity as the people of Scotland have
+      achieved. It would be superfluous to mention the preeminence of Scotland
+      in the industrial arts since the days of James Watt, or to recount the
+      glorious names in philosophy, in history, in poetry and romance, and in
+      every department of science, which since the middle of the eighteenth
+      century have made the country of Burns and Scott, of Hume and Adam Smith,
+      of Black and Hunter and Hutton and Lyell, illustrious for all future time.
+      Now this period of magnificent intellectual fruition in Scotland was
+      preceded by a period of Calvinistic orthodoxy quite as rigorous as that of
+      New England. The ministers of the Scotch Kirk in the seventeenth century
+      cherished a theocratic ideal of society not unlike that which the
+      colonists of New England aimed at realizing. There was the same austerity,
+      the same intolerance, the same narrowness of interests, in Scotland that
+      there was in New England. Mr. Buckle, in the book which thirty years ago
+      seemed so great and stimulating, gave us a graphic picture of this state
+      of society, and the only thing which he could find to say about it, as the
+      result of his elaborate survey, was that the spirit of the Scotch Kirk was
+      as thoroughly hostile to human progress as the spirit of the Spanish
+      Inquisition! If this were really so, it would be difficult indeed to
+      account for the period of brilliant mental activity which immediately
+      followed. But in reality the Puritan theory of life led to general
+      education in Scotland as it did in New England, and for precisely the same
+      reasons, while the effects of theological discussion in breaking down the
+      old Calvinistic exclusiveness have been illustrated in the history of
+      Edinburgh as well as in the history of Boston. [[Sidenote: Comparison with
+      the case of Scotland]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is well for us to bear in mind the foregoing considerations as we deal
+      with the history of the short-lived New England Confederacy. The story is
+      full of instances of an intolerant and domineering spirit, especially on
+      the part of Massachusetts, and now and then this spirit breaks forth in
+      ugly acts of persecution. In considering these facts, it is well to
+      remember that we are observing the workings of a system which contained
+      within itself a curative principle; and it is further interesting to
+      observe how political circumstances contributed to modify the Puritan
+      ideal, gradually breaking down the old theocratic exclusiveness and
+      strengthening the spirit of religious liberty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Scarcely had the first New England colonies been established when it was
+      found desirable to unite them into some kind of a confederation. It is
+      worthy of note that the separate existence of so many colonies was at the
+      outset largely the result of religious differences. The uniformity of
+      purpose, great as it was, fell far short of completeness. [[Sidenote:
+      Existence of so many colonies due to slight religious differences]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Could all have agreed, or had there been religious toleration in the
+      modern sense, there was still room enough for all in Massachusetts; and a
+      compact settlement would have been in much less danger from the Indians.
+      But in the founding of Connecticut the theocratic idea had less weight,
+      and in the founding of New Haven it had more weight, than in
+      Massachusetts. The existence of Rhode Island was based upon that principle
+      of full toleration which the three colonies just mentioned alike abhorred,
+      and its first settlers were people banished from Massachusetts. With
+      regard to toleration Plymouth occupied a middle ground; without admitting
+      the principles of Williams, the people of that colony were still fairly
+      tolerant in practice. Of the four towns of New Hampshire, two had been
+      founded by Antinomians driven from Boston, and two by Episcopal friends of
+      Mason and Gorges. It was impossible that neighbouring communities,
+      characterized by such differences of opinion, but otherwise homogeneous in
+      race and in social condition, should fail to react upon one another and to
+      liberalize one another. Still more was this true when they attempted to
+      enter into a political union. When, for example, Massachusetts in 1641-43
+      annexed the New Hampshire townships, she was of necessity obliged to relax
+      in their case her policy of insisting upon religious conformity as a test
+      of citizenship. So in forming the New England Confederacy, there were some
+      matters of dispute that had to be passed over by mutual consent or
+      connivance. [[Sidenote: It led to a notable attempt at federation]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The same causes which had spread the English settlements over so wide a
+      territory now led, as an indirect result, to their partial union into a
+      confederacy. The immediate consequence of the westward movement had been
+      an Indian war. Several savage tribes were now interspersed between the
+      settlements, so that it became desirable that the military force should be
+      brought, as far as possible, under one management. The colony of New
+      Netherlands, moreover, had begun to assume importance, and the settlements
+      west of the Connecticut river had already occasioned hard words between
+      Dutch and English, which might at any moment be followed by blows. In the
+      French colonies at the north, with their extensive Indian alliances under
+      Jesuit guidance, the Puritans saw a rival power which was likely in course
+      of time to prove troublesome. With a view to more efficient self-defence,
+      therefore, in 1643 the four colonies of Massachusetts, Plymouth,
+      Connecticut, and New Haven formed themselves into a league, under the
+      style of "The United Colonies of New England." These four little states
+      now contained thirty-nine towns, with an aggregate population of 24,000.
+      To the northeast of Massachusetts, which now extended to the Piscataqua, a
+      small colony had at length been constituted under a proprietary charter
+      somewhat similar to that held by the Calverts in Maryland. Of this new
+      province or palatinate of Maine the aged Sir Ferdinando Gorges was Lord
+      Proprietary, and he had undertaken not only to establish the Church of
+      England there, but also to introduce usages of feudal jurisdiction like
+      those remaining in the old country. Such a community was not likely to
+      join the Confederacy; apart from other reasons, its proprietary
+      constitution and the feud between the Puritans and Gorges would have been
+      sufficient obstacles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for Rhode Island, on the other hand, it was regarded with strong
+      dislike by the other colonies. It was a curious and noteworthy consequence
+      of the circumstances under which this little state was founded that for a
+      long time it became the refuge of all the fanatical and turbulent people
+      who could not submit to the strict and orderly governments of Connecticut
+      or Massachusetts. All extremes met on Narragansett bay. There were not
+      only sensible advocates of religious liberty, but theocrats as well who
+      saw flaws in the theocracy of other Puritans. The English world was then
+      in a state of theological fermentation. People who fancied themselves
+      favoured with direct revelations from Heaven; people who thought it right
+      to keep the seventh day of the week as a Sabbath instead of the first day;
+      people who cherished a special predilection for the Apocalypse and the
+      Book of Daniel; people with queer views about property and government;
+      people who advocated either too little marriage or too much marriage; all
+      such eccentric characters as are apt to come to the surface in periods of
+      religious excitement found in Rhode Island a favoured spot where they
+      could prophesy without let or hindrance. But the immediate practical
+      result of so much discordance in opinion was the impossibility of founding
+      a strong and well-ordered government. The early history of Rhode Island
+      was marked by enough of turbulence to suggest the question whether, after
+      all, at the bottom of the Puritan's refusal to recognize the doctrine of
+      private inspiration, or to tolerate indiscriminately all sorts of
+      opinions, there may not have been a grain of shrewd political sense not
+      ill adapted to the social condition of the seventeenth century. In 1644
+      and again in 1648 the Narragansett settlers asked leave to join the
+      Confederacy; but the request was refused on the ground that they had no
+      stable government of their own. They were offered the alternative of
+      voluntary annexation either to Massachusetts or to Plymouth, or of staying
+      out in the cold; and they chose the latter course. Early in 1643 they had
+      sent Roger Williams over to England to obtain a charter for Rhode Island.
+      In that year Parliament created a Board of Commissioners, with the Earl of
+      Warwick at its head, for the superintendence of colonial affairs; and
+      nothing could better illustrate the loose and reckless manner in which
+      American questions were treated in England than the first proceedings of
+      this board. It gave an early instance of British carelessness in matters
+      of American geography. In December, 1643, it granted to Massachusetts all
+      the territory on the mainland of Narragansett bay; and in the following
+      March it incorporated the townships of Newport and Portsmouth, which stood
+      on the island, together with Providence, which stood on the mainland, into
+      an independent colony empowered to frame a government and make laws for
+      itself. With this second document Williams returned to Providence in the
+      autumn of 1644. Just how far it was intended to cancel the first one,
+      nobody could tell, but it plainly afforded an occasion for a conflict of
+      claims. [[Sidenote: Turbulence of dissent in Rhode Island] [[Sidenote: The
+      Earl of Warwick and his Board of Commissioners]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The league of the four colonies is interesting as the first American
+      experiment in federation. By the articles it was agreed that each colony
+      should retain full independence so far as concerned the management of its
+      internal affairs, but that the confederate government should have entire
+      control over all dealings with the Indians or with foreign powers. The
+      administration of the league was put into the hands of a board of eight
+      Federal Commissioners, two from each colony. The commissioners were
+      required to be church-members in good standing. They could choose for
+      themselves a president or chairman out of their own number, but such a
+      president was to have no more power than the other members of the Board.
+      If any measure were to come up concerning which the commissioners could
+      not agree, it was to be referred for consideration to the legislatures or
+      general courts of the four colonies. Expenses for war were to be charged
+      to each colony in proportion to the number of males in each between
+      sixteen years of age and sixty. A meeting of the Board might be summoned
+      by any two magistrates whenever the public safety might seem to require
+      it; but a regular meeting was to be held once every year.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this scheme of confederacy all power of taxation was expressly left to
+      the several colonies. The scheme provided for a mere league, not for a
+      federal union. The government of the Commissioners acted only upon the
+      local governments, not upon individuals. The Board had thus but little
+      executive power, and was hardly more than a consulting body. Another
+      source of weakness in the confederacy was the overwhelming preponderance
+      of Massachusetts. Of the 24,000 people in the confederation, 15,000
+      belonged to Massachusetts, while the other three colonies had only about
+      3,000 each. Massachusetts accordingly had to carry the heaviest burden,
+      both in the furnishing of soldiers and in the payment of war expenses,
+      while in the direction of affairs she had no more authority than one of
+      the small colonies. As a natural consequence, Massachusetts tried to exert
+      more authority than she was entitled to by the articles of confederation;
+      and such conduct was not unnaturally resented by the small colonies, as
+      betokening an unfair and domineering spirit. In spite of these drawbacks,
+      however, the league was of great value to New England. On many occasions
+      it worked well as a high court of jurisdiction, and it made the military
+      strength of the colonies more available than it would otherwise have been.
+      But for the interference of the British government, which brought it to an
+      untimely end, the Confederacy might have been gradually amended so as to
+      become enduring. After its downfall it was pleasantly remembered by the
+      people of New England; in times of trouble their thoughts reverted to it;
+      and the historian must in fairness assign it some share in preparing men's
+      minds for the greater work of federation which was achieved before the end
+      of the following century. [[Sidenote: It was only a league, not a federal
+      union]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The formation of such a confederacy certainly involved something very like
+      a tacit assumption of sovereignty on the part of the four colonies. It is
+      worthy of note that they did not take the trouble to ask the permission of
+      the home government in advance. They did as they pleased, and then
+      defended their action afterward. In England the act of confederation was
+      regarded with jealousy and distrust. But Edward Winslow, who was sent over
+      to London to defend the colonies, pithily said: "If we in America should
+      forbear to unite for offence and defence against a common enemy till we
+      have leave from England, our throats might be all cut before the messenger
+      would be half seas through." Whether such considerations would have had
+      weight with Charles I. or not was now of little consequence. His power of
+      making mischief soon came to an end, and from the liberal and sagacious
+      policy of Cromwell the Confederacy had not much to fear. Nevertheless the
+      fall of Charles I. brought up for the first time that question which a
+      century later was to acquire surpassing interest,&mdash;the question as to
+      the supremacy of Parliament over the colonies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Down to this time the supreme control over colonial affairs had been in
+      the hands of the king and his privy council, and the Parliament had not
+      disputed it. In 1624 they had grumbled at James I.'s high-handed
+      suppression of the Virginia Company, but they had not gone so far as to
+      call in question the king's supreme authority over the colonies. In 1628,
+      in a petition to Charles I. relating to the Bermudas, they had fully
+      admitted this royal authority. But the fall of Charles I. for the moment
+      changed all this. Among the royal powers devolved upon Parliament was the
+      prerogative of superintending the affairs of the colonies. Such, at least,
+      was the theory held in England, and it is not easy to see how any other
+      theory could logically have been held; but the Americans never formally
+      admitted it, and in practice they continued to behave toward Parliament
+      very much as they had behaved toward the crown, yielding just as little
+      obedience as possible. When the Earl of Warwick's commissioners in 1644
+      seized upon a royalist vessel in Boston harbour, the legislature of
+      Massachusetts debated the question whether it was compatible with the
+      dignity of the colony to permit such an act of sovereignty on the part of
+      Parliament. It was decided to wink at the proceeding, on account of the
+      strong sympathy between Massachusetts and the Parliament which was
+      overthrowing the king. At the same time the legislature sent over to
+      London a skilfully worded protest against any like exercise of power in
+      future. In 1651 Parliament ordered Massachusetts to surrender the charter
+      obtained from Charles I. and take out a new one from Parliament, in which
+      the relations of the colony to the home government should be made the
+      subject of fresh and more precise definition. To this request the colony
+      for more than a year vouchsafed no answer; and finally, when it became
+      necessary to do something, instead of sending back the charter, the
+      legislature sent back a memorial, setting forth that the people of
+      Massachusetts were quite contented with their form of government, and
+      hoped that no change would be made in it. War between England and Holland,
+      and the difficult political problems which beset the brief rule of
+      Cromwell, prevented the question from coming to an issue, and
+      Massachusetts was enabled to preserve her independent and somewhat haughty
+      attitude. [[Sidenote: Fall of Charles I. brings up the question as to
+      supremacy of Parliament over the colonies]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the whole period of the Confederacy, however, disputes kept coming
+      up which through endless crooked ramifications were apt to end in an
+      appeal to the home government, and thus raise again and again the question
+      as to the extent of its imperial supremacy. For our present purpose, it is
+      enough to mention three of these cases: 1, the adventures of Samuel
+      Gorton; 2, the Presbyterian cabal; 3, the persecution of the Quakers.
+      Other cases in point are those of John Clarke and the Baptists, and the
+      relations of Massachusetts to the northeastern settlements; but as it is
+      not my purpose here to make a complete outline of New England history, the
+      three cases enumerated will suffice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first case shows, in a curious and instructive way, how religious
+      dissensions were apt to be complicated with threats of an Indian war on
+      the one hand and peril from Great Britain on the other; and as we come to
+      realize the triple danger, we can perhaps make some allowances for the
+      high-handed measures with which the Puritan governments sometimes sought
+      to avert it. [Genesis of the persecuting spirit]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I have elsewhere tried to show, the genesis of the persecuting spirit
+      is to be found in the conditions of primitive society, where "above all
+      things the prime social and political necessity is social cohesion within
+      the tribal limits, for unless such social cohesion be maintained, the very
+      existence of the tribe is likely to be extinguished in bloodshed." The
+      persecuting spirit "began to pass away after men had become organized into
+      great nations, covering a vast extent of territory, and secured by their
+      concentrated military strength against the gravest dangers of barbaric
+      attack." <a href="#linknote-13" name="linknoteref-13" id="linknoteref-13"><small>13</small></a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now as regards these considerations, the Puritan communities in the New
+      England wilderness were to some slight extent influenced by such
+      conditions as used to prevail in primitive society; and this will help us
+      to understand the treatment of the Antinomians and such cases as that with
+      which we have now to deal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among the supporters of Mrs. Hutchinson, after her arrival at Aquedneck,
+      was a sincere and courageous, but incoherent and crotchetty man named
+      Samuel Gorton. [[Sidenote: Samuel Gorton]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the denunciatory language of that day he was called a "proud and
+      pestilent seducer," or, as the modern newspaper would say, a "crank." It
+      is well to make due allowances for the prejudice so conspicuous in the
+      accounts given by his enemies, who felt obliged to justify their harsh
+      treatment of him. But we have also his own writings from which to form an
+      opinion as to his character and views. Lucidity, indeed, was not one of
+      his strong points as a writer, and the drift of his argument is not always
+      easy to decipher; but he seems to have had some points of contact with the
+      Familists, a sect established in the sixteenth century in Holland. The
+      Familists held that the essence of religion consists not in adherence to
+      any particular creed or ritual, but in cherishing the spirit of divine
+      love. The general adoption of this point of view was to inaugurate a third
+      dispensation, superior to those of Moses and Christ, the dispensation of
+      the Holy Ghost. The value of the Bible lay not so much in the literal
+      truth of its texts as in their spiritual import; and by the union of
+      believers with Christ they came to share in the ineffable perfection of
+      the Godhead. There is much that is modern and enlightened in such views,
+      which Gorton seems to some extent to have shared. He certainly set little
+      store by ritual observances and maintained the equal right of laymen with
+      clergymen to preach the gospel. Himself a London clothier, and thanking
+      God that he had not been brought up in "the schools of human learning," he
+      set up as a preacher without ordination, and styled himself "professor of
+      the mysteries of Christ." He seems to have cherished that doctrine of
+      private inspiration which the Puritans especially abhorred. It is not
+      likely that he had any distinct comprehension of his own views, for
+      distinctness was just what they lacked. <a href="#linknote-14"
+      name="linknoteref-14" id="linknoteref-14"><small>14</small></a> But they
+      were such as in the seventeenth century could not fail to arouse fierce
+      antagonism, and if it was true that wherever there was a government Gorton
+      was against it, perhaps that only shows that wherever there was a
+      government it was sure to be against him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the case of such men as Gorton, however,&mdash;and the type is by no
+      means an uncommon one,&mdash;their temperament usually has much more to do
+      with getting them into trouble than their opinions. Gorton's temperament
+      was such as to keep him always in an atmosphere of strife. Other
+      heresiarchs suffered persecution in Massachusetts, but Gorton was in hot
+      water everywhere. His arrival in any community was the signal for an
+      immediate disturbance of the peace. His troubles began in Plymouth, where
+      the wife of the pastor preferred his teachings to those of her husband. In
+      1638 he fled to Aquedneck, where his first achievement was a schism among
+      Mrs. Hutchinson's followers, which ended in some staying to found the town
+      of Portsmouth while others went away to found Newport. Presently
+      Portsmouth found him intolerable, flogged and banished him, and after his
+      departure was able to make up its quarrel with Newport. He next made his
+      way with a few followers to Pawtuxet, within the jurisdiction of
+      Providence, and now it is the broad-minded and gentle Roger Williams who
+      complains of his "bewitching and madding poor Providence." The question is
+      here suggested what could it have been in Gorton's teaching that enabled
+      him thus to "bewitch" these little communities? We may be sure that it
+      could not have been the element of modern liberalism suggested in the
+      Familistic doctrines above cited. That was the feature then least likely
+      to appeal to the minds of common people, and most likely to appeal to
+      Williams. More probably such success as Gorton had in winning followers
+      was due to some of the mystical rubbish which abounds in his pages and
+      finds in a modern mind no doorway through which to enter. [[Sidenote: He
+      flees to Aquedneck and is banished thence]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Williams disapproved of Gorton, but was true to his principles of
+      toleration and would not take part in any attempt to silence him. But in
+      1641 we find thirteen leading citizens of Providence, headed by William
+      Arnold, <a href="#linknote-15" name="linknoteref-15" id="linknoteref-15"><small>15</small></a>
+      sending a memorial to Boston, asking for assistance and counsel in regard
+      to this disturber of the peace. How was Massachusetts to treat such an
+      appeal? She could not presume to meddle with the affair unless she could
+      have permanent jurisdiction over Pawtuxet; otherwise she was a mere
+      intruder. How strong a side-light does this little incident throw upon the
+      history of the Roman republic, and of all relatively strong communities
+      when confronted with the problem of preserving order in neighbouring
+      states that are too weak to preserve it for themselves! Arnold's argument,
+      in his appeal to Massachusetts, was precisely the same as that by which
+      the latter colony excused herself for banishing the Antinomians. He simply
+      says that Gorton and his company "are not fit persons to be received, and
+      made members of a body in so weak a state as our town is in at present;"
+      and he adds, "There is no state but in the first place will seek to
+      preserve its own safety and peace." Whatever might be the abstract merits
+      of Gorton's opinions, his conduct was politically dangerous; and
+      accordingly the jurisdiction over Pawtuxet was formally conceded to
+      Massachusetts. Thereupon that colony, assuming jurisdiction, summoned
+      Gorton and his men to Boston, to prove their title to the lands they
+      occupied. They of course regarded the summons as a flagrant usurpation of
+      authority, and instead of obeying it they withdrew to Shawomet, on the
+      western shore of Narragansett bay, where they bought a tract of land from
+      the principal sachem of the Narragansetts, Miantonomo. The immediate rule
+      over this land belonged to two inferior chiefs, who ratified the sale at
+      the time, but six months afterward disavowed the ratification, on the
+      ground that it had been given under duress from their overlord Miantonomo.
+      Here was a state of things which might easily bring on an Indian war. The
+      two chiefs appealed to Massachusetts for protection, and were accordingly
+      summoned, along with Miantonomo, to a hearing at Boston. Here we see how a
+      kind of English protectorate over the native tribes had begun to grow up
+      so soon after the destruction of the Pequots. Such a result was
+      inevitable. After hearing the arguments, the legislature decided to defend
+      the two chiefs, provided they would put themselves under the jurisdiction
+      of Massachusetts. This was done, while further complaints against Gorton
+      came from the citizens of Providence. Gorton and his men were now
+      peremptorily summoned to Boston to show cause why they should not
+      surrender their land at Shawomet and to answer the charges against them.
+      On receiving from Gorton a defiant reply, couched in terms which some
+      thought blasphemous, the government of Massachusetts prepared to use
+      force. [[Sidenote: Providence protests against him] [[Sidenote: He flees
+      to Shawomet, where he buys land of the Indians]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile the unfortunate Miantonomo had rushed upon his doom. The
+      annihilation of the Pequots had left the Mohegans and Narragansetts
+      contending for the foremost place among the native tribes. Between the
+      rival sachems, Uncas and Miantonomo, the hatred was deep and deadly. As
+      soon as the Mohegan perceived that trouble was brewing between Miantonomo
+      and the government at Boston, he improved the occasion by gathering a few
+      Narragansett scalps. Miantonomo now took the war-path and was totally
+      defeated by Uncas in a battle on the Great Plain in the present township
+      of Norwich. Encumbered with a coat of mail which his friend Gorton had
+      given him, Miantonomo was overtaken and captured. By ordinary Indian usage
+      he would have been put to death with fiendish torments, as soon as due
+      preparations could be made and a fit company assembled to gloat over his
+      agony; but Gorton sent a messenger to Uncas, threatening dire vengeance if
+      harm were done to his ally. This message puzzled the Mohegan chief. The
+      appearance of a schism in the English counsels was more than he could
+      quite fathom. When the affair had somewhat more fully developed itself,
+      some of the Indians spoke of the white men as divided into two rival
+      tribes, the Gortonoges and Wattaconoges. <a href="#linknote-16"
+      name="linknoteref-16" id="linknoteref-16"><small>16</small></a> Roger
+      Williams tells us that the latter term, applied to the men of Boston,
+      meant coat-wearers. Whether it is to be inferred that the Gortonoges went
+      about in what in modern parlance would be called their "shirt-sleeves,"
+      the reader must decide. [[Sidenote: Miantonomo and Uncas]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his perplexity Uncas took his prisoner to Hartford, and afterward, upon
+      the advice of the governor and council, sent him to Boston, that his fate
+      might be determined by the Federal Commissioners who were there holding
+      their first regular meeting. It was now the turn of the commissioners to
+      be perplexed. According to English law there was no good reason for
+      putting Miantonomo to death. The question was whether they should
+      interfere with the Indian custom by which his life was already forfeit to
+      his captor. The magistrates already suspected the Narragansetts of
+      cherishing hostile designs. To set their sachem at liberty, especially
+      while the Gorton affair remained unsettled, might be dangerous; and it
+      would be likely to alienate Uncas from the English. In their embarrassment
+      the commissioners sought spiritual guidance. A synod of forty or fifty
+      clergymen, from all parts of New England, was in session at Boston, and
+      the question was referred to a committee of five of their number. The
+      decision was prompt that Miantonomo must die. He was sent back to Hartford
+      to be slain by Uncas, but two messengers accompanied him, to see that no
+      tortures were inflicted. A select band of Mohegan warriors journeyed
+      through the forest with the prisoner and the two Englishmen, until they
+      came to the plain where the battle had been fought. Then at a signal from
+      Uncas, the warrior walking behind Miantonomo silently lifted his tomahawk
+      and sank it into the brain of the victim who fell dead without a groan.
+      Uncas cut a warm slice from the shoulder and greedily devoured it,
+      declaring that the flesh of his enemy was the sweetest of meat and gave
+      strength to his heart. Miantonomo was buried there on the scene of his
+      defeat, which has ever since been known as the Sachem's Plain. This was in
+      September, 1643, and for years afterward, in that month, parties of
+      Narragansetts used to visit the spot and with frantic gestures and hideous
+      yells lament their fallen leader. A heap of stones was raised over the
+      grave, and no Narragansett came near it without adding to the pile. After
+      many a summer had passed and the red men had disappeared from the land, a
+      Yankee farmer, with whom thrift prevailed over sentiment, cleared away the
+      mound and used the stones for the foundation of his new barn. <a
+      href="#linknote-17" name="linknoteref-17" id="linknoteref-17"><small>17</small></a>
+      [[Sidenote: Death of Miantonomo]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One cannot regard this affair as altogether creditable to the Federal
+      Commissioners and their clerical advisers. One of the clearest-headed and
+      most impartial students of our history observes that "if the English were
+      to meddle in the matter at all, it was their clear duty to enforce as far
+      as might be the principles recognized by civilized men. When they accepted
+      the appeal made by Uncas they shifted the responsibility from the Mohegan
+      chief to themselves." <a href="#linknote-18" name="linknoteref-18"
+      id="linknoteref-18"><small>18</small></a> The decision was doubtless based
+      purely upon grounds of policy. Miantonomo was put out of the way because
+      he was believed to be dangerous. In the thirst for revenge that was
+      aroused among the Narragansetts there was an alternative source of danger,
+      to which I shall hereafter refer. <a href="#linknote-19"
+      name="linknoteref-19" id="linknoteref-19"><small>19</small></a> It is
+      difficult now to decide, as a mere question of safe policy, what the
+      English ought to have done. The chance of being dragged into an Indian
+      war, through the feud between Narragansetts and Mohegans, was always
+      imminent. The policy which condemned Miantonomo was one of timidity, and
+      fear is merciless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Federal Commissioners heartily approved the conduct of Massachusetts
+      toward Gorton, and adopted it in the name of the United Colonies. After a
+      formal warning, which passed unheeded, a company of forty men, under
+      Edward Johnson of Woburn and two other officers, was sent to Shawomet.
+      Some worthy citizens of Providence essayed to play the part of mediators,
+      and after some parley the Gortonites offered to submit to arbitration. The
+      proposal was conveyed to Boston, and the clergy were again consulted. They
+      declared it beneath the dignity of Massachusetts to negotiate "with a few
+      fugitives living without law or government," and they would no more
+      compound with Gorton's "blasphemous revilings" than they would bargain
+      with the Evil One. The community must be "purged" of such wickedness,
+      either by repentance or by punishment. The ministers felt that God would
+      hold the community responsible for Gorton and visit calamities upon them
+      unless he were silenced. <a href="#linknote-20" name="linknoteref-20"
+      id="linknoteref-20"><small>20</small></a> The arbitration was refused,
+      Gorton's blockhouse was besieged and captured, and the agitator was
+      carried with nine of his followers to Boston, where they were speedily
+      convicted of heresy and sedition. Before passing judgment the General
+      Court as usual consulted with the clergy who recommended a sentence of
+      death. Their advice was adopted by the assistants, but the deputies were
+      more merciful, and the heretics were sentenced to imprisonment at the
+      pleasure of the court. In this difference between the assistants and the
+      deputies, we observe an early symptom of that popular revolt against the
+      ascendancy of the clergy which was by and by to become so much more
+      conspicuous and effective in the affair of the Quakers. Another symptom
+      might be seen in the circumstance that so much sympathy was expressed for
+      the Gortonites, especially by women, that after some months of
+      imprisonment and abuse the heretics were banished under penalty of death.
+      [[Sidenote: Trial and sentence of the heretics]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gorton now went to England and laid his tale of woe before the
+      parliamentary Board of Commissioners. The Earl of Warwick behaved with
+      moderation. He declined to commit himself to an opinion as to the merits
+      of the quarrel, but Gorton's title to Shawomet was confirmed. He returned
+      to Boston with an order to the government to allow him to pass unmolested
+      through Massachusetts, and hereafter to protect him in the possession of
+      Shawomet. If this little commonwealth of 15,000 inhabitants had been a
+      nation as powerful as France, she could not have treated the message more
+      haughtily. By a majority of one vote it was decided not to refuse so
+      trifling a favour as a passage through the country for just this once; but
+      as for protecting the new town of Warwick which the Gortonites proceeded
+      to found at Shawomet, although it was several times threatened by the
+      Indians, and the settlers appealed to the parliamentary order, that order
+      Massachusetts flatly and doggedly refused to obey. <a href="#linknote-21"
+      name="linknoteref-21" id="linknoteref-21"><small>21</small></a>
+      [[Sidenote: Gorton appeals to Parliament]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the discussions of which these years were so full, "King Winthrop," as
+      his enemy Morton called him, used some very significant language. By a
+      curious legal fiction of the Massachusetts charter the colonists were
+      supposed to hold their land as in the manor of East Greenwich near London,
+      and it was argued that they were represented in Parliament by the members
+      of the county or borough which contained that manor, and were accordingly
+      subject to the jurisdiction of Parliament. It was further argued that
+      since the king had no absolute sovereignty independent of Parliament he
+      could not by charter impart any such independent sovereignty to others.
+      Winthrop did not dispute these points, but observed that the safety of the
+      commonwealth was the supreme law, and if in the interests of that safety
+      it should be found necessary to renounce the authority of Parliament, the
+      colonists would be justified in doing so. [[Sidenote: Winthrop's prophetic
+      opinion] <a href="#linknote-22" name="linknoteref-22" id="linknoteref-22"><small>22</small></a>
+      This was essentially the same doctrine as was set forth ninety-nine years
+      later by young Samuel Adams in his Commencement Oration at Harvard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The case of the Presbyterian cabal admits of briefer treatment than that
+      of Gorton. There had now come to be many persons in Massachusetts who
+      disapproved of the provision which restricted the suffrage to members of
+      the Independent or Congregational churches of New England, and in 1646 the
+      views of these people were presented in a petition to the General Court.
+      The petitioners asked "that their civil disabilities might be removed, and
+      that all members of the churches of England and Scotland might be admitted
+      to communion with the New England churches. If this could not be granted
+      they prayed to be released from all civil burdens. Should the court refuse
+      to entertain their complaint, they would be obliged to bring their case
+      before Parliament." <a href="#linknote-23" name="linknoteref-23"
+      id="linknoteref-23"><small>23</small></a> The leading signers of this
+      menacing petition were William Vassall, Samuel Maverick, and The
+      Presbyterian cabal. Dr. Robert Child. Maverick we have already met. From
+      the day when the ships of the first Puritan settlers had sailed past his
+      log fortress on Noddle's Island, he had been their enemy; "a man of loving
+      and curteous behaviour," says Johnson, "very ready to entertaine
+      strangers, yet an enemy to the reformation in hand, being strong for the
+      lordly prelatical power." Vassall was not a denizen of Massachusetts, but
+      lived in Scituate, in the colony of Plymouth, where there were no such
+      restrictions upon the suffrage. Child was a learned physician who after a
+      good deal of roaming about the world had lately taken it into his head to
+      come and see what sort of a place Massachusetts was. Although these names
+      were therefore not such as to lend weight to such a petition, their
+      request would seem at first sight reasonable enough. At a superficial
+      glance it seems conceived in a modern spirit of liberalism. In reality it
+      was nothing of the sort. In England it was just the critical moment of the
+      struggle between Presbyterians and Independents which had come in to
+      complicate the issues of the great civil war. Vassall, Child, and Maverick
+      seem to have been the leading spirits in a cabal for the establishment of
+      Presbyterianism in New England, and in their petition they simply took
+      advantage of the discontent of the disfranchised citizens in Massachusetts
+      in order to put in an entering wedge. This was thoroughly understood by
+      the legislature of Massachusetts, and accordingly the petition was
+      dismissed and the petitioners were roundly fined. Just as Child was about
+      to start for England with his grievances, the magistrates overhauled his
+      papers and discovered a petition to the parliamentary Board of
+      Commissioners, suggesting that Presbyterianism should be established in
+      New England, and that a viceroy or governor-general should be appointed to
+      rule there. To the men of Massachusetts this last suggestion was a
+      crowning horror. It seemed scarcely less than treason. The signers of this
+      petition were the same who had signed the petition to the General Court.
+      They were now fined still more heavily and imprisoned for six months. By
+      and by they found their way, one after another, to London, while the
+      colonists sent Edward Winslow, of Plymouth, as an advocate to thwart their
+      schemes. Winslow was assailed by Child's brother in a spicy pamphlet
+      entitled "New England's Jonas cast up at London," and replied after the
+      same sort, entitling his pamphlet "New England's Salamander discovered."
+      The cabal accomplished nothing because of the decisive defeat of
+      Presbyterianism in England. "Pride's Purge" settled all that. The petition
+      of Vassall and his friends was the occasion for the meeting of a synod of
+      churches at Cambridge, in order to complete the organization of
+      Congregationalism. In 1648 the work of the synod was embodied in the
+      famous Cambridge Platform, which adopted the Westminster Confession as its
+      creed, carefully defined the powers of the clergy, and declared it to be
+      the duty of magistrates to suppress heresy. In 1649 the General Court laid
+      this platform before the congregations; in 1651 it was adopted; and this
+      event may be regarded as completing the theocratic organization of the
+      Puritan commonwealth in Massachusetts. [[Sidenote: The Cambridge Platform;
+      deaths of Winthrop and Cotton]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was immediately preceded and followed by the deaths of the two foremost
+      men in that commonwealth. John Winthrop died in 1649 and John Cotton in
+      1652. Both were men of extraordinary power. Of Winthrop it is enough to
+      say that under his skilful guidance Massachusetts had been able to pursue
+      the daring policy which had characterized the first twenty years of her
+      history, and which in weaker hands would almost surely have ended in
+      disaster. Of Cotton it may be said that he was the most eminent among a
+      group of clergymen who for learning and dialectical skill have seldom been
+      surpassed. Neither Winthrop nor Cotton approved of toleration upon
+      principle. Cotton, in his elaborate controversy with Roger Williams,
+      frankly asserted that persecution is not wrong in itself; it is wicked for
+      falsehood to persecute truth, but it is the sacred duty of truth to
+      persecute falsehood. This was the theologian's view. Winthrop's was that
+      of a man of affairs. They had come to New England, he said, in order to
+      make a society after their own model; all who agreed with them might come
+      and join that society; those who disagreed with them might go elsewhere;
+      there was room enough on the American continent. But while neither
+      Winthrop nor Cotton understood the principle of religious liberty, at the
+      same time neither of them had the temperament which persecutes. Both were
+      men of genial disposition, sound common-sense, and exquisite tact. Under
+      their guidance no such tragedy would have been possible as that which was
+      about to leave its ineffaceable stain upon the annals of Massachusetts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was most unfortunate that at this moment the places of these two men
+      should have been taken by two as arrant fanatics as ever drew breath. For
+      thirteen out of the fifteen years following Winthrop's death, the governor
+      of Massachusetts was John Endicott, a sturdy pioneer, whose services to
+      the colony had been great. He was honest and conscientious, but
+      passionate, domineering, and very deficient in tact. At the same time
+      Cotton's successor in position and influence was John Norton, a man of
+      pungent wit, unyielding temper, and melancholy mood. He was possessed by a
+      morbid fear of Satan, whose hirelings he thought were walking up and down
+      over the earth in the visible semblance of heretics and schismatics. Under
+      such leaders the bigotry latent in the Puritan commonwealth might easily
+      break out in acts of deadly persecution. [[Sidenote: Endicott and Norton
+      take the lead] [[Sidenote: The Quakers and their views]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The occasion was not long in coming. Already the preaching of George Fox
+      had borne fruit, and the noble sect of Quakers was an object of scorn and
+      loathing to all such as had not gone so far as they toward learning the
+      true lesson of Protestantism. Of all Protestant sects the Quakers went
+      furthest in stripping off from Christianity its non-essential features of
+      doctrine and ceremonial. Their ideal was not a theocracy but a separation
+      between church and state. They would abolish all distinction between
+      clergy and laity, and could not be coaxed or bullied into paying tithes.
+      They also refused to render military service, or to take the oath of
+      allegiance. In these ways they came at once into antagonism both with
+      church and with state. In doctrine their chief peculiarity was the
+      assertion of an "Inward Light" by which every individual is to be guided
+      in his conduct of life. They did not believe that men ceased to be
+      divinely inspired when the apostolic ages came to an end, but held that at
+      all times and places the human soul may be enlightened by direct communion
+      with its Heavenly Father. Such views involved the most absolute assertion
+      of the right of private judgment; and when it is added that in the
+      exercise of this right many Quakers were found to reject the dogmas of
+      original sin and the resurrection of the body, to doubt the efficacy of
+      baptism, and to call in question the propriety of Christians turning the
+      Lord's Day into a Jewish Sabbath, we see that they had in some respects
+      gone far on the road toward modern rationalism. It was not to be expected
+      that such opinions should be treated by the Puritans in any other spirit
+      than one of extreme abhorrence and dread. The doctrine of the "Inward
+      Light," or of private inspiration, was something especially hateful to the
+      Puritan. To the modern rationalist, looking at things in the dry light of
+      history, it may seem that this doctrine was only the Puritan's own appeal
+      to individual judgment, stated in different form; but the Puritan could
+      not so regard it. To such a fanatic as Norton this inward light was but a
+      reflection from the glare of the bottomless pit, this private inspiration
+      was the beguiling voice of the Devil. As it led the Quakers to strange and
+      novel conclusions, this inward light seemed to array itself in hostility
+      to that final court of appeal for all good Protestants, the sacred text of
+      the Bible. The Quakers were accordingly regarded as infidels who sought to
+      deprive Protestantism of its only firm support. They were wrongly accused
+      of blasphemy in their treatment of the Scriptures. Cotton Mather says that
+      the Quakers were in the habit of alluding to the Bible as the Word of the
+      Devil. Such charges, from passionate and uncritical enemies, are worthless
+      except as they serve to explain the bitter prejudice with which the
+      Quakers were regarded. They remind one of the silly accusation brought
+      against Wyclif two centuries earlier, that he taught his disciples that
+      God ought to obey the Devil; <a href="#linknote-24" name="linknoteref-24"
+      id="linknoteref-24"><small>24</small></a> and they are not altogether
+      unlike the assumptions of some modern theologians who take it for granted
+      that any writer who accepts the Darwinian theory must be a materialist.
+      [[Sidenote: Endicott and Norton take the lead] [[Sidenote: The Quakers and
+      their views]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But worthless as Mather's statements are, in describing the views of the
+      Quakers, they are valuable as indicating the temper in which these
+      disturbers of the Puritan theocracy were regarded. In accusing them of
+      rejecting the Bible and making a law unto themselves, Mather simply put on
+      record a general belief which he shared. Nor can it be doubted that the
+      demeanour of the Quaker enthusiasts was sometimes such as to seem to
+      warrant the belief that their anarchical doctrines entailed, as a natural
+      consequence, disorderly and disreputable conduct. In those days all
+      manifestations of dissent were apt to be violent, and the persecution
+      which they encountered was likely to call forth strange and unseemly
+      vagaries. When we remember how the Quakers, in their scorn of earthly
+      magistrates and princes, would hoot at the governor as he walked up the
+      street; how they used to rush into church on Sundays and interrupt the
+      sermon with untimely remarks; how Thomas Newhouse once came into the Old
+      South Meeting-House with a glass bottle in each hand, and, holding them up
+      before the astonished congregation, knocked them together and smashed
+      them, with the remark, "Thus will the Lord break you all in pieces"; how
+      Lydia Wardwell and Deborah Wilson ran about the streets in the primitive
+      costume of Eve before the fall, and called their conduct "testifying
+      before the Lord"; we can hardly wonder that people should have been
+      reminded of the wretched scenes enacted at Munster by the Anabaptists of
+      the preceding century. [[Sidenote: Violent manifestations of dissent]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such incidents, however, do not afford the slightest excuse for the cruel
+      treatment which the Quakers received in Boston, nor do they go far toward
+      explaining it. Persecution began immediately, before the new-comers had a
+      chance to behave themselves well or ill. Their mere coming to Boston was
+      taken as an act of invasion. It was indeed an attack upon the Puritan
+      theocratic idea. Of all the sectaries of that age of sects, the Quakers
+      were the most aggressive. There were at one time more than four thousand
+      of them in English jails; yet when any of them left England, it was less
+      to escape persecution than to preach their doctrines far and wide over the
+      earth. Their missionaries found their way to Paris, to Vienna; even to
+      Rome, where they testified under the very roof of the Vatican. In this
+      dauntless spirit they came to New England to convert its inhabitants, or
+      at any rate to establish the principle that in whatever community it might
+      please them to stay, there they would stay in spite of judge or hangman.
+      At first they came to Barbadoes, whence two of their number, Anne Austin
+      and Mary Fisher, sailed for Boston. When they landed, on a May morning in
+      1656, Endicott happened to be away from Boston, but the deputy-governor,
+      Richard Bellingham, was equal to the occasion. He arrested the two women
+      and locked them up in jail, where, for fear they might proclaim their
+      heresies to the crowd gathered outside, the windows were boarded up. There
+      was no law as yet enacted against Quakers, but a council summoned for the
+      occasion pronounced their doctrines blasphemous and devilish. The books
+      which the poor women had with them were seized and publicly burned, and
+      the women themselves were kept in prison half-starved for five weeks until
+      the ship they had come in was ready to return to Barbadoes. Soon after
+      their departure Endicott came home. He found fault with Bellingham's
+      conduct as too gentle; if he had been there he would have had the hussies
+      flogged. [[Sidenote: Anne Austin and Mary Fisher]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Five years afterward Mary Fisher went to Adrianople and tried to convert
+      the Grand Turk, who treated her with grave courtesy and allowed her to
+      prophesy unmolested. This is one of the numerous incidents that, on a
+      superficial view of history, might be cited in support of the opinion that
+      there has been on the whole more tolerance in the Mussulman than in the
+      Christian world. Rightly interpreted, however, the fact has no such
+      implication. In Massachusetts the preaching of Quaker doctrines might (and
+      did) lead to a revolution; in Turkey it was as harmless as the barking of
+      dogs. Governor Endicott was afraid of Mary Fisher; Mahomet III. was not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No sooner had the two women been shipped from Boston than eight other
+      Quakers arrived from London. They were at once arrested. While they were
+      lying in jail the Federal Commissioners, then in session at Plymouth,
+      recommended that laws be forthwith enacted to keep these dreaded heretics
+      out of the land. Next year they stooped so far as to seek the aid of Rhode
+      Island, the colony which they had refused to admit into their confederacy.
+      "They sent a letter to the authorities of that colony, signing themselves
+      their loving friends and neighbours, and beseeching them to preserve the
+      whole body of colonies against 'such a pest' by banishing and excluding
+      all Quakers, a measure to which 'the rule of charity did oblige them.'"
+      Roger Williams was then president of Rhode Island, and in full accord with
+      his noble spirit was the reply of the assembly. "We have no law amongst us
+      whereby to punish any for only declaring by words their minds and
+      understandings concerning the things and ways of God as to salvation and
+      our eternal condition." As for these Quakers we find that where they are
+      "most of all suffered to declare themselves freely and only opposed by
+      arguments in discourse, there they least of all desire to come." Any
+      breach of the civil law shall be punished, but the "freedom of different
+      consciences shall be respected." This reply enraged the confederated
+      colonies, and Massachusetts, as the strongest and most overbearing,
+      threatened to cut off the trade of Rhode Island, which forthwith appealed
+      to Cromwell for protection. The language of the appeal is as touching as
+      its broad Christian spirit is grand. It recognizes that by stopping trade
+      the men of Massachusetts will injure themselves, yet, it goes on to say,
+      "for the safeguard of their religion they may seem to neglect themselves
+      in that respect; for what will not men do for their God?" But whatever
+      fortune may befall, "let us not be compelled to exercise any civil power
+      over men's consciences." <a href="#linknote-25" name="linknoteref-25"
+      id="linknoteref-25"><small>25</small></a> [[Sidenote: Noble conduct of
+      Rhode Island]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There could never, of course, be a doubt as to who drew up this state
+      paper. During his last visit to England, three years before, Roger
+      Williams had spent several weeks at Sir Harry Vane's country house in
+      Lincolnshire, and he had also been intimately associated with Cromwell and
+      Milton. The views of these great men were the most advanced of that age.
+      They were coming to understand the true principle upon which toleration
+      should be based. (See my Excursions of an Evolutionist, pp. 247, 289-293.)
+      Vane had said in Parliament, "Why should the labours of any be suppressed,
+      if sober, though never so different? We now profess to seek God, we desire
+      to see light!" [[Sidenote: Roger Williams appeals to Cromwell]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This Williams called a "heavenly speech." The sentiment it expressed was
+      in accordance with the practical policy of Cromwell, and in the appeal of
+      the president of Rhode Island to the Lord Protector one hears the tone
+      with which friend speaks to friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In thus protecting the Quakers, Williams never for a moment concealed his
+      antipathy to their doctrines. The author of "George Fox digged out of his
+      Burrowes," the sturdy controversialist who in his seventy-third year rowed
+      himself in a boat the whole length of Narragansett bay to engage in a
+      theological tournament against three Quaker champions, was animated by
+      nothing less than the broadest liberalism in his bold reply to the Federal
+      Commissioners in 1657. The event showed that under his guidance the policy
+      of Rhode Island was not only honourable but wise. The four confederated
+      colonies all proceeded to pass laws banishing Quakers and making it a
+      penal offence for shipmasters to bring them to New England. These laws
+      differed in severity. Those of Connecticut, in which we may trace the
+      influence of the younger John Winthrop, were the mildest; those of
+      Massachusetts were the most severe, and as Quakers kept coming all the
+      more in spite of them, they grew harsher and harsher. At first the Quaker
+      who persisted in returning was to be flogged and imprisoned at hard
+      labour, next his ears were to be cut off, and for a third offence his
+      tongue was to be bored with a hot iron. At length in 1658, the Federal
+      Commissioners, sitting at Boston with Endicott as chairman, recommended
+      capital punishment. It must be borne in mind that the general reluctance
+      toward prescribing or inflicting the death penalty was much weaker then
+      than now. On the statute-books there were not less than fifteen capital
+      crimes, including such offences as idolatry, witchcraft, blasphemy,
+      marriage within the Levitical degrees, "presumptuous sabbath-breaking,"
+      and cursing or smiting one's parents. <a href="#linknote-26"
+      name="linknoteref-26" id="linknoteref-26"><small>26</small></a> The
+      infliction of the penalty, however, lay practically very much within the
+      discretion of the court, and was generally avoided except in cases of
+      murder or other heinous felony. In some of these ecclesiastical offences
+      the statute seems to have served the purpose of a threat, and was
+      therefore perhaps the more easily enacted. Yet none of the colonies except
+      Massachusetts now adopted the suggestion of the Federal Commissioners and
+      threatened the Quakers with death. [[Sidenote: Laws passed against the
+      Quakers]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Massachusetts the opposition was very strong indeed, and its character
+      shows how wide the divergence in sentiment had already become between the
+      upper stratum of society and the people in general. This divergence was
+      one result of the excessive weight given to the clergy by the restriction
+      of the suffrage to church members. One might almost say that it was not
+      the people of Massachusetts, after all, that shed the blood of the
+      Quakers; it was Endicott and the clergy. The bill establishing death as
+      the penalty for returning after banishment was passed in the upper house
+      without serious difficulty; but in the lower house it was at first
+      defeated. Of the twenty-six deputies fifteen were opposed to it, but one
+      of these fell sick and two were intimidated, so that finally the infamous
+      measure was passed by a vote of thirteen against twelve. Probably it would
+      not have passed but for a hopeful feeling that an occasion for putting it
+      into execution would not be likely to arise. It was hoped that the mere
+      threat would prove effective. Endicott begged the Quakers to keep away,
+      saying earnestly that he did not desire their death; but the more resolute
+      spirits were not deterred by fear of the gallows. In September, 1659,
+      William Robinson, Marmaduke Stevenson, and Mary Dyer, who had come to
+      Boston expressly to defy the cruel law, were banished. Mrs. Dyer was a
+      lady of good family, wife of the secretary of Rhode Island. She had been
+      an intimate friend of Mrs. Hutchinson. While she went home to her husband,
+      Stevenson and Robinson went only to Salem and then faced about and came
+      back to Boston. Mrs. Dyer also returned. All three felt themselves under
+      divine command to resist and defy the persecutors. On the 27th of October
+      they were led to the gallows on Boston Common, under escort of a hundred
+      soldiers. Many people had begun to cry shame on such proceedings, and it
+      was thought necessary to take precautions against a tumult. The victims
+      tried to address the crowd, but their voices were drowned by the beating
+      of drums. While the Rev. John Wilson railed and scoffed at them from the
+      foot of the gallows the two brave men were hanged. The halter had been
+      placed upon Mrs. Dyer when her son, who had come in all haste from Rhode
+      Island, obtained her reprieve on his promise to take her away. The bodies
+      of the two men were denied Christian burial and thrown uncovered into a
+      pit. All the efforts of husband and son were unable to keep Mrs. Dyer at
+      home. In the following spring she returned to Boston and on the first day
+      of June was again taken to the gallows. At the last moment she was offered
+      freedom if she would only promise to go away and stay, but she refused.
+      "In obedience to the will of the Lord I came," said she, "and in his will
+      I abide faithful unto death." And so she died. [[Sidenote: Executions on
+      Boston Common] [[Sidenote: Wenlock Christison's defiance and victory]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Public sentiment in Boston was now turning so strongly against the
+      magistrates that they began to weaken in their purpose. But there was one
+      more victim. In November, 1660, William Leddra returned from banishment.
+      The case was clear enough, but he was kept in prison four months and every
+      effort was made to induce him to promise to leave the colony, but in vain.
+      In the following March he too was put to death. A few days before the
+      execution, as Leddra was being questioned in court, a memorable scene
+      occurred. Wenlock Christison was one of those who had been banished under
+      penalty of death. On his return he made straight for the town-house,
+      strode into the court-room, and with uplifted finger addressed the judges
+      in words of authority. "I am come here to warn you," said he, "that ye
+      shed no more innocent blood." He was instantly seized and dragged off to
+      jail. After three months he was brought to trial before the Court of
+      Assistants. The magistrates debated for more than a fortnight as to what
+      should be done. The air was thick with mutterings of insurrection, and
+      they had lost all heart for their dreadful work. Not so the savage old man
+      who presided, frowning gloomily under his black skull cap. Losing his
+      patience at last, Endicott smote the table with fury, upbraided the judges
+      for their weakness, and declared himself so disgusted that he was ready to
+      go back to England. <a href="#linknote-27" name="linknoteref-27"
+      id="linknoteref-27"><small>27</small></a> "You that will not consent,
+      record it," he shouted, as the question was again put to vote, "I thank
+      God I am not afraid to give judgment." Christison was condemned to death,
+      but the sentence was never executed. In the interval the legislature
+      assembled, and the law was modified. The martyrs had not died in vain.
+      Their cause was victorious. A revolution had been effected. The Puritan
+      ideal of a commonwealth composed of a united body of believers was broken
+      down, never again to be restored. The principle had been admitted that the
+      heretic might come to Massachusetts and stay there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not in a moment, however, that these results were fully realized.
+      For some years longer Quakers were fined, imprisoned, and now and then
+      tied to the cart's tail and whipped from one town to another. But these
+      acts of persecution came to be more and more discountenanced by public
+      opinion until at length they ceased.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was on the 25th of May, 1660, just one week before the martyrdom of
+      Mary Dyer, that Charles II. returned to England to occupy his father's
+      throne. One of the first papers laid before him was a memorial in behalf
+      of the oppressed Quakers in New England. In the course of the following
+      year he sent a letter to Endicott and the other New England governors,
+      ordering them to suspend proceedings against the Quakers, and if any were
+      then in prison, to send them to England for trial. Christison's victory
+      had already been won, but the "King's Missive" was now partially obeyed by
+      the release of all prisoners. As for sending anybody to England for trial,
+      that was something that no New England government could ever be made to
+      allow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Charles's defence of the Quakers was due, neither to liberality of
+      disposition nor to any sympathy with them, but rather to his inclinations
+      toward Romanism. Unlike in other respects, Quakers and Catholics were
+      alike in this, that they were the only sects which the Protestant world in
+      general agreed in excluding from toleration. Charles wished to secure
+      toleration for Catholics, and he could not prudently take steps toward
+      this end without pursuing a policy broad enough to diminish persecution in
+      other directions, and from these circumstances the Quakers profited. At
+      times there was something almost like a political alliance between Quaker
+      and Catholic, as instanced in the relations between William Penn and
+      Charles's brother, the Duke of York. [[Sidenote: The "King's Missive"]
+      [[Sidenote: Why Charles II. interfered to protect the Quakers]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides all this, Charles had good reason to feel that the governments of
+      New England were assuming too many airs of sovereignty. There were plenty
+      of people at hand to work upon his mind. The friends of Gorton and Child
+      and Vassall were loud with their complaints. Samuel Maverick swore that
+      the people of New England were all rebels, and he could prove it. The king
+      was assured that the Confederacy was "a war combination, made by the four
+      colonies when they had a design to throw off their dependence on England,
+      and for that purpose." The enemies of the New England people, while
+      dilating upon the rebellious disposition of Massachusetts, could also
+      remind the king that for several years that colony had been coining and
+      circulating shillings and sixpences with the name "Massachusetts" and a
+      tree on one side, and the name "New England" with the date on the other.
+      There was no recognition of England upon this coinage, which was begun in
+      1652 and kept up for more than thirty years. Such pieces of money used to
+      be called "pine-tree shillings"; but, so far as looks go, the tree might
+      be anything, and an adroit friend of New England once gravely assured the
+      king that it was meant for the royal oak in which his majesty hid himself
+      after the battle of Worcester!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Against the colony of New Haven the king had a special grudge. Two of the
+      regicide judges, who had sat in the tribunal which condemned his father,
+      escaped to New England in 1660 and were well received there. They were
+      gentlemen of high position. Edward Whalley was a cousin of Cromwell and
+      Hampden. He had distinguished himself at Naseby and Dunbar, and had risen
+      to the rank of lieutenant-general. He had commanded at the capture of
+      Worcester, where it is interesting to observe that the royalist commander
+      who surrendered to him was Sir Henry Washington, own cousin to the
+      grandfather of George Washington. The other regicide, William Goffe, as a
+      major-general in Cromwell's army, had won such distinction that there were
+      some who pointed to him as the proper person to succeed the Lord Protector
+      on the death of the latter. He had married Whalley's daughter. Soon after
+      the arrival of these gentlemen, a royal order for their arrest was sent to
+      Boston. If they had been arrested and sent back to England, their severed
+      heads would soon have been placed over Temple Bar. The king's detectives
+      hotly pursued them through the woodland paths of New England, and they
+      would soon have been taken but for the aid they got from the people. Many
+      are the stories of their hairbreadth escapes. Sometimes they took refuge
+      in a cave on a mountain near New Haven, sometimes they hid in friendly
+      cellars; and once, being hard put to it, they skulked under a wooden
+      bridge, while their pursuers on horseback galloped by overhead. After
+      lurking about New Haven and Milford for two or three years, on hearing of
+      the expected arrival of Colonel Nichols and his commission, they sought a
+      more secluded hiding-place near Hadley, a village lately settled far up
+      the Connecticut river, within the jurisdiction of Massachusetts. Here the
+      avengers lost the trail, the pursuit was abandoned, and the weary
+      regicides were presently forgotten. The people of New Haven had been
+      especially zealous in shielding the fugitives. Mr. Davenport had not only
+      harboured them in his own house, but on the Sabbath before their expected
+      arrival he had preached a very bold sermon, openly advising his people to
+      aid and comfort them as far as possible. <a href="#linknote-28"
+      name="linknoteref-28" id="linknoteref-28"><small>28</small></a> The
+      colony, moreover, did not officially recognize the restoration of Charles
+      II. to the throne until that event had been commonly known in New England
+      for more than a year. For these reasons the wrath of the king was
+      specially roused against New Haven, when circumstances combined to enable
+      him at once to punish this disloyal colony and deal a blow at the
+      Confederacy. We have seen that in restricting the suffrage to church
+      members New Haven had followed the example of Massachusetts, but
+      Connecticut had not; and at this time there was warm controversy between
+      the two younger colonies as to the wisdom Of such a policy. As yet none of
+      the colonies save Massachusetts had obtained a charter, and Connecticut
+      was naturally anxious to obtain one. Whether through a complaisant spirit
+      connected with this desire, or through mere accident, Connecticut had been
+      prompt in acknowledging the restoration of Charles II.; and in August,
+      1661, she dispatched the younger Winthrop to England to apply for a
+      charter. Winthrop was a man of winning address and of wide culture. His
+      scientific tastes were a passport to the favour of the king at a time when
+      the Royal Society was being founded, of which Winthrop himself was soon
+      chosen a fellow. In every way the occasion was an auspicious one. The king
+      looked upon the rise of the New England Confederacy with unfriendly eyes.
+      Massachusetts was as yet the only member of the league that was really
+      troublesome; and there seemed to be no easier way to weaken her than to
+      raise up a rival power by her side, and extend to it such privileges as
+      might awaken her jealousy. All the more would such a policy be likely to
+      succeed if accompanied by measures of which Massachusetts must necessarily
+      disapprove, and the suppression of New Haven would be such a measure.
+      [[Sidenote: New Haven annexed to Connecticut]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In accordance with these views, a charter of great liberality was at once
+      granted to Connecticut, and by the same instrument the colony of New Haven
+      was deprived of its separate existence and annexed to its stronger
+      neighbour. As if to emphasize the motives which had led to this display of
+      royal favour toward Connecticut, an equally liberal charter was granted to
+      Rhode Island. In the summer of 1664 Charles II. sent a couple of
+      ships-of-war to Boston harbour, with 400 troops under command of Colonel
+      Richard Nichols, who had been appointed, along with Samuel Maverick and
+      two others as royal commissioners, to look after the affairs of the New
+      World. Colonel Nichols took his ships to New Amsterdam, and captured that
+      important town. After his return the commissioners held meetings at
+      Boston, and for a time the Massachusetts charter seemed in danger. But the
+      Puritan magistrates were shrewd, and months were frittered away to no
+      purpose. Presently the Dutch made war upon England, and the king felt it
+      to be unwise to irritate the people of Massachusetts beyond endurance. The
+      turbulent state of English politics which followed still further absorbed
+      his attention, and New England had another respite of several years.
+      [[Sidenote: Founding of Newark]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In New Haven a party had grown up which was dissatisfied with its extreme
+      theocratic policy and approved of the union with Connecticut. Davenport
+      and his followers, the founders of the colony, were beyond measure
+      disgusted. They spurned "the Christless rule" of the sister colony. Many
+      of them took advantage of the recent conquest of New Netherland, and a
+      strong party, led by the Rev. Abraham Pierson, of Branford, migrated to
+      the banks of the Passaic in June, 1667, and laid the foundations of
+      Newark. For some years to come the theocratic idea that had given birth to
+      New Haven continued to live on in New Jersey. As for Mr. Davenport, he
+      went to Boston and ended his days there. Cotton Mather, writing at a later
+      date, when the theocratic scheme of the early settlers had been manifestly
+      outgrown and superseded, says of Davenport: "Yet, after all, the Lord gave
+      him to see that in this world a Church-State was impossible, whereinto
+      there enters nothing which defiles."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The theocratic policy, alike in New Haven and in Massachusetts, broke down
+      largely through its inherent weakness. It divided the community, and
+      created among the people a party adverse to its arrogance and
+      exclusiveness. This state of things facilitated the suppression of New
+      Haven by royal edict, and it made possible the victory of Wenlock
+      Christison in Massachusetts. We can now see the fundamental explanation of
+      the deadly hostility with which Endicott and his party regarded the
+      Quakers. The latter aimed a fatal blow at the very root of the idea which
+      had brought the Puritans to New England. Once admit these heretics as
+      citizens, or even as tolerated sojourners, and there was an end of the
+      theocratic state consisting of a united body of believers. It was a
+      life-and-death struggle, in which no quarter was given; and the Quakers,
+      aided by popular discontent with the theocracy, even more than by the
+      intervention of the crown, won a decisive victory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As the work of planting New England took place chiefly in the eleven years
+      1629-1640, during which Charles I. contrived to reign without a
+      parliament, so the prosperous period of the New England Confederacy,
+      1643-1664, covers the time of the Civil War and the Commonwealth, and just
+      laps on to the reign of Charles II. By the summary extinction of the
+      separate existence of one of its members for the benefit of another, its
+      vigour was sadly impaired. But its constitution was revised so as to make
+      it a league of three states instead of four; and the Federal Commissioners
+      kept on holding their meetings, though less frequently, until the
+      revocation of the Massachusetts charter in 1684. During this period a
+      great Indian war occurred, in the course of which this concentration of
+      the military strength of New England, imperfect as it was, proved itself
+      very useful. In the history of New England, from the restoration of the
+      Stuarts until their final expulsion, the two most important facts are the
+      military struggle of the newly founded states with the Indians, and their
+      constitutional struggle against the British government. The troubles and
+      dangers of 1636 were renewed on a much more formidable scale, but the
+      strength of the people had waxed greatly in the mean time, and the new
+      perils were boldly overcome or skilfully warded off; not, however, until
+      the constitution of Massachusetts had been violently wrenched out of shape
+      in the struggle, and seeds of conflict sown which in the following century
+      were to bear fruit in the American Revolution. [[Sidenote: Breaking down
+      of the theocratic policy] [[Sidenote: Weakening of the Confederacy]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER V. &mdash; KING PHILIP'S WAR.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      For eight-and-thirty years after the destruction of the Pequots, the
+      intercourse between the English and the Indians was to all outward
+      appearance friendly. The policy pursued by the settlers was in the main
+      well considered. While they had shown that they could strike with terrible
+      force when blows were needed, their treatment of the natives in time of
+      peace seems to have been generally just and kind. Except in the single
+      case of the conquered Pequot territory, they scrupulously paid for every
+      rood of ground on which they settled, and so far as possible they extended
+      to the Indians the protection of the law. On these points we have the
+      explicit testimony of Josiah Winslow, governor of Plymouth, in his report
+      to the Federal Commissioners in May, 1676; and what he says about Plymouth
+      seems to have been equally true of the other colonies. Says Winslow, "I
+      think I can clearly say that before these present troubles broke out, the
+      English did not possess one foot of land in this colony but what was
+      fairly obtained by honest purchase of the Indian proprietors. Nay, because
+      some of our people are of a covetous disposition, and the Indians are in
+      their straits easily prevailed with to part with their lands, we first
+      made a law that none should purchase or receive of gift any land of the
+      Indians without the knowledge and allowance of our Court .... And if at
+      any time they have brought complaints before us, they have had justice
+      impartial and speedy, so that our own people have frequently complained
+      that we erred on the other hand in showing them overmuch favour." The
+      general laws of Massachusetts and Connecticut as well as of Plymouth bear
+      out what Winslow says, and show us that as a matter of policy the colonial
+      governments were fully sensible of the importance of avoiding all
+      occasions for quarrel with their savage neighbours. [[Sidenote: Puritans
+      and Indians]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There can, moreover, be little doubt that the material comfort of the
+      Indians was for a time considerably improved by their dealings with the
+      white men. Hitherto their want of foresight and thrift had been wont to
+      involve them during the long winters in a dreadful struggle with famine.
+      Now the settlers were ready to pay liberally for the skin of every
+      fur-covered animal the red men could catch; and where the trade thus
+      arising did not suffice to keep off famine, instances of generous charity
+      were frequent. The Algonquin tribes of New England lived chiefly by
+      hunting, but partly by agriculture. They raised beans and corn, and
+      succotash was a dish which they contributed to the white man's table. They
+      could now raise or buy English vegetables, while from dogs and horses,
+      pigs and poultry, oxen and sheep, little as they could avail themselves of
+      such useful animals, they nevertheless derived some benefit. <a
+      href="#linknote-29" name="linknoteref-29" id="linknoteref-29"><small>29</small></a>
+      Better blankets and better knives were brought within their reach; and in
+      spite of all the colonial governments could do to prevent it, they were to
+      some extent enabled to supply themselves with muskets and rum. [[Sidenote:
+      Trade with the Indians]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides all this trade, which, except in the article of liquor, tended to
+      improve the condition of the native tribes, there was on the part of the
+      earlier settlers an earnest and diligent effort to convert them to
+      Christianity and give them the rudiments of a civilized education.
+      Missionary work was begun in 1643 by Thomas Mayhew on the islands of
+      Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. The savages at first declared they were
+      not so silly as to barter thirty-seven tutelar deities for one, but after
+      much preaching and many pow-wows Mayhew succeeded in persuading them that
+      the Deity of the white man was mightier than all their <i>manitous.</i>
+      Whether they ever got much farther than this toward a comprehension of the
+      white man's religion may be doubted; but they were prevailed upon to let
+      their children learn to read and write, and even to set up little courts,
+      in which justice was administered according to some of the simplest rules
+      of English law, and from which there lay an appeal to the court of
+      Plymouth. In 1646 Massachusetts enacted that the elders of the churches
+      should choose two persons each year to go and spread the gospel among the
+      Indians. In 1649 Parliament established the Society for propagating the
+      Gospel in New England, and presently from voluntary contributions the
+      society was able to dispose of an annual income of £2000. Schools were set
+      up in which agriculture was taught as well as religion. It was even
+      intended that Indians should go to Harvard College, and a building was
+      erected for their accommodation, but as none came to occupy it, the
+      college printing-press was presently set to work there. One solitary
+      Indian student afterward succeeded in climbing to the bachelor's degree,&mdash;Caleb
+      Cheeshahteaumuck of the class of 1665. It was this one success that was
+      marvellous, not the failure of the scheme, which vividly shows how
+      difficult it was for the white man of that day to understand the
+      limitations of the red man. [[Sidenote: Missionary work: Thomas Mayhew]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The greatest measure of success in converting the Indians was attained by
+      that famous linguist and preacher, the apostle John Eliot. This remarkable
+      man was a graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge. He had come to
+      Massachusetts in 1631, and in the following year had been settled as
+      teacher in the church at Roxbury of which Thomas Welde was pastor. He had
+      been distinguished at the university for philological scholarship and for
+      linguistic talent&mdash;two things not always found in connection&mdash;and
+      now during fourteen years he devoted such time as he could to acquiring a
+      complete mastery of the Algonquin dialect spoken by the Indians of
+      Massachusetts bay. To the modern comparative philologist his work is of
+      great value. He published not only an excellent Indian grammar, but a
+      complete translation of the Bible into the Massachusetts language,&mdash;a
+      monument of prodigious labour. It is one of the most instructive documents
+      in existence for the student of Algonquin speech, though the Massachusetts
+      tribe and its language have long been extinct, and there are very few
+      scholars living who can read the book. It has become one of the
+      curiosities of literature and at auction sales of private libraries
+      commands an extremely high price. Yet out of this rare book the American
+      public has somehow or other within the last five or six years contrived to
+      pick up a word which we shall very likely continue to hear for some time
+      to come. In Eliot's Bible, the word which means a great chief&mdash;such
+      as Joshua, or Gideon, or Joab&mdash;is "mugwump."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in 1646 that Eliot began his missionary preaching at a small Indian
+      village near Watertown. President Dunster, of Harvard College, and Mr.
+      Shepard, the minister at Cambridge, felt a warm interest in the
+      undertaking. These worthy men seriously believed that the aborigines of
+      America were the degenerate descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel,
+      and from this strange backsliding it was hoped that they might now be
+      reclaimed. With rare eloquence and skill did Eliot devote himself to the
+      difficult work of reaching the Indian's scanty intelligence and still
+      scantier moral sense. His ministrations reached from the sands of Cape Cod
+      to the rocky hillsides of Brookfield. But he soon found that single-handed
+      he could achieve but little over so wide an area, and accordingly he
+      adopted the policy of colonizing his converts in village communities near
+      the English towns, where they might be sequestered from their heathen
+      brethren and subjected to none but Christian influences. In these
+      communities he hoped to train up native missionaries who might thence go
+      and labour among the wild tribes until the whole lump of barbarism should
+      be leavened. In pursuance of this scheme a stockaded village was built at
+      Natick in 1651 Under the direction of an English carpenter the Indians
+      built log-houses for themselves, and most of them adopted the English
+      dress. Their simple government was administered by tithing-men, or "rulers
+      of tens," chosen after methods prescribed in the book of Exodus. Other
+      such communities were formed in the neighbourhoods of Concord and Grafton.
+      By 1674 the number of these "praying Indians," as they were called, was
+      estimated at 4000, of whom about 1500 were in Eliot's villages, as many
+      more in Martha's Vineyard, 300 in Nantucket, and 700 in the Plymouth
+      colony. There seems to be no doubt that these Indians were really
+      benefited both materially and morally by the change in their life. In
+      theology it is not likely that they reached any higher view than that
+      expressed by the Connecticut sachem Wequash who "seeing and beholding the
+      mighty power of God in the English forces, how they fell upon the Pequots,
+      ... from that time was convinced and persuaded that our God was a most
+      dreadful God;" accordingly, says the author of "New England's First
+      Fruits," "he became thoroughly reformed according to his light." Matters
+      of outward observance, too, the Indians could understand; for we read of
+      one of them rebuking an Englishman "for profaning the Lord's Day by
+      felling of a tree." The Indian's notions of religion were probably
+      confined within this narrow compass; the notions of some people that call
+      themselves civilized perhaps do not extend much further. [[Sidenote:
+      Villages of Christian Indians]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From such facts as those above cited we may infer that the early relations
+      of the Puritan settlers to the Algonquin tribes of New England were by no
+      means like the relations between white men and red men in recent times on
+      our western plains. During Philip's War, as we shall see, the Puritan
+      theory of the situation was entirely changed and our forefathers began to
+      act in accordance with the frontiersman's doctrine that the good Indians
+      are dead Indians. But down to that time it is clear that his intention was
+      to deal honourably and gently with his tawny neighbour. We sometimes hear
+      the justice and kindness of the Quakers in Pennsylvania alleged as an
+      adequate reason for the success with which they kept clear of an Indian
+      war. This explanation, however, does not seem to be adequate; it does not
+      appear that, on the whole, the Puritans were less just and kind than the
+      Quakers in their treatment of the red men. The true explanation is rather
+      to be found in the relations between the Indian tribes toward the close of
+      the seventeenth century. Early in that century the Pennsylvania region had
+      been in the hands of the ferocious and powerful Susquehannocks, but in
+      1672, after a frightful struggle of twenty years, this great tribe was
+      swept from the face of the earth by the resistless league of the Five
+      Nations. When the Quakers came to Pennsylvania in 1682, the only Indians
+      in that neighbourhood were the Delawares, who had just been terribly
+      beaten by the Five Nations and forced into a treaty by which they
+      submitted to be called "women," and to surrender their tomahawks. Penn's
+      famous treaty was made with the Delawares as occupants of the land and
+      also with the Iroquois league as overlords. <a href="#linknote-30"
+      name="linknoteref-30" id="linknoteref-30"><small>30</small></a> Now the
+      great central fact of early American history, so far as the relations
+      between white men and red men are concerned, is the unshaken friendship of
+      the Iroquois for the English. This was the natural consequence of the
+      deadly hostility between the Iroquois and the French which began with
+      Champlain's defeat of the Mohawks in 1609. During the seventy-three years
+      which intervened between the founding of Pennsylvania and the defeat of
+      Braddock there was never a moment when the Delawares could have attacked
+      the Quakers without incurring the wrath and vengeance of their overlords
+      the Five Nations. This was the reason why Pennsylvania was left so long in
+      quiet. No better proof could be desired than the fact that in Pontiac's
+      war, after the overthrow of the French and when Indian politics had
+      changed, no state suffered so much as Pennsylvania from the horrors of
+      Indian warfare. [[Sidenote: Why Pennsylvania was so long unmolested by the
+      Indians]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In New England at the time of Philip's War, the situation was very
+      different from what it was between the Hudson and the Susquehanna. The
+      settlers were thrown into immediate relations with several tribes whose
+      mutual hostility and rivalry was such that it was simply impossible to
+      keep on good terms with all at once. Such complicated questions as that
+      which involved the English in responsibility for the fate of Miantonomo
+      did not arise in Pennsylvania. Since the destruction of the Pequots we
+      have observed the Narragansetts and Mohegans contending for the foremost
+      place among New England tribes. Of the two rivals the Mohegans were the
+      weaker, and therefore courted the friendship of the formidable palefaces.
+      The English had no desire to take part in these barbarous feuds, but they
+      could not treat the Mohegans well without incurring the hostility of the
+      Narragansetts. For thirty years the feeling of the latter tribe toward the
+      English had been very unfriendly and would doubtless have vented itself in
+      murder but for their recollection of the fate of the Pequots. After the
+      loss of their chief Miantonomo their attitude became so sullen and defiant
+      that the Federal Commissioners, in order to be in readiness for an
+      outbreak, collected a force of 300 men. At the first news of these
+      preparations the Narragansetts, overcome with terror, sent a liberal
+      tribute of wampum to Boston, and were fain to conclude a treaty in which
+      they promised to behave themselves well in the future.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was impossible that this sort of English protectorate over the native
+      tribes, which was an inevitable result of the situation, should be other
+      than irksome and irritating to the Indians. They could not but see that
+      the white man stood there as master, and even in the utter absence of
+      provocation, this fact alone must have made them hate him. It is
+      difficult, moreover, for the civilized man and the savage to understand
+      each other. As a rule the one does not know what the other is thinking
+      about. When Mr. Hamilton Gushing a few years ago took some of his Zuni
+      friends into a hotel in Chicago, they marvelled at his entering such a
+      mighty palace with so little ceremony, and their wonder was heightened at
+      the promptness with which "slaves" came running at his beck and call; but
+      all at once, on seeing an American eagle over one of the doorways, they
+      felt that the mystery was solved. Evidently this palace was the communal
+      dwelling of the Eagle Clan of palefaces, and evidently Mr. Gushing was a
+      great sachem of this clan, and as such entitled to lordly sway there! The
+      Zunis are not savages, but representatives of a remote and primitive phase
+      of what Mr. Morgan calls the middle status of barbarism. The gulf between
+      their thinking and that of white men is wide because there is a wide gulf
+      between the experience of the two. [[Sidenote: Difficulty of the situation
+      in New England] [[Sidenote: It is hard for the savage and the civilized
+      man to understand one another]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This illustration may help us to understand an instance in which the
+      Indians of New England must inevitably have misinterpreted the actions of
+      the white settlers and read them in the light of their uneasy fears and
+      prejudices. I refer to the work of the apostle Eliot. His design in
+      founding his villages of Christian Indians was in the highest degree
+      benevolent and noble; but the heathen Indians could hardly be expected to
+      see anything in it but a cunning scheme for destroying them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Eliot's converts were for the most part from the Massachusetts tribe, the
+      smallest and weakest of all. The Plymouth converts came chiefly from the
+      tribe next in weakness, the Pokanokets or Wampanoags. The more powerful
+      tribes&mdash;Narragansetts, Nipmucks, and Mohegans&mdash;furnished very
+      few converts. When they saw the white intruders gathering members of the
+      weakest tribes into villages of English type, and teaching them strange
+      gods while clothing them in strange garments, they probably supposed that
+      the pale-faces were simply adopting these Indians into their white tribe
+      as a means of increasing their military strength. At any rate, such a
+      proceeding would be perfectly intelligible to the savage mind, whereas the
+      nature of Eliot's design lay quite beyond its ken. As the Indians
+      recovered from their supernatural dread of the English, and began to
+      regard them as using human means to accomplish their ends, they must of
+      course interpret their conduct in such light as savage experience could
+      afford. It is one of the commonest things in the world for a savage tribe
+      to absorb weak neighbours by adoption, and thus increase its force
+      preparatory to a deadly assault upon other neighbours. When Eliot in 1657
+      preached to the little tribe of Podunks near Hartford, and asked them if
+      they were willing to accept of Jesus Christ as their saviour, their old
+      men scornfully answered No! they had parted with most of their land, but
+      they were not going to become the white man's servants. A rebuke
+      administered to Eliot by Uncas in 1674 has a similar implication. When the
+      apostle was preaching one evening in a village over which that sachem
+      claimed jurisdiction, an Indian arose and announced himself as a deputy of
+      Uncas. Then he said, "Uncas is not well pleased that the English should
+      pass over Mohegan river to call <i>his</i> Indians to pray to God." <a
+      href="#linknote-31" name="linknoteref-31" id="linknoteref-31"><small>31</small></a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus, no matter how benevolent the white man's intentions, he could not
+      fail to be dreaded by the Indians as a powerful and ever encroaching
+      enemy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even in his efforts to keep the peace and prevent tribes from taking the
+      warpath without his permission, he was interfering with the red man's
+      cherished pastime of murder and pillage. The appeals to the court at
+      Plymouth, the frequent summoning of sachems to Boston, to explain their
+      affairs and justify themselves against accusers, must have been maddening
+      in their effects upon the Indian; for there is one sound instinct which
+      the savage has in common with the most progressive races, and that is the
+      love of self-government that resents all outside interference. All things
+      considered, it is remarkable that peace should have been maintained in New
+      England from 1637 to 1675; and probably nothing short of the consuming
+      vengeance wrought upon the Pequots could have done it. But with the lapse
+      of time the wholesome feeling of dread began to fade away, and as the
+      Indians came to use musket instead of bow and arrow, their fear of the
+      English grew less, until at length their ferocious temper broke forth in
+      an epidemic of fire and slaughter that laid waste the land. [[Sidenote: It
+      is remarkable that peace should have been so long preserved]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Massasoit, chief sachem of the Wampanoags and steadfast ally of the
+      Plymouth colonists, died in 1660, leaving two sons, Wamsutta and Metacom,
+      or as the English nicknamed them, Alexander and Philip. Alexander
+      succeeded to his father's position of savage dignity and influence, but
+      his reign was brief. Rumours came to Plymouth that he was plotting
+      mischief, and he was accordingly summoned to appear before the General
+      Court of that colony and explain himself. He seems to have gone
+      reluctantly, but he succeeded in satisfying the magistrates of his
+      innocence of any evil designs. Whether he caught cold at Plymouth or drank
+      rum as only Indians can, we do not know. At any rate, on starting
+      homeward, before he had got clear of English territory, he was seized by a
+      violent fever and died. The savage mind knows nothing of pneumonia or
+      delirium tremens. It knows nothing of what we call natural death. To the
+      savage all death means murder, for like other men he judges of the unknown
+      by the known. In the Indian's experience normal death was by tomahawk or
+      firebrand; abnormal death (such as we call natural) must come either from
+      poison or from witchcraft. So when the honest chronicler Hubbard tells us
+      that Philip suspected the Plymouth people of poisoning his brother, we can
+      easily believe him. It was long, however, before he was ready to taste the
+      sweets of revenge. He schemed and plotted in the dark. In one respect the
+      Indian diplomatist is unlike his white brethren; he does not leave
+      state-papers behind him to reward the diligence and gratify the curiosity
+      of later generations; and accordingly it is hard to tell how far Philip
+      was personally responsible for the storm which was presently to burst upon
+      New England. [[Sidenote: Deaths of Massasoit and Alexander] [[Sidenote:
+      Philip's designs]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whether his scheme was as comprehensive as that of Pontiac in 1763,
+      whether or not it amounted to a deliberate combination of all red men
+      within reach to exterminate the white men, one can hardly say with
+      confidence. The figure of Philip, in the war which bears his name, does
+      not stand out so prominently as the figure of Pontiac in the later
+      struggle. This may be partly because Pontiac's story has been told by such
+      a magician as Mr. Francis Parkman. But it is partly because the data are
+      too meagre. In all probability, however, the schemes of Sassacus the
+      Pequot, of Philip the Wampanoag, and of Pontiac the Ottawa, were
+      substantially the same. That Philip plotted with the Narragansetts seems
+      certain, and the early events of the war point clearly to a previous
+      understanding with the Nipmucks. The Mohegans, on the other hand, gave him
+      no assistance, but remained faithful to their white allies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For thirteen years had Philip been chief sachem of his tribe before the
+      crisis came. Rumours of his unfriendly disposition had at intervals found
+      their way to the ears of the magistrates at Plymouth, but Philip had
+      succeeded in setting himself right before them. In 1670 the rumours were
+      renewed, and the Plymouth men felt that it was time to strike, but the
+      other colonies held them back, and a meeting was arranged between Philip
+      and three Boston men at Taunton in April, 1671. There the crafty savage
+      expressed humility and contrition for all past offences, and even
+      consented to a treaty in which he promised that his tribe should surrender
+      all their fire-arms. On the part of the English this was an extremely
+      unwise measure, for while it could not possibly be enforced, and while it
+      must have greatly increased the irritation of the Indians, it was at the
+      same time interpretable as a symptom of fear. With ominous scowls and
+      grunts some seventy muskets were given up, but this was all. Through the
+      summer there was much uneasiness, and in September Philip was summoned to
+      Plymouth with five of his under-sachems, and solemnly warned to keep the
+      peace. The savages again behaved with humility and agreed to pay a yearly
+      tribute of five wolves' heads and to do no act of war without express
+      permission.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For three years things seemed quiet, until late in 1674 the alarm was
+      again sounded. Sausamon, a convert from the Massachusetts tribe, had
+      studied a little at Harvard College, and could speak and write English
+      with facility. He had at one time been employed by Philip as a sort of
+      private secretary or messenger, and at other times had preached and taught
+      school among the Indian converts at Natick. Sausamon now came to Plymouth
+      and informed Governor Winslow that Philip was certainly engaged in a
+      conspiracy that boded no good to the English. Somehow or other Philip
+      contrived to find out what Sausamon had said, and presently coming to
+      Plymouth loudly asseverated his innocence; but the magistrates warned him
+      that if they heard any more of this sort of thing his arms would surely be
+      seized. A few days after Philip had gone home, Sausamon's hat and gun were
+      seen lying on the frozen surface of Assowamsett Pond, near Middleborough,
+      and on cutting through the ice his body was found with unmistakable marks
+      of beating and strangling. After some months the crime was traced to three
+      Wampanoags, who were forthwith arrested, tried by a mixed jury of Indians
+      and white men, found guilty, and put to death. On the way to the gallows
+      one of them confessed that he had stood by while his two friends had
+      pounded and choked the unfortunate Sausamon. [[Sidenote: Murder of
+      Sausamon]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      More alarming reports now came from Swanzey, a pretty village of some
+      forty houses not far from Philip's headquarters at Mount Hope. On Sunday
+      June 20, while everybody was at church, a party of Indians had stolen into
+      the town and set fire to two houses. Messengers were hurried from Plymouth
+      and from Boston, to demand the culprits under penalty of instant war. As
+      they approached Swanzey the men from Boston saw a sight that filled them
+      with horror. The road was strewn with corpses of men, women, and children,
+      scorched, dismembered, and mangled with that devilish art of which the
+      American Indian is the most finished master. The savages had sacked the
+      village the day before, burning the houses and slaying the people. Within
+      three days a small force of colonial troops had driven Philip from his
+      position at Mount Hope; but while they were doing this a party of savages
+      swooped upon Dartmouth, burning thirty houses and committing fearful
+      atrocities. Some of their victims were flayed alive, or impaled on sharp
+      stakes, or roasted over slow fires. Similar horrors were wrought at
+      Middleborough and Taunton; and now the misery spread to Massachusetts,
+      where on the 14th of July the town of Mendon was attacked by a party of
+      Nipmucks. [[Sidenote: Massacres at Swanzey and Dartmouth, June, 1675]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At that time the beautiful highlands between Lancaster and the Connecticut
+      river were still an untrodden wilderness. On their southern slope
+      Worcester and Brookfield were tiny hamlets of a dozen houses each. Up the
+      Connecticut valley a line of little villages, from Springfield to
+      Northfield, formed the remotest frontier of the English, and their exposed
+      position offered tempting opportunities to the Indians. Governor Leverett
+      saw how great the danger would be if the other tribes should follow the
+      example set by Philip, and Captain Edward Hutchinson was accordingly sent
+      to Brookfield to negotiate with the Nipmucks. This officer was eldest son
+      of the unfortunate lady whose preaching in Boston nearly forty years
+      before had been the occasion of so much strife. Not only his mother, but
+      all save one or two of his brothers and sisters &mdash;and there were not
+      less than twelve of them&mdash;had been murdered by Indians on the New
+      Netherland border in 1643; now the same cruel fate overtook the gallant
+      captain. The savages agreed to hold a parley and appointed a time and
+      place for the purpose, but instead of keeping tryst they lay in ambush and
+      slew Hutchinson with eight of his men on their way to the conference.
+      [[Sidenote: Murder of Captain Hutchinson]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Three days afterward Philip, who had found home too hot for him, arrived
+      in the Nipmuck country, and on the night of August 2, took part in a
+      fierce assault on Brookfield. Thirty or forty men, with some fifty women
+      and children&mdash;all the inhabitants of the hamlet&mdash;took refuge in
+      a large house, where they were besieged by 300 savages whose bullets
+      pierced the wooden walls again and again. Arrows tipped with burning rags
+      were shot into the air in such wise as to fall upon the roof, but they who
+      crouched in the garret were watchful and well supplied with water, while
+      from the overhanging windows the volleys of musketry were so brisk and
+      steady that the screaming savages below could not get near enough to the
+      house to set it on fire. For three days the fight was kept up, while every
+      other house in the village was destroyed. By this time the Indians had
+      contrived to mount some planks on barrels so as to make a kind of rude
+      cart which they loaded with tow and chips. They were just about setting it
+      on fire and preparing to push it against the house with long poles, when
+      they were suddenly foiled by a heavy shower. That noon the gallant Simon
+      Willard, ancestor of two presidents of Harvard College, a man who had done
+      so much toward building up Concord and Lancaster that he was known as the
+      "founder of towns," was on his way from Lancaster to Groton at the head of
+      forty-seven horsemen, when he was overtaken by a courier with the news
+      from Brookfield. The distance was thirty miles, the road scarcely fit to
+      be called a bridle-path, and Willard's years were more than
+      threescore-and-ten; but by an hour after sunset he had gallopped into
+      Brookfield and routed the Indians who fled to a swamp ten miles distant.
+      [[Sidenote: Attack on Brookfield]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The scene is now shifted to the Connecticut valley, where on the 25th of
+      August Captain Lothrop defeated the savages at Hatfield. On the 1st of
+      September simultaneous attacks were made upon Deerfield and Hadley, and
+      among the traditions of the latter place is one of the most interesting of
+      the stories of that early time. The inhabitants were all in church keeping
+      a fast, when the yells of the Indians resounded. Seizing their guns, the
+      men rushed out to meet the foe; but seeing the village green swarming on
+      every side with the horrid savages, for a moment their courage gave way
+      and a panic was imminent; when all at once a stranger of reverend aspect
+      and stately form, with white beard flowing on his bosom, appeared among
+      them and took command with an air of authority which none could gainsay.
+      He bade them charge on the screeching rabble, and after a short sharp
+      skirmish the tawny foe was put to flight. When the pursuers came together
+      again, after the excitement of the rout, their deliverer was not to be
+      found. In their wonder, as they knew not whence he came or whither he had
+      gone, many were heard to say that an angel had been sent from heaven for
+      their deliverance. It was the regicide William Goffe, who from his
+      hiding-place had seen the savages stealing down the hillside, and sallied
+      forth to win yet one more victory over the hosts of Midian ere death
+      should come to claim him in his woodland retreat. Sir Walter Scott has put
+      this pretty story into the mouth of Major Bridgenorth in "Peveril of the
+      Peak," and Cooper has made use of it in "The Wept of Wish-ton-wish." Like
+      many other romantic stories, it rests upon insufficient authority and its
+      truth has been called in question. <a href="#linknote-32"
+      name="linknoteref-32" id="linknoteref-32"><small>32</small></a> But there
+      seems to be nothing intrinsically improbable in the tradition; and a
+      paramount regard for Goffe's personal safety would quite account for the
+      studied silence of contemporary writers like Hubbard and Increase Mather.
+      [[Sidenote: The mysterious stranger of Hadley]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This repulse did not check for a moment the activity of the Indians,
+      though for a long time we hear nothing more of Philip. On the 2d of
+      September they slew eight men at Northfield and on the 4th they surrounded
+      and butchered Captain Beers and most of his company of thirty-six marching
+      to the relief of that village. The next day but one, as Major Robert Treat
+      came up the road with his 100 Connecticut soldiers, they found long poles
+      planted by the wayside bearing the heads of their unfortunate comrades.
+      They in turn were assaulted, but beat off the enemy, and brought away the
+      people of Northfield. That village was abandoned, and presently Deerfield
+      shared its fate and the people were crowded into Hadley. Yet worse
+      remained to be seen. A large quantity of wheat had been left partly
+      threshed at Deerfield, and on the 11th of September eighteen wagons were
+      sent up with teamsters and farmers to finish the threshing and bring in
+      the grain. They were escorted by Captain Lothrop, with his train-band of
+      ninety picked men, known as the "Flower of Essex," perhaps the best
+      drilled company in the colony. The threshing was done, the wagons were
+      loaded, and the party made a night march southward. At seven in the
+      morning, as they were fording a shallow stream in the shade of overarching
+      woods, they were suddenly overwhelmed by the deadly fire of 700 ambushed
+      Nipmucks, and only eight of them escaped to tell the tale. A "black and
+      fatal" day was this, says the chronicler, "the saddest that ever befell
+      New England." To this day the memory of the slaughter at Bloody Brook
+      survives, and the visitor to South Deerfield may read the inscription over
+      the grave in which Major Treat's men next day buried all the victims
+      together. The Indians now began to feel their power, and on the 5th of
+      October they attacked Springfield and burned thirty houses there.
+      [[Sidenote: Ambuscade at Bloody Brook, September 12]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Things were becoming desperate. For ten weeks, from September 9 to
+      November 19, the Federal Commissioners were in session daily in Boston.
+      The most eminent of their number, for ability and character, was the
+      younger John Winthrop, who was still governor of Connecticut. Plymouth was
+      represented by its governor, Josiah Winslow, with the younger William
+      Bradford; Massachusetts by William Stoughton, Simon Bradstreet, and Thomas
+      Danforth. These strong men were confronted with a difficult problem. From
+      Batten's journal, kept during that disastrous summer, we learn the state
+      of feeling of excitement in Boston. The Puritans had by no means got rid
+      of that sense of corporate responsibility which civilized man has
+      inherited from prehistoric ages, and which has been one of the principal
+      causes of religious persecution. This sombre feeling has prompted men to
+      believe that to spare the heretic is to bring down the wrath of God upon
+      the whole community; and now in Boston many people stoutly maintained that
+      God had let loose the savages, with firebrand and tomahawk, to punish the
+      people of New England for ceasing to persecute "false worshippers and
+      especially idolatrous Quakers." Quaker meetings were accordingly forbidden
+      under penalty of fine and imprisonment. Some harmless Indians were
+      murdered. At Marblehead two were assaulted and killed by a crowd of women.
+      There was a bitter feeling toward the Christian Indians, many of whom had
+      joined their heathen kinsmen in burning and slaying. Daniel Gookin,
+      superintendent of the "praying Indians," a gentleman of the highest
+      character, was told that it would not be safe to show himself in the
+      streets of Boston. Mrs. Mary Pray, of Providence, wrote a letter
+      recommending the total extermination of the red men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The measures adopted by the Commissioners certainly went far toward
+      carrying out Mrs. Pray's suggestion. The demeanour of the Narragansetts
+      had become very threatening, and their capacity for mischief exceeded that
+      of all the other tribes together. In July the Commissioners had made a
+      treaty with them, but in October it became known in Boston that they were
+      harbouring some of Philip's hostile Indians. When the Commissioners
+      sharply called them to account for this, their sachem Canonchet, son of
+      Miantonomo, promised to surrender the fugitives within ten days. But the
+      ten days passed and nothing was heard from the Narragansetts. The victory
+      of their brethren at Bloody Brook had worked upon their minds, so that
+      they no longer thought it worth while to keep faith with the white men.
+      They had overcome their timidity and were now ready to take part in the
+      work of massacre. <a href="#linknote-33" name="linknoteref-33"
+      id="linknoteref-33"><small>33</small></a> The Commissioners soon learned
+      of their warlike preparations and lost no time in forestalling them. The
+      Narragansetts were fairly warned that if they did not at once fulfil their
+      promises they must expect the utmost severities of war. A thousand men
+      were enlisted for this service and put under command of Governor Winslow,
+      and in December they marched against the enemy. The redoubtable fighter
+      and lively chronicler Benjamin Church accompanied the expedition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Indians had fortified themselves on a piece of rising ground, six
+      acres in extent, in the middle of a hideous swamp impassable at most
+      seasons but now in some places frozen hard enough to afford a precarious
+      footing. They were surrounded by rows of tall palisades which formed a
+      wall twelve feet in thickness; and the only approach to the single door of
+      this stronghold was over the trunk of a felled tree some two feet in
+      diameter and slippery with snow and ice. A stout block-house filled with
+      sharpshooters guarded this rude bridge, which was raised some five feet
+      from the ground. Within the palisaded fortress perhaps not less than 2000
+      warriors, with many women and children, awaited the onset of the white
+      men, for here had Canonchet gathered together nearly the whole of his
+      available force. This was a military mistake. It was cooping up his men
+      for slaughter. They would have been much safer if scattered about in the
+      wilderness, and could have given the English much more trouble. But
+      readily as they acknowledged the power of the white man, they did not yet
+      understand it. One man's courage is not another's, and the Indian knew
+      little or nothing of that Gothic fury of self-abandonment which rushes
+      straight ahead and snatches victory from the jaws of death. His fortress
+      was a strong one, and it was no longer, as in the time of the Pequots, a
+      strife in which firearms were pitted against bow and arrow. Many of the
+      Narragansetts were equipped with muskets and skilled in their use, and
+      under such circumstances victory for the English was not to be lightly
+      won. [[Sidenote: Expedition against the Narragansetts]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the night of December 18 their little army slept in an open field at
+      Pettyquamscott without other blanket than a "moist fleece of snow." Thence
+      to the Indian fortress, situated in what is now South Kingston, the march
+      was eighteen miles. The morrow was a Sunday, but Winslow deemed it
+      imprudent to wait, as food had wellnigh given out. Getting up at five
+      o'clock, they toiled through deep snow till they came within sight of the
+      Narragansett stronghold early in the afternoon. First came the 527 men
+      from Massachusetts, led by Major Appleton, of Ipswich, and next the 158
+      from Plymouth, under Major Bradford; while Major Robert Treat, with the
+      300 from Connecticut, brought up the rear. There were 985 men in all. As
+      the Massachusetts men rushed upon the slippery bridge a deadly volley from
+      the blockhouse slew six of their captains, while of the rank and file
+      there were many killed or wounded. Nothing daunted they pressed on with
+      great spirit till they forced their way into the enclosure, but then the
+      head of their column, overcome by sheer weight of numbers in the
+      hand-to-hand fight, was pushed and tumbled out into the swamp. Meanwhile
+      some of the Connecticut men had discovered a path across the partly frozen
+      swamp leading to a weak spot in the rear, where the palisades were thin
+      and few, as undue reliance had been placed upon the steep bank crowned
+      with a thick rampart of bushes that had been reinforced with clods of
+      turf. In this direction Treat swept along with his men in a spirited
+      charge. Before they had reached the spot a heavy fire began mowing them
+      down, but with a furious rush they came up, and climbing on each other's
+      shoulders, some fought their way over the rampart, while others hacked
+      sturdily with axes till such a breach was made that all might enter. This
+      was effected just as the Massachusetts men had recovered themselves and
+      crossed the treacherous log in a second charge that was successful and
+      soon brought the entire English force within the enclosure. In the
+      slaughter which filled the rest of that Sunday afternoon till the sun went
+      down behind a dull gray cloud, the grim and wrathful Puritan, as he swung
+      his heavy cutlass, thought of Saul and Agag, and spared not. The Lord had
+      delivered up to him the heathen as stubble to his sword. As usual the
+      number of the slain is variously estimated. Of the Indians probably not
+      less than 1000 perished. Some hundreds, however, with Canonchet their
+      leader, saved themselves in flight, well screened by the blinding
+      snow-flakes that began to fall just after sunset. Within the fortified
+      area had been stored the greater part of the Indians' winter supply of
+      corn, and the loss of this food was a further deadly blow. Captain Church
+      advised sparing the wigwams and using them for shelter, but Winslow seems
+      to have doubted the ability of his men to maintain themselves in a
+      position so remote from all support. The wigwams with their tubs of corn
+      were burned, and a retreat was ordered. Through snowdrifts that deepened
+      every moment the weary soldiers dragged themselves along until two hours
+      after midnight, when they reached the tiny village of Wickford. Nearly
+      one-fourth of their number had been killed or wounded, and many of the
+      latter perished before shelter was reached. Forty of these were buried at
+      Wickford in the course of the next three days. Of the Connecticut men
+      eighty were left upon the swamp and in the breach at the rear of the
+      stronghold. Among the spoils which the victors brought away were a number
+      of good muskets that had been captured by the Nipmucks in their assault
+      upon Deerfield. [[Sidenote: Storming of the great swamp fortress, December
+      19]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This headlong overthrow of the Narragansett power completely changed the
+      face of things. The question was no longer whether the red men could
+      possibly succeed in making New England too hot for the white men, but
+      simply how long it would take for the white men to exterminate the red
+      men. The shiftless Indian was abandoning his squalid agriculture and
+      subsisting on the pillage of English farms; but the resources of the
+      colonies, though severely taxed, were by no means exhausted. The dusky
+      warriors slaughtered in the great swamp fight could not be replaced; but,
+      as Roger Williams told the Indians, there were still ten thousand white
+      men who could carry muskets, and should all these be slain, he added, with
+      a touch of hyperbole, the Great Father in England could send ten thousand
+      more. For the moment Williams seems to have cherished a hope that his
+      great influence with the savages might induce them to submit to terms of
+      peace while there was yet a remnant to be saved; but they were now as
+      little inclined to parley as tigers brought to bay, nor was the temper of
+      the colonists a whit less deadly, though it did not vent itself in
+      inflicting torture or in merely wanton orgies of cruelty. [[Sidenote:
+      Effect of the blow]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the modern these scenes of carnage are painful to contemplate. In the
+      wholesale destruction of the Pequots, and to a less degree in that of the
+      Narragansetts, the death-dealing power of the white man stands forth so
+      terrible and relentless that our sympathy is for a moment called out for
+      his victim. The feeling of tenderness toward the weak, almost unknown
+      among savages, is one of the finest products of civilization. Where
+      murderous emotions are frequently excited, it cannot thrive. Such advance
+      in humanity as we have made within recent times is chiefly due to the fact
+      that the horrors of war are seldom brought home to everybody's door.
+      Either war is conducted on some remote frontier, or if armies march
+      through a densely peopled country the conditions of modern warfare have
+      made it essential to their efficiency as military instruments that
+      depredation and riot should be as far as possible checked. Murder and
+      pillage are comparatively infrequent, massacre is seldom heard of, and
+      torture is almost or quite as extinct as cannibalism. The mass of citizens
+      escape physical suffering, the angry emotions are so directed upon
+      impersonal objects as to acquire a strong ethical value, and the intervals
+      of strife may find individual soldiers of hostile armies exchanging kindly
+      services. Members of a complex industrial society, without direct
+      experience of warfare save in this mitigated form, have their characters
+      wrought upon in a way that is distinctively modern, as they become more
+      and more disinclined to violence and cruelty. European historians have
+      noticed, with words of praise, the freedom from bloodthirstiness which
+      characterizes the American people. Mr. Lecky has more than once remarked
+      upon this humane temperament which is so characteristic of our peaceful
+      civilization, and which sometimes, indeed, shows the defects of its
+      excellence and tends to weaken society by making it difficult to inflict
+      due punishment upon the vilest criminals. In respect of this humanity the
+      American of the nineteenth century has without doubt improved very
+      considerably upon his forefathers of the seventeenth. The England of
+      Cromwell and Milton was not, indeed, a land of hard-hearted people as
+      compared with their contemporaries. The long experience of internal peace
+      since the War of the Roses had not been without its effect; and while the
+      Tudor and Stuart periods had atrocities enough, we need only remember what
+      was going on at the same time in France and Germany in order to realize
+      how much worse it might have been. In England, as elsewhere, however, it
+      was, when looked at with our eyes, a rough and brutal time. It was a day
+      of dungeons, whipping-posts, and thumbscrews, when slight offenders were
+      maimed and bruised and great offenders cut into pieces by sentence of
+      court. The pioneers of New England had grown up familiar with such things;
+      and among the townspeople of Boston and Hartford in 1675 were still many
+      who in youth had listened to the awful news from Magdeburg or turned pale
+      over the horrors in Piedmont upon which Milton invoked the wrath of
+      Heaven. [[Sidenote: Growth of humane sentiment in recent times]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When civilized men are removed from the safeguards of civilization and
+      placed in the wilderness amid the hideous dangers that beset human
+      existence in a savage state of society, whatever barbarism lies latent in
+      them is likely to find many opportunities for showing itself. The feelings
+      that stir the meekest of men, as he stands among the smouldering embers of
+      his homestead and gazes upon the mangled bodies of wife and children, are
+      feelings that he shares with the most bloodthirsty savage, and the primary
+      effect of his higher intelligence and greater sensitiveness is only to
+      increase their bitterness. The neighbour who hears the dreadful story is
+      quick to feel likewise, for the same thing may happen to him, and there is
+      nothing so pitiless as fear. With the Puritan such gloomy and savage
+      passions seemed to find justification in the sacred text from which he
+      drew his rules of life. To suppose that one part of the Bible could be
+      less authoritative than another would have been to him an incomprehensible
+      heresy; and bound between the same covers that included the Sermon on the
+      Mount were tales of wholesale massacre perpetrated by God's command.
+      Evidently the red men were not stray children of Israel, after all, but
+      rather Philistines, Canaanites, heathen, sons of Belial, firebrands of
+      hell, demons whom it was no more than right to sweep from the face of the
+      earth. Writing in this spirit, the chroniclers of the time were completely
+      callous in their accounts of suffering and ruin inflicted upon Indians,
+      and, as has elsewhere been known to happen, those who did not risk their
+      own persons were more truculent in tone than the professional fighters. Of
+      the narrators of the war, perhaps the fairest toward the Indian is the
+      doughty Captain Church, while none is more bitter and cynical than the
+      Ipswich pastor William Hubbard. [[Sidenote: Warfare with savages likely to
+      be truculent in character]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While the overthrow of the Narragansetts changed the face of things, it
+      was far from putting an end to the war. It showed that when the white man
+      could find his enemy he could deal crushing blows, but the Indian was not
+      always so easy to find. Before the end of January Winslow's little army
+      was partially disbanded for want of food, and its three contingents fell
+      back upon Stonington, Boston, and Plymouth. Early in February the Federal
+      Commissioners called for a new levy of 600 men to assemble at Brookfield,
+      for the Nipmucks were beginning to renew their incursions, and after an
+      interval of six months the figure of Philip again appears for a moment
+      upon the scene. What he had been doing, or where he had been, since the
+      Brookfield fight in August, was never known. When in February, 1676, he
+      re-appeared it was still in company with his allies the Nipmucks, in their
+      bloody assault upon Lancaster. On the 10th of that month at sunrise the
+      Indians came swarming into the lovely village. Danger had already been
+      apprehended, the pastor, Joseph Rowlandson, the only Harvard graduate of
+      1652, had gone to Boston to solicit aid, and Captain Wadsworth's company
+      was slowly making its way over the difficult roads from Marlborough, but
+      the Indians were beforehand. Several houses were at once surrounded and
+      set on fire, and men, women, and children began falling under the
+      tomahawk. The minister's house was large and strongly built, and more than
+      forty people found shelter there until at length it took fire and they
+      were driven out by the flames. Only one escaped, a dozen or more were
+      slain, and the rest, chiefly women and children, taken captive. The
+      Indians aimed at plunder as well as destruction; for they were in sore
+      need of food and blankets, as well as of powder and ball. Presently, as
+      they saw Wadsworth's armed men approaching, they took to flight and got
+      away, with many prisoners and a goodly store of provisions. [[Sidenote:
+      Attack upon Lancaster, February 10, 1676]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among the captives was Mary Rowlandson, the minister's wife, who afterward
+      wrote the story of her sad experiences. The treatment of the prisoners
+      varied with the caprice or the cupidity of the captors. Those for whom a
+      substantial ransom might be expected fared comparatively well; to others
+      death came as a welcome relief. One poor woman with a child in her arms
+      was too weak to endure the arduous tramp over the icy hillsides, and
+      begged to be left behind, till presently the savages lost their patience.
+      They built a fire, and after a kind of demon dance killed mother and child
+      with a club and threw the bodies into the flames. Such treatment may seem
+      exceptionally merciful, but those modern observers who best know the
+      Indian's habits say that he seldom indulges in torture except when he has
+      abundance of leisure and a mind quite undisturbed. He is an epicure in
+      human agony and likes to enjoy it in long slow sips. It is for the end of
+      the march that the accumulation of horrors is reserved; the victims by the
+      way are usually despatched quickly; and in the case of Mrs. Rowlandson's
+      captors their irregular and circuitous march indicates that they were on
+      the alert. Their movements seem to have covered much of the ground between
+      Wachusett mountain and the Connecticut river. They knew that the white
+      squaw of the great medicine man of an English village was worth a heavy
+      ransom, and so they treated Mrs. Rowlandson unusually well. She had been
+      captured when escaping from the burning house, carrying in her arms her
+      little six-year-old daughter. She was stopped by a bullet that grazed her
+      side and struck the child. The Indian who seized them placed the little
+      girl upon a horse, and as the dreary march began she kept moaning "I shall
+      die, mamma." "I went on foot after it," says the mother, "with sorrow that
+      cannot be expressed. At length I took it off the horse, and carried it in
+      my arms till my strength failed me, and I fell down with it .... After
+      this it quickly began to snow, and when night came on they stopped. And
+      now down I must sit in the snow, by a little fire, and a few boughs behind
+      me, with my sick child in my lap, and calling much for water, being now,
+      through the wound, fallen into a violent fever .... Oh, may I see the
+      wonderful power of God that my spirit did not utterly sink under my
+      affliction; still the Lord upheld me with his gracious and merciful
+      spirit." The little girl soon died. For three months the weary and
+      heartbroken mother was led about the country by these loathsome savages,
+      of whose habits and manners she gives a vivid description. At first their
+      omnivorousness astonished her. "Skunks and rattlesnakes, yea the very bark
+      of trees" they esteemed as delicacies. "They would pick up old bones and
+      cut them in pieces at the joints, ... then boil them and drink up the
+      liquor, and then beat the great ends of them in a mortar and so eat them."
+      After some weeks of starvation Mrs. Rowlandson herself was fain to partake
+      of such viands. One day, having made a cap for one of Philip's boys, she
+      was invited to dine with the great sachem. "I went," she says, "and he
+      gave me a pancake about as big as two fingers. It was made of parched
+      wheat, beaten, and fried in bear's grease; but I thought I never tasted
+      pleasanter meat in my life." Early in May she was redeemed for 20 pounds,
+      and went to find her husband in Boston, where the Old South Church society
+      hired a house for them. [[Sidenote: Mrs. Rowlandson's narrative]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such was the experience of a captive whose treatment was, according to
+      Indian notions, hospitable. There were few who came off so well. Almost
+      every week while she was led hither and thither by the savages. Mrs.
+      Rowlandson heard ghastly tales of fire and slaughter. It was a busy winter
+      and spring for these Nipmucks. Before February was over, their exploit at
+      Lancaster was followed by a shocking massacre at Medfield. They sacked and
+      destroyed the towns of Worcester, Marlborough, Mendon, and Groton, and
+      even burned some houses in Weymouth, within a dozen miles of Boston.
+      Murderous attacks were made upon Sudbury, Chelmsford, Springfield,
+      Hatfield, Hadley, Northampton, Wrentham, Andover, Bridgewater, Scituate,
+      and Middleborough. On the 18th of April Captain Wadsworth, with 70 men,
+      was drawn into an ambush near Sudbury, surrounded by 500 Nipmucks, and
+      killed with 50 of his men; six unfortunate captives were burned alive over
+      slow fires. But Wadsworth's party made the enemy pay dearly for his
+      victory; that afternoon 120 Nipmucks bit the dust. In such wise, by
+      killing two or three for one, did the English wear out and annihilate
+      their adversaries. Just one month from that day Captain Turner surprised
+      and slaughtered 300 of these warriors near the falls of the Connecticut
+      river which have since borne his name, and this blow at last broke the
+      strength of the Nipmucks. [[Sidenote: Virtual exterminations of the
+      Indians, February&mdash;August, 1676]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile the Narragansetts and Wampanoags had burned the towns of Warwick
+      and Providence. After the wholesale ruin of the great "swamp fight,"
+      Canonchet had still some 600 or 700 warriors left, and with these, on the
+      26th of March, in the neighbourhood of Pawtuxet, he surprised a company of
+      50 Plymouth men under Captain Pierce and slew them all, but not until he
+      had lost 140 of his best warriors. Ten days later Captain Denison, with
+      his Connecticut company, defeated and captured Canonchet, and the proud
+      son of Miantonomo met the same fate as his father. He was handed over to
+      the Mohegans and tomahawked. The Narragansett sachem had shown such
+      bravery that it seemed, says the chronicler Hubbard, as if "some old Roman
+      ghost had possessed the body of this western pagan." But next moment this
+      pious clergyman, as if ashamed of the classical eulogy just bestowed upon
+      the hated redskin, alludes to him as a "damned wretch." [[Sidenote: Death
+      of Canonchet]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fall of Canonchet marked the beginning of the end. In four sharp
+      fights in the last week of June, Major Talcott, of Hartford, slew from 300
+      to 400 warriors, being nearly all that were left of the Narragansetts; and
+      during the month of July Captain Church patrolled the country about
+      Taunton, making prisoners of the Wampanoags. Once more King Philip, shorn
+      of his prestige, comes upon the scene. We have seen that his agency in
+      these cruel events had been at the outset a potent one. Whatever else it
+      may have been, it was at least the agency of the match that explodes the
+      powder-cask. Under the conditions of that savage society, organized
+      leadership was not to be looked for. In the irregular and disorderly
+      series of murdering raids Philip may have been often present, but except
+      for Mrs. Rowlandson's narrative we should have known nothing of him since
+      the Brookfield fight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At length in July, 1676, having seen the last of his Nipmuck friends
+      overwhelmed, the tattered chieftain showed himself near Bridgewater, with
+      a handful of followers. In these his own hunting-grounds some of his
+      former friends had become disaffected. The daring and diplomatic Church
+      had made his way into the wigwam of Ashawonks, the squaw sachem of
+      Saconet, near Little Compton, and having first convinced her that a flask
+      of brandy might be tasted without fatal results, followed up his advantage
+      and persuaded her to make an alliance with the English. Many Indians came
+      in and voluntarily surrendered themselves, in order to obtain favourable
+      terms, and some lent their aid in destroying their old sachem. Defeated at
+      Taunton, the son of Massasoit was hunted by Church to his ancient lair at
+      Bristol Neck and there besieged. His only escape was over the narrow
+      isthmus of which the pursuers now took possession, and in this dire
+      extremity one of Philip's men presumed to advise his chief that the hour
+      for surrender had come. For his unwelcome counsel the sachem forthwith
+      lifted his tomahawk and struck him dead at his feet. Then the brother of
+      the slain man crept away through the bushes to Church's little camp, and
+      offered to guide the white men to the morass where Philip lay concealed.
+      At daybreak of August 12 the English stealthily advancing beat up their
+      prey. The savages in sudden panic rushed from under cover, and as the
+      sachem showed himself running at the top of his speed, a ball from an
+      Indian musket pierced his heart, and "he fell upon his face in the mud and
+      water, with his gun under him." His severed head was sent to Plymouth,
+      where it was mounted on a pole and exposed aloft upon the village green,
+      while the meeting-house bell summoned the townspeople to a special service
+      of thanksgiving. [[Sidenote: Death of Philip, August 12]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may be supposed that in such services at this time a Christian feeling
+      of charity and forgiveness was not uppermost. Among the captives was a son
+      of Philip, the little swarthy lad of nine years for whom Mrs. Rowlandson
+      had made a cap, and the question as to what was to be done with him
+      occasioned as much debate as if he had been a Jesse Pomeroy <a
+      href="#linknote-34" name="linknoteref-34" id="linknoteref-34"><small>34</small></a>
+      or a Chicago anarchist. The opinions of the clergy were, of course,
+      eagerly sought and freely vouchsafed. One minister somewhat doubtfully
+      urged that "although a precept in Deuteronomy explicitly forbids killing
+      the child for the father's sin," yet after all "the children of Saul and
+      Achan perished with their parents, though too young to have shared their
+      guilt." Thus curiously did this English reverence for precedent, with a
+      sort of grim conscientiousness colouring its gloomy wrath, search for
+      guidance among the ancient records of the children of Israel. Commenting
+      upon the truculent suggestion, Increase Mather, soon to be president of
+      Harvard, observed that, "though David had spared the infant Hadad, yet it
+      might have been better for his people if he had been less merciful." These
+      bloodthirsty counsels did not prevail, but the course that was adopted did
+      not lack in harshness. Among the sachems a dozen leading spirits were
+      hanged or shot, and hundreds of captives were shipped off to the West
+      Indies to be sold into slavery; among these was Philip's little son. The
+      rough soldier Church and the apostle Eliot were among the few who
+      disapproved of this policy. Church feared it might goad such Indians as
+      were still at large to acts of desperation. Eliot, in an earnest letter to
+      the Federal Commissioners, observed: "To sell souls for money seemeth to
+      me dangerous merchandise." But the plan of exporting the captives was
+      adhered to. As slaves they were understood to be of little or no value,
+      and sometimes for want of purchasers they were set ashore on strange
+      coasts and abandoned. A few were even carried to one of the foulest of
+      mediaeval slave-marts, Morocco, where their fate was doubtless wretched
+      enough. [[Sidenote: Indians sold into slavery]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In spite of Church's doubts as to the wisdom of this harsh treatment, it
+      did not prevent the beaten and starving savages from surrendering
+      themselves in considerable numbers. To some the Federal Commissioners
+      offered amnesty, and the promise was faithfully fulfilled. Among those who
+      laid down arms in reliance upon it were 140 Christian Indians, with their
+      leader known as James the Printer, because he had been employed at
+      Cambridge in setting up the type for Eliot's Bible. Quite early in the war
+      it had been discovered that these converted savages still felt the ties of
+      blood to be stronger than those of creed. At the attack on Mendon, only
+      three weeks after the horrors at Swanzey that ushered in the war, it was
+      known that Christian Indians had behaved themselves quite as cruelly as
+      their unregenerate brethren. Afterwards they made such a record that the
+      jokers and punsters of the day&mdash;for such there were, even among those
+      sombre Puritans&mdash;in writing about the "Praying Indians," spelled <i>praying</i>
+      with an <i>e</i>. The moral scruples of these savages, under the influence
+      of their evangelical training, betrayed queer freaks. One of them, says
+      Mrs. Rowlandson, would rather die than eat horseflesh, so narrow and
+      scrupulous was his conscience, although it was as wide as the whole
+      infernal abyss, when it came to torturing white Christians. The student of
+      history may have observed similar inconsistencies in the theories and
+      conduct of people more enlightened than these poor red men. "There was
+      another Praying Indian," continues Mrs. Rowlandson, "who, when he had done
+      all the mischief he could, betrayed his own father into the English's
+      hands, thereby to purchase his own life; ... and there was another ... so
+      wicked ... as to wear a string about his neck, strung with Christian
+      fingers." [[Sidenote: Conduct of the Christian Indians]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such incidents help us to comprehend the exasperation of our forefathers
+      in the days of King Philip. The month which witnessed his death saw also
+      the end of the war in the southern parts of New England; but, almost
+      before people had time to offer thanks for the victory, there came news of
+      bloodshed on the northeastern frontier. The Tarratines in Maine had for
+      some time been infected with the war fever. How far they may have been
+      comprehended in the schemes of Philip and Canonchet, it would be hard to
+      say. They had attacked settlers on the site of Brunswick as early as
+      September, 1675. About the time of Philip's death, Major Waldron of Dover
+      had entrapped a party of them by an unworthy stratagem, and after
+      satisfying himself that they were accomplices in that chieftain's scheme,
+      sent them to Boston to be sold into slavery. A terrible retribution was in
+      store for Major Waldron thirteen years later. For the present the hideous
+      strife, just ended in southern New England, was continued on the
+      northeastern frontier, and there was scarcely a village between the
+      Kennebec and the Piscataqua but was laid in ashes. [[Sidenote: War with
+      the Tarratines, 1676-78]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By midsummer of 1678 the Indians had been everywhere suppressed, and there
+      was peace in the land. For three years, since Philip's massacre at
+      Swanzey, there had been a reign of terror in New England. Within the
+      boundaries of Connecticut, indeed, little or no damage had been inflicted,
+      and the troops of that colony, not needed on their own soil, did noble
+      service in the common cause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Massachusetts and Plymouth, on the other hand, the destruction of life
+      and property had been simply frightful. Of ninety towns, twelve had been
+      utterly destroyed, while more than forty others had been the scene of fire
+      and slaughter. Out of this little society nearly a thousand staunch men,
+      including not few of broad culture and strong promise, had lost their
+      lives, while of the scores of fair women and poor little children that had
+      perished under the ruthless tomahawk, one can hardly give an accurate
+      account. Hardly a family throughout the land but was in mourning. The
+      war-debt of Plymouth was reckoned to exceed the total amount of personal
+      property in the colony; yet although it pinched every household for many a
+      year, it was paid to the uttermost farthing; nor in this respect were
+      Massachusetts and Connecticut at all behind-hand. [[Sidenote:
+      Destructiveness of the war]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But while King Philip's War wrought such fearful damage to the English, it
+      was for the Indians themselves utter destruction. Most of the warriors
+      were slain, and to the survivors, as we have seen, the conquerors showed
+      but scant mercy. The Puritan, who conned his Bible so earnestly, had taken
+      his hint from the wars of the Jews, and swept his New English Canaan with
+      a broom that was pitiless and searching. Henceforth the red man figures no
+      more in the history of New England, except as an ally of the French in
+      bloody raids upon the frontier. In that capacity he does mischief enough
+      for yet a half-century more, but from central and southern New England, as
+      an element of disturbance or a power to be reckoned with, he disappears
+      forever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VI. &mdash; THE TYRANNY OF ANDROS.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The beginnings of New England were made in the full daylight of modern
+      history. It was an age of town records, of registered deeds, of
+      contemporary memoirs, of diplomatic correspondence, of controversial
+      pamphlets, funeral sermons, political diatribes, specific instructions,
+      official reports, and private letters. It was not a time in which mythical
+      personages or incredible legends could flourish, and such things we do
+      find in the history of New England. There was nevertheless a romantic side
+      to this history, enough to envelop some of its characters and incidents in
+      a glamour that may mislead the modern reader. This wholesale migration
+      from the smiling fields of merry England to an unexplored wilderness
+      beyond a thousand leagues of sea was of itself a most romantic and
+      thrilling event, and when viewed in the light of its historic results it
+      becomes clothed with sublimity. The men who undertook this work were not
+      at all free from self-consciousness. They believed that they were doing a
+      wonderful thing. They felt themselves to be instruments in accomplishing a
+      kind of "manifest destiny." Their exodus was that of a chosen people who
+      were at length to lay the everlasting foundations of God's kingdom upon
+      earth. Such opinions, which took a strong colour from their assiduous
+      study of the Old Testament, reacted and disposed them all the more to
+      search its pages for illustrations and precedents, and to regard it as an
+      oracle, almost as a talisman. In every propitious event they saw a special
+      providence, an act of divine intervention to deliver them from the snares
+      of an ever watchful Satan. This steadfast faith in an unseen ruler and
+      guide was to them a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night. It was of
+      great moral value. It gave them clearness of purpose and concentration of
+      strength, and contributed toward making them, like the children of Israel,
+      a people of indestructible vitality and aggressive energy. At the same
+      time, in the hands of the Puritan writers, this feeling was apt to warp
+      their estimates of events and throw such a romantic haze about things as
+      seriously to interfere with a true historical perspective. [[Sidenote:
+      Romantic features in the early history of New England]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among such writings that which perhaps best epitomizes the Puritan
+      philosophy is "The Wonder-working Providence of Zion's Saviour in New
+      England," by Captain Edward Johnson, one of the principal founders of
+      Woburn. It is an extremely valuable history of New England from 1628 to
+      1651, and every page is alive with the virile energy of that stirring
+      time. With narrative, argument, and apologue, abounding in honesty of
+      purpose, sublimity of trust, and grotesqueness of fancy, wherein touching
+      tenderness is often alternated with sternness most grim and merciless, yet
+      now and then relieved by a sudden gleam of humour,&mdash;and all in a
+      style that is usually uncouth and harsh, but sometimes bursts forth in
+      eloquence worthy of Bunyan,&mdash;we are told how the founders of New
+      England are soldiers of Christ enlisted in a holy war, and how they must
+      "march manfully on till all opposers of Christ's kingly power be
+      abolished." "And as for you who are called to sound forth his silver
+      trumpets, blow loud and shrill to this chiefest treble tune&mdash;for the
+      armies of the great Jehovah are at hand." "He standeth not as an idle
+      spectator beholding his people's ruth and their enemies' rage, but as an
+      actor in all actions, to bring to naught the desires of the wicked, ...
+      having also the ordering of every weapon in its first produce, guiding
+      every shaft that flies, leading each bullet to his place of settling, and
+      weapon to the wound it makes." To men engaged in such a crusade against
+      the powers of evil, nothing could seem insignificant or trivial; for, as
+      Johnson continues, in truly prophetic phrase, "the Lord Christ intends to
+      achieve greater matters by this little handful than the world is aware
+      of." [[Sidenote: Edward Johnson]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The general sentiment of the early New England writers was like that of
+      the "Wonder-working Providence," though it did not always find such
+      rhapsodic expression. It has left its impress upon the minds of their
+      children's children down to our own time, and has affected the opinions
+      held about them by other people. It has had something to do with a certain
+      tacit assumption of superiority on the part of New Englanders, upon which
+      the men and women of other communities have been heard to comment in
+      resentful and carping tones. There has probably never existed, in any age
+      or at any spot on the earth's surface, a group of people that did not take
+      for granted its own preeminent excellence. Upon some such assumption, as
+      upon an incontrovertible axiom, all historical narratives, from the
+      chronicles of a parish to the annals of an empire, alike proceed. But in
+      New England it assumed a form especially apt to provoke challenge. One of
+      its unintentional effects was the setting up of an unreal and impossible
+      standard by which to judge the acts and motives of the Puritans of the
+      seventeenth century. We come upon instances of harshness and cruelty, of
+      narrow-minded bigotry, and superstitious frenzy; and feel, perhaps, a
+      little surprised that these men had so much in common with their
+      contemporaries. Hence the interminable discussion which has been called
+      forth by the history of the Puritans, in which the conclusions of the
+      writer have generally been determined by circumstances of birth or creed,
+      or perhaps of reaction against creed. One critic points to the Boston of
+      1659 or the Salem of 1692 with such gleeful satisfaction as used to stir
+      the heart of Thomas Paine when he alighted upon an inconsistency in some
+      text of the Bible; while another, in the firm conviction that Puritans
+      could do no wrong, plays fast and loose with arguments that might be made
+      to justify the deeds of a Torquemada. [[Sidenote: Acts of the Puritans
+      often judged by a wrong standard]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From such methods of criticism it is the duty of historians as far as
+      possible to free themselves. If we consider the Puritans in the light of
+      their surroundings as Englishmen of the seventeenth century and
+      inaugurators of a political movement that was gradually to change for the
+      better the aspect of things all over the earth, we cannot fail to discern
+      the value of that sacred enthusiasm which led them to regard themselves as
+      chosen soldiers of Christ. It was the spirit of the "Wonder-working
+      Providence" that hurled the tyrant from his throne at Whitehall and
+      prepared the way for the emancipation of modern Europe. No spirit less
+      intense, no spirit nurtured in the contemplation of things terrestrial,
+      could ever have done it. The political philosophy of a Vane or a Sidney
+      could never have done it. The passion for liberty as felt by a Jefferson
+      or an Adams, abstracted and generalized from the love of particular
+      liberties, was something scarcely intelligible to the seventeenth century.
+      The ideas of absolute freedom of thought and speech, which we breathe in
+      from childhood, were to the men of that age strange and questionable. They
+      groped and floundered among them, very much as modern wool growers in Ohio
+      or iron-smelters in Pennsylvania flounder and grope among the elementary
+      truths of political economy. But the spirit in which the Hebrew prophet
+      rebuked and humbled an idolatrous king was a spirit they could comprehend.
+      Such a spirit was sure to manifest itself in narrow cramping measures and
+      in ugly acts of persecution; but it is none the less to the fortunate
+      alliance of that fervid religious enthusiasm with the Englishman's love of
+      self-government that our modern freedom owes its existence. [[Sidenote:
+      Spirit of the Wonder-working Providence]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The history of New England under Charles II. yields abundant proof that
+      political liberty is no less indebted in the New World than in the Old to
+      the spirit of the "Wonder-working Providence." The theocratic ideal which
+      the Puritan sought to put into practice in Massachusetts and Connecticut
+      was a sacred institution in faults of the defence of which all his
+      faculties were kept perpetually alert. Much as he loved self-government he
+      would never have been so swift to detect and so stubborn to resist every
+      slightest encroachment on the part of the crown had not the loss of
+      self-government involved the imminent danger that the ark of the Lord
+      might be abandoned to the worshippers of Dagon. It was in Massachusetts,
+      where the theocracy was strongest, that the resistance to Charles II. was
+      most dogged and did most to prepare the way for the work of achieving
+      political independence a century later. Naturally it was in Massachusetts
+      at the same time that the faults of the theocracy were most conspicuous.
+      It was there that priestly authority most clearly asserted itself in such
+      oppressive acts as are always witnessed when too much power is left in the
+      hands of men whose primary allegiance is to a kingdom not of this world.
+      Much as we owe to the theocracy for warding off the encroachments of the
+      crown, we cannot be sorry that it was itself crushed in the process. It
+      was well that it did not survive its day of usefulness, and that the
+      outcome of the struggle was what has been aptly termed "the emancipation
+      of Massachusetts." [[Sidenote: Merits and faults of the theocracy]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The basis of the theocratic constitution of this commonwealth was the
+      provision by which the exercise of the franchise was made an incident of
+      church-membership. Unless a man could take part in the Lord's Supper, as
+      administered in the churches of the colony, he could not vote or hold
+      office. Church and state, parish and town, were thus virtually identified.
+      Here, as in some other aspects of early New England, one is reminded of
+      the ancient Greek cities, where the freeman who could vote in the
+      market-place or serve his turn as magistrate was the man qualified to
+      perform sacrifices to the tutelar deities of the tribe; other men might
+      dwell in the city but had no share in making or executing its laws. The
+      limitation of civil rights by religious tests is indeed one of those
+      common inheritances from the old Aryan world that we find again and again
+      cropping out, even down to the exclusion of Catholics from the House of
+      Commons from 1562 to 1829. The obvious purpose of this policy in England
+      was self-protection; and in like manner the restriction of the suffrage in
+      Massachusetts was designed to protect the colony against aggressive
+      episcopacy and to maintain unimpaired the uniformity of purpose which had
+      brought the settlers across the ocean. Under the circumstances there was
+      something to be said in behalf of such a measure of self-protection, and
+      the principle required but slight extension to cover such cases as the
+      banishment of Roger Williams and the Antinomians. There was another side
+      to the case, however. From the very outset this exclusive policy was in
+      some ways a source of weakness to Massachusetts, though we have seen that
+      the indirect effect was to diversify and enrich the political life of New
+      England as a whole. [[Sidenote: Restriction of the suffrage to church
+      members]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At first it led to the departure of the men who founded Connecticut, and
+      thereafter the way was certainly open for those who preferred the
+      Connecticut policy to go where it prevailed. Some such segregation was no
+      doubt effected, but it could not be complete and thorough. Men who
+      preferred Boston without the franchise to Hartford with it would remain in
+      Massachusetts; and thus the elder colony soon came to possess a
+      discontented class of people, always ready to join hand in glove with
+      dissenters or mischief-makers, or even with emissaries of the crown. It
+      afforded a suggestive commentary upon all attempts to suppress human
+      nature by depriving it of a share in political life; instead of keeping it
+      inside where you can try conclusions with it fairly, you thrust it out to
+      plot mischief in the dark. Within twenty years from the founding of Boston
+      the disfranchisement of such citizens as could not participate in
+      church-communion had begun to be regarded as a serious political
+      grievance. These men were obliged to pay taxes and were liable to be
+      called upon for military service against the Indians; and they naturally
+      felt that they ought to have a voice in the management of public affairs.
+      [[Sidenote: It was a source of political discontent]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides this fundamental ground of complaint, there were derivative
+      grievances. Under the influence of the clergy justice was administered in
+      somewhat inquisitorial fashion, there was an uncertainty as to just what
+      the law was, a strong disposition to confuse questions of law with
+      questions of ethics, and great laxity in the admission and estimation of
+      evidence. As early as 1639 people had begun to complain that too much
+      power was rested in the discretion of the magistrate, and they clamoured
+      for a code of laws; but as Winthrop says, the magistrates and ministers
+      were "not very forward in this matter," for they preferred to supplement
+      the common law of England by decisions based on the Old Testament rather
+      than by a body of statutes. It was not until 1649, after a persistent
+      struggle, that the deputies won a decisive victory over the assistants and
+      secured for Massachusetts a definite code of laws. In the New Haven colony
+      similar theocratic notions led the settlers to dispense with trial by jury
+      because they could find no precedent for it in the laws of Moses. Here, as
+      in Massachusetts, the inquisitorial administration of justice combined
+      with partial disfranchisement to awaken discontent, and it was partly for
+      this reason that New Haven fell so easily under the sway of Connecticut.
+      [[Sidenote: Inquisitorial administration of justice]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Massachusetts after 1650 the opinion rapidly gained ground that all
+      baptized persons of upright and decorous lives ought to be considered, for
+      practical purposes, as members of the church, and therefore entitled to
+      the exercise of political rights, even though unqualified for
+      participation in the Lord's Supper. This theory of church-membership,
+      based on what was at that time stigmatized as the "Halfway Covenant,"
+      aroused intense opposition. It was the great question of the day. In 1657
+      a council was held in Boston, which approved the principle of the Halfway
+      Covenant; and as this decision was far from satisfying the churches, a
+      synod of all the clergymen in Massachusetts was held five years later, to
+      reconsider the great question. The decision of the synod substantially
+      confirmed the decision of the council, but there were some dissenting
+      voices. Foremost among the dissenters, who wished to retain the old
+      theocratic regime in all its strictness, was Charles Chauncey, the
+      president of Harvard College, and Increase Mather agreed with him at the
+      time, though he afterward saw reason to change his opinion, and published
+      two tracts in favour of the Halfway Covenant. Most bitter of all toward
+      the new theory of church-membership was, naturally enough, Mr. Davenport
+      of New Haven. [[Sidenote: The "Halfway Covenant"]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This burning question was the source of angry contentions in the First
+      Church of Boston. Its teacher, the learned and melancholy Norton, died in
+      1663, and four years later the aged pastor, John Wilson, followed him. In
+      choosing a successor to Wilson the church decided to declare itself in
+      opposition to the liberal decision of the synod, and in token thereof
+      invited Davenport to come from New Haven to take charge of it. Davenport,
+      who was then seventy years old, was disgusted at the recent annexation of
+      his colony to Connecticut. He accepted the invitation and came to Boston,
+      against the wishes of nearly half of the Boston congregation who did not
+      like the illiberal principle which he represented. In little more than a
+      year his ministry at Boston was ended by death; but the opposition to his
+      call had already proceeded so far that a secession from the old church had
+      become inevitable. In 1669 the advocates of the Halfway Covenant organized
+      themselves into a new society under the title of the "Third Church in
+      Boston." A wooden meeting-house was built on a lot which had once belonged
+      to the late governor Winthrop, in what was then the south part of the
+      town, so that the society and its meeting-house became known as the South
+      Church; and after a new church founded in Summer Street in 1717 took the
+      name of the New South, the church of 1669 came to be further distinguished
+      as the Old South. As this church represented a liberal idea which was
+      growing in favour with the people, it soon became the most flourishing
+      church in America. After sixty years its numbers had increased so that the
+      old meeting-house could not contain them; and in 1729 the famous building
+      which still stands was erected on the same spot,&mdash;a building with a
+      grander history than any other on the American continent, unless it be
+      that other plain brick building in Philadelphia where the Declaration of
+      Independence was adopted and the Federal Constitution framed. [[Sidenote:
+      Founding of the Old South Church, 1669]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wrath of the First Church at this secession from its ranks was deep
+      and bitter, and for thirteen years it refused to entertain ecclesiastical
+      intercourse with the South Church. But by 1682 it had become apparent that
+      the king and his friends were meditating an attack upon the Puritan
+      theocracy in New England. It had even been suggested, in the council for
+      the colonies, that the Church of England should be established in
+      Massachusetts, and that none but duly ordained Episcopal clergymen should
+      be allowed to solemnize marriages. Such alarming suggestions began to
+      impress the various Puritan churches with the importance of uniting their
+      forces against the common enemy; and accordingly in 1682 the quarrel
+      between the two Boston societies came to an end. There was urgent need of
+      all the sympathy and good feeling that the community could muster, whereby
+      to cheer itself in the crisis that was coming. The four years from 1684 to
+      1688 were the darkest years in the history of New England. Massachusetts,
+      though not lacking in the spirit, had not the power to beard the tyrant as
+      she did eighty years later. Her attitude toward the Stuarts&mdash;as we
+      have seen&mdash;had been sometimes openly haughty and defiant, sometimes
+      silent and sullen, but always independent. At the accession of Charles II.
+      the colonists had thought it worth while to send commissioners to England
+      to confer with the king and avoid a quarrel. Charles promised to respect
+      their charter, but insisted that in return they must take an oath of
+      allegiance to the crown, must administer justice in the king's name, and
+      must repeal their laws restricting the right of suffrage to church members
+      and prohibiting the Episcopal form of worship. [[Sidenote: Founding of the
+      Old South Church, 1669] [[Sidenote: Demands of Charles II.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the people of Massachusetts received this message they consented to
+      administer justice in the king's name, but all the other matters were
+      referred for consideration to a committee, and so they dropped out of
+      sight. When the royal commissioners came to Boston in 1664, they were
+      especially instructed to ascertain whether Massachusetts had complied with
+      the king's demands; but upon this point the legislature stubbornly
+      withheld any definite answer, while it frittered away the time in trivial
+      altercations with the royal commissioners. The war with Holland and the
+      turbulent state of English politics operated for several years in favour
+      of this independent attitude of the colonists, though during all this time
+      their enemies at court were busy with intrigues and accusations. Apart
+      from mere slanders the real grounds of complaint were the restriction of
+      the suffrage, whereby members of the Church of England were shut out; the
+      claims of the eastern proprietors, heirs of Mason and Gorges, whose
+      territory Massachusetts had absorbed; the infraction of the navigation
+      laws; and the coinage of pine-tree shillings. The last named measure had
+      been forced upon the colonists by the scarcity of a circulating medium.
+      Until 1661 Indian wampum had been a legal tender, and far into the
+      eighteenth century it remained current in small transactions. "In 1693 the
+      ferriage from New York to Brooklyn was eight stivers in wampum or a silver
+      twopence." <a href="#linknote-35" name="linknoteref-35" id="linknoteref-35"><small>35</small></a>
+      As early as 1652 Massachusetts had sought to supply the deficiency by the
+      issue of shillings and sixpences. It was an affair of convenience and
+      probably had no political purpose. The infraction of the navigation laws
+      was a more serious matter. "Ships from France, Spain, and the Canaries
+      traded directly with Boston, and brought in goods which had never paid
+      duty in any English port." <a href="#linknote-36" name="linknoteref-36"
+      id="linknoteref-36"><small>36</small></a> The effect of this was to excite
+      the jealousy of the merchants in London and other English cities and to
+      deprive Massachusetts of the sympathy of that already numerous and
+      powerful class of people. [[Sidenote: Complaints against Massachusetts]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1675, the first year of King Philip's War, the British government made
+      up its mind to attend more closely to the affairs of its American
+      colonies. It had got the Dutch war off its hands, and could give heed to
+      other things. The general supervision of the colonies was assigned to a
+      standing committee of the privy council, styled the "Lords of the
+      Committee of Trade and Plantations," and henceforth familiarly known as
+      the "Lords of Trade." Next year the Lords of Trade sent an agent to
+      Boston, with a letter to Governor Leverett about the Mason and Gorges
+      claims. Under cover of this errand the messenger was to go about and
+      ascertain the sentiments which people in the Kennebec and Piscataqua
+      towns, as well as in Boston, entertained for the government of
+      Massachusetts. The person to whom this work was entrusted was Edward
+      Randolph, a cousin of Robert Mason who inherited the property claim to the
+      Piscataqua county. To these men had old John Mason bequeathed his deadly
+      feud with Massachusetts, and the fourteen years which Randolph now spent
+      in New England were busily devoted to sowing the seeds of strife. In 1678
+      the king appointed him collector and surveyor of customs at the port of
+      Boston, with instructions to enforce the navigation laws. Randolph was not
+      the man to do unpopular things in such a way as to dull the edge of the
+      infliction; he took delight in adding insult to injury. He was at once
+      harsh and treacherous. His one virtue was pecuniary integrity; he was
+      inaccessible to bribes and did not pick and steal from the receipts at the
+      custom-house. In the other relations of life he was disencumbered of
+      scruples. His abilities were not great, but his industry was untiring, and
+      he pursued his enemies with the tenacity of a sleuth-hound. As an
+      excellent British historian observes, "he was one of those men who, once
+      enlisted as partisans, lose every other feeling in the passion which is
+      engendered of strife." <a href="#linknote-37" name="linknoteref-37"
+      id="linknoteref-37"><small>37</small></a> [[Sidenote: The Lords of Trade]
+      [[Sidenote: Edward Randolph]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The arrival of such a man boded no good to Massachusetts. His reception at
+      the town-house was a cold one. Leverett liked neither his looks nor his
+      message, and kept his peaked hat on while he read the letter; when he came
+      to the signature of the king's chief secretary of state, he asked, with
+      careless contempt, "Who is this Henry Coventry?" Randolph's choking rage
+      found vent in a letter to the king, taking pains to remind him that the
+      governor of Massachusetts had once been an officer in Cromwell's army. As
+      we read this and think with what ghoulish glee the writer would have
+      betrayed Colonel Goffe into the hands of the headsman, had any clue been
+      given him, we can quite understand why Hubbard and Mather had nothing to
+      say about the mysterious stranger at Hadley. Everything that Randolph
+      could think of that would goad and irritate the king, he reported in full
+      to London; his letters were specimens of that worst sort of lie that is
+      based upon distorted half-truths; and his malicious pen but seldom lay
+      idle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While waiting for the effects of these reports to ripen, Randolph was
+      busily intriguing with some of the leading men in Boston who were
+      dissatisfied with the policy of the dominant party, and under his careful
+      handling a party was soon brought into existence which was ready to
+      counsel submission to the royal will. Such was the birth of Toryism in New
+      England. The leader of this party was Joseph Dudley, son of the grim
+      verse-maker who had come over as lieutenant to Winthrop. The younger
+      Dudley was graduated at Harvard in 1665, and proceeded to study theology,
+      but soon turned his attention entirely to politics. In 1673 he was a
+      deputy from Roxbury in the General Court; in 1675 he took part in the
+      storming of the Narragansett fort; in 1677 and the three following years
+      he was one of the Federal Commissioners. In character and temper he
+      differed greatly from his father. Like the proverbial minister's son whose
+      feet are swift toward folly, Joseph Dudley seems to have learned in stern
+      bleak years of childhood to rebel against the Puritan theory of life. Much
+      of the abuse that has been heaped upon him, as a renegade and traitor, is
+      probably undeserved. It does not appear that he ever made any pretence of
+      love for the Puritan commonwealth, and there were many like him who had as
+      lief be ruled by king as by clergy. But it cannot be denied that his
+      suppleness and sagacity went along with a moral nature that was weak and
+      vulgar. Joseph Dudley was essentially a self-seeking politician and
+      courtier, like his famous kinsman of the previous century, Robert, Earl of
+      Leicester. His party in Massachusetts was largely made up of men who had
+      come to the colony for commercial reasons, and had little or no sympathy
+      with the objects for which it was founded. Among them were Episcopalians,
+      Presbyterians, and Baptists, who were allowed no chance for public
+      worship, as well as many others who, like Gallio, cared for none of these
+      things. Their numbers, moreover, must have been large, for Boston had
+      grown to be a town of 5000 inhabitants, the population of Massachusetts
+      was approaching 30,000, and, according to Hutchinson, scarcely one grown
+      man in five was a church-member qualified to vote or hold office. Such a
+      fact speaks volumes as to the change which was coming over the Puritan
+      world. No wonder that the clergy had begun to preach about the weeds and
+      tares that were overrunning Christ's pleasant garden. No wonder that the
+      spirit of revolt against the disfranchising policy of the theocracy was
+      ripe. [[Sidenote: Joseph Dudley]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in 1679, when this weakness of the body politic had been duly
+      studied and reported by Randolph, and when all New England was groaning
+      under the bereavements and burdens entailed by Philip's war, that the
+      Stuart government began its final series of assaults upon Massachusetts.
+      The claims of the eastern proprietors, the heirs of Mason and Gorges,
+      furnished the occasion. Since 1643 the four Piscataqua towns&mdash;Hampton,
+      Exeter, Dover, and Portsmouth&mdash;had remained under the jurisdiction of
+      Massachusetts. After the Restoration the Mason claim had been revived, and
+      in 1677 was referred to the chief-justices North and Rainsford. Their
+      decision was that Mason's claim had always been worthless as based on a
+      grant in which the old Plymouth Company had exceeded its powers. They also
+      decided that Massachusetts had no valid claim since the charter assigned
+      her a boundary just north of the Merrimack. This decision left the four
+      towns subject to none but the king, who forthwith in 1679 proceeded to
+      erect them into the royal province of New Hampshire, with president and
+      council appointed by the crown, and an assembly chosen by the people, but
+      endowed with little authority,&mdash;a tricksome counterfeit of popular
+      government. Within three years an arrogant and thieving ruler, Edward
+      Cranfield, had goaded New Hampshire to acts of insurrection. [[Sidenote:
+      Royal province of New Hampshire]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the decisions of the chief-justices Massachusetts must needs submit.
+      The Gorges claim led to more serious results. Under Cromwell's rule in
+      1652&mdash;the same year in which she began coining money&mdash;Massachusetts
+      had extended her sway over Maine. In 1665 Colonel Nichols and his
+      commissioners, acting upon the express instructions of Charles II., took
+      it away from her. In 1668, after the commissioners had gone home,
+      Massachusetts coolly took possession again. In 1677 the chief-justices
+      decided that the claim of the Gorges family, being based on a grant from
+      James I., was valid. Then the young Ferdinando Gorges, grandson of the
+      first proprietor, offered to sell the province to the king, who had now
+      taken it into his head that he would like to bestow it upon the Duke of
+      Monmouth, his favourite son by Lucy Walters. Before Charles had responded,
+      Governor Leverett had struck a bargain with Gorges, who ceded to
+      Massachusetts all his rights over Maine for L1250 in hard cash. When the
+      king heard of this transaction he was furious. He sent a letter to Boston,
+      commanding the General Court to surrender the province again on repayment
+      of this sum of L1250, and expressing his indignation that the people
+      should thus dare to dispose of an important claim off-hand without
+      consulting his wishes. In the same letter the colony was enjoined to put
+      in force the royal orders of seventeen years before, concerning the oath
+      of allegiance, the restriction of the suffrage, and the prohibition of the
+      Episcopal form of worship. [[Sidenote: The Gorges claim]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This peremptory message reached Boston about Christmas, 1679. Leverett,
+      the sturdy Ironsides, had died six months before, and his place was filled
+      by Simon Bradstreet, a man of moderate powers but great integrity, and
+      held in peculiar reverence as the last survivor of those that had been
+      chosen to office before leaving England by the leaders of the great
+      Puritan exodus. Born in a Lincolnshire village in 1603, he was now
+      seventy-six years old. He had taken his degree at Emmanuel College,
+      Cambridge, had served as secretary to the Earl of Warwick, and in 1629 had
+      been appointed member of the board of assistants for the colony about to
+      be established on Massachusetts bay. In this position he had remained with
+      honour for half a century, while he had also served as Federal
+      Commissioner and as agent for the colony in London. His wife, who died in
+      1672, was a woman of quaint learning and quainter verses, which her
+      contemporaries admired beyond measure. One of her books was republished in
+      London, with the title: "The Tenth Muse, lately sprung up in America."
+      John Norton once said that if Virgil could only have heard the seraphic
+      poems of Anne Bradstreet, he would have thrown his heathen doggerel into
+      the fire. She was sister of Joseph Dudley, and evidently inherited this
+      rhyming talent, such as it was, from her father. Governor Bradstreet
+      belonged to the moderate party who would have been glad to extend the
+      franchise, but he did not go with his brother-in-law in subservience to
+      the king. [[Sidenote: Simon Bradstreet and his wife]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the General Court assembled, in May, 1680, the full number of
+      eighteen assistants appeared, for the first time in the history of the
+      colony, and in accordance with an expressed wish of the king. They were
+      ready to yield in trifles, but not in essentials. After wearisome
+      discussion, the answer to the royal letter was decided on. It stated in
+      vague and unsatisfactory terms that the royal orders of 1662 either had
+      been carried out already or would be in good time, while to the demand for
+      the surrender of Maine no reply whatever was made, save that "they were
+      heartily sorry that any actings of theirs should be displeasing to his
+      Majesty." After this, when Randolph wrote home that the king's letters
+      were of no more account in Massachusetts than an old London Gazette, he
+      can hardly be accused of stretching the truth. Randolph kept busily at
+      work, and seems to have persuaded the Bishop of London that if the charter
+      could be annulled, episcopacy might be established in Massachusetts as in
+      England. In February, 1682, a letter came from the king demanding
+      submission and threatening legal proceedings against the charter. Dudley
+      was then sent as agent to London, and with him was sent a Mr. Richards, of
+      the extreme clerical party, to watch him. [[Sidenote: Massachusetts
+      answers the king]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile the king's position at home had been changing. He had made up
+      his mind to follow his father's example and try the experiment of setting
+      his people at defiance and governing without a parliament. This could not
+      be done without a great supply of money. Louis XIV. had plenty of money,
+      for there was no constitution in France to prevent his squeezing what he
+      wanted out of the pockets of an oppressed people. France was thriving
+      greatly now, for Colbert had introduced a comparatively free system of
+      trade between the provinces and inaugurated an era of prosperity soon to
+      be cut short by the expulsion of the Huguenots. Louis could get money
+      enough for the asking, and would be delighted to foment civil disturbances
+      in England, so as to tie the hands of the only power which at that moment
+      could interfere with his seizing Alsace and Lorraine and invading
+      Flanders. The pretty Louise de Keroualle Duchess of Portsmouth, with her
+      innocent baby face and heart as cold as any reptile's, was the French
+      Delilah chosen to shear the locks of the British Samson. By such means and
+      from such motives a secret treaty was made in February, 1681, by which
+      Louis agreed to pay Charles 2,000,000 livres down, and 500,000 more in
+      each of the next two years, on condition that he should summon no more
+      parliaments within that time. This bargain for securing the means of
+      overthrowing the laws and liberties of England was, on the part of Charles
+      II., an act no less reprehensible than some of those for which his father
+      had gone to the block. But Charles could now afford for a while to wreak
+      his evil will. He had already summoned a parliament for the 21st of March,
+      to meet at Oxford within the precincts of the subservient university, and
+      out of reach of the high-spirited freemen of London. He now forced a
+      quarrel with the new parliament and dissolved it within a week. A joiner
+      named Stephen College, who had spoken his mind too freely in the taverns
+      at Oxford with regard to these proceedings, was drawn and quartered. The
+      Whig leader Lord Shaftesbury was obliged to flee to Holland. In the
+      absence of a parliament the only power of organized resistance to the
+      king's tyranny resided in the corporate governments of the chartered
+      towns. The charter of London was accordingly attacked by a writ of <i>quo
+      warranto</i>, and in June, 1683, the time-serving judges declared it
+      confiscated. George Jeffreys, a low drunken fellow whom Charles had made
+      Lord Chief Justice, went on a circuit through the country; and, as Roger
+      North says, "made all the charters, like the walls of Jericho, fall down
+      before him, and returned laden with surrenders, the spoils of towns." At
+      the same time a terrible blow was dealt at two of the greatest Whig
+      families in England. Lord William Russell, son of the Earl of Bedford, and
+      Algernon Sidney, younger son of the Earl of Leicester, two of the purest
+      patriots and ablest liberal leaders of the day, were tried on a false
+      charge of treason and beheaded. [[Sidenote: Secret treaty between Charles
+      II. and Louis XIV] [[Sidenote: Shameful proceedings in England]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By this quick succession of high-handed measures, the friends of law and
+      liberty were for a moment disconcerted and paralyzed. In the frightful
+      abasement of the courts of justice which these events so clearly showed,
+      the freedom of Englishmen seemed threatened in its last stronghold. The
+      doctrine of passive obedience to monarchs was preached in the pulpits and
+      inculcated by the university of Oxford, which ordered the works of John
+      Milton to be publicly burned. Sir Robert Filmer wrote that "not only in
+      human laws, but even in divine, a thing may by the king be commanded
+      contrary to law, and yet obedience to such a command is necessary."
+      Charles felt so strong that in 1684 he flatly refused to summon a
+      parliament.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not long before the effects of all this were felt in New England.
+      The mission of Dudley and his colleague was fruitless. They returned to
+      Boston, and Randolph, who had followed them to London, now followed them
+      back, armed with a writ of <i>quo warranto</i> which he was instructed not
+      to serve until he should have given Massachusetts one more chance to
+      humble herself in the dust. Should she modify her constitution to please a
+      tyrant or see it trampled under foot? Recent events in England served for
+      a solemn warning; for the moment the Tories were silenced; perhaps after
+      all, the absolute rule of a king was hardly to be preferred to the sway of
+      the Puritan clergy; the day when the House of Commons sat still and wept
+      seemed to have returned. A great town-meeting was held in the Old South
+      Meeting-House, and the moderator requested all who were for surrendering
+      the charter to hold up their hands. Not a hand was lifted, and out from
+      the throng a solitary voice exclaimed, with deep-drawn breath, "The Lord
+      be praised!" Then arose Increase Mather, president of Harvard College, and
+      reminded them how their fathers did win this charter, and should they
+      deliver it up unto the spoiler who demanded it "even as Ahab required
+      Naboth's vineyard, Oh! their children would be bound to curse them." Such
+      was the attitude of Massachusetts, and when it was known in London, the
+      blow was struck. For technical reasons Randolph's writ was not served; but
+      on the 21st of June a decree in chancery annulled the charter of
+      Massachusetts. [[Sidenote: Massachusetts refuses to surrender her charter]
+      [[Sidenote: It is annulled by degree of chancery, June 21, 1684]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To appreciate the force of this blow we must pause for a moment and
+      consider what it involved. The right to the soil of North America had been
+      hitherto regarded in England, on the strength of the discoveries of the
+      Cabots, as an appurtenance to the crown of Henry VII.,&mdash;as something
+      which descended from father to son like the palace at Hampton Court or the
+      castle at Windsor, but which the sovereign might alienate by his voluntary
+      act just as he might sell or give away a piece of his royal domain in
+      England. Over this vast territory it was doubtful how far Parliament was
+      entitled to exercise authority, and the rights of Englishmen settled there
+      had theoretically no security save in the provisions of the various
+      charters by which the crown had delegated its authority to individual
+      proprietors or to private companies. It was thus on the charter granted by
+      Charles I. to the Company of Massachusetts Bay that not only the cherished
+      political and ecclesiastical institutions of the colony, but even the
+      titles of individuals to their lands and houses, were supposed to be
+      founded. By the abrogation of the charter, all rights and immunities that
+      had been based upon it were at once swept away, and every rood of the soil
+      of Massachusetts became the personal property of the Stuart king, who
+      might, if he should possess the will and the power, turn out all the
+      present occupants or otherwise deal with them as trespassers. Such at
+      least was the theory of Charles II., and to show that he meant to wreak
+      his vengeance with no gentle hand, he appointed as his viceroy the brutal
+      Percy Kirke,&mdash;a man who would have no scruples about hanging a few
+      citizens without trial, should occasion require it. [[Sidenote: Effect of
+      annulling the charter]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in February, 1685, just as Charles seemed to be getting everything
+      arranged to his mind, a stroke of apoplexy carried him off the scene, and
+      his brother ascended the throne. Monmouth's rebellion, and the horrible
+      cruelties that followed, kept Colonel Kirke busy in England through the
+      summer, and left the new king scant leisure to think about America. Late
+      in the autumn, having made up his mind that he could not spare such an
+      exemplary knave as Kirke, James II. sent over Sir Edmund Andros. In the
+      mean time the government of Massachusetts had been administered by Dudley,
+      who showed himself willing to profit by the misfortunes of his country.
+      Andros had long been one of James's favourites. He was the dull and dogged
+      English officer such as one often meets, honest enough and faithful to his
+      master, neither cruel nor rapacious, but coarse in fibre and wanting in
+      tact. Some years before, when governor of New York, he had a territorial
+      dispute with Connecticut, and now cherished a grudge against the people of
+      New England, so that, from James's point of view, he was well fitted to be
+      their governor. James wished to abolish all the local governments in
+      America, and unite them, as far as possible, under a single
+      administration. With Plymouth there could be no trouble; she had never had
+      a charter, but had existed on sufferance from the outset. In 1687 the
+      charters of Rhode Island and Connecticut were rescinded, but the decrees
+      were not executed in due form. In October of that year Andros went to
+      Hartford, to seize the Connecticut charter but it was not surrendered.
+      While Sir Edmund was bandying threats with stout Robert Treat, the queller
+      of Indians and now governor of Connecticut, in the course of their evening
+      conference the candles were suddenly blown out, and when after some
+      scraping of tinder they were lighted again the document was nowhere to be
+      found, for Captain Wadsworth had carried it away and hidden it in the
+      hollow trunk of a mighty oak tree. Nevertheless for the moment the colony
+      was obliged to submit to the tyrant. Next day the secretary John Allyn
+      wrote "Finis" on the colonial records and shut up the book. Within another
+      twelvemonth New York and New Jersey were added to the viceroyalty of
+      Andros; so that all the northern colonies from the forests of Maine to the
+      Delaware river were thus brought under the arbitrary rule of one man, who
+      was responsible to no one but the king for whatever he might take it into
+      his head to do. [[Sidenote: Sir Edmund Andros] [[Sidenote: The Charter
+      Oak]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The vexatious character of the new government was most strongly felt at
+      Boston where Andros had his headquarters. Measures were at once taken for
+      the erection of an Episcopal church, and meantime the royal order was that
+      one of the principal meeting-houses should be seized for the use of the
+      Church of England. This was an ominous beginning. In the eyes of the
+      people it was much more than a mere question of disturbing Puritan
+      prejudices. They had before them the experience of Scotland during the
+      past ten years, the savage times of "Old Mortality," the times which had
+      seen the tyrannical prelate, on the lonely moor, begging in vain for his
+      life, the times of Drumclog and Bothwell Brigg, of Claverhouse and his
+      flinty-hearted troopers, of helpless women tied to stakes on the Solway
+      shore and drowned by inches in the rising tide. What had happened in one
+      part of the world might happen in another, for the Stuart policy was the
+      same. It aimed not at securing toleration but at asserting unchecked
+      supremacy. Its demand for an inch was the prelude to its seizing an ell,
+      and so our forefathers understood it. Sir Edmund's formal demand for the
+      Old South Meeting-House was flatly refused, but on Good Friday, 1687, the
+      sexton was frightened into opening it, and thenceforward Episcopal
+      services were held there alternately with the regular services until the
+      overthrow of Andros. The pastor, Samuel Willard, was son of the gallant
+      veteran who had rescued the beleaguered people of Brookfield in King
+      Philip's war. Amusing passages occurred between him and Sir Edmund, who
+      relished the pleasantry of keeping minister and congregation waiting an
+      hour or two in the street on Sundays before yielding to them the use of
+      their meeting-house. More kindly memories of the unpopular governor are
+      associated with the building of the first King's Chapel on the spot where
+      its venerable successor now stands. The church was not finished until
+      after Sir Edmund had taken his departure, but Lady Andros, who died in
+      February, 1688, lies in the burying-ground hard by. Her gentle manners had
+      won all hearts. For the moment, we are told, one touch of nature made
+      enemies kin, and as Sir Edmund walked to the townhouse "many a head was
+      bared to the bereaved husband that before had remained stubbornly covered
+      to the exalted governor." <a href="#linknote-38" name="linknoteref-38"
+      id="linknoteref-38"><small>38</small></a> [[Sidenote: Episcopal services
+      in Boston] [[Sidenote: Founding of the King's Chapel, 1689]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The despotic rule of Andros was felt in more serious ways than in the
+      seizing upon a meetinghouse. Arbitrary taxes were imposed, encroachments
+      were made upon common lands as in older manorial times, and the writ of <i>habeas
+      corpus</i> was suspended. Dudley was appointed censor of the press, and
+      nothing was allowed to be printed without his permission. All the public
+      records of the late New England governments were ordered to be brought to
+      Boston, whither it thus became necessary to make a tedious journey in
+      order to consult them. All deeds and wills were required to be registered
+      in Boston, and excessive fees were charged for the registry. It was
+      proclaimed that all private titles to land were to be ransacked, and that
+      whoever wished to have his title confirmed must pay a heavy quit-rent,
+      which under the circumstances amounted to blackmail. The General Court was
+      abolished. The power of taxation was taken from the town-meetings and
+      lodged with the governor. Against this crowning iniquity the town of
+      Ipswich, led by its sturdy pastor, John Wise, made protest. In response
+      Mr. Wise was thrown into prison, fined £50, and suspended from the
+      ministry. A notable and powerful character was this John Wise. One of the
+      broadest thinkers and most lucid writers of his time, he seems like a
+      forerunner of the liberal Unitarian divines of the nineteenth century. His
+      "Vindication of the Government of the New England Churches," published in
+      1717, was a masterly exposition of the principles of civil government, and
+      became "a text book of liberty for our Revolutionary fathers, containing
+      some of the notable expressions that are used in the Declaration of
+      Independence." [[Sidenote: Tyranny] [[Sidenote: John Wise of Ipswich]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was on the trial of Mr. Wise in October, 1687, that Dudley openly
+      declared that the people of New England had now no further privileges left
+      them than not to be sold for slaves. Such a state of things in the valley
+      of the Euphrates would not have attracted comment; the peasantry of
+      central Europe would have endured it until better instructed; but in an
+      English community it could not last long. If James II. had remained upon
+      the throne, New England would surely have soon risen in rebellion against
+      Andros. But the mother country had by this time come to repent the fresh
+      lease of life which she had granted to the Stuart dynasty after Cromwell's
+      death. Tired of the disgraceful subservience of her Court to the schemes
+      of Louis XIV., tired of fictitious plots and judicial murders, tired of
+      bloody assizes and declarations of indulgence and all the strange devices
+      of Stuart tyranny, England endured the arrogance of James but three years,
+      and then drove him across the Channel, to get such consolation as he might
+      from his French paymaster and patron. On the 4th of April, 1689, the
+      youthful John Winslow brought to Boston the news of the landing of the
+      Prince of Orange in England. For the space of two weeks there was quiet
+      and earnest deliberation among the citizens, as the success of the
+      Prince's enterprise was not yet regarded as assured. But all at once, on
+      the morning of the 18th, the drums beat to arms, the signal-fire was
+      lighted on Beacon Hill, a meeting was held at the Town-House, militia
+      began to pour in from the country, and Andros, summoned to surrender, was
+      fain to beseech Mr. Willard and the other ministers to intercede for him.
+      But the ministers refused. Next day the Castle was surrendered, the Rose
+      frigate riding in the harbour was seized and dismantled, and Andros was
+      arrested as he was trying to effect his escape disguised in woman's
+      clothes. Dudley and the other agents of tyranny were also imprisoned, and
+      thus the revolution was accomplished. It marks the importance which the
+      New England colonies were beginning to attain, that, before the Prince of
+      Orange had fully secured the throne, he issued a letter instructing the
+      people of Boston to preserve decorum and acquiesce yet a little longer in
+      the government of Andros, until more satisfactory arrangements could be
+      made. But Increase Mather, who was then in London on a mission in behalf
+      of New England, judiciously prevented this letter of instructions from
+      being sent. The zeal of the people outstripped the cautious policy of the
+      new sovereign, and provisional governments, in accordance with the old
+      charters, were at once set up in the colonies lately ruled by Andros.
+      Bradstreet now in his eighty-seventh year was reinstated as governor of
+      Massachusetts. Five weeks after this revolution in Boston the order to
+      proclaim King William and Queen Mary was received, amid such rejoicings as
+      had never before been seen in that quiet town, for it was believed that
+      self-government would now be guaranteed to New England. [[Sidenote: Fall
+      of James II.] [[Sidenote: Insurrection in Boston, and overthrow of Andros,
+      April 18, 1689]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This hope was at least so far realized that from the most formidable
+      dangers which had threatened it, New England was henceforth secured. The
+      struggle with the Stuarts was ended, and by this second revolution within
+      half a century the crown had received a check from which it never
+      recovered. There were troubles yet in store for England, but no more such
+      outrages as the judicial murders of Russell and Sidney. New England had
+      still a stern ordeal to go through, but never again was she to be so
+      trodden down and insulted as in the days of Andros. The efforts of George
+      III. to rule Englishmen despotically were weak as compared with those of
+      the Stuarts. In his time England had waxed strong enough to curb the
+      tyrant, America had waxed strong enough to defy and disown him. After 1689
+      the Puritan no longer felt that his religion was in danger, and there was
+      a reasonable prospect that charters solemnly granted him would be held
+      sacred. William III. was a sovereign of modern type, from whom freedom of
+      thought and worship had nothing to fear. In his theology he agreed, as a
+      Dutch Calvinist, more nearly with the Puritans than with the Church of
+      England. At the same time he had no great liking for so much independence
+      of thought and action as New England had exhibited. In the negotiations
+      which now definitely settled the affairs of this part of the world, the
+      intractable behaviour of Massachusetts was borne in mind and contrasted
+      with the somewhat less irritating attitude of the smaller colonies. It
+      happened that the decree which annulled the charters of Rhode Island and
+      Connecticut had not yet been formally enrolled. It was accordingly treated
+      as void, and the old charters were allowed to remain in force. They were
+      so liberal that no change in them was needed at the time of the
+      Revolution, so that Connecticut was governed under its old charter until
+      1818, and Rhode Island until 1842. [[Sidenote: Effects of the Revolution
+      of 1689]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was at this time a disposition on the part of the British government
+      to unite all the northern colonies under a single administration. The
+      French in Canada were fast becoming rivals to be feared; and the wonderful
+      explorations of La Salle, bringing the St. Lawrence into political
+      connection with the Mississippi, had at length foreshadowed a New France
+      in the rear of all the English colonies, aiming at the control of the
+      centre of the continent and eager to confine the English to the sea-board.
+      Already the relations of position which led to the great Seven Years' War
+      were beginning to shape themselves; and the conflict between France and
+      England actually broke out in 1689, as soon as Louis XIV.'s hired servant,
+      James II., was superseded by William III. as king of England and head of a
+      Protestant league. [[Sidenote: Need for union among all the northern
+      colonies]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In view of this new state of affairs, it was thought desirable to unite
+      the northern English colonies under one head, so far as possible, in order
+      to secure unity of military action. But natural prejudices had to be
+      considered. The policy of James II. had aroused such bitter feeling in
+      America that William must needs move with caution. Accordingly he did not
+      seek to unite New York with New England, and he did not think it worth
+      while to carry out the attack which James had only begun upon Connecticut
+      and Rhode Island. As for New Hampshire, he seems to have been restrained
+      by what in the language of modern politics would be called "pressure,"
+      brought to bear by certain local interests. <a href="#linknote-39"
+      name="linknoteref-39" id="linknoteref-39"><small>39</small></a> But in the
+      case of the little colony founded by the Pilgrims of the Mayflower there
+      was no obstacle. She was now annexed to Massachusetts, which also received
+      not only Maine but even Acadia, just won from the French; so that, save
+      for the short break at Portsmouth, the coast of Massachusetts now reached
+      all the way from Martha's Vineyard to the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
+      [[Sidenote: Plymouth, Maine, and Acadia, annexed to Massachusetts]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But along with this great territorial extension there went some
+      curtailment of the political privileges of the colony. By the new charter
+      of 1692 the right of the people to be governed by a legislature of their
+      own choosing was expressly confirmed. The exclusive right of this
+      legislature to impose taxes was also confirmed. But henceforth no
+      qualification of church-membership, but only a property qualification, was
+      to be required of voters; the governor was to be appointed by the crown
+      instead of being elected by the people; and all laws passed by the
+      legislature were to be sent to England for royal approval. These features
+      of the new charter,&mdash;the extension, or if I may so call it, the <i>secularization</i>
+      of the franchise, the appointment of the governor by the crown, and the
+      power of veto which the crown expressly reserved,&mdash;were grave
+      restrictions upon the independence which Massachusetts had hitherto
+      enjoyed. Henceforth her position was to be like that of the other colonies
+      with royal governors. But her history did not thereby lose its interest or
+      significance, though it became, like the history of most of the colonies,
+      a dismal record of irrepressible bickerings between the governor appointed
+      by the crown and the legislature elected by the people. In the period that
+      began in 1692 and ended in 1776, the movements of Massachusetts, while
+      restricted and hampered, were at the same time forced into a wider orbit.
+      She was brought into political sympathy with Virginia. While two
+      generations of men were passing across the scene, the political problems
+      of Massachusetts were assimilated to those of Virginia. In spite of all
+      the other differences, great as they were, there was a likeness in the
+      struggles between the popular legislature and the royal governor which
+      subordinated them all. It was this similarity of experience, during the
+      eighteenth century, that brought these two foremost colonies into cordial
+      alliance during the struggle against George III., and thus made it
+      possible to cement all the colonies together in the mighty nation whose
+      very name is fraught with so high and earnest a lesson to mankind,&mdash;the
+      UNITED STATES! [[Sidenote: Massachusetts becomes a royal province]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For such a far-reaching result, the temporary humiliation of Massachusetts
+      was a small price to pay. But it was not until long after the accession of
+      William III. that things could be seen in these grand outlines. With his
+      coronation began the struggle of seventy years between France and England,
+      far grander than the struggle between Rome and Carthage, two thousand
+      years earlier, for primacy in the world, for the prerogative of
+      determining the future career of mankind. That warfare, so fraught with
+      meaning, was waged as much upon American as upon European ground; and
+      while it continued, it was plainly for the interest of the British
+      government to pursue a conciliatory policy toward its American colonies,
+      for without their wholehearted assistance it could have no hope of
+      success. As soon as the struggle was ended, and the French power in the
+      colonial world finally overthrown, the perpetual quarrels between the
+      popular legislatures and the royal governors led immediately to the Stamp
+      Act and the other measures of the British government that brought about
+      the American revolution. People sometimes argue about that revolution as
+      if it had no past behind it and was simply the result of a discussion over
+      abstract principles. [[Sidenote: Seeds of the American Revolution already
+      sown]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We can now see that while the dispute involved an abstract principle of
+      fundamental importance to mankind, it was at the same time for Americans
+      illustrated by memories sufficiently concrete and real. James Otis in his
+      prime was no further distant from the tyranny of Andros than middle-aged
+      men of to-day are distant from the Missouri Compromise. The sons of men
+      cast into jail along with John Wise may have stood silent in the moonlight
+      on Griffin's Wharf and looked on while the contents of the tea-chests were
+      hurled into Boston harbour. In the events we have here passed in review,
+      it may be seen, so plainly that he who runs may read, how the spirit of
+      1776 was foreshadowed in 1689.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0010" id="link2H_4_0010"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      An interesting account of the Barons' War and the meeting of the first
+      House of Commons is given in Prothero's <i>Simon de Montfort</i>, London,
+      1877. For Wyclif and the Lollards, see Milman's <i>Latin Christianity</i>,
+      vol. viI. &mdash; The ecclesiastical history of the Tudor period may best
+      be studied in the works of John Strype, to wit, <i>Historical Memorials</i>,
+      6 vols.; <i>Annals of the Reformation</i>, 7 vols.; <i>Lives of Cranmer,
+      Parker, Whitgift, etc.</i>, Oxford, 1812-28. See also <i>Burnet's History
+      of the Reformation of the Church of England</i>, 3 vols., London,
+      1679-1715; Neal's <i>History of the Puritans</i>, London, 1793; Tulloch,
+      <i>Leaders of the Reformation</i>, Boston, 1859. A vast mass of
+      interesting information is to be found in <i>The Zurich Letters,
+      comprising the Correspondence of Several English Bishops, and Others, with
+      some of the Helvetian Reformers</i>, published by the Parker Society, 4
+      vols., Cambridge, Eng., 1845-46. Hooker's <i>Ecclesiastical Polity</i> was
+      published in London, 1594; a new edition, containing two additional books,
+      the first complete edition, was published in 1622.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the general history of England in the seventeenth century, there are
+      two modern works which stand far above all others,&mdash;Gardiner's <i>History
+      of England</i>, 10 vols., London, 1883-84; and Masson's <i>Life of Milton,
+      narrated in connection with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary
+      History of his Time</i>, 6 vols., Cambridge, Eng., 1859-80. These are
+      books of truly colossal erudition, and written in a spirit of judicial
+      fairness. Mr. Gardiner's ten volumes cover the forty years from the
+      accession of James I. to the beginning of the Civil War, 1603-1643. Mr.
+      Gardiner has lately published the first two volumes of his history of the
+      Civil War, and it is to be hoped that he will not stop until he reaches
+      the accession of William and Mary. Indeed, such books as his ought never
+      to stop. My friend and colleague, Prof. Hosmer, tells me that Mr. Gardiner
+      is a lineal descendant of Cromwell and Ireton. His little book, <i>The
+      Puritan Revolution</i>, in the "Epochs of History" series, is extremely
+      useful, and along with it one should read Airy's <i>The English
+      Restoration and Louis XIV</i>., in the same series, New York, 1889. The
+      best biography of Cromwell is by Mr. Allanson Picton, London, 1882; see
+      also Frederic Harrison's <i>Cromwell</i>, London, 1888, an excellent
+      little book. Hosmer's <i>Young Sir Henry Vane</i>, Boston, 1888, should be
+      read in the same connection; and one should not forget Carlyle's <i>Cromwell</i>.
+      See also Tulloch, <i>English Puritanism and its Leaders</i>, 1861, and <i>Rational
+      Theology and Christian Philosophy in England in the Seventeenth Century</i>,
+      1872; Skeats, <i>History of the Free Churches of England</i>, London,
+      1868; Mountfield, <i>The Church and Puritans</i>, London, 1881. Dexter's
+      <i>Congregationalism of the Last Three Hundred Years</i>, New York, 1880,
+      is a work of monumental importance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the history of New England the best general works are Palfrey, <i>History
+      of New England</i>, 4 vols., Boston, 1858-75; and Doyle, <i>The English in
+      America&mdash;The Puritan Colonies</i>, 2 vols., London, 1887. In point of
+      scholarship Dr. Palfrey's work is of the highest order, and it is written
+      in an interesting style. Its only shortcoming is that it deals somewhat
+      too leniently with the faults of the Puritan theocracy, and looks at
+      things too exclusively from a Massachusetts point of view. It is one of
+      the best histories yet written in America. Mr. Doyle's work is admirably
+      fair and impartial, and is based throughout upon a careful study of
+      original documents. The author is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford,
+      and has apparently made American history his specialty. His work on the
+      Puritan colonies is one of a series which when completed will cover the
+      whole story of English colonization in America. I have looked in vain in
+      his pages for any remark or allusion indicating that he has ever visited
+      America, and am therefore inclined to think that he has not done so. He
+      now and then makes a slight error such as would not be likely to be made
+      by a native of New England, but this is very seldom. The accuracy and
+      thoroughness of its research, its judicial temper, and its philosophical
+      spirit make Mr. Doyle's book in some respects the best that has been
+      written about New England.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among original authorities we may begin by citing John Smith's <i>Description
+      of New England</i>, 1616, and <i>New England's Trial</i>, 1622, contained
+      in Arber's new edition of Smith's works, London, 1884. Bradford's
+      narrative of the founding of Plymouth was for a long time supposed to be
+      lost. Nathaniel Morton's <i>New England's Memorial</i>, published in 1669,
+      was little more than an abridgment of it. After two centuries Bradford's
+      manuscript was discovered, and an excellent edition by Mr. Charles Deane
+      was published in the <i>Massachusetts Historical Collections</i>, 4th
+      series, vol. iii., 1856. Edward Winslow's <i>Journal of the Proceedings of
+      the English Plantation settled at Plymouth</i>, 1622, and <i>Good News
+      from New England</i>, 1624, are contained, with other valuable materials,
+      in Young's <i>Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers</i>, Boston, 1844. See
+      also Shurtleff and Pulsifer, <i>Records of Plymouth</i>, 12 vols., ending
+      with the annexation of the colony to Massachusetts in 1692; Prince's <i>Chronological
+      History of New England</i>, ed. Drake, 1852; and in this connection
+      Hunter's <i>Founders of New Plymouth</i>, London, 1854; Steele's <i>Life
+      of Brewster</i>, Philadelphia, 1857; Goodwin's <i>Pilgrim Republic</i>,
+      Boston, 1887; Bacon's <i>Genesis of the New England Churches</i>, New
+      York, 1874; Baylies's <i>Historical Memoir</i>, 1830; Thacher's <i>History
+      of the Town of Plymouth</i>, 1832.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Ferdinando Gorges wrote a <i>Briefe Narration of the Originall
+      Undertakings of the advancement of plantations into the parts of America,
+      especially showing the beginning, progress, and continuance of that of New
+      England</i>, London, 1658, contained in his grandson's collection entitled
+      <i>America Painted to the Life</i>. Thomas Morton, of Merrymount, gave his
+      own view of the situation in his <i>New English Canaan</i>, which has been
+      edited for the Prince Society, with great learning, by C.F. Adams. Samuel
+      Maverick also had his say in a valuable pamphlet entitled <i>A Description
+      of New England</i>, which has only come to light since 1875 and has been
+      edited by Mr. Deane. Maverick is, of course, hostile to the Puritans. See
+      also Lechford's <i>Plain Dealing in New England</i>, ed. J.H. Trumbull,
+      1867.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The earliest history of Massachusetts is by Winthrop himself, a work of
+      priceless value. In 1790, nearly a century and a half after the author's
+      death, it was published at Hartford. The best edition is that of 1853. In
+      1869 a valuable life of Winthrop was published by his descendant Robert
+      Winthrop. Hubbard's <i>History of New England</i> (<i>Mass. Hist. Coll.</i>,
+      2d series, vols. v., vi.) is drawn largely from Winthrop and from
+      Nathaniel Morton. There is much that is suggestive in William Wood's <i>New
+      England's Prospect</i>, 1634, and Edward Johnson's <i>Wonder-working
+      Providence of Zion's Saviour in New England</i>, 1654; the latter has been
+      ably edited by W.F. Poole, Andover, 1867. The records of the Massachusetts
+      government, from its founding in 1629 down to the overthrow of the charter
+      in 1684, were edited by Dr. Shurtleff in 6 vols. quarto, 1853-54; and
+      among the documents in the British Record Office, published since 1855,
+      three volumes&mdash;<i>Calendar of State Papers</i>, <i>Colonial America</i>,
+      vol. i., 1574-1660; vol. v., 1661-1668; vol. vii., 1669&mdash;are
+      especially useful. Of the later authorities the best is Hutchinson's <i>History
+      of Massachusetts Bay</i>, the first volume of which, coming down to 1689,
+      was published in Boston in 1764. The second volume, continuing the
+      narrative to 1749, was published in 1767. The third volume, coming down to
+      1774, was found among the illustrious author's MSS. after his death, and
+      was published in London in 1828. Hutchinson had access to many valuable
+      documents since lost, and his sound judgment and critical acumen deserve
+      the highest praise. In 1769 he published a volume of <i>Original Papers</i>,
+      illustrating the period covered by the first volume of his history. Many
+      priceless documents perished in the shameful sacking of his house by the
+      Boston rioters, Aug. 26, 1765. The second volume of Hutchinson's <i>History</i>
+      was continued to 1764 by G.R. Minot, 2 vols., 1798, and to 1820 by Alden
+      Bradford, 3 vols., 1822-29. Of recent works, the best is Barry's <i>History
+      of Massachusetts</i>, 3 vols., 1855-57. Many original authorities are
+      collected in Young's <i>Chronicles of Massachusetts</i>, Boston, 1846.
+      Cotton Mather's <i>Magnolia Christi Americana</i>, London, 1702 (reprinted
+      in 1820 and 1853), though crude and uncritical, is full of interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Many of the early Massachusetts documents relate to Maine. Of later books,
+      especial mention should be made of Folsom's <i>History of Saco and
+      Biddeford</i>, Saco, 1830; Willis's <i>History of Portland</i>, 2 vols.,
+      1831-33 (2d ed. 1865); <i>Memorial Volume of the Popham Celebration</i>,
+      Portland, 1862; Chamberlain's <i>Maine, Her Place in History</i>, Augusta,
+      1877. On New Hampshire the best general work is Belknap's <i>History of
+      New Hampshire</i>, 3 vols., Phila., 1784-92; the appendix contains many
+      original documents, and others are to be found in the <i>New Hampshire
+      Historical Collections</i>, 8 vols., 1824-66.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The <i>Connecticut Colonial Records</i> are edited by Dr. J.H. Trumbull,
+      12 vols., 1850-82. The <i>Connecticut Historical Society's Collections</i>,
+      1860-70, are of much value. The best general work is Trumbull's <i>History
+      of Connecticut</i>, 2 vols., Hartford, 1797. See also Stiles's <i>Ancient
+      Windsor</i>, 2 vols., 1859-63; Cothren's <i>Ancient Woodbury</i>, 3 vols.,
+      1854-79. Of the Pequot War we have accounts by three of the principal
+      actors. Mason's <i>History of the Pequod War</i> is in the <i>Mass. Hist.
+      Coll.</i>, 2d series, vol. viii.; Underhill's <i>News from America</i> is
+      in the 3d series, vol. vi.; and Lyon Gardiner's narrative is in the 3d
+      series, vol. iii. In the same volume with Underhill is contained <i>A True
+      Relation of the late Battle fought in New England between the English and
+      the Pequod Savages</i>, by Philip Vincent, London, 1638. The <i>New Haven
+      Colony Records</i> are edited by C.J. Hoadly, 2 vols., Hartford, 1857-58.
+      See also the <i>New Haven Historical Society's Papers</i>, 3 vols.,
+      1865-80; Lambert's <i>History of New Haven</i>, 1838; Atwater's <i>History
+      of New Haven</i>, 1881; Levermore's <i>Republic of New Haven</i>,
+      Baltimore, 1886; Johnston's <i>Connecticut</i>, Boston, 1887. The best
+      account of the Blue Laws is by J.H. Trumbull, <i>The True Blue Laws of
+      Connecticut and New Haven, and the False Blue Laws invented by the Rev.
+      Samuel Peters</i>, etc., Hartford, 1876. See also Hinman's <i>Blue Laws of
+      New Haven Colony</i>, Hartford, 1838; Barber's <i>History and Antiquities
+      of New Haven</i>, 1831; Peters's <i>History of Connecticut</i>, London,
+      1781. The story of the regicides is set forth in Stiles's <i>History of
+      the Three Judges</i> [the third being Colonel Dixwell], Hartford, 1794;
+      see also the <i>Mather Papers</i> in <i>Mass. Hist. Coll.</i>, 4th series,
+      vol. viiI. &mdash; <i>The Rhode Island Colonial Records</i> are edited by
+      J.R. Bartlett, 7 vols., 1856-62. One of the best state histories ever
+      written is that of S.G. Arnold, <i>History of the State of Rhode Island
+      and Providence Plantations</i>, 2 vols., New York, 1859-60. Many valuable
+      documents are reprinted in the <i>Rhode Island Historical Society's
+      Collections</i>. The <i>History of New England, with particular reference
+      to the denomination called Baptists</i>, by Rev. Isaac Backus, 3 vols.,
+      1777-96, has much that is valuable relating to Rhode Island. The series of
+      <i>Rhode Island Historical Tracts</i>, issued since 1878 by Mr. S.S.
+      Rider, is of great merit. Biographies of Roger Williams have been written
+      by J.D. Knowles, 1834; by William Gammell, 1845; and by Romeo Elton, 1852.
+      Williams's works have been republished by the Narragansett Club in 6
+      vols., 1866. The first volume contains the valuable <i>Key to the Indian
+      Languages of America</i>, edited by Dr. Trumbull. Williams's views of
+      religious liberty are set forth in his <i>Bloudy Tenent of Persecution</i>,
+      London, 1644; to which John Cotton replied in <i>The Bloudy Tenent washed
+      and made White in the Blood of the Lamb</i>, London, 1647; Williams's
+      rejoinder was entitled <i>The Bloudy Tenent made yet more Bloudy through
+      Mr. Cotton's attempt to Wash it White</i>, London, 1652. The controversy
+      was conducted on both sides with a candour and courtesy rare in that age.
+      The titles of Williams's other principal works, <i>George Fox digged out
+      of his Burrowes</i>, Boston, 1676; <i>Hireling Ministry none of Christ's</i>,
+      London, 1652; and <i>Christenings make not Christians</i>, 1643;
+      sufficiently indicate their character. The last-named tract was discovered
+      in the British Museum by Dr. Dexter and edited by him in Rider's <i>Tracts</i>,
+      No. xiv., 1881. The treatment of Roger Williams by the government of
+      Massachusetts is thoroughly discussed in Dexter's <i>As to Roger Williams</i>,
+      Boston, 1876. See also G.E. Ellis on "The Treatment of Intruders and
+      Dissentients by the Founders of Massachusetts," in <i>Lowell Lectures</i>,
+      Boston, 1869.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The case of Mrs. Hutchinson is treated, from a hostile and somewhat
+      truculent point of view, in Thomas Welde's pamphlet entitled <i>A Short
+      Story of the Rise, Reign, and Ruin of Antinomians, Familists, and
+      Libertines that infected the Churches of New England</i>, London, 1644. It
+      was answered in an anonymous pamphlet entitled <i>Mercurius Americanus</i>,
+      republished for the Prince Society, Boston, 1876, with prefatory notice by
+      C.H. Bell. Cotton's view of the theocracy may be seen in his <i>Milk for
+      Babes, drawn out of the Breasts of both Testaments</i>, London, 1646; <i>Keyes
+      of the Kingdom of Heaven</i>; and <i>Way of the Congregational Churches
+      Cleared</i>, London, 1648. See also Thomas Hooker's <i>Survey of the Summe
+      of Church Discipline</i>, London, 1648. The intolerant spirit of the time
+      finds quaint and forcible expression in Nathaniel Ward's satirical book,
+      <i>The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam</i>, 1647.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the Gorton controversy the best original authorities are his own book
+      entitled <i>Simplicitie's Defence against Sevenheaded Polity</i>, London,
+      1646; and Winslow's answer entitled <i>Hypocracie Unmasked</i>, London,
+      1646. See also Mackie's <i>Life of Samuel Gorton</i>, Boston, 1845, and
+      Brayton's <i>Defence of Samuel Gorton</i>, in Rider's <i>Tracts</i>, No.
+      xviI. &mdash; For the early history of the Quakers, see Robert Barclay's
+      <i>Inner Life of the Religious Societies of the Commonwealth</i>, London,
+      1876,&mdash;an admirable book. See also <i>New England a Degenerate Plant</i>,
+      1659; Bishop's <i>New England judged by the Spirit of the Lord</i>, 1661;
+      Sewel's <i>History of the Quakers</i>, 1722; Besse's <i>Sufferings of the
+      Quakers</i>, 1753; <i>The Popish Inquisition newly erected in New England</i>,
+      London, 1659; <i>The Secret Works of a Cruel People made Manifest</i>,
+      1659; and the pamphlet of the martyrs Stevenson and Robinson, entitled <i>A
+      Call from Death to Life</i>, 1660. John Norton's view of the case was
+      presented in his book, <i>The Heart of New England Rent at the Blasphemies
+      of the Present Generation</i>, London, 1660. See also J.S. Pike's <i>New
+      Puritan</i>, New York, 1879; Hallowell's <i>Pioneer Quakers</i>, Boston,
+      1887; and his <i>Quaker Invasion of Massachusetts</i>, Boston, 1883;
+      Brooks Adams, <i>The Emancipation of Massachusetts</i>, Boston, 1887;
+      Ellis, <i>The Puritan Age and Rule</i>, Boston, 1888.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some additional light upon the theocratic idea may be found in a treatise
+      by the apostle Eliot, <i>The Christian Commonwealth; or, the Civil Polity
+      of the Rising Kingdom of Jesus Christ</i>, London, 1659. An account of
+      Eliot's missionary work is given in <i>The Day breaking, if not the Sun
+      rising, of the Gospel with the Indians in New England</i>, London, 1647;
+      and <i>The Glorious Progress of the Gospel amongst the Indians in New
+      England</i>, 1649. See also Shepard's <i>Clear Sunshine of the Gospel
+      breaking forth upon the Indians</i>, 1648; and Whitfield's <i>Light
+      appearing more and more towards the Perfect Day</i>, 1651.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The principal authority for Philip's war is Hubbard's <i>Present State of
+      New England, being a Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians</i>, 1677.
+      Church's <i>Entertaining Passages relating to Philip's War</i>, published
+      in 1716, and republished in 1865, with notes by Mr. Dexter, is a charming
+      book. See also Mrs. Rowlandson's <i>True History</i>, Cambridge, Mass.,
+      1682; Mather's <i>Brief History of the War</i>, 1676; Drake's <i>Old
+      Indian Chronicle</i>, Boston, 1836; Gookin's <i>Historical Collections of
+      the Indians in New England</i>, 1674; and <i>Account of the Doings and
+      Sufferings of the Christian Indians</i>, in <i>Archchaeologia Americana</i>,
+      vol. ii. Batten's <i>Journal</i> is the diary of a citizen of Boston, sent
+      to England, and it now in MS. among the <i>Colonial Papers</i>. Mrs. Mary
+      Pray's letter (Oct. 20, 1675) is in <i>Mass. Hist. Coll.</i>, 5th series,
+      vol. i. p. 105.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The great storehouse of information for the Andros period is the <i>Andros
+      Tracts</i>, 3 vols., edited for the Prince Society by W.H. Whitmore. See
+      also Sewall's <i>Diary, Mass. Hist. Coll.</i>, 5th series, vols. v.&mdash;viii.
+      Sewall has been appropriately called the Puritan Pepys. His book is a
+      mirror of the state of society in Massachusetts at the time when it was
+      beginning to be felt that the old theocratic idea had been tried in the
+      balance and found wanting. There is a wonderful charm in such a book. It
+      makes one feel as if one had really "been there" and taken part in the
+      homely scenes, full of human interest, which it so naively portrays. Anne
+      Bradstreet's works have been edited by J.H. Ellis, Charlestown, 1867.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For further references and elaborate bibliographical discussions, see
+      Winsor's <i>Narrative and Critical History of America</i>, vol. iii.; and
+      his <i>Memorial History of Boston</i>, 4 vols., Boston, 1880. There is a
+      good account of the principal New England writers of the seventeenth
+      century, with illustrative extracts, in Tyler's <i>History of American
+      Literature</i>, 2 vols., New York, 1878. For extracts see also the first
+      two volumes of Stedman and Hutchinson's <i>Library of American Literature</i>,
+      New York, 1888.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In conclusion I would observe that town histories, though seldom written
+      in a philosophical spirit and apt to be quite amorphous in structure, are
+      a mine of wealth for the philosophic student of history.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      ]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_NOTE" id="link2H_NOTE"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      NOTES:
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-1" id="linknote-1"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      1 (<a href="#linknoteref-1">return</a>)<br /> [ Milman, <i>Lat. Christ.</i>
+      vii. 395.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-2" id="linknote-2"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      2 (<a href="#linknoteref-2">return</a>)<br /> [ Gardiner, <i>The Puritan
+      Revolution</i>, p. 12.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-3" id="linknote-3"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      3 (<a href="#linknoteref-3">return</a>)<br /> [ Green, <i>History of the
+      English People</i>, iii. 47.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-4" id="linknote-4"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      4 (<a href="#linknoteref-4">return</a>)<br /> [ Steele's <i>Life of
+      Brewster,</i> p. 161.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-5" id="linknote-5"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      5 (<a href="#linknoteref-5">return</a>)<br /> [ Gardiner, <i>Puritan
+      Revolution</i>, p. 50.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-6" id="linknote-6"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      6 (<a href="#linknoteref-6">return</a>)<br /> [ It is now 204 years since a
+      battle has been fought in England. The last was Sedgmoor in 1685. For four
+      centuries, since Bosworth, in 1485, the English people have lived in peace
+      in their own homes, except for the brief episode of the Great Rebellion,
+      and Monmouth's slight affair. This long peace, unparalleled in history,
+      has powerfully influenced the English and American character for good.
+      Since the Middle Ages most English warfare has been warfare at a distance,
+      and that does not nourish the brutal passions in the way that warfare at
+      home does. An instructive result is to be seen in the mildness of temper
+      which characterized the conduct of our stupendous Civil War. Nothing like
+      it was ever seen before.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-7" id="linknote-7"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      7 (<a href="#linknoteref-7">return</a>)<br /> [ Picton's <i>Cromwell</i>,
+      pp. 61, 67; Gardiner, <i>Puritan Revolution</i>, p. 72.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-8" id="linknote-8"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      8 (<a href="#linknoteref-8">return</a>)<br /> [ Quincy, History of Harvard
+      University, ii. 654.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-9" id="linknote-9"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      9 (<a href="#linknoteref-9">return</a>)<br /> [ C.F. Adams, <i>Sir
+      Christopher Gardiner, Knight</i>, p. 31.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-10" id="linknote-10"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      10 (<a href="#linknoteref-10">return</a>)<br /> [ The compact drawn up in
+      the Mayflower's cabin was not, in the strict sense a constitution, which
+      is a document defining and limiting the functions of government. Magna
+      Charta partook of the nature of a written constitution, as far as it went,
+      but it did not create a government.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-11" id="linknote-11"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      11 (<a href="#linknoteref-11">return</a>)<br /> [ See Johnston's
+      Connecticut, p. 321, a very brilliant book.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-12" id="linknote-12"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      12 (<a href="#linknoteref-12">return</a>)<br /> [ See the passionate
+      exclamation of Endicott, below, p. 190.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-13" id="linknote-13"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      13 (<a href="#linknoteref-13">return</a>)<br /> [ Excursions of an
+      Evolutionist: pp. 250, 255.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-14" id="linknote-14"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      14 (<a href="#linknoteref-14">return</a>)<br /> [ A glimmer of light upon
+      Gorton may be got from reading the title-page of one of his books: "AN
+      INCORRUPTIBLE KEY, composed of the CX PSALME, wherewith you may open the
+      Rest of the Holy Scriptures; Turning itself only according to the
+      Composure and Art of that Lock, of the Closure and Secresie of that great
+      Mystery of God manifest in the Flesh, but justified only by the Spirit,
+      which it evidently openeth and revealeth, out of Fall and Resurrection,
+      Sin and Righteousness, Ascension and Descension, Height and Depth, First
+      and Last, Beginning and Ending, Flesh and Spirit, Wisdome and
+      Foolishnesse, Strength and Weakness, Mortality and Immortality, Jew and
+      Gentile, Light and Darknesse, Unity and Multiplication, Fruitfulness and
+      Barrenness, Curse and Blessing, Man and Woman, Kingdom and Priesthood,
+      Heaven and Earth, Allsufficiency and Deficiency, God and Man. And out of
+      every Unity made up of twaine, it openeth that great two-leafed Gate,
+      which is the sole Entrie into the City of God, of New Jerusalem, <i>into
+      which none but the King of glory can enter</i>; and as that Porter openeth
+      the Doore of the Sheepfold, <i>by which whosoever entreth is the Shepheard
+      of the Sheep</i>; See Isa. 45. 1. Psal. 24. 7, 8, 9, 10. John 10. 1, 2, 3;
+      Or, (according to the Signification of the Word translated <i>Psalme</i>,)
+      it is a Pruning-Knife, to lop off from the Church of Christ all
+      superfluous Twigs <i>of earthly and carnal Commandments</i>, Leviticall
+      Services or Ministery, and fading and vanishing Priests, or Ministers, who
+      are taken away and cease, and are not established and confirmed by Death,
+      as holding no Correspondency with the princely Dignity, Office, and
+      Ministry of our <i>Melchisedek</i>, who is the only Minister and Ministry
+      of the Sanctuary, and of that true Tabernacle which the Lord pitcht, and
+      not Man. For it supplants the Old Man, and implants the New; abrogates the
+      Old Testament or Covenant, and confirms the New, unto a thousand
+      Generations, or in Generations forever. By Samuel Gorton, <i>Gent.</i>,
+      and at the time of penning hereof, in the Place of Judicature (upon
+      Aquethneck, alias Road Island) of Providence Plantations in the
+      Nanhyganset Bay, New England. Printed in the Yeere 1647."]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-15" id="linknote-15"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      15 (<a href="#linknoteref-15">return</a>)<br /> [ Father of Benedict
+      Arnold, afterward governor of Rhode Island, and owner of the stone
+      windmill (apparently copied from one in Chesterton, Warwickshire) which
+      was formerly supposed by some antiquarians to be a vestige of the
+      Northmen. Governor Benedict Arnold was great-grandfather of the traitor.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-16" id="linknote-16"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      16 (<a href="#linknoteref-16">return</a>)<br /> [ <i>Gorton, Simplicitie's
+      Defence against Seven-headed Policy</i>, p. 88.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-17" id="linknote-17"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      17 (<a href="#linknoteref-17">return</a>)<br /> [ De Forest, <i>History of
+      the Indians of Connecticut</i>, Hartford, 1850, p. 198.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-18" id="linknote-18"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      18 (<a href="#linknoteref-18">return</a>)<br /> [ Doyle, <i>Puritan
+      Colonies</i>, i. 324.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-19" id="linknote-19"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      19 (<a href="#linknoteref-19">return</a>)<br /> [ See below, p. 222, note.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-20" id="linknote-20"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      20 (<a href="#linknoteref-20">return</a>)<br /> [ See my <i>Excursions of
+      an Evolutionist,</i> pp. 239-242, 250-255, 286-289.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-21" id="linknote-21"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      21 (<a href="#linknoteref-21">return</a>)<br /> [ Gorton's life at Warwick,
+      after all these troubles, seems to have been quiet and happy. He died in
+      1677 at a great age. In 1771 Dr. Ezra Stiles visited, in Providence, his
+      last surviving disciple, born in 1691. This old man said that Gorton wrote
+      in heaven, and none can understand his books except those who live in
+      heaven while on earth.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-22" id="linknote-22"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      22 (<a href="#linknoteref-22">return</a>)<br /> [ Doyle, <i>Puritan
+      Colonies</i>,: i. 369.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-23" id="linknote-23"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      23 (<a href="#linknoteref-23">return</a>)<br /> [ Doyle, i.: 372.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-24" id="linknote-24"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      24 (<a href="#linknoteref-24">return</a>)<br /> [ Milman, <i>Latin
+      Christianity</i>, vii. 390.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-25" id="linknote-25"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      25 (<a href="#linknoteref-25">return</a>)<br /> [ Doyle, ii. 133, 134;
+      Rhode Island Records, i. 377, 378.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-26" id="linknote-26"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      26 (<a href="#linknoteref-26">return</a>)<br /> [ Colonial Laws of
+      Massachusetts, pp. 14-16; Levermore's Republic of New Haven, p. 153.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-27" id="linknote-27"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      27 (<a href="#linknoteref-27">return</a>)<br /> [ See my remarks above, p.
+      145.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-28" id="linknote-28"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      28 (<a href="#linknoteref-28">return</a>)<br /> [ The daring passage in the
+      sermon is thus given in Bacon's <i>Historical Discourses</i>, New Haven,
+      1838: "Withhold not countenance, entertainment, and protection from the
+      people of God&mdash;whom men may call fools and fanatics&mdash;if any such
+      come to you from other countries, as from France or England, or any other
+      place. Be not forgetful to entertain strangers. Remember those that are in
+      bonds, as bound with them. The Lord required this of Moab, saying, 'Make
+      thy shadow as the night in the midst of the noonday; hide the outcasts;
+      bewray not him that wandereth. Let mine outcasts dwell with thee, Moab; be
+      thou a covert to them from the face of the spoiler.' Is it objected&mdash;'But
+      so I may expose myself to be spoiled or troubled'? He, therefore, to
+      remove this objection, addeth, 'For the extortioner is at an end, the
+      spoiler ceaseth, the oppressors are consumed out of the land.' While we
+      are attending to our duty in owning and harbouring Christ's witnesses, God
+      will be providing for their and our safety, by destroying those that would
+      destroy his people."]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-29" id="linknote-29"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      29 (<a href="#linknoteref-29">return</a>)<br /> [ Palfrey, <i>History of
+      New England,</i> in. 138-140.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-30" id="linknote-30"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      30 (<a href="#linknoteref-30">return</a>)<br /> [ See Parkman, <i>Conspiracy
+      of Pontiac</i>, i. 80-85.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-31" id="linknote-31"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      31 (<a href="#linknoteref-31">return</a>)<br /> [ De Forest, <i>History of
+      the Indians of Connecticut,</i> pp. 252, 257.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-32" id="linknote-32"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      32 (<a href="#linknoteref-32">return</a>)<br /> [ The story rests chiefly
+      upon the statements of Hutchinson, an extremely careful and judicious
+      writer, and not in the least what the French call a <i>gobemouche</i>.
+      Goffe kept a diary which came into Hutchinson's possession, and was one of
+      the priceless manuscripts that perished in the infamous sacking of his
+      house by the Boston mob of August 26, 1765. What light that diary might
+      have thrown upon the matter can never be known. Hutchinson was born in
+      1711, only thirty-six years after the event, so that his testimony is not
+      so very far removed from that of a contemporary. Whalley seems to have
+      died in Hadley shortly before 1675, and Goffe deemed it prudent to leave
+      that neighbourhood in 1676. His letters to Increase Mather are dated from
+      "Ebenezer," i. e., wherever in his roamings he set up his Ebenezer. One of
+      these letters, dated September 8, 1676, shows that his Ebenezer was then
+      set up in Hartford, where probably he died about 1679 In 1676 the arrival
+      of Edward Randolph (see below, p. 256) renewed the peril of the regicide
+      judge, and his sudden removal from his skilfully contrived hiding-place at
+      Hadley might possibly have been due to his having exposed himself to
+      recognition in the Indian fight. Possibly even the supernatural
+      explanation might have been started, with a touch of Yankee humour, as a
+      blind. The silence of Mather and Hubbard was no more remarkable than some
+      of the other ingenious incidents which had so long served to conceal the
+      existence of this sturdy and crafty man. The reasons for doubting the
+      story are best stated by Mr. George Sheldon of Deerfield, in <i>Hist.-Genealogical
+      Register</i>, October, 1874.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-33" id="linknote-33"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      33 (<a href="#linknoteref-33">return</a>)<br /> [ If Philip was half the
+      diplomatist that he is represented in tradition, he never would have gone
+      into such a war without assurance of Narragansett help. Canonchet was a
+      far more powerful sachem than Philip, and played a more conspicuous part
+      in the war. May we not suppose that Canonchet's desire to avenge his
+      father's death was one of the principal incentives to the war; that
+      Philip's attack upon Swanzey was a premature explosion; and that Canonchet
+      then watched the course of events for a while before making up his mind
+      whether to abandon Philip or support him?]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-34" id="linknote-34"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      34 (<a href="#linknoteref-34">return</a>)<br /> [ A wretched little
+      werewolf who some few years ago, being then a lad of fourteen or fifteen
+      years, most cruelly murdered two or three young children, just to amuse
+      himself with their dying agonies. The misdirected "humanitarianism," which
+      in our country makes every murderer an object of popular sympathy,
+      prevailed to save this creature from the gallows. Massachusetts has lately
+      witnessed a similar instance of misplaced clemency in the case of a vile
+      woman who had poisoned eight or ten persons, including some of her own
+      children, in order to profit by their life insurance. Such instances help
+      to explain the prolonged vitality of "Judge Lynch," and sometimes almost
+      make one regret the days in old England when William Probert, after
+      escaping in 1824 as "king's evidence," from the Thurtell affair, got
+      caught and hanged within a twelvemonth for horse-stealing. Any one who
+      wishes to study the results of allowing criminality to survive and
+      propagate itself should read Dugdale's The Jukes; Hereditary Crime, New
+      York, 1877.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-35" id="linknote-35"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      35 (<a href="#linknoteref-35">return</a>)<br /> [ Weeden, <i>Indian Money
+      as a Factor in New England Civilization</i>, Johns Hopkins University
+      Studies, II. viii., ix. p. 30.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-36" id="linknote-36"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      36 (<a href="#linknoteref-36">return</a>)<br /> [ Doyle, ii. 253.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-37" id="linknote-37"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      37 (<a href="#linknoteref-37">return</a>)<br /> [ Doyle, <i>Puritan
+      Colonies</i>, ii. 254.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-38" id="linknote-38"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      38 (<a href="#linknoteref-38">return</a>)<br /> [ The quotation is from an
+      unpublished letter of Rev. Robert Ratcliffe to the Bishop of London, cited
+      in an able article in the <i>Boston Herald</i>, January 4, 1888. I have
+      not seen the letter.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-39" id="linknote-39"></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      39 (<a href="#linknoteref-39">return</a>)<br /> [ Doyle, <i>Puritan
+      Colonies</i>, ii. 379, 380.]
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+<pre>
+
+
+
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+  </body>
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Beginnings of New England, by John Fiske
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Beginnings of New England
+       Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty
+
+Author: John Fiske
+
+Release Date: June 28, 2004 [EBook #12767]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW ENGLAND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Franks and PG Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW ENGLAND
+
+OR THE PURITAN THEOCRACY IN ITS RELATIONS TO CIVIL AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY
+
+BY
+
+JOHN FISKE
+
+"The Lord Christ intends to achieve greater matters by this little
+handful than the world is aware of." EDWARD JOHNSON, _Wonder-Working
+Providence of Zion's Saviour in New England_ 1654
+
+1892
+
+
+
+
+To
+
+MY DEAR CLASSMATES,
+
+
+BENJAMIN THOMPSON FROTHINGHAM,
+
+WILLIAM AUGUSTUS WHITE,
+
+AND
+
+FREDERIC CROMWELL,
+
+I DEDICATE THIS BOOK.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+This book contains the substance of the lectures originally given at
+the Washington University, St. Louis, in May, 1887, in the course of my
+annual visit to that institution as University Professor of American
+History. The lectures were repeated in the following month of June at
+Portland, Oregon, and since then either the whole course, or one or more
+of the lectures, have been given in Boston, Newton, Milton, Chelsea,
+New Bedford, Lowell, Worcester, Springfield, and Pittsfield, Mass.;
+Farmington, Middletown, and Stamford, Conn.; New York, Brooklyn, and
+Tarrytown, N.Y.; Philadelphia and Ogontz, Pa.; Wilmington, Del.;
+Chicago, 111.; San Francisco and Oakland, Cal.
+
+In this sketch of the circumstances which attended the settlement of New
+England, I have purposely omitted many details which in a formal history
+of that period would need to be included. It has been my aim to give the
+outline of such a narrative as to indicate the principles at work in
+the history of New England down to the Revolution of 1689. When I was
+writing the lectures I had just been reading, with much interest, the
+work of my former pupil, Mr. Brooks Adams, entitled "The Emancipation of
+Massachusetts."
+
+With the specific conclusions set forth in that book I found myself
+often agreeing, but it seemed to me that the general aspect of the case
+would be considerably modified and perhaps somewhat more adequately
+presented by enlarging the field of view. In forming historical
+judgments a great deal depends upon our perspective. Out of the very
+imperfect human nature which is so slowly and painfully casting off the
+original sin of its inheritance from primeval savagery, it is scarcely
+possible in any age to get a result which will look quite satisfactory
+to the men of a riper and more enlightened age. Fortunately we can learn
+something from the stumblings of our forefathers, and a good many
+things seem quite clear to us to-day which two centuries ago were only
+beginning to be dimly discerned by a few of the keenest and boldest
+spirits. The faults of the Puritan theocracy, which found its most
+complete development in Massachusetts, are so glaring that it is idle to
+seek to palliate them or to explain them away. But if we would really
+understand what was going on in the Puritan world of the seventeenth
+century, and how a better state of things has grown out of it, we must
+endeavour to distinguish and define the elements of wholesome strength
+in that theocracy no less than its elements of crudity and weakness.
+
+The first chapter, on "The Roman Idea and the English Idea," contains a
+somewhat more developed statement of the points briefly indicated in the
+thirteenth section (pp. 85-95) of "The Destiny of Man." As all of the
+present book, except the first chapter, was written here under the
+shadow of the Washington University, I take pleasure in dating it from
+this charming and hospitable city where I have passed some of the most
+delightful hours of my life.
+
+St. Louis, April 15, 1889.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE ROMAN IDEA AND THE ENGLISH IDEA.
+
+When did the Roman Empire come to an end? ... 1-3
+
+Meaning of Odovakar's work ... 3
+
+The Holy Roman Empire ... 4, 5
+
+Gradual shifting of primacy from the men who spoke Latin, and their
+descendants, to the men who speak English ... 6-8
+
+Political history is the history of nation-making ... 8, 9
+
+The ORIENTAL method of nation-making; _conquest without incorporation_
+... 9
+
+Illustrations from eastern despotisms ... 10
+
+And from the Moors in Spain ... 11
+
+The ROMAN method of nation-making; _conquest with incorporation, but
+without representation_ ... 12
+
+Its slow development ... 13
+
+Vices in the Roman system. ... 14
+
+Its fundamental defect ... 15
+
+It knew nothing of political power delegated by the people to
+representatives ... 16
+
+And therefore the expansion of its dominion ended in a centralized
+Despotism ... 16
+
+Which entailed the danger that human life might come to stagnate in
+Europe, as it had done in Asia ... 17
+
+The danger was warded off by the Germanic invasions, which, however,
+threatened to undo the work which the Empire had done in organizing
+European society ... 17
+
+But such disintegration was prevented by the sway which the Roman Church
+had come to exercise over the European mind ... 18
+
+The wonderful thirteenth century ... 19
+
+The ENGLISH method of nation-making; _incorporation with representation_
+... 20
+
+Pacific tendencies of federalism ... 21
+
+Failure of Greek attempts at federation ... 22
+
+Fallacy of the notion that republics must be small ... 23
+
+"It is not the business of a government to support its people, but of
+the people to support their government" ... 24
+
+Teutonic March-meetings and representative assemblies ... 25
+
+Peculiarity of the Teutonic conquest of Britain ... 26, 27
+
+Survival and development of the Teutonic representative assembly in
+England ... 28
+
+Primitive Teutonic institutions less modified in England than in Germany
+... 29
+
+Some effects of the Norman conquest of England ... 30
+
+The Barons' War and the first House of Commons ... 31
+
+Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty ... 32
+
+Conflict between Roman Idea and English Idea begins to become clearly
+visible in the thirteenth century ... 33
+
+Decline of mediaeval Empire and Church with the growth of modern
+nationalities ... 34
+
+Overthrow of feudalism, and increasing power of the crown ... 35
+
+Formidable strength of the Roman Idea ... 36
+
+Had it not been for the Puritans, political liberty would probably have
+disappeared from the world ... 37
+
+Beginnings of Protestantism in the thirteenth century ... 38
+
+The Cathari, or Puritans of the Eastern Empire ... 39
+
+The Albigenses ... 40
+
+Effects of persecution; its feebleness in England ... 41
+
+Wyclif and the Lollards ... 42
+
+Political character of Henry VIII.'s revolt against Rome ... 43
+
+The yeoman Hugh Latimer ... 44
+
+The moment of Cromwell's triumph was the most critical moment in history
+... 45
+
+Contrast with France; fate of the Huguenots ... 46, 47
+
+Victory of the English Idea ... 48
+
+Significance of the Puritan Exodus ... 49
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE PURITAN EXODUS.
+
+Influence of Puritanism upon modern Europe ... 50, 51
+
+Work of the Lollards ... 52
+
+They made the Bible the first truly popular literature in England ...
+53, 54
+
+The English version of the Bible ... 54, 55
+
+Secret of Henry VIII.'s swift success in his revolt against Rome ... 56
+
+Effects of the persecution under Mary ... 57
+
+Calvin's theology in its political bearings ... 58, 59
+
+Elizabeth's policy and its effects ... 60, 61
+
+Puritan sea-rovers ... 61
+
+Geographical distribution of Puritanism in England; it was strongest in
+the eastern counties ... 62
+
+Preponderance of East Anglia in the Puritan exodus ... 63
+
+Familiar features of East Anglia to the visitor from New England ... 64
+
+Puritanism was not intentionally allied with liberalism ... 65
+
+Robert Brown and the Separatists ... 66
+
+Persecution of the Separatists ... 67
+
+Recantation of Brown; it was reserved for William Brewster to take the
+lead in the Puritan exodus ... 68
+
+James Stuart, and his encounter with Andrew Melville ... 69
+
+What James intended to do when he became King of England ... 70
+
+His view of the political situation, as declared in the conference at
+Hampton Court ... 71
+
+The congregation of Separatists at Scrooby ... 72
+
+The flight to Holland, and settlement at Leyden in 1609 ... 73
+
+Systematic legal toleration in Holland ... 74
+
+Why the Pilgrims did not stay there; they wished to keep up their
+distinct organization and found a state ... 74
+
+And to do this they must cross the ocean, because European territory was
+all preoccupied ... 75
+
+The London and Plymouth companies ... 75
+
+First explorations of the New England coast; Bartholomew Gosnold (1602),
+and George Weymouth (1605) ... 76
+
+The Popham colony (1607) ... 77
+
+Captain John Smith gives to New England its name (1614) ... 78
+
+The Pilgrims at Leyden decide to make a settlement near the Delaware
+river ... 79
+
+How King James regarded the enterprise ... 80
+
+Voyage of the Mayflower; she goes astray and takes the Pilgrims to Cape
+Cod bay ... 81
+
+Founding of the Plymouth colony (1620) ... 82, 83
+
+Why the Indians did not molest the settlers ... 84, 85
+
+The chief interest of this beginning of the Puritan exodus lies not so
+much in what it achieved as in what it suggested ... 86, 87
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE PLANTING OF NEW ENGLAND.
+
+Sir Ferdinando Gorges and the Council for New England ... 88, 89
+
+Wessagusset and Merrymount ... 90, 91
+
+The Dorchester adventurers ... 92
+
+John White wishes to raise a bulwark against the Kingdom of Antichrist
+... 93
+
+And John Endicott undertakes the work of building it ... 94
+
+Conflicting grants sow seeds of trouble; the Gorges and Mason claims ...
+94, 95
+
+Endicott's arrival in New England, and the founding of Salem ... 95
+
+The Company of Massachusetts Bay; Francis Higginson takes a powerful
+reinforcement to Salem ... 96
+
+The development of John White's enterprise into the Company of
+Massachusetts Bay coincided with the first four years of the reign of
+Charles I ... 97
+
+Extraordinary scene in the House of Commons (June 5, 1628) ... 98, 99
+
+The King turns Parliament out of doors (March 2, 1629) ... 100
+
+Desperate nature of the crisis ... 100, 101
+
+The meeting at Cambridge (Aug. 26, 1629), and decision to transfer the
+charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company, and the government established
+under it, to New England ... 102
+
+Leaders of the great migration; John Winthrop ... 102
+
+And Thomas Dudley ... 103
+
+Founding of Massachusetts; the schemes of Gorges overwhelmed ... 104
+
+Beginnings of American constitutional history; the question as to
+self-government raised at Watertown ... 105
+
+Representative system established ... 106
+
+Bicameral assembly; story of the stray pig ... 107
+
+Ecclesiastical polity; the triumph of Separatism ... 108
+
+Restriction of the suffrage to members of the Puritan congregational
+churches ... 109
+
+Founding of Harvard College ... 110
+
+Threefold danger to the New England settlers in 1636:--
+
+  1. From the King, who prepares to attack the charter, but is foiled by
+dissensions at home ... 111-113
+
+  2. From religious dissensions; Roger Williams ... 114-116
+     Henry Vane and Anne Hutchinson ... 116-119
+     Beginnings of New Hampshire and Rhode Island ... 119-120
+
+  3. From the Indians; the Pequot supremacy ... 121
+
+First movements into the Connecticut valley, and disputes with the Dutch
+settlers of New Amsterdam ... 122, 123
+
+Restriction of the suffrage leads to disaffection in Massachusetts;
+profoundly interesting opinions of Winthrop and Hooker ... 123, 124
+
+Connecticut pioneers and their hardships ... 125
+
+Thomas Hooker, and the founding of Connecticut ... 120
+
+The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut (Jan 14, 1639); the first written
+constitution that created a government ... 127
+
+Relations of Connecticut to the genesis of the Federal Union ... 128
+
+Origin of the Pequot War; Sassacus tries to unite the Indian tribes in a
+crusade against the English ... 129, 130
+
+The schemes of Sassacus are foiled by Roger Williams ... 130
+
+The Pequots take the war path alone ... 131
+
+And are exterminated ... 132-134
+
+John Davenport, and the founding of New Haven ... 135
+
+New Haven legislation, and legend of the "Blue Laws" ... 136
+
+With the meeting of the Long Parliament, in 1640, the Puritan exodus
+comes to its end ... 137
+
+What might have been ... 138, 391
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE NEW ENGLAND CONFEDERACY.
+
+The Puritan exodus was purely and exclusively English ... 140
+
+And the settlers were all thrifty and prosperous; chiefly country
+squires and yeomanry of the best and sturdiest type ... 141, 142
+
+In all history there has been no other instance of colonization so
+exclusively effected by picked and chosen men ... 143
+
+What, then, was the principle of selection? The migration was not
+intended to promote what we call religious liberty ... 144, 145
+
+Theocratic ideal of the Puritans ... 146
+
+The impulse which sought to realize itself in the Puritan ideal was an
+ethical impulse ... 147
+
+In interpreting Scripture, the Puritan appealed to his Reason ... 148,
+149
+
+Value of such perpetual theological discussion as was carried on in
+early New England ... 150, 151
+
+Comparison with the history of Scotland ... 152
+
+Bearing of these considerations upon the history of the New England
+confederacy ... 153
+
+The existence of so many colonies (Plymouth, Massachusetts, Connecticut,
+New Haven, Rhode Island, the Piscataqua towns, etc.) was due to
+differences of opinion on questions in which men's religious ideas were
+involved ... 154
+
+And this multiplication of colonies led to a notable and significant
+attempt at confederation ... 155
+
+Turbulence of dissent in Rhode Island ... 156
+
+The Earl of Warwick, and his Board of Commissioners ... 157
+
+Constitution of the Confederacy ... 158
+
+It was only a league, not a federal union ... 159
+
+Its formation involved a tacit assumption of sovereignty ... 160
+
+The fall of Charles I. brought up, for a moment, the question as to the
+supremacy of Parliament over the colonies ... 161
+
+Some interesting questions ... 162
+
+Genesis of the persecuting spirit ... 163
+
+Samuel Gorton and his opinions ... 163-165
+
+He flees to Aquedneck and is banished thence ... 166
+
+Providence protests against him ... 167
+
+He flees to Shawomet, where he buys land of the Indians ... 168
+
+Miantonomo and Uncas ... 169, 170
+
+Death of Miantonomo ... 171
+
+Edward Johnson leads an expedition against Shawomet ... 172
+
+Trial and sentence of the heretics ... 173
+
+Winthrop declares himself in a prophetic opinion ... 174
+
+The Presbyterian cabal ... 175-177
+
+The Cambridge Platform; deaths of Winthrop and Cotton ... 177
+
+Views of Winthrop and Cotton as to toleration in matters of Religion ...
+178
+
+After their death, the leadership in Massachusetts was in the hands of
+Endicott and Norton ... 179
+
+The Quakers; their opinions and behavior ... 179-181
+
+Violent manifestations of dissent ... 182
+
+Anne Austin and Mary Fisher; how they were received in Boston ... 183
+
+The confederated colonies seek to expel the Quakers; noble attitude of
+Rhode Island ... 184
+
+Roger Williams appeals to his friend, Oliver Cromwell ... 185
+
+The "heavenly speech" of Sir Harry Vane ... 185
+
+Laws passed against the Quakers ... 186
+
+How the death penalty was regarded at that time in New England ... 187
+
+Executions of Quakers on Boston Common ... 188, 189
+
+Wenlock Christison's defiance and victory ... 189, 190
+
+The "King's Missive" ... 191
+
+Why Charles II. interfered to protect the Quakers ... 191
+
+His hostile feeling toward the New England governments ... 192
+
+The regicide judges, Goffe and Whalley ... 193, 194
+
+New Haven annexed to Connecticut ... 194, 195
+
+Abraham Pierson, and the founding of Newark ... 196
+
+Breaking-down of the theocratic policy ... 197
+
+Weakening of the Confederacy ... 198
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+KING PHILIP'S WAR.
+
+Relations between the Puritan settlers and the Indians ... 199
+
+Trade with the Indians ... 200
+
+Missionary work; Thomas Mayhew ... 201
+
+John Eliot and his translation of the Bible ... 202
+
+His preaching to the Indians ... 203
+
+His villages of Christian Indians ... 204
+
+The Puritan's intention was to deal gently and honourably with the red
+men ... 205
+
+Why Pennsylvania was so long unmolested by the Indians ... 205, 206
+
+Difficulty of the situation in New England ... 207
+
+It is hard for the savage and the civilized man to understand one
+another ... 208
+
+How Eliot's designs must inevitably have been misinterpreted by the
+Indians ... 209
+
+It is remarkable that peace should have been so long preserved ... 210
+
+Deaths of Massasoit and his son Alexander ... 211
+
+Very little is known about the nature of Philip's designs ... 212
+
+The meeting at Taunton ... 213
+
+Sausamon informs against Philip ... 213
+
+And is murdered ... 214
+
+Massacres at Swanzey and Dartmouth ... 214
+
+Murder of Captain Hutchinson ... 215
+
+Attack on Brookfield, which is relieved by Simon Willard ... 216
+
+Fighting in the Connecticut valley; the mysterious stranger at Hadley
+... 217, 218
+
+Ambuscade at Bloody Brook ... 219
+
+Popular excitement in Boston ... 220
+
+The Narragansetts prepare to take the war-path ... 221
+
+And Governor Winslow leads an army against them ... 222, 223
+
+Storming of the great swamp fortress ... 224
+
+Slaughter of the Indians ... 225
+
+Effect of the blow ... 226
+
+Growth of the humane sentiment in recent times, due to the fact that the
+horrors of war are seldom brought home to everybody's door ... 227, 228
+
+Warfare with savages is likely to be truculent in character ... 229
+
+Attack upon Lancaster ... 230
+
+Mrs. Rowlandson's narrative ... 231-233
+
+Virtual extermination of the Indians (February to August, 1676) ... 233,
+234
+
+Death of Canonchet ... 234
+
+Philip pursued by Captain Church ... 235
+
+Death of Philip ... 236
+
+Indians sold into slavery ... 237
+
+Conduct of the Christian Indians ... 238
+
+War with the Tarratines ... 239
+
+Frightful destruction of life and property ... 240
+
+Henceforth the red man figures no more in the history of New England,
+except in frontier raids under French guidance ... 241
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE TYRANNY OF ANDROS.
+
+Romantic features in the early history of New England ... 242
+
+Captain Edward Johnson, of Woburn, and his book on "The Wonder-working
+Providence of Zion's Saviour in New England" ... 243,244
+
+Acts of the Puritans often judged by an unreal and impossible standard
+... 245
+
+Spirit of the "Wonder-working Providence" ... 246
+
+Merits and faults of the Puritan theocracy ... 247
+
+Restriction of the suffrage to church members ... 248
+
+It was a source of political discontent ... 249
+
+Inquisitorial administration of justice ... 250
+
+The "Half way Covenant" ... 251
+
+Founding of the Old South church ... 252
+
+Unfriendly relations between Charles II and Massachusetts ... 253
+
+Complaints against Massachusetts ... 254
+
+The Lords of Trade ... 255
+
+Arrival of Edward Randolph in Boston ... 256
+
+Joseph Dudley and the beginnings of Toryism in New England ... 257, 258
+
+Charles II. erects the four Piscataqua towns into the royal province of
+New Hampshire ... 259
+
+And quarrels with Massachusetts over the settlement of the Gorges claim
+to the Maine district ... 260
+
+Simon Bradstreet and his verse-making wife ... 261
+
+Massachusetts answers the king's peremptory message ... 262
+
+Secret treaty between Charles II. and Louis XIV ... 263
+
+Shameful proceedings in England ... 264
+
+Massachusetts refuses to surrender her charter; and accordingly it is
+annulled by decree of chancery, June 21, 1684 ... 265
+
+Effect of annulling the charter ... 266
+
+Death of Charles II, accession of James II., and appointment of Sir
+Edmund Andros as viceroy over New England, with despotic powers ... 267
+
+The charter oak ... 268
+
+Episcopal services in Boston ... 268, 269
+
+Founding of the King's Chapel ... 269
+
+The tyranny ... 270
+
+John Wise of Ipswich ... 271
+
+Fall of James II ... 271
+
+Insurrection in Boston, and overthrow of Andros ... 272
+
+Effects of the Revolution of 1689 ... 273
+
+Need for union among all the northern colonies ... 274
+
+Plymouth, Maine, and Acadia annexed to Massachusetts ... 275
+
+Which becomes a royal province ... 276
+
+And is thus brought into political sympathy with Virginia ... 276
+
+The seeds of the American Revolution were already sown, and the spirit
+of 1776 was foreshadowed in 1689 ... 277, 278
+
+
+
+
+THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW ENGLAND.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE ROMAN IDEA AND THE ENGLISH IDEA.
+
+
+It used to be the fashion of historians, looking superficially at the
+facts presented in chronicles and tables of dates, without analyzing and
+comparing vast groups of facts distributed through centuries, or even
+suspecting the need for such analysis and comparison, to assign the date
+476 A.D. as the moment at which the Roman Empire came to an end. It was
+in that year that the soldier of fortune, Odovakar, commander of the
+Herulian mercenaries in Italy, sent the handsome boy Romulus, son of
+Orestes, better known as "little Augustus," from his imperial throne
+to the splendid villa of Lucullus near Naples, and gave him a yearly
+pension of $35,000 [6,000 solidi] to console him for the loss of a
+world. As 324 years elapsed before another emperor was crowned at Rome,
+and as the political headship of Europe after that happy restoration
+remained upon the German soil to which the events of the eighth century
+had shifted it, nothing could seem more natural than the habit which
+historians once had, of saying that the mighty career of Rome had ended,
+as it had begun, with a Romulus. Sometimes the date 476 was even set up
+as a great landmark dividing modern from ancient history. For those,
+however, who took such a view, it was impossible to see the events of
+the Middle Ages in their true relations to what went before and what
+came after. It was impossible to understand what went on in Italy in
+the sixth century, or to explain the position of that great Roman power
+which had its centre on the Bosphorus, which in the code of Justinian
+left us our grandest monument of Roman law, and which for a thousand
+years was the staunch bulwark of Europe against the successive
+aggressions of Persian, Saracen, and Turk. It was equally impossible to
+understand the rise of the Papal power, the all-important politics of
+the great Saxon and Swabian emperors, the relations of mediaeval England
+to the Continental powers, or the marvellously interesting growth of the
+modern European system of nationalities. [Sidenote: When did the Roman
+Empire come to an end?]
+
+Since the middle of the nineteenth century the study of history has
+undergone changes no less sweeping than those which have in the same
+time affected the study of the physical sciences. Vast groups of facts
+distributed through various ages and countries have been subjected to
+comparison and analysis, with the result that they have not only thrown
+fresh light upon one another, but have in many cases enabled us to
+recover historic points of view that had long been buried in oblivion.
+Such an instance was furnished about twenty-five years ago by Dr.
+Bryce's epoch-making work on the Holy Roman Empire. Since then
+historians still recognize the importance of the date 476 as that which
+left the Bishop of Rome the dominant personage in Italy, and marked the
+shifting of the political centre of gravity from the Palatine to the
+Lateran. This was one of those subtle changes which escape notice until
+after some of their effects have attracted attention. The most important
+effect, in this instance, realized after three centuries, was not the
+overthrow of Roman power in the West, but its indefinite extension and
+expansion. The men of 476 not only had no idea that they were entering
+upon a new era, but least of all did they dream that the Roman Empire
+had come to an end, or was ever likely to. Its cities might be pillaged,
+its provinces overrun, but the supreme imperial power itself was
+something without which the men of those days could not imagine the
+world as existing. It must have its divinely ordained representative in
+one place if not in another. If the throne in Italy was vacant, it
+was no more than had happened before; there was still a throne at
+Constantinople, and to its occupant Zeno the Roman Senate sent a
+message, saying that one emperor was enough for both ends of the earth,
+and begging him to confer upon the gallant Odovakar the title of
+patrician, and entrust the affairs of Italy to his care. So when
+Sicambrian Chlodwig set up his Merovingian kingdom in northern Gaul, he
+was glad to array himself in the robe of a Roman consul, and obtain from
+the eastern emperor a formal ratification of his rule.
+
+[Transcriber's note: page missing in original.] still survives in
+political methods and habits of thought that will yet be long in dying
+out. With great political systems, as with typical forms of organic
+life, the processes of development and of extinction are exceedingly
+slow, and it is seldom that the stages can be sharply marked by dates.
+The processes which have gradually shifted the seat of empire until the
+prominent part played nineteen centuries ago by Rome and Alexandria,
+on opposite sides of the Mediterranean, has been at length assumed by
+London and New York, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, form a most
+interesting subject of study. But to understand them, one must do much
+more than merely catalogue the facts of political history; one must
+acquire a knowledge of the drifts and tendencies of human thought and
+feeling and action from the earliest ages to the times in which we
+live. In covering so wide a field we cannot of course expect to obtain
+anything like complete results. In order to make a statement simple
+enough to be generally intelligible, it is necessary to pass over many
+circumstances and many considerations that might in one way and another
+qualify what we have to say. Nevertheless it is quite possible for us to
+discern, in their bold general outlines, some historic truths of supreme
+importance. In contemplating the salient features of the change which
+has now for a long time been making the world more English and less
+Roman, we shall find not only intellectual pleasure and profit but
+practical guidance. For in order to understand this slow but mighty
+change, we must look a little into that process of nation-making which
+has been going on since prehistoric ages and is going on here among us
+to-day, and from the recorded experience of men in times long past
+we may gather lessons of infinite value for ourselves and for our
+children's children. As in all the achievements of mankind it is only
+after much weary experiment and many a heart-sickening failure that
+success is attained, so has it been especially with nation-making. Skill
+in the political art is the fruit of ages of intellectual and moral
+discipline; and just as picture-writing had to come before printing and
+canoes before steamboats, so the cruder political methods had to be
+tried and found wanting, amid the tears and groans of unnumbered
+generations, before methods less crude could be put into operation. In
+the historic survey upon which we are now to enter, we shall see that
+the Roman Empire represented a crude method of nation-making which began
+with a masterful career of triumph over earlier and cruder methods, but
+has now for several centuries been giving way before a more potent and
+satisfactory method. And just as the merest glance at the history of
+Europe shows us Germanic peoples wresting the supremacy from Rome, so in
+this deeper study we shall discover a grand and far-reaching Teutonic
+Idea of political life overthrowing and supplanting the Roman Idea. Our
+attention will be drawn toward England as the battle-ground and the
+seventeenth century as the critical moment of the struggle; we shall see
+in Puritanism the tremendous militant force that determined the issue;
+and when our perspective has thus become properly adjusted, we shall
+begin to realize for the first time how truly wonderful was the age that
+witnessed the Beginnings of New England. We have long had before our
+minds the colossal figure of Roman Julius as "the foremost man of all
+this world," but as the seventeenth century recedes into the past
+the figure of English Oliver begins to loom up as perhaps even more
+colossal. In order to see these world-events in their true perspective,
+and to make perfectly clear the manner in which we are to estimate them,
+we must go a long distance away from them. We must even go back, as
+nearly as may be, to the beginning of things. [Sidenote: Gradual
+shifting of primacy from the men who spoke Latin, and their descendants,
+to the men who speak English]
+
+If we look back for a moment to the primitive stages of society, we may
+picture to ourselves the surface of the earth sparsely and scantily
+covered with wandering tribes of savages, rude in morals and manners,
+narrow and monotonous in experience, sustaining life very much as lower
+animals sustain it, by gathering wild fruits or slaying wild game, and
+waging chronic warfare alike with powerful beasts and with rival tribes
+of men. [Sidenote: Political history is the history of nation-making]
+
+In the widest sense the subject of political history is the description
+of the processes by which, under favourable circumstances, innumerable
+such primitive tribes have become welded together into mighty nations,
+with elevated standards of morals and manners, with wide and varied
+experience, sustaining life and ministering to human happiness by
+elaborate arts and sciences, and putting a curb upon warfare by limiting
+its scope, diminishing its cruelty, and interrupting it by intervals of
+peace. The story, as laid before us in the records of three thousand
+years, is fascinating and absorbing in its human interest for those who
+content themselves with the study of its countless personal incidents,
+and neglect its profound philosophical lessons. But for those who study
+it in the scientific spirit, the human interest of its details becomes
+still more intensely fascinating and absorbing. Battles and coronations,
+poems and inventions, migrations and martyrdoms, acquire new meanings
+and awaken new emotions as we begin to discern their bearings upon the
+solemn work of ages that is slowly winning for humanity a richer and
+more perfect life. By such meditation upon men's thoughts and deeds is
+the understanding purified, till we become better able to comprehend our
+relations to the world and the duty that lies upon each of us to shape
+his conduct rightly.
+
+In the welding together of primitive shifting tribes into stable and
+powerful nations, we can seem to discern three different methods that
+have been followed at different times and places, with widely different
+results. In all cases the fusion has been effected by war, but it has
+gone on in three broadly contrasted ways. The first of these methods,
+which has been followed from time immemorial in the Oriental world, may
+be roughly described as _conquest without incorporation._ A tribe grows
+to national dimensions by conquering and annexing its neighbours,
+without admitting them to a share in its political life. Probably there
+is always at first some incorporation, or even perhaps some crude germ
+of federative alliance; but this goes very little way,--only far enough
+to fuse together a few closely related tribes, agreeing in speech and
+habits, into a single great tribe that can overwhelm its neighbours. In
+early society this sort of incorporation cannot go far without being
+stopped by some impassable barrier of language or religion. After
+reaching that point, the conquering tribe simply annexes its neighbours
+and makes them its slaves. It becomes a superior caste, ruling over
+vanquished peoples, whom it oppresses with frightful cruelty, while
+living on the fruits of their toil in what has been aptly termed
+Oriental luxury. Such has been the origin of many eastern despotisms, in
+the valleys of the Nile and Euphrates, and elsewhere. Such a political
+structure admits of a very considerable development of material
+civilization, in which gorgeous palaces and artistic temples may be
+built, and perhaps even literature and scholarship rewarded, with money
+wrung from millions of toiling wretches. There is that sort of brutal
+strength in it, that it may endure for many long ages, until it comes
+into collision with some higher civilization. Then it is likely to end
+in sudden collapse, because the fighting quality of the people has
+been destroyed. Populations that have lived for centuries in fear of
+impalement or crucifixion, and have known no other destination for
+the products of their labour than the clutches of the omnipresent
+tax-gatherer, are not likely to furnish good soldiers. A handful of
+freemen will scatter them like sheep, as the Greeks did twenty-three
+centuries ago at Kynaxa, as the English did the other day at Tel
+el-Kebir. On the other hand, where the manliness of the vanquished
+people is not crushed, the sway of the conquerors who cannot enter into
+political union with them is likely to be cast off, as in the case of
+the Moors in Spain. There was a civilization in many respects admirable.
+It was eminent for industry, science, art, and poetry; its annals are
+full of romantic interest; it was in some respects superior to the
+Christian system which supplanted it; in many ways it contributed
+largely to the progress of the human race; and it was free from some
+of the worst vices of Oriental civilizations. Yet because of the
+fundamental defect that between the Christian Spaniard and his
+Mussulman conqueror there could be no political fusion, this brilliant
+civilization was doomed. During eight centuries of more or less
+extensive rule in the Spanish peninsula, the Moor was from first to last
+an alien, just as after four centuries the Turk is still an alien in
+the Balkan peninsula. The natural result was a struggle that lasted
+age after age till it ended in the utter extermination of one of the
+parties, and left behind it a legacy of hatred and persecution that has
+made the history of modern Spain a dismal record of shame and disaster.
+[Sidenote: The Oriental method of nation-making]
+
+In this first method of nation-making, then, which we may call the
+Oriental method, one now sees but little to commend. It was better than
+savagery, and for a long time no more efficient method was possible,
+but the leading peoples of the world have long since outgrown it; and
+although the resulting form of political government is the oldest we
+know and is not yet extinct, it nevertheless has not the elements
+of permanence. Sooner or later it will disappear, as savagery is
+disappearing, as the rudest types of inchoate human society have
+disappeared.
+
+The second method by which nations have been made may be called
+the Roman method; and we may briefly describe it as _conquest with
+incorporation, but without representation_. The secret of Rome's
+wonderful strength lay in the fact that she incorporated the vanquished
+peoples into her own body politic. In the early time there was a fusion
+of tribes going on in Latium, which, if it had gone no further, would
+have been similar to the early fusion of Ionic tribes in Attika or of
+Iranian tribes in Media. But whereas everywhere else this political
+fusion soon stopped, in the Roman world it went on. One after another
+Italian tribes and Italian towns were not merely overcome but admitted
+to a share in the political rights and privileges of the victors. By the
+time this had gone on until the whole Italian peninsula was consolidated
+under the headship of Rome, the result was a power incomparably greater
+than any other that the world had yet seen. Never before had so many
+people been brought under one government without making slaves of most
+of them. Liberty had existed before, whether in barbaric tribes or
+in Greek cities. Union had existed before, in Assyrian or Persian
+despotisms. Now liberty and union were for the first time joined
+together, with consequences enduring and stupendous. The whole
+Mediterranean world was brought under one government; ancient barriers
+of religion, speech, and custom were overthrown in every direction; and
+innumerable barbarian tribes, from the Alps to the wilds of northern
+Britain, from the Bay of Biscay to the Carpathian mountains, were more
+or less completely transformed into Roman citizens, protected by Roman
+law, and sharing in the material and spiritual benefits of Roman
+civilization. Gradually the whole vast structure became permeated by
+Hellenic and Jewish thought, and thus were laid the lasting foundations
+of modern society, of a common Christendom, furnished with a common
+stock of ideas concerning man's relation to God and the world, and
+acknowledging a common standard of right and wrong. This was a
+prodigious work, which raised human life to a much higher plane than
+that which it had formerly occupied, and endless gratitude is due to the
+thousands of steadfast men who in one way or another devoted their lives
+to its accomplishment. [Sidenote: The Roman method of nation-making]
+
+This Roman method of nation-making had nevertheless its fatal
+shortcomings, and it was only very slowly, moreover, that it wrought
+out its own best results. It was but gradually that the rights and
+privileges of Roman citizenship were extended over the whole Roman
+world, and in the mean time there were numerous instances where
+conquered provinces seemed destined to no better fate than had awaited
+the victims of Egyptian or Assyrian conquest. The rapacity and cruelty
+of Caius Verres could hardly have been outdone by the worst of Persian
+satraps; but there was a difference. A moral sense and political sense
+had been awakened which could see both the wickedness and the folly of
+such conduct. The voice of a Cicero sounded with trumpet tones against
+the oppressor, who was brought to trial and exiled for deeds which under
+the Oriental system, from the days of Artaxerxes to those of the Grand
+Turk, would scarcely have called forth a reproving word. It was by slow
+degrees that the Roman came to understand the virtues of his own method,
+and learned to apply it consistently until the people of all parts of
+the empire were, in theory at least, equal before the law. In theory, I
+say, for in point of fact there was enough of viciousness in the Roman
+system to prevent it from achieving permanent success. Historians have
+been fond of showing how the vitality of the whole system was impaired
+by wholesale slave-labour, by the false political economy which taxes
+all for the benefit of a few, by the debauching view of civil office
+which regards it as private perquisite and not as public trust,
+and--worst of all, perhaps--by the communistic practice of feeding an
+idle proletariat out of the imperial treasury. The names of these deadly
+social evils are not unfamiliar to American ears. Even of the last we
+have heard ominous whispers in the shape of bills to promote mendicancy
+under the specious guise of fostering education or rewarding military
+services. And is it not a striking illustration of the slowness with
+which mankind learns the plainest rudiments of wisdom and of justice,
+that only in the full light of the nineteenth century, and at the cost
+of a terrible war, should the most intelligent people on earth have got
+rid of a system of labour devised in the crudest ages of antiquity and
+fraught with misery to the employed, degradation to the employers, and
+loss to everybody? [Sidenote: Its slow development]
+
+These evils, we see, in one shape or another, have existed almost
+everywhere; and the vice of the Roman system did not consist in the fact
+that under it they were fully developed, but in the fact that it had no
+adequate means of overcoming them. Unless helped by something supplied
+from outside the Roman world, civilization must have succumbed to these
+evils, the progress of mankind must have been stopped. What was needed
+was the introduction of a fierce spirit of personal liberty and local
+self-government. The essential vice of the Roman system was that it had
+been unable to avoid weakening the spirit of personal independence and
+crushing out local self-government among the peoples to whom it had been
+applied. It owed its wonderful success to joining Liberty with Union,
+but as it went on it found itself compelled gradually to sacrifice
+Liberty to Union, strengthening the hands of the central government and
+enlarging its functions more and more, until by and by the political
+life of the several parts had so far died away that, under the pressure
+of attack from without, the Union fell to pieces and the whole political
+system had to be slowly and painfully reconstructed.
+
+Now if we ask why the Roman government found itself thus obliged to
+sacrifice personal liberty and local independence to the paramount
+necessity of holding the empire together, the answer will point us to
+the essential and fundamental vice of the Roman method of nation-making.
+It lacked the principle of representation. The old Roman world knew
+nothing of representative assemblies. [Sidenote: It knew nothing of
+representation]
+
+Its senates were assemblies of notables, constituting in the main an
+aristocracy of men who had held high office; its popular assemblies were
+primary assemblies,--town-meetings. There was no notion of such a thing
+as political power delegated by the people to representatives who were
+to wield it away from home and out of sight of their constituents. The
+Roman's only notion of delegated power was that of authority delegated
+by the government to its generals and prefects who discharged at a
+distance its military and civil functions. When, therefore, the Roman
+popular government, originally adapted to a single city, had come
+to extend itself over a large part of the world, it lacked the one
+institution by means of which government could be carried on over
+so vast an area without degenerating into despotism. [Sidenote: And
+therefore ended in despotism]
+
+Even could the device of representation have occurred to the mind of
+some statesman trained in Roman methods, it would probably have made no
+difference. Nobody would have known how to use it. You cannot invent
+an institution as you would invent a plough. Such a notion as that of
+representative government must needs start from small beginnings and
+grow in men's minds until it should become part and parcel of their
+mental habits. For the want of it the home government at Rome became
+more and more unmanageable until it fell into the hands of the army,
+while at the same time the administration of the empire became more and
+more centralized; the people of its various provinces, even while their
+social condition was in some respects improved, had less and less
+voice in the management of their local affairs, and thus the spirit of
+personal independence was gradually weakened. This centralization was
+greatly intensified by the perpetual danger of invasion on the northern
+and eastern frontiers, all the way from the Rhine to the Euphrates.
+Do what it would, the government must become more and more a military
+despotism, must revert toward the Oriental type. The period extending
+from the third century before Christ to the third century after was a
+period of extraordinary intellectual expansion and moral awakening; but
+when we observe the governmental changes introduced under the emperor
+Diocletian at the very end of this period, we realize how serious had
+been the political retrogression, how grave the danger that the stream
+of human life might come to stagnate in Europe, as it had long since
+stagnated in Asia.
+
+Two mighty agents, cooperating in their opposite ways to prevent any
+such disaster, were already entering upon the scene. The first was the
+colonization of the empire by Germanic tribes already far advanced
+beyond savagery, already somewhat tinctured with Roman civilization, yet
+at the same time endowed with an intense spirit of personal and local
+independence. With this wholesome spirit they were about to refresh and
+revivify the empire, but at the risk of undoing its work of political
+organization and reducing it to barbarism. The second was the
+establishment of the Roman church, an institution capable of holding
+European society together in spite of a political disintegration that
+was widespread and long-continued. While wave after wave of Germanic
+colonization poured over romanized Europe, breaking down old
+boundary-lines and working sudden and astonishing changes on the map,
+setting up in every quarter baronies, dukedoms, and kingdoms fermenting
+with vigorous political life; while for twenty generations this salutary
+but wild and dangerous work was going on, there was never a moment when
+the imperial sway of Rome was quite set aside and forgotten, there was
+never a time when union of some sort was not maintained through the
+dominion which the church had established over the European mind. When
+we duly consider this great fact in its relations to what went before
+and what came after, it is hard to find words fit to express the debt of
+gratitude which modern civilization owes to the Roman Catholic church.
+When we think of all the work, big with promise of the future, that went
+on in those centuries which modern writers in their ignorance used once
+to set apart and stigmatize as the "Dark Ages"; when we consider how the
+seeds of what is noblest in modern life were then painfully sown upon
+the soil which imperial Rome had prepared; when we think of the various
+work of a Gregory, a Benedict, a Boniface, an Alfred, a Charlemagne; we
+feel that there is a sense in which the most brilliant achievements
+of pagan antiquity are dwarfed in comparison with these. Until quite
+lately, indeed, the student of history has had his attention too
+narrowly confined to the ages that have been preeminent for literature
+and art--the so-called classical ages--and thus his sense of historical
+perspective has been impaired. When Mr. Freeman uses Gregory of Tours as
+a text-book, he shows that he realizes how an epoch may be none the less
+portentous though it has not had a Tacitus to describe it, and certainly
+no part of history is more full of human interest than the troubled
+period in which the powerful streams of Teutonic life pouring into Roman
+Europe were curbed in their destructiveness and guided to noble ends by
+the Catholic church. Out of the interaction between these two mighty
+agents has come the political system of the modern world. The moment
+when this interaction might have seemed on the point of reaching a
+complete and harmonious result was the glorious thirteenth century, the
+culminating moment of the Holy Roman Empire. Then, as in the times of
+Caesar or Trajan, there might have seemed to be a union among civilized
+men, in which the separate life of individuals and localities was not
+submerged. In that golden age alike of feudal system, of empire, and of
+church, there were to be seen the greatest monarchs, in fullest sympathy
+with their peoples, that Christendom has known,--an Edward I., a St.
+Louis, a Frederick II. Then when in the pontificates of Innocent III.
+and his successors the Roman church reached its apogee, the religious
+yearnings of men sought expression in the sublimest architecture the
+world has seen. Then Aquinas summed up in his profound speculations the
+substance of Catholic theology, and while the morning twilight of modern
+science might be discerned in the treatises of Roger Bacon, while
+wandering minstrelsy revealed the treasures of modern speech, soon to
+be wrought under the hands of Dante and Chaucer into forms of exquisite
+beauty, the sacred fervour of the apostolic ages found itself renewed in
+the tender and mystic piety of St. Francis of Assisi. It was a wonderful
+time, but after all less memorable as the culmination of mediaeval
+empire and mediaeval church than as the dawning of the new era in which
+we live to-day, and in which the development of human society proceeds
+in accordance with more potent methods than those devised by the genius
+of pagan or Christian Rome. [Sidenote: The German invaders and the Roman
+church] [Sidenote: The wonderful thirteenth century]
+
+For the origin of these more potent methods we must look back to the
+early ages of the Teutonic people; for their development and application
+on a grand scale we must look chiefly to the history of that most
+Teutonic of peoples in its institutions, though perhaps not more than
+half-Teutonic in blood, the English, with their descendants in the New
+World. The third method of nation-making may be called the Teutonic or
+preeminently the English method. It differs from the Oriental and Roman
+methods which we have been considering in a feature of most profound
+significance; it contains the principle of representation. For this
+reason, though like all nation-making it was in its early stages
+attended with war and conquest, it nevertheless does not necessarily
+require war and conquest in order to be put into operation. Of the other
+two methods war was an essential part. In the typical Oriental nation,
+such as Assyria or Persia, we see a conquering tribe holding down a
+number of vanquished peoples, and treating them like slaves: here the
+nation is very imperfectly made, and its government is subject to sudden
+and violent changes. In the Roman empire we see a conquering people hold
+sway over a number of vanquished peoples, but instead of treating them
+like slaves, it gradually makes them its equals before the law; here
+the resulting political body is much more nearly a nation, and its
+government is much more stable. A Lydian of the fifth century before
+Christ felt no sense of allegiance to the Persian master who simply
+robbed and abused him; but the Gaul of the fifth century after Christ
+was proud of the name of Roman and ready to fight for the empire of
+which he was a citizen. We have seen, nevertheless, that for want of
+representation the Roman method failed when applied to an immense
+territory, and the government tended to become more and more despotic,
+to revert toward the Oriental type. Now of the English or Teutonic
+method, I say, war is not an essential part; for where representative
+government is once established, it is possible for a great nation to be
+formed by the peaceful coalescence of neighbouring states, or by their
+union into a federal body. An instance of the former was the coalescence
+of England and Scotland effected early in the eighteenth century
+after ages of mutual hostility; for instances of the latter we have
+Switzerland and the United States. Now federalism, though its rise
+and establishment may be incidentally accompanied by warfare, is
+nevertheless in spirit pacific. Conquest in the Oriental sense is quite
+incompatible with it; conquest in the Roman sense is hardly less so. At
+the close of our Civil War there were now and then zealous people to
+be found who thought that the southern states ought to be treated as
+conquered territory, governed by prefects sent from Washington, and held
+down by military force for a generation or so. Let us hope that there
+are few to-day who can fail to see that such a course would have been
+fraught with almost as much danger as the secession movement itself.
+At least it would have been a hasty confession, quite uncalled for
+and quite untrue, that American federalism had thus far proved itself
+incompetent,--that we had indeed preserved our national unity, but only
+at the frightful cost of sinking to a lower plane of national life.
+[Sidenote: The English method of nation-making] [Sidenote: Pacific
+tendencies of federalism]
+
+But federalism, with its pacific implications, was not an invention of
+the Teutonic mind. The idea was familiar to the city communities of
+ancient Greece, which, along with their intense love of self-government,
+felt the need of combined action for warding off external attack. In
+their Achaian and Aitolian leagues the Greeks made brilliant attempts
+toward founding a nation upon some higher principle than that of mere
+conquest, and the history of these attempts is exceedingly
+interesting and instructive. They failed for lack of the principle
+of representation, which was practically unknown to the world until
+introduced by the Teutonic colonizers of the Roman empire. Until the
+idea of power delegated by the people had become familiar to men's minds
+in its practical bearings, it was impossible to create a great nation
+without crushing out the political life in some of its parts. Some
+centre of power was sure to absorb all the political life, and grow at
+the expense of the outlying parts, until the result was a centralized
+despotism. Hence it came to be one of the commonplace assumptions of
+political writers that republics must be small, that free government
+is practicable only in a confined area, and that the only strong and
+durable government, capable of maintaining order throughout a vast
+territory, is some form of absolute monarchy. [Sidenote: Fallacy of the
+notion that republics must be small]
+
+It was quite natural that people should formerly have held this opinion,
+and it is indeed not yet quite obsolete, but its fallaciousness will
+become more and more apparent as American history is better understood.
+Our experience has now so far widened that we can see that despotism
+is not the strongest but wellnigh the weakest form of government; that
+centralized administrations, like that of the Roman empire, have fallen
+to pieces, not because of too much but because of too little freedom;
+and that the only perdurable government must be that which succeeds in
+achieving national unity on a grand scale, without weakening the sense
+of personal and local independence. For in the body politic this spirit
+of freedom is as the red corpuscles in the blood; it carries the life
+with it. It makes the difference between a society of self-respecting
+men and women and a society of puppets.
+
+Your nation may have art, poetry, and science, all the refinements of
+civilized life, all the comforts and safeguards that human ingenuity can
+devise; but if it lose this spirit of personal and local independence,
+it is doomed and deserves its doom. As President Cleveland has well
+said, it is not the business of a government to support its people, but
+of the people to support their government; and once to lose sight
+of this vital truth is as dangerous as to trifle with some stealthy
+narcotic poison. Of the two opposite perils which have perpetually
+threatened the welfare of political society--anarchy on the one hand,
+loss of self-government on the other--Jefferson was right in maintaining
+that the latter is really the more to be dreaded because its beginnings
+are so terribly insidious. Many will understand what is meant by a
+threat of secession, where few take heed of the baneful principle
+involved in a Texas Seed-bill.
+
+That the American people are still fairly alive to the importance of
+these considerations, is due to the weary ages of struggle in which our
+forefathers have manfully contended for the right of self-government.
+From the days of Arminius and Civilis in the wilds of lower Germany to
+the days of Franklin and Jefferson in Independence Hall, we have been
+engaged in this struggle, not without some toughening of our political
+fibre, not without some refining of our moral sense. Not among our
+English forefathers only, but among all the peoples of mediaeval and
+modern Europe has the struggle gone on, with various and instructive
+results. In all parts of romanized Europe invaded and colonized by
+Teutonic tribes, self-government attempted to spring up. What may have
+been the origin of the idea of representation we do not know; like most
+origins, it seems lost in the prehistoric darkness. Wherever we find
+Teutonic tribes settling down over a wide area, we find them holding
+their primary assemblies, usually their annual March-meetings, like
+those in which Mr. Hosea Biglow and others like him have figured.
+Everywhere, too, we find some attempt at representative assemblies,
+based on the principle of the three estates, clergy, nobles, and
+commons. But nowhere save in England does the representative principle
+become firmly established, at first in county-meetings, afterward in a
+national parliament limiting the powers of the national monarch as the
+primary tribal assembly had limited the powers of the tribal chief. It
+is for this reason that we must call the method of nation-making by
+means of a representative assembly the English method. While the idea of
+representation was perhaps the common property of the Teutonic tribes,
+it was only in England that it was successfully put into practice and
+became the dominant political idea. We may therefore agree with Dr.
+Stubbs that in its political development England is the most Teutonic of
+all European countries,--the country which in becoming a great nation
+has most fully preserved the local independence so characteristic of the
+ancient Germans. The reasons for this are complicated, and to try to
+assign them all would needlessly encumber our exposition. But there is
+one that is apparent and extremely instructive. There is sometimes a
+great advantage in being able to plant political institutions in a
+virgin soil, where they run no risk of being modified or perhaps
+metamorphosed through contact with rival institutions. In America the
+Teutonic idea has been worked out even more completely than in Britain;
+and so far as institutions are concerned, our English forefathers
+settled here as in an empty country. They were not obliged to modify
+their political ideas so as to bring them into harmony with those of the
+Indians; the disparity in civilization was so great that the Indians
+were simply thrust aside, along with the wolves and buffaloes.
+[Sidenote: Teutonic March-meetings and representative assemblies]
+
+This illustration will help us to understand the peculiar features of
+the Teutonic settlement of Britain. Whether the English invaders really
+slew all the romanized Kelts who dwelt in the island, except those who
+found refuge in the mountains of Cumberland, Wales, and Cornwall, or
+fled across the channel to Brittany, we need not seek to decide. It
+is enough to point out one respect in which the Teutonic conquest was
+immeasurably more complete in Britain than in any other part of the
+empire. Everywhere else the tribes who settled upon Roman soil--the
+Goths, Vandals, Suevi, and Burgundians--were christianized, and so to
+some extent romanized, before they came to take possession. Even the
+more distant Franks had been converted to Christianity before they
+had completed their conquest of Gaul. Everywhere except in Britain,
+therefore, the conquerors had already imbibed Roman ideas, and the
+authority of Rome was in a certain sense acknowledged. There was no
+break in the continuity of political events. In Britain, on the other
+hand, there was a complete break, so that while on the continent the
+fifth and sixth centuries are seen in the full midday light of history,
+in Britain they have lapsed into the twilight of half-legendary
+tradition. The Saxon and English tribes, coming from the remote wilds
+of northern Germany, whither Roman missionaries had not yet penetrated,
+still worshipped Thor and Wodan; and their conquest of Britain was
+effected with such deadly thoroughness that Christianity was destroyed
+there, or lingered only in sequestered nooks. A land once christianized
+thus actually fell back into paganism, so that the work of converting it
+to Christianity had to be done over again. From the landing of heathen
+Hengest on the isle of Thanet to the landing of Augustine and his monks
+on the same spot, one hundred and forty-eight years elapsed, during
+which English institutions found time to take deep root in British
+soil with scarcely more interference, as to essential points, than in
+American soil twelve centuries afterward. [Sidenote: Peculiarity of the
+Teutonic conquest of Britain]
+
+The century and a half between 449 and 597 is therefore one of the most
+important epochs in the history of the people that speak the English
+language. Before settling in Britain our forefathers had been tribes in
+the upper stages of barbarism; now they began the process of coalescence
+into a nation in which the principle of self-government should be
+retained and developed. The township and its town-meeting we find there,
+as later in New England. The county-meeting we also find, while the
+county is a little state in itself and not a mere administrative
+district. And in this county-meeting we may observe a singular feature,
+something never seen before in the world, something destined to work
+out vaster political results than Caesar ever dreamed of. This
+county-meeting is not a primary assembly; all the freemen from all the
+townships cannot leave their homes and their daily business to attend
+it. Nor is it merely an assembly of notables, attended by the most
+important men of the neighbourhood. It is a representative assembly,
+attended by select men from each township. We may see in it the germ of
+the British parliament and of the American congress, as indeed of all
+modern legislative bodies, for it is a most suggestive commentary upon
+what we are saying that in all other countries which have legislatures,
+they have been copied, within quite recent times, from English or
+American models. We can seldom if ever fix a date for the beginning
+of anything, and we can by no means fix a date for the beginning of
+representative assemblies in England. We can only say that where
+we first find traces of county organization, we find traces of
+representation. Clearly, if the English conquerors of Britain had left
+the framework of Roman institutions standing there, as it remained
+standing in Gaul, there would have been great danger of this principle
+of representation not surviving. It would most likely have been crushed
+in its callow infancy. The conquerors would insensibly have fallen into
+the Roman way of doing things, as they did in Gaul. [Sidenote: Survival
+and development of Teutonic representative assembly in England]
+
+
+From the start, then, we find the English nationality growing up under
+very different conditions from those which obtained in other parts
+of Europe. So far as institutions are concerned, Teutonism was less
+modified in England than in the German fatherland itself, For the
+gradual conquest and Christianization of Germany which began with
+Charles the Great, and went on until in the thirteenth century the
+frontier had advanced eastward to the Vistula, entailed to a certain
+extent the romanization of Germany. For a thousand years after Charles
+the Great, the political head of Germany was also the political head
+of the Holy Roman Empire, and the civil and criminal code by which the
+daily life of the modern German citizen is regulated is based upon the
+jurisprudence of Rome. Nothing, perhaps, could illustrate more forcibly
+than this sheer contrast the peculiarly Teutonic character of English
+civilization. Between the eighth and the eleventh centuries, when the
+formation of English nationality was approaching completion, it received
+a fresh and powerful infusion of Teutonism in the swarms of heathen
+Northmen or Danes who occupied the eastern coasts, struggled long for
+the supremacy, and gradually becoming christianized, for a moment
+succeeded in seizing the crown. Of the invasion of partially romanized
+Northmen from Normandy which followed soon after, and which has so
+profoundly affected English society and English speech, we need notice
+here but two conspicuous features. First, it increased the power of the
+crown and the clergy, brought all England more than ever under one law,
+and strengthened the feeling of nationality. It thus made England a
+formidable military power, while at the same time it brought her into
+closer relations with continental Europe than she had held since the
+fourth century. Secondly, by superposing a new feudal nobility as the
+upper stratum of society, it transformed the Old-English thanehood into
+the finest middle-class of rural gentry and yeomanry that has ever
+existed in any country; a point of especial interest to Americans, since
+it was in this stratum of society that the two most powerful streams of
+English migration to America--the Virginia stream and the New
+England stream--alike had their source. [Sidenote: Primitive Teutonic
+institutions less modified in England than in Germany]
+
+By the thirteenth century the increasing power and pretensions of the
+crown, as the unification of English nationality went on, brought about
+a result unlike anything known on the continent of Europe; it brought
+about a resistless coalition between the great nobles, the rural gentry
+and yeomanry, and the burghers of the towns, for the purpose of curbing
+royalty, arresting the progress of centralization, and setting up
+representative government on a truly national scale. This grand result
+was partly due to peculiar circumstances which had their origin in
+the Norman conquest; but it was largely due to the political habits
+generated by long experience of local representative assemblies,--habits
+which made it comparatively easy for different classes of society to
+find their voice and use it for the attainment of ends in common. On the
+continent of Europe the encroaching sovereign had to contend with
+here and there an arrogant vassal, here and there a high-spirited and
+rebellious town; in England, in this first great crisis of popular
+government, he found himself confronted by a united people. The fruits
+of the grand combination were _first_, the wresting of Magna Charta from
+King John in 1215, and _secondly_, the meeting of the first House of
+Commons in 1265. Four years of civil war were required to secure these
+noble results. The Barons' War, of the years 1263 to 1267, was an
+event of the same order of importance as the Great Rebellion of the
+seventeenth century and the American Revolution; and among the
+founders of that political freedom which is enjoyed to-day by all
+English-speaking people, the name of Simon de Montfort, Earl of
+Leicester, deserves a place in our grateful remembrance beside the names
+of Cromwell and Washington. Simon's great victory at Lewes in 1264 must
+rank with Naseby and Yorktown. The work begun by his House of Commons
+was the same work that has continued to go on without essential
+interruption down to the days of Cleveland and Gladstone. The
+fundamental principle of political freedom is "no taxation without
+representation"; you must not take a farthing of my money without
+consulting my wishes as to the use that shall be made of it. Only
+when this principle of justice was first practically recognized, did
+government begin to divorce itself from the primitive bestial barbaric
+system of tyranny and plunder, and to ally itself with the forces that
+in the fulness of time are to bring peace on earth and good will to
+men. Of all dates in history, therefore, there is none more fit to be
+commemorated than 1265; for in that year there was first asserted and
+applied at Westminster, on a national scale, that fundamental principle
+of "no taxation without representation," that innermost kernel of the
+English Idea, which the Stamp Act Congress defended at New York exactly
+five hundred years afterward. When we think of these dates, by the way,
+we realize the import of the saying that in the sight of the Lord a
+thousand years are but as a day, and we feel that the work of the Lord
+cannot be done by the listless or the slothful. So much time and so much
+strife by sea and land has it taken to secure beyond peradventure the
+boon to mankind for which Earl Simon gave up his noble life on the field
+of Evesham! Nor without unremitting watchfulness can we be sure that the
+day of peril is yet past. From kings, indeed, we have no more to fear;
+they have come to be as spooks and bogies of the nursery. But the
+gravest dangers are those which present themselves in new forms, against
+which people's minds have not yet been fortified with traditional
+sentiments and phrases. The inherited predatory tendency of men to seize
+upon the fruits of other people's labour is still very strong, and while
+we have nothing more to fear from kings, we may yet have trouble enough
+from commercial monopolies and favoured industries, marching to the
+polls their hordes of bribed retainers. Well indeed has it been said
+that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. God never meant that in
+this fair but treacherous world in which He has placed us we should earn
+our salvation without steadfast labour. [Eternal vigilance is the price
+of liberty]
+
+To return to Earl Simon, we see that it was just in that wonderful
+thirteenth century, when the Roman idea of government might seem to
+have been attaining its richest and most fruitful development, that the
+richer and more fruitful English idea first became incarnate in the
+political constitution of a great and rapidly growing nation. It was not
+long before the struggle between the Roman Idea and the English Idea,
+clothed in various forms, became the dominating issue in European
+history. We have now to observe the rise of modern nationalities, as new
+centres of political life, out of the various provinces of the Roman
+world. In the course of this development the Teutonic representative
+assembly is at first everywhere discernible, in some form or other,
+as in the Spanish Cortes or the States-General of France, but on the
+continent it generally dies out. Only in such nooks as Switzerland and
+the Netherlands does it survive. In the great nations it succumbs before
+the encroachments of the crown. The comparatively novel Teutonic idea of
+power delegated by the people to their representatives had not become
+deeply enough rooted in the political soil of the continent; and
+accordingly we find it more and more disused and at length almost
+forgotten, while the old and deeply rooted Roman idea of power delegated
+by the governing body to its lieutenants and prefects usurps its place.
+Let us observe some of the most striking features of this growth of
+modern nationalities. [Sidenote: Conflict between Roman Idea and English
+Idea begins to become clearly visible in the thirteenth century]
+
+The reader of medieval history cannot fail to be impressed with the
+suddenness with which the culmination of the Holy Roman Empire, in
+the thirteenth century, was followed by a swift decline. The imperial
+position of the Hapsburgs was far less splendid than that of the
+Hohenstauffen; it rapidly became more German and less European, until
+by and by people began to forget what the empire originally meant.
+The change which came over the papacy was even more remarkable. The
+grandchildren of the men who had witnessed the spectacle of a king of
+France and a king of England humbled at the feet of Innocent III., the
+children of the men who had found the gigantic powers of a Frederick II.
+unequal to the task of curbing the papacy, now beheld the successors of
+St. Peter carried away to Avignon, there to be kept for seventy years
+under the supervision of the kings of France. Henceforth the glory of
+the papacy in its political aspect was to be but the faint shadow of
+that with which it had shone before. This sudden change in its position
+showed that the medieval dream of a world-empire was passing away,
+and that new powers were coming uppermost in the shape of modern
+nationalities with their national sovereigns. So long as these
+nationalities were in the weakness of their early formation, it was
+possible for pope and emperor to assert, and sometimes to come near
+maintaining, universal supremacy. But the time was now at hand when
+kings could assert their independence of the pope, while the emperor was
+fast sinking to be merely one among kings.
+
+As modern kingdoms thus grew at the expense of empire and papacy above,
+so they also grew at the expense of feudal dukedoms, earldoms, and
+baronies below. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were as fatal
+to feudalism as to world-empire and world-church. A series of wars
+occurring at this time were especially remarkable for the wholesale
+slaughter of the feudal nobility, whether on the field or under the
+headsman's axe. This was a conspicuous feature of the feuds of the
+Trastamare in Spain, of the English invasions of France, followed by the
+quarrel between Burgundians and Armagnacs, and of the great war of the
+Roses in England. So thorough-going was the butchery in England, for
+example, that only twenty-nine lay peers could be found to sit in the
+first parliament of Henry VII in 1485. The old nobility was almost
+annihilated, both in person and in property; for along with the
+slaughter there went wholesale confiscation, and this added greatly to
+the disposable wealth of the crown. The case was essentially similar in
+France and Spain. In all three countries the beginning of the sixteenth
+century saw the power of the crown increased and increasing. Its vast
+accessions of wealth made it more independent of legislative assemblies,
+and at the same time enabled it to make the baronage more subservient in
+character by filling up the vacant places with new creations of its own.
+Through the turbulent history of the next two centuries, we see the
+royal power aiming at unchecked supremacy and in the principal instances
+attaining it except in England. Absolute despotism was reached first in
+Spain, under Philip II.; in France it was reached a century later, under
+Louis XIV.; and at about the same time in the hereditary estates of
+Austria; while over all the Italian and German soil of the disorganized
+empire, except among the glaciers of Switzerland and the dykes of the
+Netherlands, the play of political forces had set up a host of petty
+tyrannies which aped the morals and manners of the great autocrats at
+Paris and Madrid and Vienna. [Sidenote: Increasing power of the crown]
+
+As we look back over this growth of modern monarchy, we cannot but
+be struck with the immense practical difficulty of creating a strong
+nationality without sacrificing self-government. Powerful, indeed, is
+the tendency toward over-centralization, toward stagnation, toward
+political death. Powerful is the tendency to revert to the Roman, if not
+to the Oriental method. As often as we reflect upon the general state of
+things at the end of the seventeenth century--the dreadful ignorance and
+misery which prevailed among most of the people of continental Europe,
+and apparently without hope of remedy--so often must we be impressed
+anew with the stupendous significance of the part played by
+self-governing England in overcoming dangers which have threatened the
+very existence of modern civilization. It is not too much to say that
+in the seventeenth century the entire political future of mankind was
+staked upon the questions that were at issue in England. To keep the
+sacred flame of liberty alive required such a rare and wonderful
+concurrence of conditions that, had our forefathers then succumbed in
+the strife, it is hard to imagine how or where the failure could have
+been repaired. Some of these conditions we have already considered; let
+us now observe one of the most important of all. Let us note the part
+played by that most tremendous of social forces, religious sentiment,
+in its relation to the political circumstances which we have passed
+in review. If we ask why it was that among modern nations absolute
+despotism was soonest and most completely established in Spain, we find
+it instructive to observe that the circumstances under which the
+Spanish monarchy grew up, during centuries of deadly struggle with the
+Mussulman, were such as to enlist the religious sentiment on the side of
+despotic methods in church and state. It becomes interesting, then, to
+observe by contrast how it was that in England the dominant religious
+sentiment came to be enlisted on the side of political freedom.
+[Illustration: Had it not been for the Puritans, political liberty would
+probably have disappeared from the world]
+
+In such an inquiry we have nothing to do with the truth or falsity of
+any system of doctrines, whether Catholic or Protestant. The legitimate
+purposes of the historian do not require him to intrude upon the
+province of the theologian. Our business is to trace the sequence of
+political cause and effect. Nor shall we get much help from crude
+sweeping statements which set forth Catholicism as invariably the enemy
+and Protestantism as invariably the ally of human liberty. The Catholic
+has a right to be offended at statements which would involve a
+Hildebrand or a St. Francis in the same historical judgment with a
+Sigismund or a Torquemada. The character of ecclesiastical as of all
+other institutions has varied with the character of the men who have
+worked them and the varying needs of the times and places in which they
+have been worked; and our intense feeling of the gratitude we owe to
+English Puritanism need in nowise diminish the enthusiasm with which we
+praise the glorious work of the mediaeval church. It is the duty of
+the historian to learn how to limit and qualify his words of blame or
+approval; for so curiously is human nature compounded of strength and
+weakness that the best of human institutions are likely to be infected
+with some germs of vice or folly. [Sidenote: Beginnings of Protestantism
+in the thirteenth century]
+
+Of no human institution is this more true than of the great medieval
+church of Gregory and Innocent when viewed in the light of its claims
+to unlimited temporal and spiritual sovereignty. In striking down the
+headship of the emperors, it would have reduced Europe to a sort of
+Oriental caliphate, had it not been checked by the rising spirit of
+nationality already referred to. But there was another and even mightier
+agency coming in to curb its undue pretensions to absolute sovereignty.
+That same thirteenth century which witnessed the culmination of its
+power witnessed also the first bold and determined manifestation of the
+Protestant temper of revolt against spiritual despotism. It was long
+before this that the earliest Protestant heresy had percolated into
+Europe, having its source, like so many other heresies, in that eastern
+world where the stimulating thought of the Greeks busied itself with the
+ancient theologies of Asia. From Armenia in the eighth century came the
+Manichaean sect of Paulicians into Thrace, and for twenty generations
+played a considerable part in the history of the Eastern Empire. In the
+Bulgarian tongue they were known as Bogomilians, or men constant in
+prayer. In Greek they were called Cathari, or "Puritans." They accepted
+the New Testament, but set little store by the Old; they laughed at
+transubstantiation, denied any mystical efficiency to baptism, frowned
+upon image-worship as no better than idolatry, despised the intercession
+of saints, and condemned the worship of the Virgin Mary. As for the
+symbol of the cross, they scornfully asked, "If any man slew the son of
+a king with a bit of wood, how could this piece of wood be dear to the
+king?" Their ecclesiastical government was in the main presbyterian, and
+in politics they showed a decided leaning toward democracy. They wore
+long faces, looked askance at frivolous amusements, and were terribly in
+earnest. Of the more obscure pages of mediaeval history, none are fuller
+of interest than those in which we decipher the westward progress of
+these sturdy heretics through the Balkan peninsula into Italy, and
+thence into southern France, where toward the end of the twelfth century
+we find their ideas coming to full blossom in the great Albigensian
+heresy. It was no light affair to assault the church in the days of
+Innocent III. The terrible crusade against the Albigenses, beginning in
+1207, was the joint work of the most powerful of popes and one of the
+most powerful of French kings. On the part of Innocent it was the
+stamping out of a revolt that threatened the very existence of
+the Catholic hierarchy; on the part of Philip Augustus it was the
+suppression of those too independent vassals the Counts of Toulouse, and
+the decisive subjection of the southern provinces to the government at
+Paris. Nowhere in European history do we read a more frightful story
+than that which tells of the blazing fires which consumed thousand after
+thousand of the most intelligent and thrifty people in France. It was
+now that the Holy Inquisition came into existence, and after forty years
+of slaughter these Albigensian Cathari or Puritans seemed exterminated.
+The practice of burning heretics, first enacted by statute in Aragon in
+1197, was adopted in most parts of Europe during the thirteenth century,
+but in England not until the beginning of the fifteenth. The Inquisition
+was never established in England. Edward II. attempted to introduce
+it in 1311 for the purpose of suppressing the Templars, but his utter
+failure showed that the instinct of self-government was too strong in
+the English people to tolerate the entrusting of so much power over
+men's lives to agents of the papacy. Mediaeval England was ignorant and
+bigoted enough, but under a representative government which so strongly
+permeated society, it was impossible to set the machinery of repression
+to work with such deadly thoroughness as it worked under the guidance of
+Roman methods. When we read the history of persecution in England, the
+story in itself is dreadful enough; but when we compare it with the
+horrors enacted in other countries, we arrive at some startling results.
+During the two centuries of English persecution, from Henry IV. to James
+I., some 400 persons were burned at the stake, and three-fourths of
+these cases occurred in 1555-57, the last three years of Mary Tudor.
+Now in a single province of Spain, in the single year 1482, about 2000
+persons were burned. The lowest estimates of the number slain for heresy
+in the Netherlands in the course of the sixteenth century place it at
+75,000. Very likely such figures are in many cases grossly exaggerated.
+But after making due allowance for this, the contrast is sufficiently
+impressive. In England the persecution of heretics was feeble and
+spasmodic, and only at one moment rose to anything like the appalling
+vigour which ordinarily characterized it in countries where the
+Inquisition was firmly established. Now among the victims of religious
+persecution must necessarily be found an unusual proportion of men and
+women more independent than the average in their thinking, and more
+bold than the average in uttering their thoughts. The Inquisition was a
+diabolical winnowing machine for removing from society the most flexible
+minds and the stoutest hearts; and among every people in which it was
+established for a length of time it wrought serious damage to the
+national character. It ruined the fair promise of Spain, and inflicted
+incalculable detriment upon the fortunes of France. No nation could
+afford to deprive itself of such a valuable element in its political
+life as was furnished in the thirteenth century by the intelligent and
+sturdy Cathari of southern Gaul. [Sidenote: The Cathari, or Puritans of
+the Eastern Empire] [Sidenote: The Albigenses] [Sidenote: Effects of
+persecution; its feebleness in England]
+
+The spirit of revolt against the hierarchy, though broken and repressed
+thus terribly by the measures of Innocent III., continued to live on
+obscurely in sequestered spots, in the mountains of Savoy, and Bosnia,
+and Bohemia, ready on occasion to spring into fresh and vigorous life.
+In the following century Protestant ideas were rapidly germinating in
+England, alike in baron's castle, in yeoman's farmstead, in citizen's
+shop, in the cloistered walks of the monastery. Henry Knighton,
+writing in the time of Richard II., declares, with the exaggeration of
+impatience, that every second man you met was a Lollard, or "babbler,"
+for such was the nickname given to these free-thinkers, of whom the most
+eminent was John Wyclif, professor at Oxford, and rector of Lutterworth,
+greatest scholar of the age. [Sidenote: Wyclif and the Lollards]
+
+The career of this man is a striking commentary upon the difference
+between England and continental Europe in the Middle Ages. Wyclif denied
+transubstantiation, disapproved of auricular confession, opposed the
+payment of Peter's pence, taught that kings should not be subject to
+prelates, translated the Bible into English and circulated it among the
+people, and even denounced the reigning pope as Antichrist; yet he was
+not put to death, because there was as yet no act of parliament for the
+burning of heretics, and in England things must be done according to the
+laws which the people had made. [1] Pope Gregory XI. issued five bulls
+against him, addressed to the king, the archbishop of Canterbury, and
+the university of Oxford; but their dictatorial tone offended the
+national feeling, and no heed was paid to them. Seventeen years after
+Wyclif's death, the statute for burning heretics was passed, and the
+persecution of Lollards began. It was feeble and ineffectual, however.
+Lollardism was never trampled out in England as Catharism was trampled
+out in France. Tracts of Wyclif and passages from his translation of
+the Bible were copied by hand and secretly passed about to be read on
+Sundays in the manor-house, or by the cottage fireside after the day's
+toil was over. The work went on quietly, but not the less effectively,
+until when the papal authority was defied by Henry VIII., it soon became
+apparent that England was half-Protestant already. It then appeared
+also that in this Reformation there were two forces cooperating,--the
+sentiment of national independence which would not brook dictation from
+Rome, and the Puritan sentiment of revolt against the hierarchy in
+general. The first sentiment had found expression again and again in
+refusals to pay tribute to Rome, in defiance of papal bulls, and in the
+famous statutes of _praemunire_, which made it a criminal offence to
+acknowledge any authority in England higher than the crown. The revolt
+of Henry VIII. was simply the carrying out of these acts of Edward I.
+and Edward III. to their logical conclusion. It completed the detachment
+of England from the Holy Roman Empire, and made her free of all the
+world. Its intent was political rather than religious. Henry, who wrote
+against Martin Luther, was far from wishing to make England a Protestant
+country. Elizabeth, who differed from her father in not caring a straw
+for theology, was by temperament and policy conservative. Yet England
+could not cease to be Papist without ceasing in some measure to be
+Catholic; nor could she in that day carry on war against Spain without
+becoming a leading champion of Protestantism. The changes in creed and
+ritual wrought by the government during this period were cautious and
+skilful; and the resulting church of England, with its long line of
+learned and liberal divines, has played a noble part in history.
+[Sidenote: Political character of Henry VIII's revolt against Rome]
+
+But along with this moderate Protestantism espoused by the English
+government, as consequent upon the assertion of English national
+independence, there grew up the fierce uncompromising democratic
+Protestantism of which the persecuted Lollards had sown the seeds. This
+was not the work of government. [Sidenote: The yeoman, Hugh Latimer]
+
+By the side of Henry VIII. stands the sublime figure of Hugh Latimer,
+most dauntless of preachers, the one man before whose stern rebuke the
+headstrong and masterful Tudor monarch quailed. It was Latimer
+that renewed the work of Wyclif. and in his life as well as in his
+martyrdom,--to use his own words of good cheer uttered while the fagots
+were kindling around him,--lighted "such a candle in England as by God's
+grace shall never be put out." This indomitable man belonged to that
+middle-class of self-governing, self-respecting yeomanry that has been
+the glory of free England and free America. He was one of the sturdy
+race that overthrew French chivalry at Crecy and twice drove the
+soldiery of a tyrant down the slope of Bunker Hill. In boyhood he worked
+on his father's farm and helped his mother to milk the thirty kine; he
+practised archery on the village green, studied in the village school,
+went to Cambridge, and became the foremost preacher of Christendom. Now
+the most thorough and radical work of the English Reformation was done
+by this class of men of which Latimer was the type. It was work that was
+national in its scope, arousing to fervent heat the strong religious
+and moral sentiment of the people, and hence it soon quite outran the
+cautious and conservative policy of the government, and tended to
+introduce changes extremely distasteful to those who wished to keep
+England as nearly Catholic as was consistent with independence of the
+pope. Hence before the end of Elizabeth's reign, we find the crown set
+almost as strongly against Puritanism as against Romanism. Hence, too,
+when under Elizabeth's successors the great decisive struggle between
+despotism and liberty was inaugurated, we find all the tremendous force
+of this newly awakened religious enthusiasm cooperating with the English
+love of self-government and carrying it under Cromwell to victory. From
+this fortunate alliance of religious and political forces has come all
+the noble and fruitful work of the last two centuries in which men of
+English speech have been labouring for the political regeneration of
+mankind. But for this alliance of forces, it is quite possible that the
+fateful seventeenth century might have seen despotism triumphant in
+England as on the continent of Europe, and the progress of civilization
+indefinitely arrested. [Sidenote: The moment of Cromwell's triumph was
+the most critical moment in history]
+
+In illustration of this possibility, observe what happened in France
+at the very time when the victorious English tendencies were shaping
+themselves in the reign of Elizabeth. In France there was a strong
+Protestant movement, but it had no such independent middle-class to
+support it as that which existed in England; nor had it been able to
+profit by such indispensable preliminary work as that which Wyclif had
+done; the horrible slaughter of the Albigenses had deprived France of
+the very people who might have played a part in some way analogous to
+that of the Lollards. Consequently the Protestant movement in France
+failed to become a national movement. Against the wretched Henry III who
+would have temporized with it, and the gallant Henry IV who honestly
+espoused it, the oppressed peasantry and townsmen made common cause by
+enlisting under the banner of the ultra-Catholic Guises. The mass of
+the people saw nothing in Protestantism but an idea favoured by the
+aristocracy and which they could not comprehend. Hence the great king
+who would have been glad to make France a Protestant country could only
+obtain his crown by renouncing his religion, while seeking to protect
+it by his memorable Edict of Nantes. But what a generous despot could
+grant, a bigoted despot might revoke; and before another century had
+elapsed, the good work done by Henry IV. was undone by Louis XIV., the
+Edict of Nantes was set aside, the process of casting out the most
+valuable political element in the community was carried to completion,
+and seven percent of the population of France was driven away and added
+to the Protestant populations of northern Germany and England and
+America. The gain to these countries and the damage to France was far
+greater than the mere figures would imply; for in determining the
+character of a community a hundred selected men and women are more
+potent than a thousand men and women taken at random. Thus while the
+Reformation in France reinforced to some extent the noble army of
+freemen, its triumphs were not to be the triumphs of Frenchmen, but of
+the race which has known how to enlist under its banner the forces that
+fight for free thought, free speech, and self-government, and all that
+these phrases imply. [Sidenote: Contrast with France; fate of the
+Huguenots]
+
+In view of these facts we may see how tremendous was the question at
+stake with the Puritans of the seventeenth century. Everywhere else the
+Roman idea seemed to have conquered or to be conquering, while they
+seemed to be left as the forlorn hope of the human race. But from the
+very day when Oliver Cromwell reached forth his mighty arm to stop the
+persecutions in Savoy, the victorious English idea began to change the
+face of things. The next century saw William Pitt allied with Frederick
+of Prussia to save the work of the Reformation in central Europe and set
+in motion the train of events that were at last to make the people of
+the Teutonic fatherland a nation. At that same moment the keenest
+minds in France were awaking to the fact that in their immediate
+neighbourhood, separated from them only by a few miles of salt water,
+was a country where people were equal in the eye of the law. It was the
+ideas of Locke and Milton, of Vane and Sidney, that, when transplanted
+into French soil, produced that violent but salutary Revolution which
+has given fresh life to the European world. And contemporaneously with
+all this, the American nation came upon the scene, equipped as no
+other nation had ever been, for the task of combining sovereignty with
+liberty, indestructible union of the whole with indestructible life in
+the parts. The English idea has thus come to be more than national,
+it has become imperial. It has come to rule, and it has come to stay.
+[Sidenote: Victory of the English Idea]
+
+We are now in a position to answer the question when the Roman Empire
+came to an end, in so far as it can be answered at all. It did not come
+to its end at the hands of an Odovakar in the year 476, or of a Mahomet
+II in 1453, or of a Napoleon in 1806. It has been coming to its end as
+the Roman idea of nation-making has been at length decisively overcome
+by the English idea. For such a fact it is impossible to assign a date,
+because it is not an event but a stage in the endless procession
+of events. But we can point to landmarks on the way. Of movements
+significant and prophetic there have been many. The whole course of the
+Protestant reformation, from the thirteenth century to the nineteenth,
+is coincident with the transfer of the world's political centre of
+gravity from the Tiber and the Rhine to the Thames and the Mississippi.
+The whole career of the men who speak English has within this period
+been the most potent agency in this transfer. In these gigantic
+processes of evolution we cannot mark beginnings or endings by years,
+hardly even by centuries. But among the significant events which
+prophesied the final triumph of the English over the Roman idea, perhaps
+the most significant--the one which marks most incisively the dawning
+of a new era--was the migration of English Puritans across the Atlantic
+Ocean, to repeat in a new environment and on a far grander scale the
+work which their forefathers had wrought in Britain. The voyage of the
+Mayflower was not in itself the greatest event in this migration; but
+it serves to mark the era, and it is only when we study it in the mood
+awakened by the general considerations here set forth that we can
+properly estimate the historic importance of the great Puritan Exodus.
+[Sidenote: Significance of the Puritan Exodus]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE PURITAN EXODUS.
+
+
+In the preceding chapter I endeavoured to set forth and illustrate some
+of the chief causes which have shifted the world's political centre of
+gravity from the Mediterranean and the Rhine to the Atlantic and the
+Mississippi; from the men who spoke Latin to the men who speak English.
+In the course of the exposition we began to catch glimpses of the
+wonderful significance of the fact that--among the people who had
+first suggested the true solution of the difficult problem of making a
+powerful nation without sacrificing local self-government--when the
+supreme day of trial came, the dominant religious sentiment was arrayed
+on the side of political freedom and against political despotism. If we
+consider merely the territorial area which it covered, or the numbers
+of men slain in its battles, the war of the English parliament against
+Charles I. seems a trivial affair when contrasted with the gigantic
+but comparatively insignificant work of barbarians like Jinghis or
+Tamerlane. But if we consider the moral and political issues involved,
+and the influence of the struggle upon the future welfare of mankind,
+we soon come to see that there never was a conflict of more world-wide
+importance than that from which Oliver Cromwell came out victorious. It
+shattered the monarchical power in England at a time when monarchical
+power was bearing down all opposition in the other great countries of
+Europe. It decided that government by the people and for the people
+should not then perish from the earth. It placed free England in a
+position of such moral advantage that within another century the
+English Idea of political life was able to react most powerfully upon
+continental Europe. It was the study of English institutions by such men
+as Montesquieu and Turgot, Voltaire and Rousseau, that gave shape and
+direction to the French Revolution. That violent but wholesome clearing
+of the air, that tremendous political and moral awakening, which ushered
+in the nineteenth century in Europe, had its sources in the spirit
+which animated the preaching of Latimer, the song of Milton, the solemn
+imagery of Bunyan, the political treatises of Locke and Sidney, the
+political measures of Hampden and Pym. The noblest type of modern
+European statesmanship, as represented by Mazzini and Stein, is the
+spiritual offspring of seventeenth-century Puritanism. To speak of
+Naseby and Marston Moor as merely English victories would be as
+absurd as to restrict the significance of Gettysburg to the state of
+Pennsylvania. If ever there were men who laid down their lives in the
+cause of all mankind, it was those grim old Ironsides whose watchwords
+were texts from Holy Writ, whose battle-cries were hymns of praise.
+[Sidenote: Influence of Puritanism upon modern Europe]
+
+It was to this unwonted alliance of intense religious enthusiasm with
+the instinct of self-government and the spirit of personal independence
+that the preservation of English freedom was due. When James I. ascended
+the English throne, the forces which prepared the Puritan revolt had
+been slowly and quietly gathering strength among the people for at least
+two centuries. The work which Wyclif had begun in the fourteenth century
+had continued to go on in spite of occasional spasmodic attempts to
+destroy it with the aid of the statute passed in 1401 for the burning
+of heretics. The Lollards can hardly be said at any time to have
+constituted a sect, marked off from the established church by the
+possession of a system of doctrines held in common. The name by which
+they were known was a nickname which might cover almost any amount
+of diversity in opinion, like the modern epithets "free-thinker" and
+"agnostic." The feature which characterized the Lollards in common was a
+bold spirit of inquiry which led them, in spite of persecution, to read
+Wyclif's English Bible and call in question such dogmas and rites of the
+church as did not seem to find warrant in the sacred text. Clad in long
+robes of coarse red wool, barefoot, with pilgrim's staff in hand, the
+Lollard preachers fared to and fro among the quaint Gothic towns and
+shaded hamlets, setting forth the word of God wherever they could find
+listeners, now in the parish church or under the vaulted roof of the
+cathedral, now in the churchyard or market-place, or on some green
+hillside. During the fifteenth century persecution did much to check
+this open preaching, but passages from Wyclif's tracts and texts from
+the Bible were copied by hand and passed about among tradesmen and
+artisans, yeomen and plough-boys, to be pondered over and talked about
+and learned by heart. It was a new revelation to the English people,
+this discovery of the Bible. Christ and his disciples seemed to come
+very near when the beautiful story of the gospels was first read in
+the familiar speech of every-day life. Heretofore they might well have
+seemed remote and unreal, just as the school-boy hardly realizes that
+the Cato and Cassius over whom he puzzles in his Latin lessons were once
+living men like his father and neighbours, and not mere nominatives
+governing a verb, or ablatives of means or instrument. Now it became
+possible for the layman to contrast the pure teachings of Christ with
+the doctrines and demeanour of the priests and monks to whom the
+spiritual guidance of Englishmen had been entrusted. Strong and
+self-respecting men and women, accustomed to manage their own affairs,
+could not but be profoundly affected by the contrast. [Sidenote: Work of
+the Lollards]
+
+While they were thus led more and more to appeal to the Bible as the
+divine standard of right living and right thinking, at the same time
+they found in the sacred volume the treasures of a most original and
+noble literature unrolled before them; stirring history and romantic
+legend, cosmical theories and priestly injunctions, profound metaphysics
+and pithy proverbs, psalms of unrivalled grandeur and pastorals of
+exquisite loveliness, parables fraught with solemn meaning, the mournful
+wisdom of the preacher, the exultant faith of the apostle, the matchless
+eloquence of Job and Isaiah, the apocalyptic ecstasy of St. John. At a
+time when there was as yet no English literature for the common people,
+this untold wealth of Hebrew literature was implanted in the English
+mind as in a virgin soil. Great consequences have flowed from the fact
+that the first truly popular literature in England--the first which
+stirred the hearts of all classes of people, and filled their minds with
+ideal pictures and their every-day speech with apt and telling phrases--
+was the literature comprised within the Bible. The superiority of the
+common English version of the Bible, made in the reign of James I., over
+all other versions, is a fact generally admitted by competent critics.
+The sonorous Latin of the Vulgate is very grand, but in sublimity of
+fervour as in the unconscious simplicity of strength it is surpassed
+by the English version, which is scarcely if at all inferior to the
+original, while it remains to-day, and will long remain, the noblest
+monument of English speech. The reason for this is obvious. The common
+English version of the Bible was made by men who were not aiming at
+literary effect, but simply gave natural expression to the feelings
+which for several generations had clustered around the sacred text. They
+spoke with the voice of a people, which is more than the voice of the
+most highly gifted man. They spoke with the voice of a people to whom
+the Bible had come to mean all that it meant to the men who wrote it. To
+the Englishmen who listened to Latimer, to the Scotchmen who listened
+to Knox, the Bible more than filled the place which in modern times
+is filled by poem and essay, by novel and newspaper and scientific
+treatise. To its pages they went for daily instruction and comfort,
+with its strange Semitic names they baptized their children, upon its
+precepts, too often misunderstood and misapplied, they sought to build
+up a rule of life that might raise them above the crude and unsatisfying
+world into which they were born. [Sidenote: The English version of the
+Bible]
+
+It would be wrong to accredit all this awakening of spiritual life in
+England to Wyclif and the Lollards, for it was only after the Bible, in
+the translations of Tyndall and Coverdale, had been made free to the
+whole English people in the reign of Edward VI. that its significance
+began to be apparent; and it was only a century later, in the time of
+Cromwell and Milton, that its full fruition was reached. It was with the
+Lollards, however, that the spiritual awakening began and was continued
+until its effects, when they came, were marked by surprising maturity
+and suddenness. Because the Lollards were not a clearly defined sect, it
+was hard to trace the manifold ramifications of their work. During the
+terrible Wars of the Roses, contemporary chroniclers had little or
+nothing to say about the labours of these humble men, which seemed
+of less importance than now, when we read them in the light of their
+world-wide results. From this silence some modern historians have
+carelessly inferred that the nascent Protestantism of the Lollards had
+been extinguished by persecution under the Lancastrian kings, and was in
+nowise continuous with modern English Protestantism. Nothing could be
+more erroneous. The extent to which the Lollard leaven had permeated all
+classes of English society was first clearly revealed when Henry VIII.
+made his domestic affairs the occasion for a revolt against the Papacy.
+Despot and brute as he was in many ways, Henry had some characteristics
+which enabled him to get on well with his people. He not only
+represented the sentiment of national independence, but he had a truly
+English reverence for the forms of law. In his worst acts he relied upon
+the support of his Parliament, which he might in various ways cajole or
+pack, but could not really enslave. In his quarrel with Rome he could
+have achieved but little, had he not happened to strike a chord of
+feeling to which the English people, trained by this slow and subtle
+work of the Lollards, responded quickly and with a vehemence upon which
+he had not reckoned. As if by magic, the fabric of Romanism was broken
+to pieces in England, monasteries were suppressed and their abbots
+hanged, the authority of the Pope was swept away, and there was no
+powerful party, like that of the Guises in France to make such sweeping
+measures the occasion for civil war. The whole secret of Henry's swift
+success lay in the fact that the English people were already more than
+half Protestant in temper, and needed only an occasion for declaring
+themselves. Hence, as soon as Catholic Henry died, his youthful son
+found himself seated on the throne of a Protestant nation. The terrible
+but feeble persecution which followed under Mary did much to strengthen
+the extreme Protestant sentiment by allying it with the outraged feeling
+of national independence. The bloody work of the grand-daughter of
+Ferdinand and Isabella, the doting wife of Philip II., was rightly felt
+to be Spanish work; and never, perhaps, did England feel such a sense of
+relief as on the auspicious day which welcomed to the throne the great
+Elizabeth, an Englishwoman in every fibre, and whose mother withal was
+the daughter of a plain country gentleman. But the Marian persecution
+not only increased the strength of the extreme Protestant sentiment, but
+indirectly it supplied it with that Calvinistic theology which was to
+make it indomitable. Of the hundreds of ministers and laymen who fled
+from England in 1555 and the two following years, a great part found
+their way to Geneva, and thus came under the immediate personal
+influence of that man of iron who taught the very doctrines for which
+their souls were craving, and who was then at the zenith of his power.
+[Sidenote: Secret of Henry VIII.'s swift success in his revolt against
+Rome] [Sidenote: Effects of the persecution under Mary]
+
+Among all the great benefactors of mankind the figure of Calvin is
+perhaps the least attractive. He was, so to speak, the constitutional
+lawyer of the Reformation, with vision as clear, with head as cool, with
+soul as dry, as any old solicitor in rusty black that ever dwelt in
+chambers in Lincoln's Inn. His sternness was that of the judge who
+dooms a criminal to the gallows. His theology had much in it that is in
+striking harmony with modern scientific philosophy, and much in it, too,
+that the descendants of his Puritan converts have learned to loathe as
+sheer diabolism. It is hard for us to forgive the man who burned Michael
+Servetus, even though it was the custom of the time to do such things
+and the tender-hearted Melanchthon found nothing to blame in it. It is
+not easy to speak of Calvin with enthusiasm, as it comes natural to
+speak of the genial, whole-souled, many-sided, mirth-and-song-loving
+Luther. Nevertheless it would be hard to overrate the debt which mankind
+owe to Calvin. The spiritual father of Coligny, of William the Silent,
+and of Cromwell must occupy a foremost rank among the champions of
+modern democracy. Perhaps not one of the mediaeval popes was more
+despotic in temper than Calvin; but it is not the less true that the
+promulgation of his theology was one of the longest steps that mankind
+have taken toward personal freedom. Calvinism left the individual man
+alone in the presence of his God. His salvation could not be wrought by
+priestly ritual, but only by the grace of God abounding in his soul; and
+wretched creature that he felt himself to be, through the intense moral
+awakening of which this stern theology was in part the expression, his
+soul was nevertheless of infinite value, and the possession of it was
+the subject of an everlasting struggle between the powers of heaven and
+the powers of hell. In presence of the awful responsibility of life, all
+distinctions of rank and fortune vanished; prince and pauper were alike
+the helpless creatures of Jehovah and suppliants for his grace. Calvin
+did not originate these doctrines; in announcing them he was but setting
+forth, as he said, the Institutes of the Christian religion; but in
+emphasizing this aspect of Christianity, in engraving it upon men's
+minds with that keen-edged logic which he used with such unrivalled
+skill, Calvin made them feel, as it had perhaps never been felt before,
+the dignity and importance of the individual human soul. It was a
+religion fit to inspire men who were to be called upon to fight for
+freedom, whether in the marshes of the Netherlands or on the moors of
+Scotland. In a church, moreover, based upon such a theology there was
+no room for prelacy. Each single church tended to become an independent
+congregation of worshippers, constituting one of the most effective
+schools that has ever existed for training men in local self-government.
+[Sidenote: Calvin's theology in its political bearings]
+
+When, therefore, upon the news of Elizabeth's accession to the throne,
+the Protestant refugees made their way back to England, they came as
+Calvinistic Puritans. Their stay upon the Continent had been short, but
+it had been just enough to put the finishing touch upon the work that
+had been going on since the days of Wyclif. Upon such men and their
+theories Elizabeth could not look with favour. With all her father's
+despotic temper, Elizabeth possessed her mother's fine tact, and
+she represented so grandly the feeling of the nation in its
+life-and-death-struggle with Spain and the pope, that never perhaps in
+English history has the crown wielded so much real power as during the
+five-and-forty years of her wonderful reign.
+
+One day Elizabeth asked a lady of the court how she contrived to retain
+her husband's affection. The lady replied that "she had confidence
+in her husband's understanding and courage, well founded on her own
+steadfastness not to offend or thwart, but to cherish and obey, whereby
+she did persuade her husband of her own affection, and in so doing did
+command his." "Go to, go to, mistress," cried the queen, "You are
+wisely bent, I find. After such sort do I keep the good will of all
+my husbands, my good people; for if they did not rest assured of some
+special love towards them, they would not readily yield me such good
+obedience." [2] Such a theory of government might work well in the hands
+of an Elizabeth, and in the circumstances in which England was then
+placed; but it could hardly be worked by a successor. The seeds of
+revolt were already sown. The disposition to curb the sovereign was
+growing and would surely assert itself as soon as it should have some
+person less loved and respected than Elizabeth to deal with. The queen
+in some measure foresaw this, and in the dogged independence and
+uncompromising enthusiasm of the Puritans she recognized the rock on
+which the monarchy might dash itself into pieces. She therefore hated
+the Puritans, and persecuted them zealously with one hand, while
+circumstances forced her in spite of herself to aid and abet them with
+the other. She could not maintain herself against Spain without helping
+the Dutch and the Huguenots; but every soldier she sent across the
+channel came back, if he came at all, with his head full of the
+doctrines of Calvin; and these stalwart converts were reinforced by the
+refugees from France and the Netherlands who came flocking into English
+towns to set up their thrifty shops and hold prayer-meetings in their
+humble chapels. To guard the kingdom against the intrigues of Philip and
+the Guises and the Queen of Scots, it was necessary to choose the most
+zealous Protestants for the most responsible positions, and such men
+were more than likely to be Calvinists and Puritans. Elizabeth's great
+ministers, Burleigh, Walsingham, and Nicholas Bacon, were inclined
+toward Puritanism; and so were the naval heroes who won the most
+fruitful victories of that century, by shattering the maritime power of
+Spain and thus opening the way for Englishmen to colonize North America.
+If we would realize the dangers that would have beset the Mayflower and
+her successors but for the preparatory work of these immortal sailors,
+we must remember the dreadful fate of Ribault and his Huguenot followers
+in Florida, twenty-three years before that most happy and glorious
+event, the destruction of the Spanish Armada. But not even the devoted
+men and women who held their prayer-meetings in the Mayflower's cabin
+were more constant in prayer or more assiduous in reading the Bible than
+the dauntless rovers, Drake and Hawkins, Gilbert and Cavendish. In the
+church itself, too, the Puritan spirit grew until in 1575-83 it seized
+upon Grindal, archbishop of Canterbury, who incurred the queen's
+disfavour by refusing to meddle with the troublesome reformers or to
+suppress their prophesyings. By the end of the century the majority
+of country gentlemen and of wealthy merchants in the towns had become
+Puritans, and the new views had made great headway in both universities,
+while at Cambridge they had become dominant. [Sidenote: Elizabeth's
+policy, and its effects] [Sidenote: Puritan Sea-rovers]
+
+This allusion to the universities may serve to introduce the very
+interesting topic of the geographical distribution of Puritanism in
+England. No one can study the history of the two universities without
+being impressed with the greater conservatism of Oxford, and the greater
+hospitality of Cambridge toward new ideas. Possibly the explanation
+may have some connection with the situation of Cambridge upon the East
+Anglian border. The eastern counties of England have often been remarked
+as rife in heresy and independency. For many generations the coast
+region between the Thames and the Humber was a veritable _litus
+haereticum._ Longland, bishop of Lincoln in 1520, reported Lollardism as
+especially vigorous and obstinate in his diocese, where more than two
+hundred heretics were once brought before him in the course of a single
+visitation. It was in Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, and
+among the fens of Ely, Cambridge, and Huntingdon, that Puritanism was
+strongest at the end of the sixteenth century. It was as member and
+leading spirit of the Eastern Counties Association that Oliver Cromwell
+began his military career; and in so far as there was anything sectional
+in the struggle between Charles I. and the Long Parliament, it was a
+struggle which ended in the victory of east over west. East Anglia was
+from first to last the one region in which the supremacy of Parliament
+was unquestionable and impregnable, even after the strength of its
+population had been diminished by sending some thousands of picked men
+and women to America. While every one of the forty counties of England
+was represented in the great Puritan exodus, the East Anglian counties
+contributed to it far more than all the rest. Perhaps it would not be
+far out of the way to say that two-thirds of the American people who can
+trace their ancestry to New England might follow it back to the East
+Anglian shires of the mother-country; one-sixth might follow it to those
+southwestern countries--Devonshire, Dorset, and Somerset--which so
+long were foremost in maritime enterprise; one-sixth to other parts of
+England. I would not insist upon the exactness of such figures, in a
+matter where only a rough approximation is possible; but I do not think
+they overstate the East Anglian preponderance. It was not by accident
+that the earliest counties of Massachusetts were called Norfolk,
+Suffolk, and Essex, or that Boston in Lincolnshire gave its name to the
+chief city of New England. The native of Connecticut or Massachusetts
+who wanders about rural England to-day finds no part of it so homelike
+as the cosy villages and smiling fields and quaint market towns as he
+fares leisurely and in not too straight a line from Ipswich toward Hull.
+Countless little unobtrusive features remind him of home. The very names
+on the sign-boards over the sleepy shops have an unwontedly familiar
+look. In many instances the homestead which his forefathers left, when
+they followed Winthrop or Hooker to America, is still to be found,
+well-kept and comfortable; the ancient manor-house built of massive
+unhewn stone, yet in other respects much like the New England farmhouse,
+with its long sloping roof and gable end toward the road, its staircase
+with twisted balusters running across the shallow entry-way, its low
+ceilings with their sturdy oaken beams, its spacious chimneys, and its
+narrow casements from which one might have looked out upon the anxious
+march of Edward IV. from Ravenspur to the field of victory at Barnet
+in days when America was unknown. Hard by, in the little parish church
+which has stood for perhaps a thousand years, plain enough and bleak
+enough to suit the taste of the sternest Puritan, one may read upon
+the cold pavement one's own name and the names of one's friends and
+neighbours in startling proximity, somewhat worn and effaced by the
+countless feet that have trodden there. And yonder on the village green
+one comes with bated breath upon the simple inscription which tells of
+some humble hero who on that spot in the evil reign of Mary suffered
+death by fire. Pursuing thus our interesting journey, we may come at
+last to the quiet villages of Austerfield and Scrooby, on opposite
+banks of the river Idle, and just at the corner of the three shires of
+Lincoln, York, and Nottingham. It was from this point that the Puritan
+exodus to America was begun. [Sidenote: Puritanism was strongest in the
+eastern counties] [Sidenote: Preponderance of East Anglia in the Puritan
+exodus]
+
+It was not, however, in the main stream of Puritanism, but in one of its
+obscure rivulets that this world-famous movement originated. During the
+reign of Elizabeth it was not the purpose of the Puritans to separate
+themselves from the established church of which the sovereign was the
+head, but to remain within it and reform it according to their own
+notions. For a time they were partially successful in this work,
+especially in simplifying the ritual and in giving a Calvinistic tinge
+to the doctrines. In doing this they showed no conscious tendency toward
+freedom of thought, but rather a bigotry quite as intense as that which
+animated the system against which they were fighting. The most advanced
+liberalism of Elizabeth's time was not to be found among the Puritans,
+but in the magnificent treatise on "Ecclesiastical Polity" by the
+churchman Richard Hooker. But the liberalism of this great writer, like
+that of Erasmus a century earlier, was not militant enough to meet the
+sterner demands of the time. It could not then ally itself with the
+democratic spirit, as Puritanism did. It has been well said that while
+Luther was the prophet of the Reformation that has been, Erasmus was the
+prophet of the Reformation that is to come, and so it was to some extent
+with the Puritans and Hooker. The Puritan fight against the hierarchy
+was a political necessity of the time, something without which no real
+and thorough reformation could then be effected. In her antipathy to
+this democratic movement, Elizabeth vexed and tormented the Puritans
+as far as she deemed it prudent; and in the conservative temper of the
+people she found enough support to prevent their transforming the church
+as they would have liked to do. Among the Puritans themselves, indeed,
+there was no definite agreement on this point. Some would have stopped
+short with Presbyterianism, while others held that "new presbyter was
+but old priest writ large," and so pressed on to Independency. It was
+early in Elizabeth's reign that the zeal of these extreme brethren,
+inflamed by persecution, gave rise to the sect of Separatists, who
+flatly denied the royal supremacy over ecclesiastical affairs, and
+asserted the right to set up churches of their own, with pastors
+and elders and rules of discipline, independent of queen or bishop.
+[Sidenote: Puritanism was not intentionally allied with liberalism]
+
+In 1567 the first congregation of this sort, consisting of about a
+hundred persons assembled in a hall in Anchor Lane in London, was
+forcibly broken up and thirty-one of the number were sent to jail and
+kept there for nearly a year. By 1576 the Separatists had come to be
+recognized as a sect, under the lead of Robert Brown, a man of high
+social position, related to the great Lord Burleigh. Brown fled to
+Holland, where he preached to a congregation of English exiles, and
+wrote books which were smuggled into England and privately circulated
+there, much to the disgust, not only of the queen, but of all parties,
+Puritans as well as High Churchmen. The great majority of Puritans,
+whose aim was not to leave the church, but to stay in it and control
+it, looked with dread and disapproval upon these extremists who seemed
+likely to endanger their success by forcing them into deadly opposition
+to the crown. Just as in the years which ushered in our late Civil War,
+the opponents of the Republicans sought to throw discredit upon them by
+confusing them with the little sect of Abolitionists; and just as the
+Republicans, in resenting the imputation, went so far as to frown upon
+the Abolitionists, so that in December, 1860, men who had just voted for
+Mr. Lincoln were ready to join in breaking up "John Brown meetings" in
+Boston; so it was with religious parties in the reign of Elizabeth. The
+opponents of the Puritans pointed to the Separatists, and cried, "See
+whither your anarchical doctrines are leading!" and in their eagerness
+to clear themselves of this insinuation, the leading Puritans were as
+severe upon the Separatists as anybody. It is worthy of note that in
+both instances the imputation, so warmly resented, was true. Under the
+pressure of actual hostilities the Republicans did become Abolitionists,
+and in like manner, when in England it came to downright warfare the
+Puritans became Separatists. But meanwhile it fared ill with the little
+sect which everybody hated and despised. Their meetings were broken up
+by mobs. In an old pamphlet describing a "tumult in Fleet Street, raised
+by the disorderly preachment, pratings, and prattlings of a swarm of
+Separatists," one reads such sentences as the following: "At length they
+catcht one of them alone, but they kickt him so vehemently as if they
+meant to beat him into a jelly. It is ambiguous whether they have kil'd
+him or no, but for a certainty they did knock him about as if they meant
+to pull him to pieces. I confesse it had been no matter if they had
+beaten the whole tribe in the like manner." For their leaders the
+penalty was more serious. The denial of the queen's ecclesiastical
+supremacy could be treated as high treason, and two of Brown's friends,
+convicted of circulating his books, were sent to the gallows. In spite
+of these dangers Brown returned to England in 1585. William the Silent
+had lately been murdered, and heresy in Holland was not yet safe from
+the long arm of the Spaniard. Brown trusted in Lord Burleigh's ability
+to protect him, but in 1588, finding himself in imminent danger, he
+suddenly recanted and accepted a comfortable living under the bishops
+who had just condemned him. His followers were already known as
+Brownists; henceforth their enemies took pains to call them so and twit
+them with holding doctrines too weak for making martyrs. [Sidenote:
+Robert Brown and the Separatists]
+
+The flimsiness of Brown's moral texture prevented him from becoming the
+leader in the Puritan exodus to New England. That honour was reserved
+for William Brewster, son of a country gentleman who had for many
+years been postmaster at Scrooby. The office was then one of high
+responsibility and influence. After taking his degree at Cambridge,
+Brewster became private secretary to Sir William Davison, whom he
+accompanied on his mission to the Netherlands. When Davison's public
+career came to an end in 1587, Brewster returned to Scrooby, and soon
+afterward succeeded his father as postmaster, in which position he
+remained until 1607. During the interval Elizabeth died, and James
+Stuart came from Scotland to take her place on the throne. [Sidenote:
+William Brewster]
+
+The feelings with which the late queen had regarded Puritanism were mild
+compared with the sentiments entertained by her successor. For some
+years he had been getting worsted in his struggle with the Presbyterians
+of the northern kingdom. His vindictive memory treasured up the day when
+a mighty Puritan preacher had in public twitched him by the sleeve and
+called him "God's silly vassal." "I tell you, sir," said Andrew Melville
+on that occasion, "there are two kings and two kingdoms in Scotland.
+There is Christ Jesus the King, and his kingdom the Kirk, whose subject
+James VI. is, and of whose kingdom not a king, nor a lord, nor a head,
+but a member. And they whom Christ hath called to watch over his kirk
+and govern his spiritual kingdom have sufficient power and authority so
+to do both together and severally." In this bold and masterful speech
+we have the whole political philosophy of Puritanism, as in a nutshell.
+Under the guise of theocratic fanaticism, and in words as arrogant as
+ever fell from priestly lips, there was couched the assertion of the
+popular will against despotic privilege. Melville could say such things
+to the king's face and walk away unharmed, because there stood behind
+him a people fully aroused to the conviction that there is an eternal
+law of God, which kings no less than scullions must obey. [3] Melville
+knew this full well, and so did James know it in the bitterness of his
+heart. He would have no such mischievous work in England. He despised
+Elizabeth's grand national policy which his narrow intellect could not
+comprehend. He could see that in fighting Spain and aiding Dutchmen and
+Huguenots she was strengthening the very spirit that sought to pull
+monarchy down. In spite of her faults, which were neither few nor small,
+the patriotism of that fearless woman was superior to any personal
+ambition. It was quite otherwise with James. He was by no means
+fearless, and he cared more for James Stuart than for either England or
+Scotland. He had an overweening opinion of his skill in kingcraft. In
+coming to Westminster it was his policy to use his newly acquired
+power to break down the Puritan party in both kingdoms and to fasten
+episcopacy upon Scotland. In pursuing this policy he took no heed of
+English national sentiment, but was quite ready to defy and insult it,
+even to the point of making--before children who remembered the Armada
+had yet reached middle age--an alliance with the hated Spaniard. In such
+wise James succeeded in arraying against the monarchical principle the
+strongest forces of English life,--the sentiment of nationality, the
+sentiment of personal freedom, and the uncompromising religious fervour
+of Calvinism; and out of this invincible combination of forces has been
+wrought the nobler and happier state of society in which we live to-day.
+[Sidenote: James Stuart and Andrew Melville]
+
+Scarcely ten months had James been king of England when he invited
+the leading Puritan clergymen to meet himself and the bishops in a
+conference at Hampton Court, as he wished to learn what changes they
+would like to make in the government and ritual of the church. In the
+course of the discussion he lost his temper and stormed, as was his
+wont. [Sidenote: King James's view of the political situation]
+
+The mention of the word "presbytery" lashed him into fury. "A Scottish
+presbytery," he cried, "agreeth as well with a monarchy as God and the
+Devil. Then Jack and Tom and Will and Dick shall meet, and at their
+pleasures censure me and my council and all our proceedings .... Stay,
+I pray you, for one seven years, before you demand that from me, and if
+then you find me pursy and fat, and my windpipes stuffed, I will perhaps
+hearken to you .... Until you find that I grow lazy, let that alone."
+One of the bishops declared that in this significant tirade his Majesty
+spoke by special inspiration from Heaven! The Puritans saw that their
+only hope lay in resistance. If any doubt remained, it was dispelled by
+the vicious threat with which the king broke up the conference. "I will
+_make_ them conform," said he, "or I will harry them out of the land."
+
+These words made a profound sensation in England, as well they might,
+for they heralded the struggle which within half a century was to
+deliver up James's son to the executioner. The Parliament of 1604 met
+in angrier mood than any Parliament which had assembled at Westminster
+since the dethronement of Richard II. Among the churches non-conformity
+began more decidedly to assume the form of secession. The key-note of
+the conflict was struck at Scrooby. Staunch Puritan as he was, Brewster
+had not hitherto favoured the extreme measures of the Separatists. Now
+he withdrew from the church, and gathered together a company of men and
+women who met on Sundays for divine service in his own drawing-room at
+Scrooby Manor. In organizing this independent Congregationalist
+society, Brewster was powerfully aided by John Robinson, a native of
+Lincolnshire. Robinson was then thirty years of age, and had taken his
+master's degree at Cambridge in 1600. He was a man of great learning and
+rare sweetness of temper, and was moreover distinguished for a broad and
+tolerant habit of mind too seldom found among the Puritans of that day.
+Friendly and unfriendly writers alike bear witness to his spirit of
+Christian charity and the comparatively slight value which he attached
+to orthodoxy in points of doctrine; and we can hardly be wrong in
+supposing that the comparatively tolerant behaviour of the Plymouth
+colonists, whereby they were contrasted with the settlers of
+Massachusetts, was in some measure due to the abiding influence of the
+teachings of this admirable man. Another important member of the Scrooby
+congregation was William Bradford, of the neighbouring village of
+Austerfield, then a lad of seventeen years, but already remarkable for
+maturity of intelligence and weight of character. Afterward governor of
+Plymouth for nearly thirty years, he became the historian of his colony;
+and to his picturesque chronicle, written in pure and vigorous English,
+we are indebted for most that we know of the migration that started
+from Scrooby and ended in Plymouth. [Sidenote: The congregation of
+Separatists at Scrooby]
+
+It was in 1606--two years after King James's truculent threat--that
+this independent church of Scrooby was organized. Another year had not
+elapsed before its members had suffered so much at the hands of officers
+of the law, that they began to think of following the example of former
+heretics and escaping to Holland. After an unsuccessful attempt in
+the autumn of 1607, they at length succeeded a few months later in
+accomplishing their flight to Amsterdam, where they hoped to find a
+home. But here they found the English exiles who had preceded them so
+fiercely involved in doctrinal controversies, that they decided to
+go further in search of peace and quiet. This decision, which we may
+ascribe to Robinson's wise counsels, served to keep the society of
+Pilgrims from getting divided and scattered. They reached Leyden in
+1609, just as the Spanish government had sullenly abandoned the hopeless
+task of conquering the Dutch, and had granted to Holland the Twelve
+Years Truce. During eleven of these twelve years the Pilgrims remained
+in Leyden, supporting themselves by various occupations, while their
+numbers increased from 300 to more than 1000. Brewster opened a
+publishing house, devoted mainly to the issue of theological books.
+Robinson accepted a professorship in the university, and engaged in the
+defence of Calvinism against the attacks of Episcopius, the successor
+of Arminius. The youthful Bradford devoted himself to the study of
+languages,--Dutch, French, Latin, Greek, and finally Hebrew; wishing,
+as he said, to "see with his own eyes the ancient oracles of God in all
+their native beauty." During their sojourn in Leyden the Pilgrims were
+introduced to a strange and novel spectacle,--the systematic legal
+toleration of all persons, whether Catholic or Protestant, who called
+themselves followers of Christ. Not that there was not plenty of
+intolerance in spirit, but the policy inaugurated by the idolized
+William the Silent held it in check by law. All persons who came to
+Holland, and led decorous lives there, were protected in their opinions
+and customs. By contemporary writers in other countries this eccentric
+behaviour of the Dutch government was treated with unspeakable scorn.
+"All strange religions flock thither," says one; it is "a common harbour
+of all heresies," a "cage of unclean birds," says another; "the great
+mingle mangle of religion," says a third. [4] In spite of the relief
+from persecution, however, the Pilgrims were not fully satisfied with
+their new home. The expiration of the truce with Spain might prove that
+this relief was only temporary; and at any rate, complete toleration
+did not fill the measure of their wants. Had they come to Holland as
+scattered bands of refugees, they might have been absorbed into the
+Dutch population, as Huguenot refugees have been absorbed in Germany,
+England, and America. But they had come as an organized community, and
+absorption into a foreign nation was something to be dreaded. They
+wished to preserve their English speech and English traditions, keep up
+their organization, and find some favoured spot where they might lay the
+corner-stone of a great Christian state. The spirit of nationality was
+strong in them; the spirit of self-government was strong in them; and
+the only thing which could satisfy these feelings was such a migration
+as had not been seen since ancient times, a migration like that of
+Phokaians to Massilia or Tyrians to Carthage. [Sidenote: The flight to
+Holland] [Sidenote: Why the Pilgrims did not stay there]
+
+It was too late in the world's history to carry out such a scheme upon
+European soil. Every acre of territory there was appropriated. The only
+favourable outlook was upon the Atlantic coast of America, where English
+cruisers had now successfully disputed the pretensions of Spain, and
+where after forty years of disappointment and disaster a flourishing
+colony had at length been founded in Virginia. The colonization of the
+North American coast had now become part of the avowed policy of the
+British government. In 1606 a great joint-stock company was formed for
+the establishment of two colonies in America. The branch which was to
+take charge of the proposed southern colony had its headquarters in
+London; the management of the northern branch was at Plymouth in
+Devonshire. Hence the two branches are commonly spoken of as the London
+and Plymouth companies. The former was also called the Virginia Company,
+and the latter the North Virginia Company, as the name of Virginia was
+then loosely applied to the entire Atlantic coast north of Florida. The
+London Company had jurisdiction from 34 degrees to 38 degrees north
+latitude; the Plymouth Company had jurisdiction from 45 degrees down to
+41 degrees; the intervening territory, between 38 degrees and 41 degrees
+was to go to whichever company should first plant a self-supporting
+colony. The local government of each colony was to be entrusted to a
+council resident in America and nominated by the king; while general
+supervision over both colonies was to be exercised by a council resident
+in England. [Sidenote: The London and Plymouth companies]
+
+In pursuance of this general plan, though with some variations in
+detail, the settlement of Jamestown had been begun in 1607, and its
+success was now beginning to seem assured. On the other hand all the
+attempts which had been made to the north of the fortieth parallel had
+failed miserably. As early as 1602 Bartholomew Gosnold, with 32 men, had
+landed on the headland which they named Cape Cod from the fish found
+thereabouts in great numbers. This was the first English name given to
+any spot in that part of America, and so far as known these were the
+first Englishmen that ever set foot there. They went on and gave names
+to Martha's Vineyard and the Elizabeth Islands in Buzzard's Bay; and
+on Cuttyhunk they built some huts with the intention of remaining, but
+after a month's experience they changed their mind and went back to
+England. Gosnold's story interested other captains, and on Easter
+Sunday, 1605, George Weymouth set sail for North Virginia, as it was
+called. He found Cape Cod and coasted northward as far as the Kennebec
+river, up which he sailed for many miles. Weymouth kidnapped five
+Indians and carried them to England, that they might learn the language
+and acquire a wholesome respect for the arts of civilization and the
+resistless power of white men. His glowing accounts of the spacious
+harbours, the abundance of fish and game, the noble trees, the luxuriant
+herbage, and the balmy climate, aroused general interest in England, and
+doubtless had some influence upon the formation, in the following year,
+of the great joint-stock company just described. The leading spirit of
+the Plymouth Company was Sir John Popham, chief-justice of England, and
+he was not disposed to let his friends of the southern branch excel him
+in promptness. Within three months after the founding of Jamestown, a
+party of 120 colonists, led by the judge's kinsman George Popham, landed
+at the mouth of the Kennebec, and proceeded to build a rude village of
+some fifty cabins, with storehouse, chapel, and block-house. When
+they landed in August they doubtless shared Weymouth's opinion of the
+climate. These Englishmen had heard of warm countries like Italy and
+cold countries like Russia; harsh experience soon taught them that there
+are climates in which the summer of Naples may alternate with the winter
+of Moscow. The president and many others fell sick and died. News came
+of the death of Sir John Popham in England, and presently the weary and
+disappointed settlers abandoned their enterprise and returned to their
+old homes. Their failure spread abroad in England the opinion that
+North Virginia was uninhabitable by reason of the cold, and no further
+attempts were made upon that coast until in 1614 it was visited by
+Captain John Smith. [Sidenote: First exploration of the New England
+coast]
+
+The romantic career of this gallant and garrulous hero did not end with
+his departure from the infant colony at Jamestown. By a curious destiny
+his fame is associated with the beginnings of both the southern and the
+northern portions of the United States. To Virginia Smith may be said to
+have given its very existence as a commonwealth; to New England he
+gave its name. In 1614 he came over with two ships to North Virginia,
+explored its coast minutely from the Penobscot river to Cape Cod, and
+thinking it a country of such extent and importance as to deserve a name
+of its own, rechristened it New England. On returning home he made a
+very good map of the coast and dotted it with English names suggested by
+Prince Charles. Of these names Cape Elizabeth, Cape Ann, Charles River,
+and Plymouth still remain where Smith placed them. In 1615 Smith again
+set sail for the New World, this time with a view to planting a colony
+under the auspices of the Plymouth Company, but his talent for strange
+adventures had not deserted him. He was taken prisoner by a French
+fleet, carried hither and thither on a long cruise, and finally set
+ashore at Rochelle, whence, without a penny in his pocket, he contrived
+to make his way back to England. Perhaps Smith's life of hardship may
+have made him prematurely old. After all his wild and varied experience
+he was now only in his thirty-seventh year, but he does not seem to have
+gone on any more voyages. The remaining sixteen years of his life
+were spent quietly in England in writing books, publishing maps, and
+otherwise stimulating the public interest in the colonization of the New
+World. But as for the rocky coast of New England, which he had explored
+and named, he declared that he was not so simple as to suppose that any
+other motive than riches would "ever erect there a commonwealth or draw
+company from their ease and humours at home, to stay in New England."
+[Sidenote: John Smith]
+
+In this opinion, however, the bold explorer was mistaken. Of all
+migrations of peoples the settlement of New England is preeminently
+the one in which the almighty dollar played the smallest part, however
+important it may since have become as a motive power. It was left for
+religious enthusiasm to achieve what commercial enterprise had failed
+to accomplish. By the summer of 1617 the Pilgrim society at Leyden had
+decided to send a detachment of its most vigorous members to lay
+the foundations of a Puritan state in America. There had been much
+discussion as to the fittest site for such a colony. Many were in favour
+of Guiana, which Sir Walter Raleigh had described in such glowing
+colours; but it was thought that the tropical climate would be
+ill-suited to northern men of industrious and thrifty habit, and the
+situation, moreover, was dangerously exposed to the Spaniards. Half a
+century had scarcely elapsed since the wholesale massacre of Huguenots
+in Florida. Virginia was then talked of, but Episcopal ideas had already
+taken root there. New England, on the other hand, was considered too
+cold. Popham's experience was not encouraging. But the country about
+the Delaware river afforded an opportunity for erecting an independent
+colony under the jurisdiction of the London Company, and this seemed
+the best course to pursue. Sir Edwin Sandys, the leading spirit in the
+London Company, was favourably inclined toward Puritans, and through him
+negotiations were begun. Capital to the amount of L7000 was furnished
+by seventy merchant adventurers in England, and the earnings of the
+settlers were to be thrown into a common stock until these subscribers
+should have been remunerated. A grant of land was obtained from the
+London Company, and the king was asked to protect the emigrants by a
+charter, but this was refused. James, however, made no objections to
+their going, herein showing himself less of a bigot than Louis XIV.
+in later days, who would not suffer a Huguenot to set foot in Canada,
+though France was teeming with Huguenots who would have been glad
+enough to go. When James inquired how the colonists expected to support
+themselves, some one answered, most likely by fishing. "Very good,"
+quoth the king, "it was the Apostles' own calling." He declared that no
+one should molest them so long as they behaved themselves properly. From
+this unwonted urbanity it would appear that James anticipated no trouble
+from the new colony. A few Puritans in America could not do much to
+annoy him, and there was of course a fair chance of their perishing, as
+so many other colonizers had perished. [Sidenote: The Pilgrims at Leyden
+decide to make a settlement near the Delaware river]
+
+The congregation at Leyden did not think it wise to cut loose from
+Holland until they should have secured a foothold in America. It was but
+an advance guard that started out from Delft haven late in July, 1620,
+in the rickety ship Speedwell, with Brewster and Bradford, and sturdy
+Miles Standish, a trained soldier whose aid was welcome, though he does
+not seem to have belonged to the congregation. Robinson remained at
+Leyden, and never came to America. After a brief stop at Southampton,
+where they met the Mayflower with friends from London, the Pilgrims
+again set sail in the two ships. The Speedwell sprang a leak, and they
+stopped at Dartmouth for repairs. Again they started, and had put three
+hundred miles of salt water between themselves and Land's End, when the
+Speedwell leaked so badly that they were forced to return. When they
+dropped anchor at Plymouth in Devonshire, about twenty were left on
+shore, and the remainder, exactly one hundred in number, crowded into
+the Mayflower and on the 6th of September started once more to cross the
+Atlantic. The capacity of the little ship was 180 tons, and her strength
+was but slight. In a fierce storm in mid-ocean a mainbeam amidships was
+wrenched and cracked, and but for a huge iron screw which one of the
+passengers had brought from Delft, they might have gone to the bottom.
+The foul weather prevented any accurate calculation of latitude and
+longitude, and they were so far out in their reckoning that when they
+caught sight of land on the 9th of November, it was to Cape Cod that
+they had come. Their patent gave them no authority to settle here, as
+it was beyond the jurisdiction of the London Company. They turned their
+prow southward, but encountering perilous shoals and a stiff headwind
+they desisted and sought shelter in Cape Cod bay. On the 11th they
+decided to find some place of abode in this neighbourhood, anticipating
+no difficulty in getting a patent from the Plymouth Company, which was
+anxious to obtain settlers. For five weeks they stayed in the ship while
+little parties were exploring the coast and deciding upon the best site
+for a town. It was purely a coincidence that the spot which they chose
+had already received from John Smith the name of Plymouth, the beautiful
+port in Devonshire from which the Mayflower had sailed. [Sidenote:
+Founding of Plymouth]
+
+There was not much to remind them of home in the snow-covered coast on
+which they landed. They had hoped to get their rude houses built before
+the winter should set in, but the many delays and mishaps had served to
+bring them ashore in the coldest season. When the long winter came to
+an end, fifty-one of the hundred Pilgrims had died,--a mortality even
+greater than that before which the Popham colony had succumbed. But
+Brewster spoke truth when he said, "It is not with us as with men whom
+small things can discourage or small discontentments cause to wish
+themselves at home again." At one time the living were scarcely able to
+bury the dead; only Brewster, Standish, and five other hardy ones were
+well enough to get about. At first they were crowded under a single
+roof, and as glimpses were caught of dusky savages skulking among the
+trees, a platform was built on the nearest hill and a few cannon were
+placed there in such wise as to command the neighbouring valleys and
+plains. By the end of the first summer the platform had grown to a
+fortress, down from which to the harbour led a village street with seven
+houses finished and others going up. Twenty-six acres had been cleared,
+and a plentiful harvest gathered in; venison, wild fowl, and fish were
+easy to obtain. When provisions and fuel had been laid in for the
+ensuing winter, Governor Bradford appointed a day of Thanksgiving.
+Town-meetings had already been held, and a few laws passed. The history
+of New England had begun.
+
+This had evidently been a busy summer for the forty-nine survivors.
+On the 9th of November, the anniversary of the day on which they had
+sighted land, a ship was descried in the offing. She was the Fortune,
+bringing some fifty more of the Leyden company. It was a welcome
+reinforcement, but it diminished the rations of food that could be
+served during the winter, for the Fortune was not well supplied. When
+she set sail for England, she carried a little cargo of beaver-skins and
+choice wood for wainscoting to the value of L500 sterling, as a first
+instalment of the sum due to the merchant adventurers. But this cargo
+never reached England, for the Fortune was overhauled by a French
+cruiser and robbed of everything worth carrying away.
+
+For two years more it was an anxious and difficult time for the new
+colony. By 1624 its success may be said to have become assured. That the
+Indians in the neighbourhood had not taken advantage of the distress of
+the settlers in that first winter, and massacred every one of them, was
+due to a remarkable circumstance. Early in 1617 a frightful pestilence
+had swept over New England and slain, it is thought, more than half the
+Indian population between the Penobscot river and Narragansett bay. Many
+of the Indians were inclined to attribute this calamity to the murder of
+two or three white fishermen the year before. They had not got over the
+superstitious dread with which the first sight of white men had inspired
+them, and now they believed that the strangers held the demon of the
+plague at their disposal and had let him loose upon the red men in
+revenge for the murders they had committed. This wholesome delusion
+kept their tomahawks quiet for a while. When they saw the Englishmen
+establishing themselves at Plymouth, they at first held a powwow in
+the forest, at which the new-comers were cursed with all the elaborate
+ingenuity that the sorcery of the medicine-men could summon for so
+momentous an occasion; but it was deemed best to refrain from merely
+human methods of attack. It was not until the end of the first winter
+that any of them mustered courage to visit the palefaces. Then an Indian
+named Samoset, who had learned a little English from fishermen and for
+his own part was inclined to be friendly, came one day into the
+village with words of welcome. He was so kindly treated that presently
+Massasoit, principal sachem of the Wampanoags, who dwelt between
+Narragansett and Cape Cod bays, came with a score of painted and
+feathered warriors and squatting on a green rug and cushions in the
+governor's log-house smoked the pipe of peace, while Standish with
+half-a-dozen musketeers stood quietly by. An offensive and defensive
+alliance was then and there made between King Massasoit and King James,
+and the treaty was faithfully kept for half a century. Some time
+afterward, when Massasoit had fallen sick and lay at death's door, his
+life was saved by Edward Winslow, who came to his wigwam and skilfully
+nursed him. Henceforth the Wampanoag thought well of the Pilgrim. The
+powerful Narragansetts, who dwelt on the farther side of the bay, felt
+differently, and thought it worth while to try the effect of a threat.
+A little while after the Fortune had brought its reinforcement, the
+Narragansett sachem Canonicus sent a messenger to Plymouth with a bundle
+of newly-made arrows wrapped in a snake-skin. The messenger threw it
+in at the governor's door and made off with unseemly haste. Bradford
+understood this as a challenge, and in this he was confirmed by a
+friendly Wampanoag. The Narragansetts could muster 2000 warriors, for
+whom forty or fifty Englishmen, even with firearms, were hardly a fair
+match; but it would not do to show fear. Bradford stuffed the snake-skin
+with powder and bullets, and sent it back to Canonicus, telling him that
+if he wanted war he might come whenever he liked and get his fill of it.
+When the sachem saw what the skin contained, he was afraid to touch
+it or have it about, and medicine-men, handling it no doubt gingerly
+enough, carried it out of his territory. [Sidenote: Why the colony was
+not attacked by the Indians]
+
+It was a fortunate miscalculation that brought the Pilgrims to New
+England. Had they ventured upon the lands between the Hudson and the
+Delaware, they would probably have fared worse. They would soon have
+come into collision with the Dutch, and not far from that neighbourhood
+dwelt the Susquehannocks, at that time one of the most powerful and
+ferocious tribes on the continent. For the present the new-comers were
+less likely to be molested in the Wampanoag country than anywhere else.
+In the course of the year 1621 they obtained their grant from the
+Plymouth Company. This grant was not made to them directly but to
+the joint-stock company of merchant adventurers with whom they were
+associated. But the alliance between the Pilgrims and these London
+merchants was not altogether comfortable; there was too much divergence
+between their aims. In 1627 the settlers, wishing to be entirely
+independent, bought up all the stock and paid for it by instalments
+from the fruits of their labour. By 1633 they had paid every penny, and
+become the undisputed owners of the country they had occupied.
+
+Such was the humble beginning of that great Puritan exodus from England
+to America which had so much to do with founding and peopling the United
+States. These Pilgrims of the Mayflower were but the pioneers of a
+mighty host. Historically their enterprise is interesting not so much
+for what it achieved as for what it suggested. Of itself the Plymouth
+colony could hardly have become a wealthy and powerful state. Its growth
+was extremely slow. After ten years its numbers were but three hundred.
+In 1643, when the exodus had come to an end, and the New England
+Confederacy was formed, the population of Plymouth was but three
+thousand. In an established community, indeed, such a rate of increase
+would be rapid, but it was not sufficient to raise in New England a
+power which could overcome Indians and Dutchmen and Frenchmen, and
+assert its will in opposition to the crown. It is when we view the
+founding of Plymouth in relation to what came afterward, that it assumes
+the importance which belongs to the beginning of a new era.
+
+We have thus seen how it was that the political aspirations of James I.
+toward absolute sovereignty resulted in the beginnings of the Puritan
+exodus to America. In the next chapter we shall see how the still more
+arbitrary policy of his ill-fated son all at once gave new dimensions to
+that exodus and resulted in the speedy planting of a high-spirited and
+powerful New England.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE PLANTING OF NEW ENGLAND.
+
+
+When Captain George Weymouth in the summer of 1605 sailed into the
+harbour of Plymouth in Devonshire, with his five kidnapped savages and
+his glowing accounts of the country since known as New England, the
+garrison of that fortified seaport was commanded by Sir Ferdinando
+Gorges. The Christian name of this person now strikes us as rather odd,
+but in those days it was not so uncommon in England, and it does not
+necessarily indicate a Spanish or Italian ancestry for its bearer.
+Gorges was a man of considerable ability, but not of high character. On
+the downfall of his old patron the Earl of Essex he had contrived to
+save his own fortunes by a course of treachery and ingratitude. He had
+served in the Dutch war against Spain, and since 1596 had been military
+governor of Plymouth. The sight of Weymouth's Indians and the recital of
+his explorations awakened the interest of Gorges in the colonization of
+North America. He became one of the most active members of the Plymouth,
+or North Virginia, Company established in the following year. It was he
+who took the leading part in fitting out the two ships with which John
+Smith started on his unsuccessful expedition in 1615. In the following
+years he continued to send out voyages of exploration, became largely
+interested in the fisheries, and at length in 1620 succeeded in
+obtaining a new patent for the Plymouth Company, by which it was made
+independent of the London Company, its old yoke-fellow and rival. This
+new document created a corporation of forty patentees who, sitting in
+council as directors of their enterprise, were known as the Council for
+New England. The president of this council was King James's unpopular
+favourite the Duke of Buckingham, and its most prominent members
+were the earls of Pembroke and Lenox, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, and
+Shakespeare's friend the Earl of Southampton. This council was empowered
+to legislate for its American territory, to exercise martial law there
+and expel all intruders, and to exercise a monopoly of trade within the
+limits of the patent. Such extensive powers, entrusted to a company of
+which Buckingham was the head, excited popular indignation, and in the
+great struggle against monopolies which was then going on, the Plymouth
+Company did not fail to serve as a target for attacks. It started,
+however, with too little capital to enter upon schemes involving
+immediate outlay, and began almost from the first to seek to increase
+its income by letting or selling portions of its territory, which
+extended from the latitude of Philadelphia to that of Quebec, thus
+encroaching upon regions where Holland and France were already gaining
+a foothold. It was from this company that the merchant adventurers
+associated with the Mayflower Pilgrims obtained their new patent in
+the summer of 1621, and for the next fifteen years all settlers in New
+England based their claims to the soil upon territorial rights conveyed
+to them by the Plymouth Company. The grants, however, were often
+ignorantly and sometimes unscrupulously made, and their limits were so
+ill-defined that much quarrelling ensued. [Sidenote: Sir Ferdinando
+Gorges, and the Council for New England]
+
+During the years immediately following the voyage of the Mayflower,
+several attempts at settlement were made about the shores of
+Massachusetts bay. One of the merchant adventurers, Thomas Weston, took
+it into his head in 1622 to separate from his partners and send out a
+colony of seventy men on his own account. These men made a settlement
+at Wessagusset, some twenty-five miles north of Plymouth. They were a
+disorderly, thriftless rabble, picked up from the London streets, and
+soon got into trouble with the Indians; after a year they were glad
+to get back to England as best they could, and in this the Plymouth
+settlers willingly aided them. In June of that same year 1622 there
+arrived on the scene a picturesque but ill understood personage, Thomas
+Morton, "of Clifford's Inn, Gent.," as he tells on the title-page of
+his quaint and delightful book, the "New English Canaan." Bradford
+disparagingly says that he "had been a kind of petie-fogger of
+Furnifell's Inn"; but the churchman Samuel Maverick declares that he
+was a "gentleman of good qualitie." He was an agent of Sir Ferdinando
+Gorges, and came with some thirty followers to make the beginnings of
+a royalist and Episcopal settlement in the Massachusetts bay. He was
+naturally regarded with ill favour by the Pilgrims as well as by the
+later Puritan settlers, and their accounts of him will probably
+bear taking with a grain or two of salt. [Sidenote: Wessagusset and
+Merrymount]
+
+In 1625 there came one Captain Wollaston, with a gang of indented white
+servants, and established himself on the site of the present town
+of Quincy. Finding this system of industry ill suited to northern
+agriculture, he carried most of his men off to Virginia, where he sold
+them. Morton took possession of the site of the settlement, which he
+called Merrymount. There, according to Bradford, he set up a "schoole of
+athisme," and his men did quaff strong waters and comport themselves "as
+if they had anew revived and celebrated the feasts of ye Roman Goddes
+Flora, or the beastly practices of ye madd Bachanalians." Charges of
+atheism have been freely hurled about in all ages. In Morton's case the
+accusation seems to have been based upon the fact that he used the Book
+of Common Prayer. His men so far maintained the ancient customs of
+merry England as to plant a Maypole eighty feet high, about which they
+frolicked with the redskins, while furthermore they taught them the
+use of firearms and sold them muskets and rum. This was positively
+dangerous, and in the summer of 1628 the settlers at Merrymount were
+dispersed by Miles Standish. Morton was sent to England, but returned
+the next year, and presently again repaired to Merrymount.
+
+By this time other settlements were dotted about the coast. There were
+a few scattered cottages or cabins at Nantasket and at the mouth of the
+Piscataqua, while Samuel Maverick had fortified himself on Noddle's
+Island, and William Blackstone already lived upon the Shawmut peninsula,
+since called Boston. These two gentlemen were no friends to the
+Puritans; they were churchmen and representatives of Sir Ferdinando
+Gorges.
+
+The case was very different with another of these earliest settlements,
+which deserves especial mention as coming directly in the line of
+causation which led to the founding of Massachusetts by Puritans. For
+some years past the Dorchester adventurers--a small company of merchants
+in the shire town of Dorset--had been sending vessels to catch fish off
+the New England coast. In 1623 these men conceived the idea of planting
+a small village as a fishing station, and setting up a church and
+preacher therein, for the spiritual solace of the fishermen and sailors.
+In pursuance of this scheme a small party occupied Cape Ann, where after
+two years they got into trouble with the men of Plymouth. Several grants
+and assignments had made it doubtful where the ownership lay, and
+although this place was not near their own town, the men of Plymouth
+claimed it. The dispute was amicably arranged by Roger Conant, an
+independent settler who had withdrawn from Plymouth because he did not
+fully sympathize with the Separatist views of the people there. The
+next step was for the Dorchester adventurers to appoint Conant as their
+manager, and the next was for them to abandon their enterprise, dissolve
+their partnership, and leave the remnant of the little colony to shift
+for itself. The settlers retained their tools and cattle, and Conant
+found for them a new and safer situation at Naumkeag, on the site of the
+present Salem. So far little seemed to have been accomplished; one more
+seemed added to the list of failures.
+
+But the excellent John White, the Puritan rector of Trinity Church in
+Dorchester, had meditated carefully about these things. He saw that
+many attempts at colonization had failed because they made use of unfit
+instruments, "a multitude of rude ungovernable persons, the very scum of
+the land." So Virginia had failed in its first years, and only succeeded
+when settled by worthy and industrious people under a strong government.
+The example of Plymouth, as contrasted with Wessagusset, taught a
+similar lesson. We desire, said White, "to raise a bulwark against the
+kingdom of Antichrist." Learn wisdom, my countrymen, from the ruin which
+has befallen the Protestants at Rochelle and in the Palatinate; learn
+"to avoid the plague while it is foreseen, and not to tarry as they did
+till it overtook them." The Puritan party in England was numerous and
+powerful, but the day of strife was not far off and none might foretell
+its issue. Clearly it was well to establish a strong and secure retreat
+in the New World, in case of disaster in the Old. What had been done at
+Plymouth by a few men of humble means might be done on a much greater
+scale by an association of leading Puritans, including men of wealth and
+wide social influence. Such arguments were urged in timely pamphlets, of
+one of which White is supposed to have been the author. The matter was
+discussed in London, and inquiry was made whether fit men could be found
+"to engage their persons in the voyage." "It fell out that among others
+they lighted at last on Master Endicott, a man well known to divers
+persons of good note, who manifested much willingness to accept of the
+offer as soon as it was tendered." All were thereby much encouraged, the
+schemes of White took definite shape, and on the 19th of March, 1628, a
+tract of land was obtained from the Council for New England, consisting
+of all the territory included between three miles north of the Merrimack
+and three miles south of the Charles in one direction, and the Atlantic
+and Pacific Oceans in the other. [Sidenote: John White and his noble
+scheme]
+
+This liberal grant was made at a time when people still supposed the
+Pacific coast to be not far west of Henry Hudson's river. The territory
+was granted to an association of six gentlemen, only one of whom--John
+Endicott--figures conspicuously in the history of New England. The
+grant was made in the usual reckless style, and conflicted with various
+patents which had been issued before. In 1622 Gorges and John Mason
+had obtained a grant of all the land between the rivers Kennebec
+and Merrimack, and the new grant encroached somewhat upon this. The
+difficulty seems to have been temporarily adjusted by some sort of
+compromise which restricted the new grant to the Merrimack, for in 1629
+we find Mason's title confirmed to the region between that river and the
+Piscataqua, while later on Gorges appears as proprietor of the territory
+between the Piscataqua and the Kennebec. A more serious difficulty was
+the claim of Robert Gorges, son of Sir Ferdinando. That young man had in
+1623 obtained a grant of some 300 square miles in Massachusetts, and had
+gone to look after it, but had soon returned discouraged to England
+and shortly afterward died. But his claim devolved upon his surviving
+brother, John Gorges, and Sir Ferdinando, in consenting to the grant to
+Endicott and his friends, expressly reserved the rights of his sons. No
+such reservation, however, was mentioned in the Massachusetts charter,
+and the colonists never paid the slightest heed to it. In these
+conflicting claims were sown seeds of trouble which bore fruit for more
+than half a century. In such cases actual possession is apt to make nine
+points in the law, and accordingly Endicott was sent over, as soon as
+possible, with sixty persons, to reinforce the party at Naumkeag and
+supersede Conant as its leader. On Endicott's arrival in September,
+1628, the settlers were at first inclined to dispute his authority, but
+they were soon conciliated, and in token of this amicable adjustment the
+place was called by the Hebrew name of Salem, or "peace." [Sidenote:
+Conflicting grants sow seeds of trouble] [Sidenote: John Endicot and the
+founding of Salem]
+
+Meanwhile Mr. White and the partners in England were pushing things
+vigorously. Their scheme took a wider scope. They were determined to
+establish something more than a trading company. From Charles I. it
+was sometimes easy to get promises because he felt himself under no
+obligation to keep them. In March, 1629, a royal charter was granted,
+creating a corporation, under the legal style of the Governor and
+Company of Massachusetts Bay in New England. The affairs of this
+corporate body were to be managed by a governor, deputy-governor, and a
+council of eighteen assistants, to be elected annually by the company.
+They were empowered to make such laws as they liked for their settlers,
+provided they did not contravene the laws of England,--a proviso
+susceptible of much latitude of interpretation. The place where the
+company was to hold its meetings was not mentioned in the charter. The
+law-officers of the crown at first tried to insert a condition that
+the government must reside in England, but the grantees with skilful
+argument succeeding in preventing this. Nothing was said in the charter
+about religious liberty, for a twofold reason: the crown would not have
+granted it, and it was not what the grantees wanted; such a provision
+would have been liable to hamper them seriously in carrying out their
+scheme. They preferred to keep in their own hands the question as to how
+much or how little religious liberty they should claim or allow. Six
+small ships were presently fitted out, and upon them were embarked 300
+men, 80 women, and 26 children, with 140 head of cattle, 40 goats, and
+abundance of arms, ammunition, and tools. The principal leader of this
+company was Francis Higginson, of St. John's College, Cambridge, rector
+of a church in Leicestershire, who had been deprived of his living for
+non-conformity. With him were associated two other ministers, also
+graduates of Cambridge. All three were members of the council. By the
+arrival of this company at Salem, Endicott now became governor of a
+colony larger than any yet started in New England,--larger than Plymouth
+after its growth of nearly nine years. [Sidenote: The Company of
+Massachusetts Bay]
+
+The time was at length ripe for that great Puritan exodus of which the
+voyage of the Mayflower had been the premonitory symptom. The grand
+crisis for the Puritans had come, the moment when decisive action could
+no longer be deferred. It was not by accident that the rapid development
+of John White's enterprise into the Company of Massachusetts Bay
+coincided exactly with the first four years of the reign of Charles I.
+They were years well fitted to bring such a scheme to quick maturity.
+The character of Charles was such as to exacerbate the evils of his
+father's reign. James could leave some things alone in the comfortable
+hope that all would by and by come out right, but Charles was not
+satisfied without meddling everywhere. Both father and son cherished
+some good intentions; both were sincere believers in their narrow theory
+of kingcraft. For wrong-headed obstinacy, utter want of tact, and
+bottomless perfidy, there was little to choose between them. The
+humorous epitaph of the grandson "whose word no man relies on" might
+have served for them all. But of this unhappy family Charles I. was
+eminently the dreamer. He lived in a world of his own, and was slow
+in rendering thought into action; and this made him rely upon the
+quick-witted but unwise and unscrupulous Buckingham, [5] who was silly
+enough to make feeble attempts at unpopular warfare without consulting
+Parliament. During each of Charles's first four years there was an
+angry session of Parliament, in which, through the unwillingness of the
+popular leaders to resort to violence, the king's policy seemed able
+to hold its ground. Despite all protest the king persisted in levying
+strange taxes and was to some extent able to collect them. Men who
+refused to pay enforced loans were thrown into jail and the writ of
+_habeas corpus_ was denied them. Meanwhile the treatment of Puritans
+became more and more vexatious. It was clear enough that Charles meant
+to become an absolute monarch, like Louis XIII., but Parliament began
+by throwing all the blame upon the unpopular minister and seeking to
+impeach him.
+
+On the 5th of June, 1628, the House of Commons presented the most
+extraordinary spectacle, perhaps in all its history. The famous Petition
+of Right had been Passed by both Houses, and the royal answer had just
+been received. Its tone was that of gracious assent, but it omitted the
+necessary legal formalities, and the Commons well knew what this meant.
+They were to be tricked with sweet words, and the petition was not to
+acquire the force of a statute. How was it possible to deal with such a
+slippery creature? There was but one way of saving the dignity of the
+throne without sacrificing the liberty of the people, and that was to
+hold the king's ministers responsible to Parliament, in anticipation
+of modern methods. It was accordingly proposed to impeach the Duke
+of Buckingham before the House of Lords. The Speaker now "brought an
+imperious message from the king, ... warning them ... that he would not
+tolerate any aspersion upon his ministers." Nothing daunted by this,
+Sir John Eliot arose to lead the debate, when the Speaker called him to
+order in view of the king's message. "Amid a deadly stillness" Eliot
+sat down and burst into tears. For a moment the House was overcome
+with despair. Deprived of all constitutional methods of redress, they
+suddenly saw yawning before them the direful alternative--slavery or
+civil war. Since the day of Bosworth a hundred and fifty years had
+passed without fighting worthy of mention on English soil, such an era
+of peace as had hardly ever before been seen on the earth; now half the
+nation was to be pitted against the other half, families were to be
+divided against themselves, as in the dreadful days of the Roses, and
+with what consequences no one could foresee. "Let us sit in silence,"
+quoth Sir Dudley Digges, "we are miserable, we know not what to do!"
+Nay, cried Sir Nathaniel Rich, "we _must_ now speak, or forever hold our
+peace." Then did grim Mr. Prynne and Sir Edward Coke mingle their words
+with sobs, while there were few dry eyes in the House. Presently they
+found their voices, and used them in a way that wrung from the startled
+king his formal assent to the Petition of Right. [Sidenote: Remarkable
+scene in the House of Commons]
+
+There is something strangely pathetic and historically significant [6]
+in the emotion of these stern, fearless men. The scene was no less
+striking on the 2d of the following March, when, "amid the cries and
+entreaties of the Speaker held down in his chair by force," while the
+Usher of the Black Rod was knocking loudly at the bolted door, and the
+tramp of the king's soldiers was heard in the courtyard, Eliot's clear
+voice rang out the defiance that whoever advised the levy of tonnage and
+poundage without a grant from Parliament, or whoever voluntarily paid
+those duties, was to be counted an enemy to the kingdom and a betrayer
+of its liberties. As shouts of "Aye, aye," resounded on every side, "the
+doors were flung open, and the members poured forth in a throng." The
+noble Eliot went to end his days in the Tower, and for eleven years no
+Parliament sat again in England. [7]
+
+It was in one and the same week that Charles I. thus began his
+experiment of governing without a Parliament, and that he granted a
+charter to the Company of Massachusetts Bay. He was very far, as we
+shall see, from realizing the import of what he was doing. To the
+Puritan leaders it was evident that a great struggle was at hand.
+Affairs at home might well seem desperate, and the news from abroad was
+not encouraging. It was only four months since the surrender of Rochelle
+had ended the existence of the Huguenots as an armed political party.
+They had now sunk into the melancholy condition of a tolerated sect
+which may at any moment cease to be tolerated. In Germany the
+terrible Thirty Years War had just reached the darkest moment for
+the Protestants. Fifteen months were yet to pass before the immortal
+Gustavus was to cross the Baltic and give to the sorely harassed cause
+of liberty a fresh lease of life. The news of the cruel Edict of
+Restitution in this same fateful month of March, 1629, could not but
+give the English Puritans great concern. Everywhere in Europe the
+champions of human freedom seemed worsted. They might well think that
+never had the prospect looked so dismal; and never before, as never
+since, did the venture of a wholesale migration to the New World so
+strongly recommend itself as the only feasible escape from a situation
+that was fast becoming intolerable. Such were the anxious thoughts of
+the leading Puritans in the spring of 1629, and in face of so grave a
+problem different minds came naturally to different conclusions. Some
+were for staying in England to fight it out to the bitter end; some were
+for crossing the ocean to create a new England in the wilderness. Either
+task was arduous enough, and not to be achieved without steadfast and
+sober heroism. [Sidenote: Desperate nature of the crisis]
+
+On the 26th of August twelve gentlemen, among the most eminent in the
+Puritan party, held a meeting at Cambridge, and resolved to lead a
+migration to New England, provided the charter of the Massachusetts Bay
+Company and the government established under it could be transferred to
+that country. On examination it appeared that no legal obstacle stood in
+the way. Accordingly such of the old officers as did not wish to take
+part in the emigration resigned their places, which were forthwith
+filled by these new leaders. For governor the choice fell upon John
+Winthrop, a wealthy gentleman from Groton in Suffolk, who was henceforth
+to occupy the foremost place among the founders of New England. Winthrop
+was at this time forty-one years of age, having been born in the
+memorable year of the Armada. He was a man of remarkable strength and
+beauty of character, grave and modest, intelligent and scholarlike,
+intensely religious and endowed with a moral sensitiveness that was
+almost morbid, yet liberal withal in his opinions and charitable in
+disposition. When his life shall have been adequately written, as it
+never has been, he will be recognized as one of the very noblest figures
+in American history. From early youth he had that same power of
+winning confidence and commanding respect for which Washington was so
+remarkable; and when he was selected as the Moses of the great Puritan
+exodus, there was a wide-spread feeling that extraordinary results were
+likely to come of such an enterprise.
+
+In marked contrast to Winthrop stands the figure of the man associated
+with him as deputy-governor. Thomas Dudley came of an ancient family,
+the history of which, alike in the old and in the new England, has not
+been altogether creditable. He represented the elder branch of that
+Norman family, to the younger branch of which belonged the unfortunate
+husband of Lady Jane Grey and the unscrupulous husband of Amy Robsart.
+There was, however, very little likeness to Elizabeth's gay lover
+in grim Thomas Dudley. His Puritanism was bleak and stern, and for
+Christian charity he was not eminent. He had a foible for making verses,
+and at his death there was found in his pocket a poem of his, containing
+a quatrain wherein the intolerance of that age is neatly summed up:--
+
+"Let men of God in courts and churches watch O'er such as do a
+Toleration hatch, Lest that ill egg bring forth a cockatrice To poison
+all with heresy and vice."
+
+Such was the spirit of most of the Puritans of that day, but in the
+manifestation of it there were great differences, and here was the
+strong contrast between Dudley and Winthrop,--a contrast which shows
+itself in their portraits. In that of Dudley we see the typical
+narrow-minded, strait-laced Calvinist for whom it is so much easier to
+entertain respect than affection. In that of Winthrop we see a face
+expressive of what was finest in the age of Elizabeth,--the face of a
+spiritual brother of Raleigh and Bacon.
+
+The accession of two men so important as Winthrop and Dudley served to
+bring matters speedily to a crisis. Their embarkation in April, 1630,
+was the signal for a general movement on the part of the English
+Puritans. Before Christmas of that year seventeen ships had come to
+New England, bringing more than 1000 passengers. This huge wave of
+immigration quite overwhelmed and bore away the few links of possession
+by which Gorges had thus far kept his hold upon the country. In January,
+1629, John Gorges had tried to assert the validity of his late brother's
+claim by executing conveyances covering portions of it. One of these
+was to John Oldham, a man who had been harshly treated at Plymouth, and
+might be supposed very ready to defend his rights against settlers
+of the Puritan company. Gorges further maintained that he retained
+possession of the country through the presence of his brother's tenants,
+Blackstone, Maverick, Walford, and others on the shores of the bay. In
+June, 1629, Endicott had responded by sending forward some fifty persons
+from Salem to begin the settlement of Charlestown. Shortly before
+Winthrop's departure from England, Gorges had sent that singular
+personage Sir Christopher Gardiner to look after his interests in the
+New World, and there he was presently found established near the mouth
+of the Neponset river, in company with "a comly yonge woman whom he
+caled his cousin." But these few claimants were now at once lost in the
+human tide which poured over Charlestown, Boston, Newtown, Watertown,
+Roxbury, and Dorchester. The settlement at Merrymount was again
+dispersed, and Morton sent back to London; Gardiner fled to the coast
+of Maine and thence sailed for England in 1632. The Puritans had indeed
+occupied the country in force.
+
+Here on the very threshold we are confronted by facts which show that
+not a mere colonial plantation, but a definite and organized state was
+in process of formation. The emigration was not like that of Jamestown
+or of Plymouth. It sufficed at once to make the beginnings of half a
+dozen towns, and the question as to self-government immediately sprang
+up. Early in 1631 a tax of L60 was assessed upon the settlements, in
+order to pay for building frontier fortifications at Newtown. This
+incident was in itself of small dimensions, as incidents in newly
+founded states are apt to be. But in its historic import it may serve
+to connect the England of John Hampden with the New England of Samuel
+Adams. The inhabitants of Watertown at first declined to pay this tax,
+which was assessed by the Board of Assistants, on the ground that
+English freemen cannot rightfully be taxed save by their own consent.
+This protest led to a change in the constitution of the infant colony,
+and here, at once, we are introduced to the beginnings of American
+constitutional history. At first it was thought that public business
+could be transacted by a primary assembly of all the freemen in the
+colony meeting four times in the year; but the number of freemen
+increased so fast that this was almost at once (in October, 1630) found
+to be impracticable. The right of choosing the governor and making the
+laws was then left to the Board of Assistants; and in May, 1631, it was
+further decided that the assistants need not be chosen afresh every
+year, but might keep their seats during good behaviour or until ousted
+by special vote of the freemen. If the settlers of Massachusetts had
+been ancient Greeks or Romans, this would have been about as far as they
+could go in the matter; the choice would have been between a primary
+assembly and an assembly of notables. It is curious to see Englishmen
+passing from one of these alternatives to the other. But it was only for
+a moment. The protest of the Watertown men came in time to check these
+proceedings, which began to have a decidedly oligarchical look. To
+settle the immediate question of the tax, two deputies were sent from
+each settlement to advise with the Board of Assistants; while the power
+of choosing each year the governor and assistants was resumed by the
+freemen. Two years later, in order to reserve to the freemen the power
+of making laws without interfering too much with the ordinary business
+of life, the colonists fell back upon the old English rural plan of
+electing deputies or representatives to a general court. [Sidenote: The
+question as to self-government raised at Watertown]
+
+At first the deputies sat in the same chamber with the assistants, but
+at length in 1644 they were formed into a second chamber with increased
+powers, and the way in which this important constitutional change came
+about is worth remembering, as an illustration of the smallness of the
+state which so soon was to play a great part in history. As Winthrop
+puts it, "there fell out a great business upon a very small occasion."
+To a certain Captain Keayne, of Boston, a rich man deemed to be hard and
+overbearing toward the poor, there was brought a stray pig, whereof he
+gave due public notice through the town-crier, yet none came to claim it
+till after he had killed a pig of his own which he kept in the same stye
+with the stray. A year having passed by, a poor woman named Sherman came
+to see the stray and to decide if it were one that she had lost. Not
+recognizing it as hers, she forthwith laid claim to the slaughtered pig.
+The case was brought before the elders of the church of Boston, who
+decided that the woman was mistaken. Mrs. Sherman then accused the
+captain of theft, and brought the case before a jury, which exonerated
+the defendant with L3 costs. The captain then sued Mrs. Sherman for
+defamation of character and got a verdict for L40 damages, a round
+sum indeed to assess upon the poor woman. But long before this it had
+appeared that she had many partisans and supporters; it had become a
+political question, in which the popular protest against aristocracy was
+implicated. Not yet browbeaten, the warlike Mrs. Sherman appealed to the
+General Court. The length of the hearing shows the importance which
+was attached to the case. After seven days of discussion, the vote
+was taken. Seven assistants and eight deputies approved the former
+decisions, two assistants and fifteen deputies condemned them, while
+seven deputies refrained from voting. In other words, Captain Keayne has
+a decided majority among the more aristocratic assistants, while Mrs.
+Sherman seemed to prevail with the more democratic deputies. Regarding
+the result as the vote of a single body, the woman had a plurality of
+two; regarding it as the vote of a double body, her cause had prevailed
+in the lower house, but was lost by the veto of the upper. No decision
+was reached at the time, but after a year of discussion the legislature
+was permanently separated into two houses, each with a veto power upon
+the other; and this was felt to be a victory for the assistants. As for
+the ecclesiastical polity of the new colony, it had begun to take
+shape immediately upon the arrival of Endicott's party at Salem. The
+clergymen, Samuel Skelton and Francis Higginson, consecrated each
+other, and a church covenant and confession of faith were drawn up by
+Higginson. Thirty persons joining in this covenant constituted the first
+church in the colony; and several brethren appointed by this church
+proceeded formally to ordain the two ministers by the laying on of
+hands. In such simple wise was the first Congregational church in
+Massachusetts founded. The simple fact of removal from England converted
+all the Puritan emigrants into Separatists, as Robinson had already
+predicted. Some, however, were not yet quite prepared for so radical a
+measure. These proceedings gave umbrage to two of the Salem party, who
+attempted forthwith to set up a separate church in conformity with
+episcopal models. A very important question was thus raised at once, but
+it was not allowed to disturb the peace of the colony. Endicott was a
+man of summary methods. He immediately sent the two malcontents back to
+England; and thus the colonial church not only seceded from the national
+establishment, but the principle was virtually laid down that the
+Episcopal form of worship would not be tolerated in the colony. For the
+present such a step was to be regarded as a measure of self-defence on
+the part of the colonists. Episcopacy to them meant actual and practical
+tyranny--the very thing they had crossed the ocean expressly to get
+away from--and it was hardly to be supposed that they would encourage
+the growth of it in their new home. One or two surpliced priests,
+conducting worship in accordance with the Book of Common Prayer, might
+in themselves be excellent members of society; but behind the surpliced
+priest the colonist saw the intolerance of Laud and the despotism of
+the Court of High Commission. In 1631 a still more searching measure
+of self-protection was adopted. It was decided that "no man shall be
+admitted to the freedom of this body politic, but such as are members of
+some of the churches within the limits of the same." Into the merits of
+this measure as illustrating the theocratic ideal of society which the
+Puritans sought to realize in New England, we shall inquire hereafter.
+At present we must note that, as a measure of self-protection, this
+decree was intended to keep out of the new community all emissaries of
+Strafford and Laud, as well as such persons as Morton and Gardiner and
+other agents of Sir Ferdinando Gorges.
+
+By the year 1634 the scheme of the Massachusetts Company had so far
+prospered that nearly 4000 Englishmen had come over, and some twenty
+villages on or near the shores of the bay had been founded. The building
+of permanent houses, roads, fences, and bridges had begun to go on quite
+briskly; farms were beginning to yield a return for the labour of the
+husbandman; lumber, furs, and salted fish were beginning to be sent to
+England in exchange for manufactured articles; 4000 goats and 1500 head
+of cattle grazed in the pastures, and swine innumerable rooted in the
+clearings and helped to make ready the land for the ploughman. Political
+meetings were held, justice was administered by magistrates after old
+English precedents, and church services were performed by a score of
+clergymen, nearly all graduates of Cambridge, though one or two had
+their degrees from Oxford, and nearly all of whom had held livings in
+the Church of England. The most distinguished of these clergymen, John
+Cotton, in his younger days a Fellow and Tutor of Emmanuel College, had
+for more than twenty years been rector of St. Botolph's, when he left
+the most magnificent parish church in England to hold service in the
+first rude meeting-house of the new Boston. From Emmanuel College came
+also Thomas Hooker and John Harvard. Besides these clergymen, so many of
+the leading persons concerned in the emigration were university men that
+it was not long before a university began to seem indispensable to
+the colony. In 1636 the General Court appropriated L400 toward the
+establishment of a college at Newtown. In 1638 John Harvard, dying
+childless, bequeathed his library and the half of his estate to the new
+college, which the Court forthwith ordered to be called by his name;
+while in honour of the mother university the name of the town was
+changed to Cambridge.
+
+[Illustration: Founding of Harvard College]
+
+It has been said that the assembly which decreed the establishment
+of Harvard College was "the first body in which the people, by their
+representatives, ever gave their own money to found a place of
+education." [8] The act was a memorable one if we have regard to all the
+circumstances of the year in which it was done. On every side danger was
+in the air. Threatened at once with an Indian war, with the enmity of
+the home government, and with grave dissensions among themselves, the
+year 1636 was a trying one indeed for the little community of Puritans,
+and their founding a college by public taxation just at this time is a
+striking illustration of their unalterable purpose to realize, in this
+new home, their ideal of an educated Christian society. [Sidenote:
+Threefold danger in the year 1636]
+
+That the government of Charles I. should view with a hostile eye the
+growth of a Puritan state in New England is not at all surprising. (1.
+From the king, who prepares to attack the infant colony but is fueled by
+dissensions at home.) The only fit ground for wonder would seem to be
+that Charles should have been willing at the outset to grant a charter
+to the able and influential Puritans who organized the Company of
+Massachusetts Bay. Probably, however, the king thought at first that it
+would relieve him at home if a few dozen of the Puritan leaders could
+be allowed to concentrate their minds upon a project of colonization in
+America. It might divert attention for a moment from his own despotic
+schemes. Very likely the scheme would prove a failure and the
+Massachusetts colony incur a fate like that of Roanoke Island; and at
+all events the wealth of the Puritans might better be sunk in a remote
+and perilous enterprise than employed at home in organizing resistance
+to the crown. Such, very likely, may have been the king's motive in
+granting the Massachusetts charter two days after turning his Parliament
+out of doors. But the events of the last half-dozen years had come to
+present the case in a new light. The young colony was not languishing.
+It was full of sturdy life; it had wrought mischief to the schemes of
+Gorges; and what was more, it had begun to take unheard-of liberties
+with things ecclesiastical and political. Its example was getting to be
+a dangerous one. It was evidently worth while to put a strong curb upon
+Massachusetts. Any promise made to his subjects Charles regarded as
+a promise made under duress which he was quite justified in breaking
+whenever it suited his purpose to do so. Enemies of Massachusetts were
+busy in England. Schismatics from Salem and revellers from Merrymount
+were ready with their tales of woe, and now Gorges and Mason were
+vigorously pressing their territorial claims. They bargained with
+the king. In February, 1635, the moribund Council for New England
+surrendered its charter and all its corporate rights in America, on
+condition that the king should disregard all the various grants by which
+these rights had from time to time been alienated, and should divide
+up the territory of New England in severalty among the members of the
+Council. In pursuance of this scheme Gorges and Mason, together with
+half a dozen noblemen, were allowed to parcel out New England among
+themselves as they should see fit. In this way the influence of the
+Marquis of Hamilton, with the Earls of Arundel, Surrey, Carlisle, and
+Stirling, might be actively enlisted against the Massachusetts Company.
+A writ of _quo warranto_ was brought against it; and it was proposed to
+send Sir Ferdinando to govern New England with viceregal powers like
+those afterward exercised by Andros.
+
+For a moment the danger seemed alarming; but, as Winthrop says, "the
+Lord frustrated their design." It was noted as a special providence that
+the ship in which Gorges was to sail was hardly off the stocks when it
+fell to pieces. Then the most indefatigable enemy of the colony, John
+Mason, suddenly died. The king issued his famous writ of ship-money and
+set all England by the ears; and, to crown all, the attempt to read the
+Episcopal liturgy at St. Giles's church in Edinburgh led straight to
+the Solemn League and Covenant. Amid the first mutterings of the Great
+Rebellion the proceedings against Massachusetts were dropped, and the
+unheeded colony went on thriving in its independent course. Possibly too
+some locks at Whitehall may have been turned with golden keys, [9] for
+the company was rich, and the king was ever open to such arguments. But
+when the news of his evil designs had first reached Boston the people of
+the infant colony showed no readiness to yield to intimidation. In their
+measures there was a decided smack of what was to be realized a hundred
+and forty years later. Orders were immediately issued for fortifying
+Castle Island in the harbour and the heights at Charlestown and
+Dorchester. Militia companies were put in training, and a beacon was
+set up on the highest hill in Boston, to give prompt notice to all the
+surrounding country of any approaching enemy.
+
+While the ill will of the home government thus kept the colonists in a
+state of alarm, there were causes of strife at work at their very doors,
+of which they were fain to rid themselves as soon as possible. Among all
+the Puritans who came to New England there is no more interesting figure
+than the learned, quick-witted pugnacious Welshman, Roger Williams. He
+was over-fond of logical subtleties and delighted in controversy. There
+was scarcely any subject about which he did not wrangle, from the
+sinfulness of persecution to the propriety of women wearing veils in
+church. Yet, with all this love of controversy, there has perhaps
+never lived a more gentle and kindly soul. Within five years from the
+settlement of Massachusetts this young preacher had announced the true
+principles of religious liberty with a clearness of insight quite
+remarkable in that age. Roger Williams had been aided in securing an
+education by the great lawyer Sir Edward Coke, and had lately taken his
+degree at Pembroke College, Cambridge; but the boldness with which he
+declared his opinions had aroused the hostility of Laud, and in 1631 he
+had come over to Plymouth, whence he removed two years later to Salem,
+and became pastor of the church there. The views of Williams, if
+logically carried out, involved the entire separation of church from
+state, the equal protection of all forms of religious faith, the repeal
+of all laws compelling attendance on public worship, the abolition of
+tithes and of all forced contributions to the support of religion. Such
+views are to-day quite generally adopted by the more civilized portions
+of the Protestant world; but it is needless to say that they were not
+the views of the seventeenth century, in Massachusetts or elsewhere. For
+declaring such opinions as these on the continent of Europe, anywhere
+except in Holland, a man like Williams would in that age have run great
+risk of being burned at the stake. In England, under the energetic
+misgovernment of Laud, he would very likely have had to stand in the
+pillory with his ears cropped, or perhaps, like Bunyan and Baxter, would
+have been sent to jail. In Massachusetts such views were naturally
+enough regarded as anarchical, but in Williams's case they were further
+complicated by grave political imprudence. He wrote a pamphlet in which
+he denied the right of the colonists to the lands which they held in New
+England under the king's grant. He held that the soil belonged to the
+Indians, that the settlers could only obtain a valid title to it by
+purchase from them, and that the acceptance of a patent from a mere
+intruder, like the king, was a sin requiring public repentance. This
+doctrine was sure to be regarded in England as an attack upon the king's
+supremacy over Massachusetts, and at the same time an incident occurred
+in Salem which made it all the more unfortunate. The royal colours under
+which the little companies of militia marched were emblazoned with the
+red cross of St. George. The uncompromising Endicott loathed this emblem
+as tainted with Popery, and one day he publicly defaced the flag of the
+Salem company by cutting out the cross. The enemies of Massachusetts
+misinterpreted this act as a defiance aimed at the royal authority, and
+they attributed it to the teachings of Williams. In view of the king's
+unfriendliness these were dangerous proceedings. Endicott was summoned
+before the General Court at Boston, where he was publicly reprimanded
+and declared incapable of holding office for a year. A few months
+afterward, in January, 1636, Williams was ordered by the General Court
+to come to Boston and embark in a ship that was about to set sail for
+England. But he escaped into the forest, and made his way through the
+snow to the wigwam of Massasoit. He was a rare linguist, and had learned
+to talk fluently in the language of the Indians, and now he passed the
+winter in trying to instill into their ferocious hearts something of the
+gentleness of Christianity. In the spring he was privately notified by
+Winthrop that if he were to steer his course to Narragansett bay he
+would be secure from molestation; and such was the beginning of the
+settlement of Providence. [Sidenote: From religious dissensions; Roger
+Williams]
+
+Shortly before the departure of Williams, there came to Boston one of
+the greatest Puritan statesmen of that heroic age, the younger Henry
+Vane. It is pleasant to remember that the man and Anne who did so much
+to overthrow the tyranny of Strafford, who brought the military strength
+of Scotland to the aid of the hard-pressed Parliament, who administered
+the navy with which Blake won his astonishing victories, who dared even
+withstand Cromwell at the height of his power when his measures became
+too violent,--it is pleasant to remember that this admirable man was
+once the chief magistrate of an American commonwealth. It is pleasant
+for a Harvard man to remember that as such he presided over the assembly
+that founded our first university. Thorough republican and enthusiastic
+lover of liberty, he was spiritually akin to Jefferson and to Samuel
+Adams. Like Williams he was a friend to toleration, and like Williams
+he found Massachusetts an uncomfortable home. In 1636 he was only
+twenty-four years of age, "young in years," and perhaps not yet "in
+sage counsel old." He was chosen governor for that year, and his
+administration was stormy. Among those persons who had followed Mr.
+Cotton from Lincolnshire was Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, a very bright and
+capable lady, if perhaps somewhat impulsive and indiscreet. She had
+brought over with her, says Winthrop, "two dangerous errors: first, that
+the person of the Holy Ghost dwells in a justified person; second, that
+no sanctification can help to evidence to us our justification." Into
+the merits of such abstruse doctrines it is not necessary for the
+historian to enter. One can hardly repress a smile as one reflects
+how early in the history of Boston some of its characteristic social
+features were developed. It is curious to read of lectures there in
+1636, lectures by a lady, and transcendentalist lectures withal! Never
+did lectures in Boston arouse greater excitement than Mrs. Hutchinson's.
+Many of her hearers forsook the teachings of the regular ministers, to
+follow her. [Sidenote: Henry Vane and Anne Hutchinson]
+
+She was very effectively supported by her brother-in-law, Mr.
+Wheelwright, an eloquent preacher, and for a while she seemed to be
+carrying everything before her. She won her old minister Mr. Cotton, she
+won the stout soldier Captain Underhill, she won Governor Vane himself;
+while she incurred the deadly hatred of such men as Dudley and Cotton's
+associate John Wilson. The church at Boston was divided into two hostile
+camps. The sensible Winthrop marvelled at hearing men distinguished "by
+being under a covenant of grace or a covenant of works, as in other
+countries between Protestants and Papists," and he ventured to doubt
+whether any man could really tell what the difference was. The
+theological strife went on until it threatened to breed civil
+disaffection among the followers of Mrs. Hutchinson. A peculiar
+bitterness was given to the affair, from the fact that she professed to
+be endowed with the spirit of prophecy and taught her partisans that it
+was their duty to follow the biddings of a supernatural light; and there
+was nothing which the orthodox Puritan so steadfastly abhorred as the
+anarchical pretence of living by the aid of a supernatural light. In a
+strong and complex society the teachings of Mrs. Hutchinson would have
+awakened but a languid speculative interest, or perhaps would have
+passed by unheeded. In the simple society of Massachusetts in 1636,
+physically weak and as yet struggling for very existence, the practical
+effect of such teachings may well have been deemed politically
+dangerous. When things came to such a pass that the forces of the colony
+were mustered for an Indian campaign and the men of Boston were ready to
+shirk the service because they suspected their chaplain to be "under a
+covenant of works," it was naturally thought to be high time to put Mrs.
+Hutchinson down. In the spring of 1637 Winthrop was elected governor,
+and in August Vane returned to England. His father had at that moment
+more influence with the king than any other person except Strafford,
+and the young man had indiscreetly hinted at an appeal to the home
+government for the protection of the Antinomians, as Mrs. Hutchinson's
+followers were called. But an appeal from America to England was
+something which Massachusetts would no more tolerate in the days of
+Winthrop than in the days of Hancock and Adams. Soon after Vane's
+departure, Mrs. Hutchinson and her friends were ordered to leave the
+colony. It was doubtless an odious act of persecution, yet of all
+such acts which stain the history of Massachusetts in the seventeenth
+century, it is just the one for which the plea of political necessity
+may really be to some extent accepted.
+
+We now begin to see how the spreading of the New England colonization,
+and the founding of distinct communities, was hastened by these
+differences of opinion on theological questions or on questions
+concerning the relations between church and state. Of Mrs. Hutchinson's
+friends and adherents, some went northward, and founded the towns of
+Exeter and Hampton. Some time before Portsmouth and Dover had been
+settled by followers of Mason and Gorges. In 1641 these towns were added
+to the domain of Massachusetts, and so the matter stood until 1679, when
+we shall see Charles II. marking them off as a separate province, under
+a royal government. Such were the beginnings of New Hampshire. Mrs.
+Hutchinson herself, however, with the rest of her adherents, bought
+the island of Aquedneck from the Indians, and settlements were made at
+Portsmouth and Newport. After a quarter of a century of turbulence,
+these settlements coalesced with Williams's colony at Providence, and
+thus was formed the state of Rhode Island. After her husband's death in
+1642, Mrs. Hutchinson left Aquedneck and settled upon some land to the
+west of Stamford and supposed to be within the territory of the New
+Netherlands. There in the following year she was cruelly murdered by
+Indians, together with nearly all her children and servants, sixteen
+victims in all. One of her descendants was the illustrious Thomas
+Hutchinson, the first great American historian, and last royal governor
+of Massachusetts.
+
+To the dangers arising from the ill-will of the crown, and from these
+theological quarrels, there was added the danger of a general attack by
+the savages. Down to this time, since the landing of the Pilgrims at
+Plymouth, the settlers of New England had been in no way molested by the
+natives. Massasoit's treaty with the Pilgrims was scrupulously observed
+on both sides, and kept the Wampanoags quiet for fifty-four years. The
+somewhat smaller tribe which took its name from the _Massawachusett_, or
+Great Hill, of Milton, kept on friendly terms with the settlers about
+Boston, because these red men coveted the powerful aid of the white
+strangers in case of war with their hereditary foes the Tarratines, who
+dwelt in the Piscataqua country. It was only when the English began
+to leave these coast regions and press into the interior that trouble
+arose. The western shores of Narragansett bay were possessed by
+the numerous and warlike tribe of that name, which held in partial
+subjection the Nyantics near Point Judith. To the west of these, and
+about the Thames river, dwelt the still more formidable Pequots, a tribe
+which for bravery and ferocity asserted a preeminence in New England
+not unlike that which the Iroquois league of the Mohawk valley was fast
+winning over all North America east of the Mississippi. North of the
+Pequots, the squalid villages of the Nipmucks were scattered over the
+beautiful highlands that stretch in long ridges from Quinsigamond to
+Nichewaug, and beyond toward blue Monadnock. Westward, in the lower
+Connecticut valley, lived the Mohegans, a small but valiant tribe, now
+for some time held tributary to their Pequot cousins, and very restive
+under the yoke. The thickly wooded mountain ranges between the
+Connecticut and the Hudson had few human inhabitants. These hundred
+miles of crag and forest were a bulwark none too wide or strong against
+the incursions of the terrible Mohawks, whose name sent a shiver of fear
+throughout savage New England, and whose forbearance the Nipmucks and
+Mohegans were fain to ensure by a yearly payment of blackmail. Each
+summer there came two Mohawk elders, secure in the dread that Iroquois
+prowess had everywhere inspired; and up and down the Connecticut valley
+they seized the tribute of weapons and wampum, and proclaimed the last
+harsh edict issued from the savage council at Onondaga. The scowls that
+greeted their unwelcome visits were doubtless nowhere fiercer than among
+the Mohegans, thus ground down between Mohawk and Pequot as between the
+upper and the nether millstone. [Sidenote: From the Indians: the Pequot
+supremacy]
+
+Among the various points in which civilized man surpasses the savage
+none is more conspicuous than the military brute force which in the
+highest civilization is always latent though comparatively seldom
+exerted. The sudden intrusion of English warfare into the Indian world
+of the seventeenth century may well have seemed to the red men a
+supernatural visitation, like the hurricane or the earthquake. The
+uncompromising vigour with which the founders of Massachusetts carried
+on their work was viewed in some quarters with a dissatisfaction which
+soon thrust the English migration into the very heart of the Indian
+country.
+
+The first movement, however, was directed against the encroachments of
+the New Netherlands. In October, 1634, some men of Plymouth, led by
+William Holmes, sailed up the Connecticut river, and, after bandying
+threats with a party of Dutch who had built a rude fort on the site of
+Hartford, passed on and fortified themselves on the site of Windsor.
+Next year Governor Van Twiller sent a company of seventy men to drive
+away these intruders, but after reconnoitring the situation the Dutchmen
+thought it best not to make an attack. Their little stronghold at
+Hartford remained unmolested by the English, and, in order to secure
+the communication between this advanced outpost and New Amsterdam, Van
+Twiller decided to build another fort at the mouth of the river, but
+this time the English were beforehand. Rumours of Dutch designs may
+have reached the ears of Lord Say and Sele and Lord Brooke--"fanatic
+Brooke," as Scott calls him in "Marmion"--who had obtained from the
+Council for New England a grant of territory on the shores of the Sound.
+These noblemen chose as their agent the younger John Winthrop, son of
+the Massachusetts governor, and this new-comer arrived upon the scene
+just in time to drive away Van Twiller's vessel and build an English
+fort which in honour of his two patrons he called "Say-Brooke."
+
+Had it not been for seeds of discontent already sown in Massachusetts,
+the English hold upon the Connecticut valley might perhaps have been
+for a few years confined to these two military outposts at Windsor and
+Saybrook. But there were people in Massachusetts who did not look with
+favour upon the aristocratic and theocratic features in its polity. The
+provision that none but church-members should vote or hold office was
+by no means unanimously approved. We see it in the course of another
+generation putting altogether too much temporal power into the hands of
+the clergy, and we can trace the growth of the opposition to it until in
+the reign of Charles II. it becomes a dangerous source of weakness to
+Massachusetts. At the outset the opposition seems to have been strongest
+in Dorchester, Newtown, and Watertown. When the Board of Assistants
+undertook to secure for themselves permanency of tenure, together with
+the power of choosing the governor and making the laws, these three
+towns sent deputies to Boston to inspect the charter and see if it
+authorized any such stretch of power. They were foremost in insisting
+that representatives chosen by the towns must have a share in the
+general government. Men who held such opinions were naturally unwilling
+to increase the political weight of the clergy, who, during these early
+disputes and indeed until the downfall of the charter, were inclined to
+take aristocratic views and to sympathize with the Board of Assistants.
+Cotton declared that democracy was no fit government either for church
+or for commonwealth, and the majority of the ministers agreed with
+him. Chief among those who did not was the learned and eloquent Thomas
+Hooker, pastor of the church at Newtown. When Winthrop, in a letter to
+Hooker, defended the restriction of the suffrage on the ground that "the
+best part is always the least, and of that best part the wiser part is
+always the lesser;" Hooker replied that "in matters which concern the
+common good, a general council, chosen by all, to transact businesses
+which concern all, I conceive most suitable to rule and most safe for
+relief of the whole." It is interesting to meet, on the very threshold
+of American history, with such a lucid statement of the strongly
+contrasted views which a hundred and fifty years later were to be
+represented on a national scale by Hamilton and Jefferson. There were
+many in Newtown who took Hooker's view of the matter; and there, as
+also in Watertown and Dorchester, which in 1633 took the initiative in
+framing town governments with selectmen, a strong disposition was shown
+to evade the restrictions upon the suffrage.
+
+While such things were talked about in the summer of 1633 the
+adventurous John Oldham was making his way through the forest and over
+the mountains into the Connecticut valley, and when he returned to
+the coast his glowing accounts set some people to thinking. Two years
+afterward a few pioneers from Dorchester pushed through the wilderness
+as far as the Plymouth men's fort at Windsor, while a party from
+Watertown went farther and came to a halt upon the site of Wethersfield.
+A larger party, bringing cattle and such goods as they could carry,
+set out in the autumn and succeeded in reaching Windsor. Their winter
+supplies were sent around by water to meet them, but early in November
+the ships had barely passed the Saybrook fort when they found the river
+blocked with ice and were obliged to return to Boston. The sufferings of
+the pioneers, thus cut off from the world, were dreadful. Their cattle
+perished, and they were reduced to a diet of acorns and ground-nuts.
+Some seventy of them, walking on the frozen river to Saybrook, were
+so fortunate as to find a crazy little sloop jammed in the ice. They
+succeeded in cutting her adrift, and steered themselves back to Boston.
+Others surmounted greater obstacles in struggling back through the snow
+over the region which the Pullman car now traverses, regardless of
+seasons, in three hours. A few grim heroes, the nameless founders of a
+noble commonwealth, stayed on the spot and defied starvation. In the
+next June, 1636, the Newtown congregation, a hundred or more in number,
+led by their sturdy pastor, and bringing with them 160 head of cattle,
+made the pilgrimage to the Connecticut valley. Women and children took
+part in this pleasant summer journey; Mrs. Hooker, the pastor's wife,
+being too ill to walk, was carried on a litter. Thus, in the memorable
+year in which our great university was born, did Cambridge become, in
+the true Greek sense of a much-abused word, the _metropolis_ or "mother
+town" of Hartford. The migration at once became strong in numbers.
+During the past twelvemonth a score of ships had brought from England
+to Massachusetts more than 3000 souls, and so great an accession made
+further movement easy. Hooker's pilgrims were soon followed by the
+Dorchester and Watertown congregations, and by the next May 800 people
+were living in Windsor, Hartford, and Wethersfield. As we read of these
+movements, not of individuals, but of organic communities, united in
+allegiance to a church and its pastor, and fervid with the instinct
+of self-government, we seem to see Greek history renewed, but with
+centuries of added political training. For one year a board of
+commissioners from Massachusetts governed the new towns, but at the end
+of that time the towns chose representatives and held a General Court at
+Hartford, and thus the separate existence of Connecticut was begun. As
+for Springfield, which was settled about the same time by a party from
+Roxbury, it remained for some years doubtful to which state it belonged.
+At the opening session of the General Court, May 31,1638, Mr. Hooker
+preached a sermon of wonderful power, in which he maintained that "the
+foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people,"
+"that the choice of public magistrates belongs unto the people by God's
+own allowance," and that "they who have power to appoint officers and
+magistrates have the right also to set the bounds and limitations of
+the power and place unto which they call them." On the 14th of January,
+1639, all the freemen of the three towns assembled at Hartford and
+adopted a written constitution in which the hand of the great preacher
+is clearly discernible. It is worthy of note that this document contains
+none of the conventional references to a "dread sovereign" or a
+"gracious king," nor the slightest allusion to the British or any other
+government outside of Connecticut itself, nor does it prescribe any
+condition of church-membership for the right of suffrage. It was the
+first written constitution known to history, that created a government,
+[10] and it marked the beginnings of American democracy, of which Thomas
+Hooker deserves more than any other man to be called the father. The
+government of the United States today is in lineal descent more nearly
+related to that of Connecticut than to that of any of the other thirteen
+colonies. The most noteworthy feature of the Connecticut republic was
+that it was a federation of independent towns, and that all attributes
+of sovereignty not expressly granted to the General Court remained,
+as of original right, in the towns. Moreover, while the governor and
+council were chosen by a majority vote of the whole people, and by a
+suffrage that was almost universal, there was for each township an
+equality of representation in the assembly. [11] This little federal
+republic was allowed to develop peacefully and normally; its
+constitution was not violently wrenched out of shape like that of
+Massachusetts at the end of the seventeenth century. It silently grew
+till it became the strongest political structure on the continent, as
+was illustrated in the remarkable military energy and the unshaken
+financial credit of Connecticut during the Revolutionary War; and in the
+chief crisis of the Federal Convention of 1787 Connecticut, with her
+compromise which secured equal state representation in one branch of the
+national government and popular representation in the other, played the
+controlling part. [Sidenote: Connecticut Pioneers] [Sidenote: The first
+written constitution]
+
+Before the little federation of towns had framed its government, it had
+its Indian question to dispose of. Three years before the migration led
+by Hooker, a crew of eight traders, while making their way up the river
+to the Dutch station on the site of Hartford, had been murdered by a
+party of Indians subject to Sassacus, chief sachem of the Pequots.
+Negotiations concerning this outrage had gone on between Sassacus and
+the government at Boston, and the Pequots had promised to deliver up
+the murderers, but had neglected to do so. In the summer of 1636 some
+Indians on Block Island subject to the Narragansetts murdered the
+pioneer John Oldham, who was sailing on the Sound, and captured his
+little vessel. At this, says Underhill, "God stirred up the hearts" of
+Governor Vane and the rest of the magistrates. They were determined to
+make an end of the Indian question and show the savages that such things
+would not be endured. First an embassy was sent to Canonicus and his
+nephew Miantonomo, chief sachems of the Narragansetts, who hastened
+to disclaim all responsibility for the murder, and to throw the blame
+entirely upon the Indians of the island. Vane then sent out three
+vessels under command of Endicott, who ravaged Block Island, burning
+wigwams, sinking canoes, and slaying dogs, for the men had taken to the
+woods. Endicott then crossed to the mainland to reckon with the Pequots.
+He demanded the surrender of the murderers, with a thousand fathoms of
+wampum for damages; and not getting a satisfactory answer, he attacked
+the Indians, killed a score of them, seized their ripe corn, and burned
+and spoiled what he could. But such reprisals served only to enrage the
+red men. Lyon Gardiner, commander of the Saybrook fort, complained to
+Endicott: "You come hither to raise these wasps about my ears; then
+you will take wing and flee away." The immediate effect was to incite
+Sassacus to do his utmost to compass the ruin of the English. The
+superstitious awe with which the white men were at first regarded had
+been somewhat lessened by familiar contact with them, as in Aesop's
+fable of the fox and the lion. The resources of Indian diplomacy were
+exhausted in the attempt to unite the Narragansett warriors with the
+Pequots in a grand crusade against the white men. Such a combination
+could hardly have been as formidable as that which was effected forty
+years afterward in King Philip's war; for the savages had not as yet
+become accustomed to firearms, and the English settlements did not
+present so many points exposed to attack; but there is no doubt that
+it might have wrought fearful havoc. We can, at any rate, find no
+difficulty in comprehending the manifold perplexity of the Massachusetts
+men at this time, threatened as they were at once by an Indian crusade,
+by the machinations of a faithless king, and by a bitter theological
+quarrel at home, in this eventful year when they laid aside part of
+their incomes to establish Harvard College. [Sidenote: Origin of the
+Pequot War]
+
+The schemes of Sassacus were unsuccessful. The hereditary enmity of the
+Narragansetts toward their Pequot rivals was too strong to be lightly
+overcome. Roger Williams, taking advantage of this feeling, so worked
+upon the minds of the Narragansett chiefs that in the autumn of 1636
+they sent an embassy to Boston and made a treaty of alliance with the
+English. The Pequots were thus left to fight out their own quarrel; and
+had they still been separated from the English by the distance between
+Boston and the Thames river, the feud might very likely have smouldered
+until the drift of events had given a different shape to it. But as the
+English had in this very year thrown out their advanced posts into the
+lower Connecticut valley, there was clearly no issue from the situation
+save in deadly war. All through the winter of 1636-37 the Connecticut
+towns were kept in a state of alarm by the savages. Men going to their
+work were killed and horribly mangled. A Wethersfield man was kidnapped
+and roasted alive. Emboldened by the success of this feat, the Pequots
+attacked Wethersfield, massacred ten people, and carried away two girls.
+[Sidenote: Sassacus is foiled by Roger Williams] [Sidenote: The Pequots
+take the warpath alone]
+
+Wrought up to desperation by these atrocities, the Connecticut men
+appealed to Massachusetts and Plymouth for aid, and put into service
+ninety of their own number, under command of John Mason, an excellent
+and sturdy officer who had won golden opinions from Sir Thomas Fairfax,
+under whom he had served in the Netherlands. It took time to get men
+from Boston, and all that Massachusetts contributed to the enterprise at
+its beginning was that eccentric daredevil John Underhill, with a force
+of twenty men. Seventy friendly Mohegans, under their chief Uncas, eager
+to see vengeance wrought upon their Pequot oppressors, accompanied the
+expedition. From the fort at Saybrook this little company set sail on
+the twentieth of May, 1637, and landed in brilliant moonlight near Point
+Judith, where they were reinforced by four hundred Narragansetts and
+Nyantics. From this point they turned westward toward the stronghold of
+the Pequots, near the place where the town of Stonington now stands. As
+they approached the dreaded spot the courage of the Indian allies gave
+out, and they slunk behind, declaring that Sassacus was a god whom
+it was useless to think of attacking. The force with which Mason
+and Underhill advanced to the fray consisted of just seventy-seven
+Englishmen. Their task was to assault and carry an entrenched fort or
+walled village containing seven hundred Pequots. The fort was a
+circle of two or three acres in area, girdled by a palisade of
+sturdy sapling-trunks, set firm and deep into the ground, the narrow
+interstices between them serving as loopholes wherefrom to reconnoitre
+any one passing by and to shoot at assailants. At opposite sides of
+this stronghold were two openings barely large enough to let any one go
+through. Within this enclosure were the crowded wigwams. The attack was
+skilfully managed, and was a complete surprise. A little before daybreak
+Mason, with sixteen men, occupied one of the doors, while Underhill made
+sure of the other. The Indians in panic sought first one outlet and then
+the other, and were ruthlessly shot down, whichever way they turned. A
+few succeeded in breaking loose, but these were caught and tomahawked by
+the Indian allies, who, though afraid to take the risks of the fight,
+were ready enough to help slay the fugitives. The English threw
+firebrands among the wigwams, and soon the whole village was in a light
+blaze, and most of the savages suffered the horrible death which they
+were so fond of inflicting upon their captives. Of the seven hundred
+Pequots in the stronghold, but five got away with their lives. All this
+bloody work had been done in less than an hour, and of the English there
+had been two killed and sixteen wounded. It was the end of the Pequot
+nation. Of the remnant which had not been included in this wholesale
+slaughter, most were soon afterwards destroyed piecemeal in a running
+fight which extended as far westward as the site of Fairfield. Sassacus
+fled across the Hudson river to the Mohawks, who slew him and sent his
+scalp to Boston, as a peace-offering to the English. The few survivors
+were divided between the Mohegans and Narragansetts and adopted into
+those tribes. Truly the work was done with Cromwellian thoroughness. The
+tribe which had lorded it so fiercely over the New England forests was
+all at once wiped out of existence. So terrible a vengeance the Indians
+had never heard of. If the name of Pequot had hitherto been a name of
+terror, so now did the Englishmen win the inheritance of that deadly
+prestige. Not for eight-and-thirty years after the destruction of the
+Pequots, not until a generation of red men had grown up that knew not
+Underhill and Mason, did the Indian of New England dare again to lift
+his hand against the white man. [Sidenote: And are exterminated]
+
+Such scenes of wholesale slaughter are not pleasant reading in this
+milder age. But our forefathers felt that the wars of Canaan afforded
+a sound precedent for such cases; and, indeed, if we remember what
+the soldiers of Tilly and Wallenstein were doing at this very time in
+Germany, we shall realize that the work of Mason and Underhill would not
+have been felt by any one in that age to merit censure or stand in need
+of excuses. As a matter of practical policy the annihilation of the
+Pequots can be condemned only by those who read history so incorrectly
+as to suppose that savages, whose business is to torture and slay, can
+always be dealt with according to the methods in use between civilized
+peoples. A mighty nation, like the United States, is in honour bound to
+treat the red man with scrupulous justice and refrain from cruelty in
+punishing his delinquencies. But if the founders of Connecticut, in
+confronting a danger which threatened their very existence, struck with
+savage fierceness, we cannot blame them. The world is so made that it
+is only in that way that the higher races have been able to preserve
+themselves and carry on their progressive work.
+
+The overthrow of the Pequots was a cardinal event in the planting of
+New England. It removed the chief obstacle to the colonization of
+the Connecticut coast, and brought the inland settlements into such
+unimpeded communication with those on tide-water as to prepare the way
+for the formation of the New England confederacy. Its first fruits were
+seen in the direction taken by the next wave of migration, which ended
+the Puritan exodus from England to America. About a month after the
+storming of the palisaded village there arrived in Boston a company of
+wealthy London merchants, with their families. The most prominent among
+them, Theophilus Eaton, was a member of the Company of Massachusetts
+Bay. Their pastor, John Davenport, was an eloquent preacher and a man of
+power. He was a graduate of Oxford, and in 1624 had been chosen vicar
+of St. Stephen's parish, in Coleman street, London. When he heard that
+Cotton and Hooker were about to sail for America, he sought earnestly to
+turn them from what he deemed the error of their ways, but instead he
+became converted himself and soon incurred the especial enmity of Laud,
+so that it became necessary for him to flee to Amsterdam. In 1636 he
+returned to England, and in concert with Eaton organized a scheme of
+emigration that included men from Yorkshire, Hertfordshire, and Kent.
+The leaders arrived in Boston in the midst of the Antinomian disputes,
+and although Davenport won admiration for his skill in battling with
+heresy, he may perhaps have deemed it preferable to lead his flock
+to some new spot in the wilderness where such warfare might not be
+required. The merchants desired a fine harbour and good commercial
+situation, and the reports of the men who returned from hunting the
+Pequots told them of just such a spot at Quinnipiack on Long Island
+Sound. Here they could carry out their plan of putting into practice
+a theocratic ideal even more rigid than that which obtained in
+Massachusetts, and arrange their civil as well as ecclesiastical affairs
+in accordance with rules to be obtained from a minute study of the
+Scriptures. [Sidenote: The colony of New Haven]
+
+In the spring of 1638 the town of New Haven was accordingly founded.
+The next year a swarm from this new town settled Milford, while another
+party, freshly arrived from England, made the beginnings of Guilford. In
+1640 Stamford was added to the group, and in 1643 the four towns were
+united into the republic of New Haven, to which Southold, on Long
+Island, and Branford were afterwards added. As being a confederation of
+independent towns, New Haven resembled Connecticut. In other respects
+the differences between the two reflected the differences between
+Davenport and Hooker; the latter was what would now be called more
+radical than Winthrop or Cotton, the former was more conservative.
+In the New Haven colony none but church-members could vote, and this
+measure at the outset disfranchised more than half the settlers in New
+Haven town, nearly half in Guilford, and less than one fifth in Milford.
+This result was practically less democratic than in Massachusetts where
+it was some time before the disfranchisement attained such dimensions.
+The power of the clergy reached its extreme point in New Haven, where
+each of the towns was governed by seven ecclesiastical officers known as
+"pillars of the church." These magistrates served as judges, and trial
+by jury was dispensed with, because no authority could be found for it
+in the laws of Moses. The legislation was quaint enough, though the
+famous "Blue Laws" of New Haven, which have been made the theme of so
+many jests at the expense of our forefathers, never really existed. The
+story of the Blue Laws was first published in 1781 by the Rev. Samuel
+Peters, a Tory refugee in London, who took delight in horrifying our
+British cousins with tales of wholesale tarring and feathering done by
+the patriots of the Revolution. In point of strict veracity Dr. Peters
+reminds one of Baron Munchausen; he declares that the river at Bellows
+Falls flows so fast as to float iron crowbars, and he gravely describes
+sundry animals who were evidently cousins to the Jabberwok. The most
+famous passage of his pretended code is that which enacts that "no woman
+shall kiss her child on the Sabbath," and that "no one shall play on any
+instrument of music except the drum, trumpet, or jewsharp." [Sidenote:
+Legend of the "Blue Laws"]
+
+When the Long Parliament met in 1640, the Puritan exodus to New England
+came to an end. During the twenty years which had elapsed since the
+voyage of the Mayflower, the population had grown to 26,000 souls. Of
+this number scarcely 500 had arrived before 1629. It is a striking fact,
+since it expresses a causal relation and not a mere coincidence, that
+the eleven years, 1629-1640, during which Charles I. governed England
+without a parliament, were the same eleven years that witnessed the
+planting of New England. For more than a century after this there was no
+considerable migration to this part of North America. Puritan England
+now found employment for all its energies and all its enthusiasm at
+home. The struggle with the king and the efforts toward reorganization
+under Cromwell were to occupy it for another score of years, and
+then, by the time of the Restoration the youthful creative energy of
+Puritanism had spent itself. The influence of this great movement
+was indeed destined to grow wider and deeper with the progress of
+civilization, but after 1660 its creative work began to run in new
+channels and assume different forms. [Sidenote: End of the Puritan
+exodus]
+
+It is curious to reflect what might have been the result, to America and
+to the world, had things in England gone differently between 1620 and
+1660. Had the policy of James and Charles been less formidable, the
+Puritan exodus might never have occurred, and the Virginian type of
+society, varied perhaps by a strong Dutch infusion, might have become
+supreme in America. The western continent would have lost in richness
+and variety of life, and it is not likely that Europe would have made a
+corresponding gain, for the moral effect of the challenge, the struggle,
+and the overthrow of monarchy in England was a stimulus sorely needed
+by neighbouring peoples. It is not always by avoiding the evil, it
+is rather by grappling with it and conquering it that character is
+strengthened and life enriched, and there is no better example of this
+than the history of England in the seventeenth century.
+
+On the other hand, if the Stuart despotism had triumphed in England, the
+Puritan exodus would doubtless have been swelled to huge dimensions. New
+England would have gained strength so quickly that much less irritation
+than she actually suffered between 1664 and 1689 would probably have
+goaded her into rebellion. The war of independence might have been waged
+a century sooner than it was. It is not easy to point to any especial
+advantage that could have come to America from this; one is rather
+inclined to think of the peculiarly valuable political training of the
+eighteenth century that would have been lost. Such surmises are for the
+most part idle. But as concerns Europe, it is plain to be seen, for
+reasons stated in my first chapter, that the decisive victory of Charles
+I. would have been a calamity of the first magnitude. It would have been
+like the Greeks losing Marathon or the Saracens winning Tours, supposing
+the worst consequences ever imagined in those hypothetical cases to have
+been realized. Or taking a more contracted view, we can see how England,
+robbed of her Puritan element, might still have waxed in strength, as
+France has done in spite of losing the Huguenots; but she could not
+have taken the proud position that she has come to occupy as mother of
+nations. Her preeminence since Cromwell's time has been chiefly due to
+her unrivalled power of planting self-supporting colonies, and that
+power has had its roots in English self-government. It is the vitality
+of the English Idea that is making the language of Cromwell and
+Washington dominant in the world.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE NEW ENGLAND CONFEDERACY.
+
+
+The Puritan exodus to New England, which came to an end about 1640, was
+purely and exclusively English. There was nothing in it that came from
+the continent of Europe, nothing that was either Irish or Scotch, very
+little that was Welsh. As Palfrey says, the population of 26,000 that
+had been planted in New England by 1640 "thenceforward continued to
+multiply on its own soil for a century and a half, in remarkable
+seclusion from other communities." During the whole of this period New
+England received but few immigrants; and it was not until after the
+Revolutionary War that its people had fairly started on their westward
+march into the state of New York and beyond, until now, after yet
+another century, we find some of their descendants dwelling in a
+homelike Salem and a Portland of charming beauty on the Pacific coast.
+Three times between the meeting of the Long Parliament and the meeting
+of the Continental Congress did the New England colonies receive a
+slight infusion of non-English blood. In 1652, after his victories at
+Dunbar and Worcester, Cromwell sent 270 of his Scottish prisoners to
+Boston, where the descendants of some of them still dwell. After the
+revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, 150 families of Huguenots
+came to Massachusetts. And finally in 1719, 120 Presbyterian families
+came over from the north of Ireland, and settled at Londonderry in New
+Hampshire, and elsewhere. In view of these facts it may be said that
+there is not a county in England of which the population is more purely
+English than the population of New England at the end of the eighteenth
+century. From long and careful research, Mr. Savage, the highest
+authority on this subject, concludes that more than 98 in 100 of the New
+England people at that time could trace their origin to England in
+the narrowest sense, excluding even Wales. As already observed, every
+English shire contributed something to the emigration, but there was
+a marked preponderance of people from the East Anglian counties.
+[Sidenote: The exodus was purely English]
+
+The population of New England was nearly as homogeneous in social
+condition as it was in blood. The emigration was preeminent for its
+respectability. Like the best part of the emigration to Virginia, it
+consisted largely of country squires and yeomen. The men who followed
+Winthrop were thrifty and prosperous in their old homes from which their
+devotion to an idea made them voluntary exiles. They attached so much
+importance to regular industry and decorous behaviour that for a long
+time the needy and shiftless people who usually make trouble in new
+colonies were not tolerated among them. Hence the early history of New
+England is remarkably free from those scenes of violence and disorder
+which have so often made hideous the first years of new communities.
+Of negro slaves there were very few, and these were employed wholly in
+domestic service; there were not enough of them to affect the industrial
+life of New England or to be worth mentioning as a class. Neither were
+there many of the wretched people, kidnapped from the jails and slums
+of English sea-ports, such as in those early days when negro labour was
+scarce, were sent by ship-loads to Virginia, to become the progenitors
+of the "white trash." There were a few indented white servants, usually
+of the class known as "redemptioners," or immigrants who voluntarily
+bound themselves to service for a stated time in order to defray the
+cost of their voyage from Europe. At a later time there were many of
+these "redemptioners" in the middle colonies, but in New England they
+were very few; and as no stigma of servitude was attached to manual
+labour, they were apt at the end of their terms of service to become
+independent farmers; thus they ceased to be recognizable as a distinct
+class of society. Nevertheless the common statement that no traces of
+the "mean white" are to be found in New England is perhaps somewhat
+too sweeping. Interspersed among those respectable and tidy mountain
+villages, once full of such vigorous life, one sometimes comes upon
+little isolated groups of wretched hovels whose local reputation is
+sufficiently indicated by such terse epithets as "Hardscrabble" or
+"Hell-huddle." Their denizens may in many instances be the degenerate
+offspring of a sound New England stock, but they sometimes show strong
+points of resemblance to that "white trash" which has come to be a
+recognizable strain of the English race; and one cannot help suspecting
+that while the New England colonies made every effort to keep out such
+riff raff, it may nevertheless have now and then crept in. However this
+may be, it cannot be said that this element ever formed a noticeable
+feature in the life of colonial New England. As regards their social
+derivation, the settlers of New England were homogeneous in character to
+a remarkable degree, and they were drawn from the sturdiest part of
+the English stock. In all history there has been no other instance of
+colonization so exclusively effected by picked and chosen men. The
+colonists knew this, and were proud of it, as well they might be. It was
+the simple truth that was spoken by William Stoughton when he said, in
+his election sermon of 1688: "God sifted a whole nation, that He might
+send choice grain into the wilderness." [Sidenote: Respectable character
+of the emigration]
+
+This matter comes to have more than a local interest, when we reflect
+that the 26,000 New Englanders of 1640 have in two hundred and fifty
+years increased to something like 15,000,000. From these men have come
+at least one-fourth of the present population of the United States.
+Striking as this fact may seem, it is perhaps less striking than the
+fact of the original migration when duly considered. In these times,
+when great steamers sail every day from European ports, bringing
+immigrants to a country not less advanced in material civilization
+than the country which they leave, the daily arrival of a thousand new
+citizens has come to be a commonplace event. But in the seventeenth
+century the transfer of more than twenty thousand well-to-do people
+within twenty years from their comfortable homes in England to the
+American wilderness was by no means a commonplace event. It reminds one
+of the migrations of ancient peoples, and in the quaint thought of
+our forefathers it was aptly likened to the exodus of Israel from the
+Egyptian house of bondage.
+
+In this migration a principle of selection was at work which insured an
+extraordinary uniformity of character and of purpose among the settlers.
+To this uniformity of purpose, combined with complete homogeneity of
+race, is due the preponderance early acquired by New England in the
+history of the American people. In view of this, it is worth while to
+inquire what were the real aims of the settlers of New England. What was
+the common purpose which brought these men together in their resolve to
+create for themselves new homes in the wilderness?
+
+This is a point concerning which there has been a great deal of popular
+misapprehension, and there has been no end of nonsense talked about it.
+It has been customary first to assume that the Puritan migration was
+undertaken in the interests of religious liberty, and then to upbraid
+the Puritans for forgetting all about religious liberty as soon as
+people came among them who disagreed with their opinions. But this view
+of the case is not supported by history. It is quite true that the
+Puritans were chargeable with gross intolerance; but it is not true that
+in this they were guilty of inconsistency. The notion that they came to
+New England for the purpose of establishing religious liberty, in
+any sense in which we should understand such a phrase, is entirely
+incorrect. It is neither more nor less than a bit of popular legend. If
+we mean by the phrase "religious liberty" a state of things in which
+opposite or contradictory opinions on questions of religion shall exist
+side by side in the same community, and in which everybody shall
+decide for himself how far he will conform to the customary religious
+observances, nothing could have been further from their thoughts. There
+is nothing they would have regarded with more genuine abhorrence. If
+they could have been forewarned by a prophetic voice of the general
+freedom--or, as they would have termed it, license--of thought and
+behaviour which prevails in this country to-day, they would very likely
+have abandoned their enterprise in despair. [12] The philosophic student
+of history often has occasion to see how God is wiser than man. In other
+words, he is often brought to realize how fortunate it is that the
+leaders in great historic events cannot foresee the remote results of
+the labours to which they have zealously consecrated their lives. It is
+part of the irony of human destiny that the end we really accomplish by
+striving with might and main is apt to be something quite different from
+the end we dreamed of as we started on our arduous labour. So it was
+with the Puritan settlers of New England. The religious liberty that
+we enjoy to-day is largely the consequence of their work; but it is a
+consequence that was unforeseen, while the direct and conscious aim of
+their labours was something that has never been realized, and probably
+never will be. [Sidenote: The migration was not intended to promote what
+we call religious liberty]
+
+The aim of Winthrop and his friends in coming to Massachusetts was the
+construction of a theocratic state which should be to Christians, under
+the New Testament dispensation, all that the theocracy of Moses and
+Joshua and Samuel had been to the Jews in Old Testament days. They
+should be to all intents and purposes freed from the jurisdiction of
+the Stuart king, and so far as possible the text of the Holy Scriptures
+should be their guide both in weighty matters of general legislation and
+in the shaping of the smallest details of daily life. In such a scheme
+there was no room for religious liberty as we understand it. No doubt
+the text of the Scriptures may be interpreted in many ways, but among
+these men there was a substantial agreement as to the important points,
+and nothing could have been further from their thoughts than to found
+a colony which should afford a field for new experiments in the art of
+right living. The state they were to found was to consist of a united
+body of believers; citizenship itself was to be co-extensive with
+church-membership; and in such a state there was apparently no more room
+for heretics than there was in Rome or Madrid. This was the idea which
+drew Winthrop and his followers from England at a time when--as events
+were soon to show--they might have stayed there and defied persecution
+with less trouble than it cost them to cross the ocean and found a new
+state. [Sidenote: Theocratic ideal of the Puritans]
+
+Such an ideal as this, considered by itself and apart from the concrete
+acts in which it was historically manifested, may seem like the merest
+fanaticism. But we cannot dismiss in this summary way a movement which
+has been at the source of so much that is great in American history:
+mere fanaticism has never produced such substantial results. Mere
+fanaticism is sure to aim at changing the constitution of human society
+in some essential point, to undo the work of evolution, and offer in
+some indistinctly apprehended fashion to remodel human life. But in
+these respects the Puritans were intensely conservative. The impulse by
+which they were animated was a profoundly ethical impulse--the desire
+to lead godly lives, and to drive out sin from the community--the same
+ethical impulse which animates the glowing pages of Hebrew poets and
+prophets, and which has given to the history and literature of Israel
+their commanding influence in the world. The Greek, says Matthew Arnold,
+held that the perfection of happiness was to have one's thoughts hit the
+mark; but the Hebrew held that it was to serve the Lord day and night.
+It was a touch of this inspiration that the Puritan caught from his
+earnest and reverent study of the sacred text, and that served to
+justify and intensify his yearning for a better life, and to give it
+the character of a grand and holy ideal. Yet with all this religious
+enthusiasm, the Puritan was in every fibre a practical Englishman with
+his full share of plain common-sense. He avoided the error of
+mediaeval anchorites and mystics in setting an exaggerated value upon
+otherworldliness. In his desire to win a crown of glory hereafter he did
+not forget that the present life has its simple duties, in the exact
+performance of which the welfare of society mainly consists. He likewise
+avoided the error of modern radicals who would remodel the fundamental
+institutions of property and of the family, and thus disturb the very
+groundwork of our ethical ideals. The Puritan's ethical conception of
+society was simply that which has grown up in the natural course of
+historical evolution, and which in its essential points is therefore
+intelligible to all men, and approved by the common-sense of men,
+however various may be the terminology--whether theological or
+scientific--in which it is expounded. For these reasons there was
+nothing essentially fanatical or impracticable in the Puritan scheme: in
+substance it was something that great bodies of men could at once put
+into practice, while its quaint and peculiar form was something that
+could be easily and naturally outgrown and set aside. [Sidenote: The
+impulse which sought to realize itself in the Puritan ideal was an
+ethical impulse]
+
+Yet another point in which the Puritan scheme of a theocratic society
+was rational and not fanatical was its method of interpreting the
+Scriptures. That method was essentially rationalistic in two ways.
+First, the Puritan laid no claim to the possession of any peculiar
+inspiration or divine light whereby he might be aided in ascertaining
+the meaning of the sacred text; but he used his reason just as he would
+in any matter of business, and he sought to convince, and expected to
+be convinced, by rational argument, and by nothing else. Secondly, it
+followed from this denial of any peculiar inspiration that there was no
+room in the Puritan commonwealth for anything like a priestly class, and
+that every individual must hold his own opinions at his own personal
+risk. The consequences of this rationalistic spirit have been very
+far-reaching. In the conviction that religious opinion must be consonant
+with reason, and that religious truth must be brought home to each
+individual by rational argument, we may find one of the chief causes of
+that peculiarly conservative yet flexible intelligence which has enabled
+the Puritan countries to take the lead in the civilized world of
+today. Free discussion of theological questions, when conducted with
+earnestness and reverence, and within certain generally acknowledged
+limits, was never discountenanced in New England. On the contrary, there
+has never been a society in the world in which theological problems have
+been so seriously and persistently discussed as in New England in the
+colonial period. The long sermons of the clergymen were usually learned
+and elaborate arguments of doctrinal points, bristling with quotations
+from the Bible, or from famous books of controversial divinity, and in
+the long winter evenings the questions thus raised afforded the occasion
+for lively debate in every household. The clergy were, as a rule, men
+of learning, able to read both Old and New Testaments in the original
+languages, and familiar with the best that had been talked and written,
+among Protestants at least, on theological subjects. They were also, for
+the most part, men of lofty character, and they were held in high social
+esteem on account of their character and scholarship, as well as on
+account of their clerical position. But in spite of the reverence in
+which they were commonly held, it would have been a thing quite unheard
+of for one of these pastors to urge an opinion from the pulpit on the
+sole ground of his personal authority or his superior knowledge of
+Scriptural exegesis. The hearers, too, were quick to detect novelties
+or variations in doctrine; and while there was perhaps no more than the
+ordinary human unwillingness to listen to a new thought merely because
+of its newness, it was above all things needful that the orthodox
+soundness of every new suggestion should be thoroughly and severely
+tested. This intense interest in doctrinal theology was part and parcel
+of the whole theory of New England life; because, as I have said, it was
+taken for granted that each individual must hold his own opinions at
+his own personal risk in the world to come. Such perpetual discussion,
+conducted, under such a stimulus, afforded in itself no mean school
+of intellectual training. Viewed in relation to the subsequent mental
+activity of New England, it may be said to have occupied a position
+somewhat similar to that which the polemics of the medieval schoolmen
+occupied in relation to the European thought of the Renaissance, and of
+the age of Hobbes and Descartes. At the same time the Puritan theory of
+life lay at the bottom of the whole system of popular education in New
+England. According to that theory, it was absolutely essential that
+every one should be taught from early childhood how to read and
+understand the Bible. So much instruction as this was assumed to be a
+sacred duty which the community owed to every child born within its
+jurisdiction. In ignorance, the Puritans maintained, lay the principal
+strength of popery in religion as well as of despotism in politics; and
+so, to the best of their lights, they cultivated knowledge with might
+and main. But in this energetic diffusion of knowledge they were
+unwittingly preparing the complete and irreparable destruction of the
+theocratic ideal of society which they had sought to realize by crossing
+the ocean and settling in New England. This universal education, and
+this perpetual discussion of theological questions, were no more
+compatible with rigid adherence to the Calvinistic system than with
+submission to the absolute rule of Rome. The inevitable result was the
+liberal and enlightened Protestantism which is characteristic of the
+best American society at the present day, and which is continually
+growing more liberal as it grows more enlightened--a Protestantism
+which, in the natural course of development, is coming to realize the
+noble ideal of Roger Williams, but from the very thought of which such
+men as Winthrop and Cotton and Endicott would have shrunk with dismay.
+[Sidenote: In interpreting Scripture, the Puritan appealed to his
+reason] [Sidenote: Value of theological discussion]
+
+In this connection it is interesting to note the similarity between the
+experience of the Puritans in New England and in Scotland with respect
+to the influence of their religious theory of life upon general
+education. Nowhere has Puritanism, with its keen intelligence and its
+iron tenacity of purpose, played a greater part than it has played in
+the history of Scotland. And one need not fear contradiction in saying
+that no other people in modern times, in proportion to their numbers,
+have achieved so much in all departments of human activity as the people
+of Scotland have achieved. It would be superfluous to mention the
+preeminence of Scotland in the industrial arts since the days of James
+Watt, or to recount the glorious names in philosophy, in history, in
+poetry and romance, and in every department of science, which since the
+middle of the eighteenth century have made the country of Burns and
+Scott, of Hume and Adam Smith, of Black and Hunter and Hutton and
+Lyell, illustrious for all future time. Now this period of magnificent
+intellectual fruition in Scotland was preceded by a period of
+Calvinistic orthodoxy quite as rigorous as that of New England. The
+ministers of the Scotch Kirk in the seventeenth century cherished a
+theocratic ideal of society not unlike that which the colonists of New
+England aimed at realizing. There was the same austerity, the same
+intolerance, the same narrowness of interests, in Scotland that there
+was in New England. Mr. Buckle, in the book which thirty years ago
+seemed so great and stimulating, gave us a graphic picture of this state
+of society, and the only thing which he could find to say about it, as
+the result of his elaborate survey, was that the spirit of the Scotch
+Kirk was as thoroughly hostile to human progress as the spirit of the
+Spanish Inquisition! If this were really so, it would be difficult
+indeed to account for the period of brilliant mental activity which
+immediately followed. But in reality the Puritan theory of life led
+to general education in Scotland as it did in New England, and for
+precisely the same reasons, while the effects of theological discussion
+in breaking down the old Calvinistic exclusiveness have been illustrated
+in the history of Edinburgh as well as in the history of Boston.
+[Sidenote: Comparison with the case of Scotland]
+
+It is well for us to bear in mind the foregoing considerations as we
+deal with the history of the short-lived New England Confederacy. The
+story is full of instances of an intolerant and domineering spirit,
+especially on the part of Massachusetts, and now and then this spirit
+breaks forth in ugly acts of persecution. In considering these facts, it
+is well to remember that we are observing the workings of a system
+which contained within itself a curative principle; and it is further
+interesting to observe how political circumstances contributed to
+modify the Puritan ideal, gradually breaking down the old theocratic
+exclusiveness and strengthening the spirit of religious liberty.
+
+Scarcely had the first New England colonies been established when it was
+found desirable to unite them into some kind of a confederation. It is
+worthy of note that the separate existence of so many colonies was at
+the outset largely the result of religious differences. The uniformity
+of purpose, great as it was, fell far short of completeness. [Sidenote:
+Existence of so many colonies due to slight religious differences]
+
+Could all have agreed, or had there been religious toleration in the
+modern sense, there was still room enough for all in Massachusetts;
+and a compact settlement would have been in much less danger from the
+Indians. But in the founding of Connecticut the theocratic idea had less
+weight, and in the founding of New Haven it had more weight, than
+in Massachusetts. The existence of Rhode Island was based upon that
+principle of full toleration which the three colonies just mentioned
+alike abhorred, and its first settlers were people banished from
+Massachusetts. With regard to toleration Plymouth occupied a middle
+ground; without admitting the principles of Williams, the people of that
+colony were still fairly tolerant in practice. Of the four towns of New
+Hampshire, two had been founded by Antinomians driven from Boston, and
+two by Episcopal friends of Mason and Gorges. It was impossible that
+neighbouring communities, characterized by such differences of opinion,
+but otherwise homogeneous in race and in social condition, should fail
+to react upon one another and to liberalize one another. Still more was
+this true when they attempted to enter into a political union. When, for
+example, Massachusetts in 1641-43 annexed the New Hampshire townships,
+she was of necessity obliged to relax in their case her policy of
+insisting upon religious conformity as a test of citizenship. So in
+forming the New England Confederacy, there were some matters of dispute
+that had to be passed over by mutual consent or connivance. [Sidenote:
+It led to a notable attempt at federation]
+
+The same causes which had spread the English settlements over so wide a
+territory now led, as an indirect result, to their partial union into a
+confederacy. The immediate consequence of the westward movement had been
+an Indian war. Several savage tribes were now interspersed between the
+settlements, so that it became desirable that the military force should
+be brought, as far as possible, under one management. The colony of
+New Netherlands, moreover, had begun to assume importance, and the
+settlements west of the Connecticut river had already occasioned hard
+words between Dutch and English, which might at any moment be followed
+by blows. In the French colonies at the north, with their extensive
+Indian alliances under Jesuit guidance, the Puritans saw a rival power
+which was likely in course of time to prove troublesome. With a view to
+more efficient self-defence, therefore, in 1643 the four colonies of
+Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven formed themselves
+into a league, under the style of "The United Colonies of New England."
+These four little states now contained thirty-nine towns, with an
+aggregate population of 24,000. To the northeast of Massachusetts,
+which now extended to the Piscataqua, a small colony had at length been
+constituted under a proprietary charter somewhat similar to that held by
+the Calverts in Maryland. Of this new province or palatinate of Maine
+the aged Sir Ferdinando Gorges was Lord Proprietary, and he had
+undertaken not only to establish the Church of England there, but also
+to introduce usages of feudal jurisdiction like those remaining in the
+old country. Such a community was not likely to join the Confederacy;
+apart from other reasons, its proprietary constitution and the feud
+between the Puritans and Gorges would have been sufficient obstacles.
+
+As for Rhode Island, on the other hand, it was regarded with strong
+dislike by the other colonies. It was a curious and noteworthy
+consequence of the circumstances under which this little state was
+founded that for a long time it became the refuge of all the fanatical
+and turbulent people who could not submit to the strict and orderly
+governments of Connecticut or Massachusetts. All extremes met on
+Narragansett bay. There were not only sensible advocates of religious
+liberty, but theocrats as well who saw flaws in the theocracy of
+other Puritans. The English world was then in a state of theological
+fermentation. People who fancied themselves favoured with direct
+revelations from Heaven; people who thought it right to keep the seventh
+day of the week as a Sabbath instead of the first day; people who
+cherished a special predilection for the Apocalypse and the Book of
+Daniel; people with queer views about property and government; people
+who advocated either too little marriage or too much marriage; all such
+eccentric characters as are apt to come to the surface in periods of
+religious excitement found in Rhode Island a favoured spot where they
+could prophesy without let or hindrance. But the immediate practical
+result of so much discordance in opinion was the impossibility of
+founding a strong and well-ordered government. The early history of
+Rhode Island was marked by enough of turbulence to suggest the question
+whether, after all, at the bottom of the Puritan's refusal to recognize
+the doctrine of private inspiration, or to tolerate indiscriminately all
+sorts of opinions, there may not have been a grain of shrewd political
+sense not ill adapted to the social condition of the seventeenth
+century. In 1644 and again in 1648 the Narragansett settlers asked leave
+to join the Confederacy; but the request was refused on the ground
+that they had no stable government of their own. They were offered
+the alternative of voluntary annexation either to Massachusetts or to
+Plymouth, or of staying out in the cold; and they chose the latter
+course. Early in 1643 they had sent Roger Williams over to England to
+obtain a charter for Rhode Island. In that year Parliament created a
+Board of Commissioners, with the Earl of Warwick at its head, for the
+superintendence of colonial affairs; and nothing could better illustrate
+the loose and reckless manner in which American questions were treated
+in England than the first proceedings of this board. It gave an early
+instance of British carelessness in matters of American geography. In
+December, 1643, it granted to Massachusetts all the territory on the
+mainland of Narragansett bay; and in the following March it incorporated
+the townships of Newport and Portsmouth, which stood on the island,
+together with Providence, which stood on the mainland, into an
+independent colony empowered to frame a government and make laws for
+itself. With this second document Williams returned to Providence in the
+autumn of 1644. Just how far it was intended to cancel the first one,
+nobody could tell, but it plainly afforded an occasion for a conflict of
+claims. [Sidenote: Turbulence of dissent in Rhode Island] [Sidenote: The
+Earl of Warwick and his Board of Commissioners]
+
+The league of the four colonies is interesting as the first American
+experiment in federation. By the articles it was agreed that each colony
+should retain full independence so far as concerned the management of
+its internal affairs, but that the confederate government should have
+entire control over all dealings with the Indians or with foreign
+powers. The administration of the league was put into the hands of
+a board of eight Federal Commissioners, two from each colony. The
+commissioners were required to be church-members in good standing. They
+could choose for themselves a president or chairman out of their own
+number, but such a president was to have no more power than the other
+members of the Board. If any measure were to come up concerning
+which the commissioners could not agree, it was to be referred for
+consideration to the legislatures or general courts of the four
+colonies. Expenses for war were to be charged to each colony in
+proportion to the number of males in each between sixteen years of
+age and sixty. A meeting of the Board might be summoned by any two
+magistrates whenever the public safety might seem to require it; but a
+regular meeting was to be held once every year.
+
+In this scheme of confederacy all power of taxation was expressly left
+to the several colonies. The scheme provided for a mere league, not for
+a federal union. The government of the Commissioners acted only upon the
+local governments, not upon individuals. The Board had thus but little
+executive power, and was hardly more than a consulting body. Another
+source of weakness in the confederacy was the overwhelming preponderance
+of Massachusetts. Of the 24,000 people in the confederation, 15,000
+belonged to Massachusetts, while the other three colonies had only about
+3,000 each. Massachusetts accordingly had to carry the heaviest burden,
+both in the furnishing of soldiers and in the payment of war expenses,
+while in the direction of affairs she had no more authority than one of
+the small colonies. As a natural consequence, Massachusetts tried
+to exert more authority than she was entitled to by the articles of
+confederation; and such conduct was not unnaturally resented by the
+small colonies, as betokening an unfair and domineering spirit. In
+spite of these drawbacks, however, the league was of great value to
+New England. On many occasions it worked well as a high court of
+jurisdiction, and it made the military strength of the colonies more
+available than it would otherwise have been. But for the interference
+of the British government, which brought it to an untimely end, the
+Confederacy might have been gradually amended so as to become enduring.
+After its downfall it was pleasantly remembered by the people of New
+England; in times of trouble their thoughts reverted to it; and the
+historian must in fairness assign it some share in preparing men's minds
+for the greater work of federation which was achieved before the end of
+the following century. [Sidenote: It was only a league, not a federal
+union]
+
+The formation of such a confederacy certainly involved something very
+like a tacit assumption of sovereignty on the part of the four colonies.
+It is worthy of note that they did not take the trouble to ask the
+permission of the home government in advance. They did as they pleased,
+and then defended their action afterward. In England the act of
+confederation was regarded with jealousy and distrust. But Edward
+Winslow, who was sent over to London to defend the colonies, pithily
+said: "If we in America should forbear to unite for offence and defence
+against a common enemy till we have leave from England, our throats
+might be all cut before the messenger would be half seas through."
+Whether such considerations would have had weight with Charles I. or not
+was now of little consequence. His power of making mischief soon came
+to an end, and from the liberal and sagacious policy of Cromwell the
+Confederacy had not much to fear. Nevertheless the fall of Charles I.
+brought up for the first time that question which a century later was
+to acquire surpassing interest,--the question as to the supremacy of
+Parliament over the colonies.
+
+Down to this time the supreme control over colonial affairs had been in
+the hands of the king and his privy council, and the Parliament had
+not disputed it. In 1624 they had grumbled at James I.'s high-handed
+suppression of the Virginia Company, but they had not gone so far as
+to call in question the king's supreme authority over the colonies. In
+1628, in a petition to Charles I. relating to the Bermudas, they had
+fully admitted this royal authority. But the fall of Charles I. for the
+moment changed all this. Among the royal powers devolved upon Parliament
+was the prerogative of superintending the affairs of the colonies. Such,
+at least, was the theory held in England, and it is not easy to see how
+any other theory could logically have been held; but the Americans never
+formally admitted it, and in practice they continued to behave toward
+Parliament very much as they had behaved toward the crown, yielding
+just as little obedience as possible. When the Earl of Warwick's
+commissioners in 1644 seized upon a royalist vessel in Boston harbour,
+the legislature of Massachusetts debated the question whether it was
+compatible with the dignity of the colony to permit such an act of
+sovereignty on the part of Parliament. It was decided to wink at the
+proceeding, on account of the strong sympathy between Massachusetts and
+the Parliament which was overthrowing the king. At the same time the
+legislature sent over to London a skilfully worded protest against
+any like exercise of power in future. In 1651 Parliament ordered
+Massachusetts to surrender the charter obtained from Charles I. and take
+out a new one from Parliament, in which the relations of the colony to
+the home government should be made the subject of fresh and more precise
+definition. To this request the colony for more than a year vouchsafed
+no answer; and finally, when it became necessary to do something,
+instead of sending back the charter, the legislature sent back a
+memorial, setting forth that the people of Massachusetts were quite
+contented with their form of government, and hoped that no change would
+be made in it. War between England and Holland, and the difficult
+political problems which beset the brief rule of Cromwell, prevented
+the question from coming to an issue, and Massachusetts was enabled to
+preserve her independent and somewhat haughty attitude. [Sidenote: Fall
+of Charles I. brings up the question as to supremacy of Parliament over
+the colonies]
+
+During the whole period of the Confederacy, however, disputes kept
+coming up which through endless crooked ramifications were apt to end
+in an appeal to the home government, and thus raise again and again the
+question as to the extent of its imperial supremacy. For our present
+purpose, it is enough to mention three of these cases: 1, the adventures
+of Samuel Gorton; 2, the Presbyterian cabal; 3, the persecution of the
+Quakers. Other cases in point are those of John Clarke and the Baptists,
+and the relations of Massachusetts to the northeastern settlements; but
+as it is not my purpose here to make a complete outline of New England
+history, the three cases enumerated will suffice.
+
+The first case shows, in a curious and instructive way, how religious
+dissensions were apt to be complicated with threats of an Indian war on
+the one hand and peril from Great Britain on the other; and as we come
+to realize the triple danger, we can perhaps make some allowances for
+the high-handed measures with which the Puritan governments sometimes
+sought to avert it. [Genesis of the persecuting spirit]
+
+As I have elsewhere tried to show, the genesis of the persecuting spirit
+is to be found in the conditions of primitive society, where "above
+all things the prime social and political necessity is social cohesion
+within the tribal limits, for unless such social cohesion be maintained,
+the very existence of the tribe is likely to be extinguished in
+bloodshed." The persecuting spirit "began to pass away after men
+had become organized into great nations, covering a vast extent of
+territory, and secured by their concentrated military strength against
+the gravest dangers of barbaric attack." [13]
+
+Now as regards these considerations, the Puritan communities in the
+New England wilderness were to some slight extent influenced by such
+conditions as used to prevail in primitive society; and this will help
+us to understand the treatment of the Antinomians and such cases as that
+with which we have now to deal.
+
+Among the supporters of Mrs. Hutchinson, after her arrival at Aquedneck,
+was a sincere and courageous, but incoherent and crotchetty man named
+Samuel Gorton. [Sidenote: Samuel Gorton]
+
+In the denunciatory language of that day he was called a "proud and
+pestilent seducer," or, as the modern newspaper would say, a "crank." It
+is well to make due allowances for the prejudice so conspicuous in the
+accounts given by his enemies, who felt obliged to justify their harsh
+treatment of him. But we have also his own writings from which to form
+an opinion as to his character and views. Lucidity, indeed, was not one
+of his strong points as a writer, and the drift of his argument is not
+always easy to decipher; but he seems to have had some points of contact
+with the Familists, a sect established in the sixteenth century in
+Holland. The Familists held that the essence of religion consists not
+in adherence to any particular creed or ritual, but in cherishing the
+spirit of divine love. The general adoption of this point of view was to
+inaugurate a third dispensation, superior to those of Moses and Christ,
+the dispensation of the Holy Ghost. The value of the Bible lay not so
+much in the literal truth of its texts as in their spiritual import;
+and by the union of believers with Christ they came to share in the
+ineffable perfection of the Godhead. There is much that is modern and
+enlightened in such views, which Gorton seems to some extent to have
+shared. He certainly set little store by ritual observances and
+maintained the equal right of laymen with clergymen to preach the
+gospel. Himself a London clothier, and thanking God that he had not been
+brought up in "the schools of human learning," he set up as a preacher
+without ordination, and styled himself "professor of the mysteries of
+Christ." He seems to have cherished that doctrine of private inspiration
+which the Puritans especially abhorred. It is not likely that he had any
+distinct comprehension of his own views, for distinctness was just what
+they lacked. [14] But they were such as in the seventeenth century could
+not fail to arouse fierce antagonism, and if it was true that wherever
+there was a government Gorton was against it, perhaps that only shows
+that wherever there was a government it was sure to be against him.
+
+In the case of such men as Gorton, however,--and the type is by no
+means an uncommon one,--their temperament usually has much more to do
+with getting them into trouble than their opinions. Gorton's temperament
+was such as to keep him always in an atmosphere of strife. Other
+heresiarchs suffered persecution in Massachusetts, but Gorton was in hot
+water everywhere. His arrival in any community was the signal for an
+immediate disturbance of the peace. His troubles began in Plymouth,
+where the wife of the pastor preferred his teachings to those of her
+husband. In 1638 he fled to Aquedneck, where his first achievement was a
+schism among Mrs. Hutchinson's followers, which ended in some staying to
+found the town of Portsmouth while others went away to found Newport.
+Presently Portsmouth found him intolerable, flogged and banished him,
+and after his departure was able to make up its quarrel with Newport.
+He next made his way with a few followers to Pawtuxet, within the
+jurisdiction of Providence, and now it is the broad-minded and gentle
+Roger Williams who complains of his "bewitching and madding poor
+Providence." The question is here suggested what could it have been
+in Gorton's teaching that enabled him thus to "bewitch" these little
+communities? We may be sure that it could not have been the element of
+modern liberalism suggested in the Familistic doctrines above cited.
+That was the feature then least likely to appeal to the minds of common
+people, and most likely to appeal to Williams. More probably such
+success as Gorton had in winning followers was due to some of the
+mystical rubbish which abounds in his pages and finds in a modern mind
+no doorway through which to enter. [Sidenote: He flees to Aquedneck and
+is banished thence]
+
+Williams disapproved of Gorton, but was true to his principles of
+toleration and would not take part in any attempt to silence him. But in
+1641 we find thirteen leading citizens of Providence, headed by William
+Arnold, [15] sending a memorial to Boston, asking for assistance and
+counsel in regard to this disturber of the peace. How was Massachusetts
+to treat such an appeal? She could not presume to meddle with the affair
+unless she could have permanent jurisdiction over Pawtuxet; otherwise
+she was a mere intruder. How strong a side-light does this little
+incident throw upon the history of the Roman republic, and of all
+relatively strong communities when confronted with the problem of
+preserving order in neighbouring states that are too weak to preserve it
+for themselves! Arnold's argument, in his appeal to Massachusetts, was
+precisely the same as that by which the latter colony excused herself
+for banishing the Antinomians. He simply says that Gorton and his
+company "are not fit persons to be received, and made members of a body
+in so weak a state as our town is in at present;" and he adds, "There is
+no state but in the first place will seek to preserve its own safety and
+peace." Whatever might be the abstract merits of Gorton's opinions, his
+conduct was politically dangerous; and accordingly the jurisdiction over
+Pawtuxet was formally conceded to Massachusetts. Thereupon that colony,
+assuming jurisdiction, summoned Gorton and his men to Boston, to prove
+their title to the lands they occupied. They of course regarded the
+summons as a flagrant usurpation of authority, and instead of obeying
+it they withdrew to Shawomet, on the western shore of Narragansett bay,
+where they bought a tract of land from the principal sachem of the
+Narragansetts, Miantonomo. The immediate rule over this land belonged to
+two inferior chiefs, who ratified the sale at the time, but six months
+afterward disavowed the ratification, on the ground that it had been
+given under duress from their overlord Miantonomo. Here was a state
+of things which might easily bring on an Indian war. The two chiefs
+appealed to Massachusetts for protection, and were accordingly summoned,
+along with Miantonomo, to a hearing at Boston. Here we see how a kind of
+English protectorate over the native tribes had begun to grow up so soon
+after the destruction of the Pequots. Such a result was inevitable.
+After hearing the arguments, the legislature decided to defend the two
+chiefs, provided they would put themselves under the jurisdiction of
+Massachusetts. This was done, while further complaints against Gorton
+came from the citizens of Providence. Gorton and his men were now
+peremptorily summoned to Boston to show cause why they should not
+surrender their land at Shawomet and to answer the charges against them.
+On receiving from Gorton a defiant reply, couched in terms which some
+thought blasphemous, the government of Massachusetts prepared to use
+force. [Sidenote: Providence protests against him] [Sidenote: He flees
+to Shawomet, where he buys land of the Indians]
+
+Meanwhile the unfortunate Miantonomo had rushed upon his doom. The
+annihilation of the Pequots had left the Mohegans and Narragansetts
+contending for the foremost place among the native tribes. Between the
+rival sachems, Uncas and Miantonomo, the hatred was deep and deadly.
+As soon as the Mohegan perceived that trouble was brewing between
+Miantonomo and the government at Boston, he improved the occasion by
+gathering a few Narragansett scalps. Miantonomo now took the war-path
+and was totally defeated by Uncas in a battle on the Great Plain in the
+present township of Norwich. Encumbered with a coat of mail which his
+friend Gorton had given him, Miantonomo was overtaken and captured. By
+ordinary Indian usage he would have been put to death with fiendish
+torments, as soon as due preparations could be made and a fit company
+assembled to gloat over his agony; but Gorton sent a messenger to Uncas,
+threatening dire vengeance if harm were done to his ally. This message
+puzzled the Mohegan chief. The appearance of a schism in the English
+counsels was more than he could quite fathom. When the affair had
+somewhat more fully developed itself, some of the Indians spoke of
+the white men as divided into two rival tribes, the Gortonoges and
+Wattaconoges. [16] Roger Williams tells us that the latter term, applied
+to the men of Boston, meant coat-wearers. Whether it is to be inferred
+that the Gortonoges went about in what in modern parlance would be
+called their "shirt-sleeves," the reader must decide. [Sidenote:
+Miantonomo and Uncas]
+
+In his perplexity Uncas took his prisoner to Hartford, and afterward,
+upon the advice of the governor and council, sent him to Boston, that
+his fate might be determined by the Federal Commissioners who were
+there holding their first regular meeting. It was now the turn of the
+commissioners to be perplexed. According to English law there was no
+good reason for putting Miantonomo to death. The question was whether
+they should interfere with the Indian custom by which his life was
+already forfeit to his captor. The magistrates already suspected the
+Narragansetts of cherishing hostile designs. To set their sachem at
+liberty, especially while the Gorton affair remained unsettled, might be
+dangerous; and it would be likely to alienate Uncas from the English. In
+their embarrassment the commissioners sought spiritual guidance. A synod
+of forty or fifty clergymen, from all parts of New England, was in
+session at Boston, and the question was referred to a committee of five
+of their number. The decision was prompt that Miantonomo must die. He
+was sent back to Hartford to be slain by Uncas, but two messengers
+accompanied him, to see that no tortures were inflicted. A select band
+of Mohegan warriors journeyed through the forest with the prisoner and
+the two Englishmen, until they came to the plain where the battle had
+been fought. Then at a signal from Uncas, the warrior walking behind
+Miantonomo silently lifted his tomahawk and sank it into the brain of
+the victim who fell dead without a groan. Uncas cut a warm slice from
+the shoulder and greedily devoured it, declaring that the flesh of
+his enemy was the sweetest of meat and gave strength to his heart.
+Miantonomo was buried there on the scene of his defeat, which has ever
+since been known as the Sachem's Plain. This was in September, 1643, and
+for years afterward, in that month, parties of Narragansetts used to
+visit the spot and with frantic gestures and hideous yells lament their
+fallen leader. A heap of stones was raised over the grave, and no
+Narragansett came near it without adding to the pile. After many a
+summer had passed and the red men had disappeared from the land, a
+Yankee farmer, with whom thrift prevailed over sentiment, cleared away
+the mound and used the stones for the foundation of his new barn. [17]
+[Sidenote: Death of Miantonomo]
+
+One cannot regard this affair as altogether creditable to the Federal
+Commissioners and their clerical advisers. One of the clearest-headed
+and most impartial students of our history observes that "if the English
+were to meddle in the matter at all, it was their clear duty to enforce
+as far as might be the principles recognized by civilized men. When they
+accepted the appeal made by Uncas they shifted the responsibility from
+the Mohegan chief to themselves." [18] The decision was doubtless based
+purely upon grounds of policy. Miantonomo was put out of the way because
+he was believed to be dangerous. In the thirst for revenge that was
+aroused among the Narragansetts there was an alternative source of
+danger, to which I shall hereafter refer. [19] It is difficult now to
+decide, as a mere question of safe policy, what the English ought to
+have done. The chance of being dragged into an Indian war, through the
+feud between Narragansetts and Mohegans, was always imminent. The policy
+which condemned Miantonomo was one of timidity, and fear is merciless.
+
+The Federal Commissioners heartily approved the conduct of Massachusetts
+toward Gorton, and adopted it in the name of the United Colonies. After
+a formal warning, which passed unheeded, a company of forty men, under
+Edward Johnson of Woburn and two other officers, was sent to Shawomet.
+Some worthy citizens of Providence essayed to play the part of
+mediators, and after some parley the Gortonites offered to submit to
+arbitration. The proposal was conveyed to Boston, and the clergy were
+again consulted. They declared it beneath the dignity of Massachusetts
+to negotiate "with a few fugitives living without law or government,"
+and they would no more compound with Gorton's "blasphemous revilings"
+than they would bargain with the Evil One. The community must be
+"purged" of such wickedness, either by repentance or by punishment. The
+ministers felt that God would hold the community responsible for Gorton
+and visit calamities upon them unless he were silenced. [20] The
+arbitration was refused, Gorton's blockhouse was besieged and captured,
+and the agitator was carried with nine of his followers to Boston, where
+they were speedily convicted of heresy and sedition. Before passing
+judgment the General Court as usual consulted with the clergy who
+recommended a sentence of death. Their advice was adopted by the
+assistants, but the deputies were more merciful, and the heretics
+were sentenced to imprisonment at the pleasure of the court. In this
+difference between the assistants and the deputies, we observe an early
+symptom of that popular revolt against the ascendancy of the clergy
+which was by and by to become so much more conspicuous and effective
+in the affair of the Quakers. Another symptom might be seen in the
+circumstance that so much sympathy was expressed for the Gortonites,
+especially by women, that after some months of imprisonment and abuse
+the heretics were banished under penalty of death. [Sidenote: Trial and
+sentence of the heretics]
+
+Gorton now went to England and laid his tale of woe before the
+parliamentary Board of Commissioners. The Earl of Warwick behaved with
+moderation. He declined to commit himself to an opinion as to the
+merits of the quarrel, but Gorton's title to Shawomet was confirmed. He
+returned to Boston with an order to the government to allow him to pass
+unmolested through Massachusetts, and hereafter to protect him in
+the possession of Shawomet. If this little commonwealth of 15,000
+inhabitants had been a nation as powerful as France, she could not have
+treated the message more haughtily. By a majority of one vote it was
+decided not to refuse so trifling a favour as a passage through the
+country for just this once; but as for protecting the new town of
+Warwick which the Gortonites proceeded to found at Shawomet, although it
+was several times threatened by the Indians, and the settlers appealed
+to the parliamentary order, that order Massachusetts flatly and doggedly
+refused to obey. [21] [Sidenote: Gorton appeals to Parliament]
+
+In the discussions of which these years were so full, "King Winthrop,"
+as his enemy Morton called him, used some very significant language. By
+a curious legal fiction of the Massachusetts charter the colonists were
+supposed to hold their land as in the manor of East Greenwich near
+London, and it was argued that they were represented in Parliament by
+the members of the county or borough which contained that manor, and
+were accordingly subject to the jurisdiction of Parliament. It was
+further argued that since the king had no absolute sovereignty
+independent of Parliament he could not by charter impart any such
+independent sovereignty to others. Winthrop did not dispute these
+points, but observed that the safety of the commonwealth was the supreme
+law, and if in the interests of that safety it should be found necessary
+to renounce the authority of Parliament, the colonists would be
+justified in doing so. [Sidenote: Winthrop's prophetic opinion] [22]
+This was essentially the same doctrine as was set forth ninety-nine
+years later by young Samuel Adams in his Commencement Oration at
+Harvard.
+
+The case of the Presbyterian cabal admits of briefer treatment than that
+of Gorton. There had now come to be many persons in Massachusetts who
+disapproved of the provision which restricted the suffrage to members of
+the Independent or Congregational churches of New England, and in 1646
+the views of these people were presented in a petition to the General
+Court. The petitioners asked "that their civil disabilities might be
+removed, and that all members of the churches of England and Scotland
+might be admitted to communion with the New England churches. If this
+could not be granted they prayed to be released from all civil burdens.
+Should the court refuse to entertain their complaint, they would be
+obliged to bring their case before Parliament." [23] The leading signers
+of this menacing petition were William Vassall, Samuel Maverick, and The
+Presbyterian cabal. Dr. Robert Child. Maverick we have already met. From
+the day when the ships of the first Puritan settlers had sailed past
+his log fortress on Noddle's Island, he had been their enemy; "a man of
+loving and curteous behaviour," says Johnson, "very ready to entertaine
+strangers, yet an enemy to the reformation in hand, being strong for the
+lordly prelatical power." Vassall was not a denizen of Massachusetts,
+but lived in Scituate, in the colony of Plymouth, where there were no
+such restrictions upon the suffrage. Child was a learned physician who
+after a good deal of roaming about the world had lately taken it into
+his head to come and see what sort of a place Massachusetts was.
+Although these names were therefore not such as to lend weight to such a
+petition, their request would seem at first sight reasonable enough.
+At a superficial glance it seems conceived in a modern spirit of
+liberalism. In reality it was nothing of the sort. In England it was
+just the critical moment of the struggle between Presbyterians and
+Independents which had come in to complicate the issues of the great
+civil war. Vassall, Child, and Maverick seem to have been the leading
+spirits in a cabal for the establishment of Presbyterianism in New
+England, and in their petition they simply took advantage of the
+discontent of the disfranchised citizens in Massachusetts in order
+to put in an entering wedge. This was thoroughly understood by the
+legislature of Massachusetts, and accordingly the petition was dismissed
+and the petitioners were roundly fined. Just as Child was about to start
+for England with his grievances, the magistrates overhauled his papers
+and discovered a petition to the parliamentary Board of Commissioners,
+suggesting that Presbyterianism should be established in New England,
+and that a viceroy or governor-general should be appointed to rule
+there. To the men of Massachusetts this last suggestion was a crowning
+horror. It seemed scarcely less than treason. The signers of this
+petition were the same who had signed the petition to the General Court.
+They were now fined still more heavily and imprisoned for six months.
+By and by they found their way, one after another, to London, while the
+colonists sent Edward Winslow, of Plymouth, as an advocate to thwart
+their schemes. Winslow was assailed by Child's brother in a spicy
+pamphlet entitled "New England's Jonas cast up at London," and replied
+after the same sort, entitling his pamphlet "New England's Salamander
+discovered." The cabal accomplished nothing because of the decisive
+defeat of Presbyterianism in England. "Pride's Purge" settled all that.
+The petition of Vassall and his friends was the occasion for the
+meeting of a synod of churches at Cambridge, in order to complete the
+organization of Congregationalism. In 1648 the work of the synod was
+embodied in the famous Cambridge Platform, which adopted the Westminster
+Confession as its creed, carefully defined the powers of the clergy, and
+declared it to be the duty of magistrates to suppress heresy. In 1649
+the General Court laid this platform before the congregations; in
+1651 it was adopted; and this event may be regarded as completing the
+theocratic organization of the Puritan commonwealth in Massachusetts.
+[Sidenote: The Cambridge Platform; deaths of Winthrop and Cotton]
+
+It was immediately preceded and followed by the deaths of the two
+foremost men in that commonwealth. John Winthrop died in 1649 and John
+Cotton in 1652. Both were men of extraordinary power. Of Winthrop it is
+enough to say that under his skilful guidance Massachusetts had been
+able to pursue the daring policy which had characterized the first
+twenty years of her history, and which in weaker hands would almost
+surely have ended in disaster. Of Cotton it may be said that he was the
+most eminent among a group of clergymen who for learning and dialectical
+skill have seldom been surpassed. Neither Winthrop nor Cotton approved
+of toleration upon principle. Cotton, in his elaborate controversy
+with Roger Williams, frankly asserted that persecution is not wrong in
+itself; it is wicked for falsehood to persecute truth, but it is the
+sacred duty of truth to persecute falsehood. This was the theologian's
+view. Winthrop's was that of a man of affairs. They had come to New
+England, he said, in order to make a society after their own model;
+all who agreed with them might come and join that society; those who
+disagreed with them might go elsewhere; there was room enough on the
+American continent. But while neither Winthrop nor Cotton understood the
+principle of religious liberty, at the same time neither of them had the
+temperament which persecutes. Both were men of genial disposition, sound
+common-sense, and exquisite tact. Under their guidance no such
+tragedy would have been possible as that which was about to leave its
+ineffaceable stain upon the annals of Massachusetts.
+
+It was most unfortunate that at this moment the places of these two men
+should have been taken by two as arrant fanatics as ever drew breath.
+For thirteen out of the fifteen years following Winthrop's death, the
+governor of Massachusetts was John Endicott, a sturdy pioneer, whose
+services to the colony had been great. He was honest and conscientious,
+but passionate, domineering, and very deficient in tact. At the same
+time Cotton's successor in position and influence was John Norton, a man
+of pungent wit, unyielding temper, and melancholy mood. He was possessed
+by a morbid fear of Satan, whose hirelings he thought were walking
+up and down over the earth in the visible semblance of heretics and
+schismatics. Under such leaders the bigotry latent in the Puritan
+commonwealth might easily break out in acts of deadly persecution.
+[Sidenote: Endicott and Norton take the lead] [Sidenote: The Quakers and
+their views]
+
+The occasion was not long in coming. Already the preaching of George Fox
+had borne fruit, and the noble sect of Quakers was an object of scorn
+and loathing to all such as had not gone so far as they toward learning
+the true lesson of Protestantism. Of all Protestant sects the Quakers
+went furthest in stripping off from Christianity its non-essential
+features of doctrine and ceremonial. Their ideal was not a theocracy
+but a separation between church and state. They would abolish all
+distinction between clergy and laity, and could not be coaxed or bullied
+into paying tithes. They also refused to render military service, or
+to take the oath of allegiance. In these ways they came at once into
+antagonism both with church and with state. In doctrine their chief
+peculiarity was the assertion of an "Inward Light" by which every
+individual is to be guided in his conduct of life. They did not believe
+that men ceased to be divinely inspired when the apostolic ages came
+to an end, but held that at all times and places the human soul may be
+enlightened by direct communion with its Heavenly Father. Such views
+involved the most absolute assertion of the right of private judgment;
+and when it is added that in the exercise of this right many Quakers
+were found to reject the dogmas of original sin and the resurrection of
+the body, to doubt the efficacy of baptism, and to call in question the
+propriety of Christians turning the Lord's Day into a Jewish Sabbath, we
+see that they had in some respects gone far on the road toward modern
+rationalism. It was not to be expected that such opinions should
+be treated by the Puritans in any other spirit than one of extreme
+abhorrence and dread. The doctrine of the "Inward Light," or of private
+inspiration, was something especially hateful to the Puritan. To the
+modern rationalist, looking at things in the dry light of history,
+it may seem that this doctrine was only the Puritan's own appeal to
+individual judgment, stated in different form; but the Puritan could not
+so regard it. To such a fanatic as Norton this inward light was but
+a reflection from the glare of the bottomless pit, this private
+inspiration was the beguiling voice of the Devil. As it led the Quakers
+to strange and novel conclusions, this inward light seemed to array
+itself in hostility to that final court of appeal for all good
+Protestants, the sacred text of the Bible. The Quakers were accordingly
+regarded as infidels who sought to deprive Protestantism of its only
+firm support. They were wrongly accused of blasphemy in their treatment
+of the Scriptures. Cotton Mather says that the Quakers were in the habit
+of alluding to the Bible as the Word of the Devil. Such charges, from
+passionate and uncritical enemies, are worthless except as they serve to
+explain the bitter prejudice with which the Quakers were regarded. They
+remind one of the silly accusation brought against Wyclif two centuries
+earlier, that he taught his disciples that God ought to obey the Devil;
+[24] and they are not altogether unlike the assumptions of some modern
+theologians who take it for granted that any writer who accepts the
+Darwinian theory must be a materialist. [Sidenote: Endicott and Norton
+take the lead] [Sidenote: The Quakers and their views]
+
+But worthless as Mather's statements are, in describing the views of
+the Quakers, they are valuable as indicating the temper in which these
+disturbers of the Puritan theocracy were regarded. In accusing them of
+rejecting the Bible and making a law unto themselves, Mather simply put
+on record a general belief which he shared. Nor can it be doubted that
+the demeanour of the Quaker enthusiasts was sometimes such as to seem
+to warrant the belief that their anarchical doctrines entailed, as a
+natural consequence, disorderly and disreputable conduct. In those
+days all manifestations of dissent were apt to be violent, and the
+persecution which they encountered was likely to call forth strange and
+unseemly vagaries. When we remember how the Quakers, in their scorn of
+earthly magistrates and princes, would hoot at the governor as he
+walked up the street; how they used to rush into church on Sundays and
+interrupt the sermon with untimely remarks; how Thomas Newhouse once
+came into the Old South Meeting-House with a glass bottle in each hand,
+and, holding them up before the astonished congregation, knocked them
+together and smashed them, with the remark, "Thus will the Lord break
+you all in pieces"; how Lydia Wardwell and Deborah Wilson ran about the
+streets in the primitive costume of Eve before the fall, and called
+their conduct "testifying before the Lord"; we can hardly wonder that
+people should have been reminded of the wretched scenes enacted at
+Munster by the Anabaptists of the preceding century. [Sidenote: Violent
+manifestations of dissent]
+
+Such incidents, however, do not afford the slightest excuse for the
+cruel treatment which the Quakers received in Boston, nor do they go
+far toward explaining it. Persecution began immediately, before the
+new-comers had a chance to behave themselves well or ill. Their mere
+coming to Boston was taken as an act of invasion. It was indeed an
+attack upon the Puritan theocratic idea. Of all the sectaries of that
+age of sects, the Quakers were the most aggressive. There were at one
+time more than four thousand of them in English jails; yet when any of
+them left England, it was less to escape persecution than to preach
+their doctrines far and wide over the earth. Their missionaries found
+their way to Paris, to Vienna; even to Rome, where they testified under
+the very roof of the Vatican. In this dauntless spirit they came to New
+England to convert its inhabitants, or at any rate to establish the
+principle that in whatever community it might please them to stay, there
+they would stay in spite of judge or hangman. At first they came to
+Barbadoes, whence two of their number, Anne Austin and Mary Fisher,
+sailed for Boston. When they landed, on a May morning in 1656, Endicott
+happened to be away from Boston, but the deputy-governor, Richard
+Bellingham, was equal to the occasion. He arrested the two women and
+locked them up in jail, where, for fear they might proclaim their
+heresies to the crowd gathered outside, the windows were boarded up.
+There was no law as yet enacted against Quakers, but a council summoned
+for the occasion pronounced their doctrines blasphemous and devilish.
+The books which the poor women had with them were seized and publicly
+burned, and the women themselves were kept in prison half-starved for
+five weeks until the ship they had come in was ready to return to
+Barbadoes. Soon after their departure Endicott came home. He found fault
+with Bellingham's conduct as too gentle; if he had been there he would
+have had the hussies flogged. [Sidenote: Anne Austin and Mary Fisher]
+
+Five years afterward Mary Fisher went to Adrianople and tried to convert
+the Grand Turk, who treated her with grave courtesy and allowed her to
+prophesy unmolested. This is one of the numerous incidents that, on a
+superficial view of history, might be cited in support of the opinion
+that there has been on the whole more tolerance in the Mussulman than in
+the Christian world. Rightly interpreted, however, the fact has no such
+implication. In Massachusetts the preaching of Quaker doctrines might
+(and did) lead to a revolution; in Turkey it was as harmless as the
+barking of dogs. Governor Endicott was afraid of Mary Fisher; Mahomet
+III. was not.
+
+No sooner had the two women been shipped from Boston than eight other
+Quakers arrived from London. They were at once arrested. While they were
+lying in jail the Federal Commissioners, then in session at Plymouth,
+recommended that laws be forthwith enacted to keep these dreaded
+heretics out of the land. Next year they stooped so far as to seek the
+aid of Rhode Island, the colony which they had refused to admit into
+their confederacy. "They sent a letter to the authorities of that
+colony, signing themselves their loving friends and neighbours, and
+beseeching them to preserve the whole body of colonies against 'such a
+pest' by banishing and excluding all Quakers, a measure to which 'the
+rule of charity did oblige them.'" Roger Williams was then president of
+Rhode Island, and in full accord with his noble spirit was the reply of
+the assembly. "We have no law amongst us whereby to punish any for only
+declaring by words their minds and understandings concerning the things
+and ways of God as to salvation and our eternal condition." As for these
+Quakers we find that where they are "most of all suffered to declare
+themselves freely and only opposed by arguments in discourse, there
+they least of all desire to come." Any breach of the civil law shall be
+punished, but the "freedom of different consciences shall be respected."
+This reply enraged the confederated colonies, and Massachusetts, as the
+strongest and most overbearing, threatened to cut off the trade of
+Rhode Island, which forthwith appealed to Cromwell for protection. The
+language of the appeal is as touching as its broad Christian spirit is
+grand. It recognizes that by stopping trade the men of Massachusetts
+will injure themselves, yet, it goes on to say, "for the safeguard of
+their religion they may seem to neglect themselves in that respect; for
+what will not men do for their God?" But whatever fortune may befall,
+"let us not be compelled to exercise any civil power over men's
+consciences." [25] [Sidenote: Noble conduct of Rhode Island]
+
+There could never, of course, be a doubt as to who drew up this state
+paper. During his last visit to England, three years before, Roger
+Williams had spent several weeks at Sir Harry Vane's country house in
+Lincolnshire, and he had also been intimately associated with Cromwell
+and Milton. The views of these great men were the most advanced of
+that age. They were coming to understand the true principle upon which
+toleration should be based. (See my Excursions of an Evolutionist, pp.
+247, 289-293.) Vane had said in Parliament, "Why should the labours of
+any be suppressed, if sober, though never so different? We now profess
+to seek God, we desire to see light!" [Sidenote: Roger Williams appeals
+to Cromwell]
+
+This Williams called a "heavenly speech." The sentiment it expressed was
+in accordance with the practical policy of Cromwell, and in the appeal
+of the president of Rhode Island to the Lord Protector one hears the
+tone with which friend speaks to friend.
+
+In thus protecting the Quakers, Williams never for a moment concealed
+his antipathy to their doctrines. The author of "George Fox digged out
+of his Burrowes," the sturdy controversialist who in his seventy-third
+year rowed himself in a boat the whole length of Narragansett bay to
+engage in a theological tournament against three Quaker champions, was
+animated by nothing less than the broadest liberalism in his bold reply
+to the Federal Commissioners in 1657. The event showed that under his
+guidance the policy of Rhode Island was not only honourable but wise.
+The four confederated colonies all proceeded to pass laws banishing
+Quakers and making it a penal offence for shipmasters to bring them to
+New England. These laws differed in severity. Those of Connecticut, in
+which we may trace the influence of the younger John Winthrop, were the
+mildest; those of Massachusetts were the most severe, and as Quakers
+kept coming all the more in spite of them, they grew harsher and
+harsher. At first the Quaker who persisted in returning was to be
+flogged and imprisoned at hard labour, next his ears were to be cut off,
+and for a third offence his tongue was to be bored with a hot iron.
+At length in 1658, the Federal Commissioners, sitting at Boston with
+Endicott as chairman, recommended capital punishment. It must be borne
+in mind that the general reluctance toward prescribing or inflicting the
+death penalty was much weaker then than now. On the statute-books there
+were not less than fifteen capital crimes, including such offences as
+idolatry, witchcraft, blasphemy, marriage within the Levitical degrees,
+"presumptuous sabbath-breaking," and cursing or smiting one's parents.
+[26] The infliction of the penalty, however, lay practically very much
+within the discretion of the court, and was generally avoided except in
+cases of murder or other heinous felony. In some of these ecclesiastical
+offences the statute seems to have served the purpose of a threat, and
+was therefore perhaps the more easily enacted. Yet none of the colonies
+except Massachusetts now adopted the suggestion of the Federal
+Commissioners and threatened the Quakers with death. [Sidenote: Laws
+passed against the Quakers]
+
+In Massachusetts the opposition was very strong indeed, and its
+character shows how wide the divergence in sentiment had already become
+between the upper stratum of society and the people in general. This
+divergence was one result of the excessive weight given to the clergy by
+the restriction of the suffrage to church members. One might almost say
+that it was not the people of Massachusetts, after all, that shed
+the blood of the Quakers; it was Endicott and the clergy. The bill
+establishing death as the penalty for returning after banishment was
+passed in the upper house without serious difficulty; but in the lower
+house it was at first defeated. Of the twenty-six deputies fifteen were
+opposed to it, but one of these fell sick and two were intimidated,
+so that finally the infamous measure was passed by a vote of thirteen
+against twelve. Probably it would not have passed but for a hopeful
+feeling that an occasion for putting it into execution would not
+be likely to arise. It was hoped that the mere threat would prove
+effective. Endicott begged the Quakers to keep away, saying earnestly
+that he did not desire their death; but the more resolute spirits
+were not deterred by fear of the gallows. In September, 1659, William
+Robinson, Marmaduke Stevenson, and Mary Dyer, who had come to Boston
+expressly to defy the cruel law, were banished. Mrs. Dyer was a lady
+of good family, wife of the secretary of Rhode Island. She had been an
+intimate friend of Mrs. Hutchinson. While she went home to her husband,
+Stevenson and Robinson went only to Salem and then faced about and came
+back to Boston. Mrs. Dyer also returned. All three felt themselves
+under divine command to resist and defy the persecutors. On the 27th of
+October they were led to the gallows on Boston Common, under escort of
+a hundred soldiers. Many people had begun to cry shame on such
+proceedings, and it was thought necessary to take precautions against a
+tumult. The victims tried to address the crowd, but their voices were
+drowned by the beating of drums. While the Rev. John Wilson railed and
+scoffed at them from the foot of the gallows the two brave men were
+hanged. The halter had been placed upon Mrs. Dyer when her son, who
+had come in all haste from Rhode Island, obtained her reprieve on
+his promise to take her away. The bodies of the two men were denied
+Christian burial and thrown uncovered into a pit. All the efforts of
+husband and son were unable to keep Mrs. Dyer at home. In the following
+spring she returned to Boston and on the first day of June was again
+taken to the gallows. At the last moment she was offered freedom if she
+would only promise to go away and stay, but she refused. "In obedience
+to the will of the Lord I came," said she, "and in his will I abide
+faithful unto death." And so she died. [Sidenote: Executions on Boston
+Common] [Sidenote: Wenlock Christison's defiance and victory]
+
+Public sentiment in Boston was now turning so strongly against the
+magistrates that they began to weaken in their purpose. But there
+was one more victim. In November, 1660, William Leddra returned from
+banishment. The case was clear enough, but he was kept in prison four
+months and every effort was made to induce him to promise to leave the
+colony, but in vain. In the following March he too was put to death. A
+few days before the execution, as Leddra was being questioned in court,
+a memorable scene occurred. Wenlock Christison was one of those who had
+been banished under penalty of death. On his return he made straight for
+the town-house, strode into the court-room, and with uplifted finger
+addressed the judges in words of authority. "I am come here to warn
+you," said he, "that ye shed no more innocent blood." He was instantly
+seized and dragged off to jail. After three months he was brought to
+trial before the Court of Assistants. The magistrates debated for more
+than a fortnight as to what should be done. The air was thick with
+mutterings of insurrection, and they had lost all heart for their
+dreadful work. Not so the savage old man who presided, frowning gloomily
+under his black skull cap. Losing his patience at last, Endicott smote
+the table with fury, upbraided the judges for their weakness, and
+declared himself so disgusted that he was ready to go back to England.
+[27] "You that will not consent, record it," he shouted, as the question
+was again put to vote, "I thank God I am not afraid to give judgment."
+Christison was condemned to death, but the sentence was never executed.
+In the interval the legislature assembled, and the law was modified. The
+martyrs had not died in vain. Their cause was victorious. A revolution
+had been effected. The Puritan ideal of a commonwealth composed of a
+united body of believers was broken down, never again to be restored.
+The principle had been admitted that the heretic might come to
+Massachusetts and stay there.
+
+It was not in a moment, however, that these results were fully realized.
+For some years longer Quakers were fined, imprisoned, and now and then
+tied to the cart's tail and whipped from one town to another. But these
+acts of persecution came to be more and more discountenanced by public
+opinion until at length they ceased.
+
+It was on the 25th of May, 1660, just one week before the martyrdom of
+Mary Dyer, that Charles II. returned to England to occupy his father's
+throne. One of the first papers laid before him was a memorial in behalf
+of the oppressed Quakers in New England. In the course of the following
+year he sent a letter to Endicott and the other New England governors,
+ordering them to suspend proceedings against the Quakers, and if any
+were then in prison, to send them to England for trial. Christison's
+victory had already been won, but the "King's Missive" was now partially
+obeyed by the release of all prisoners. As for sending anybody to
+England for trial, that was something that no New England government
+could ever be made to allow.
+
+Charles's defence of the Quakers was due, neither to liberality
+of disposition nor to any sympathy with them, but rather to his
+inclinations toward Romanism. Unlike in other respects, Quakers and
+Catholics were alike in this, that they were the only sects which the
+Protestant world in general agreed in excluding from toleration. Charles
+wished to secure toleration for Catholics, and he could not prudently
+take steps toward this end without pursuing a policy broad enough to
+diminish persecution in other directions, and from these circumstances
+the Quakers profited. At times there was something almost like a
+political alliance between Quaker and Catholic, as instanced in the
+relations between William Penn and Charles's brother, the Duke of York.
+[Sidenote: The "King's Missive"] [Sidenote: Why Charles II. interfered
+to protect the Quakers]
+
+Besides all this, Charles had good reason to feel that the governments
+of New England were assuming too many airs of sovereignty. There were
+plenty of people at hand to work upon his mind. The friends of Gorton
+and Child and Vassall were loud with their complaints. Samuel Maverick
+swore that the people of New England were all rebels, and he could prove
+it. The king was assured that the Confederacy was "a war combination,
+made by the four colonies when they had a design to throw off their
+dependence on England, and for that purpose." The enemies of the New
+England people, while dilating upon the rebellious disposition of
+Massachusetts, could also remind the king that for several years that
+colony had been coining and circulating shillings and sixpences with the
+name "Massachusetts" and a tree on one side, and the name "New England"
+with the date on the other. There was no recognition of England upon
+this coinage, which was begun in 1652 and kept up for more than thirty
+years. Such pieces of money used to be called "pine-tree shillings";
+but, so far as looks go, the tree might be anything, and an adroit
+friend of New England once gravely assured the king that it was meant
+for the royal oak in which his majesty hid himself after the battle of
+Worcester!
+
+Against the colony of New Haven the king had a special grudge. Two of
+the regicide judges, who had sat in the tribunal which condemned his
+father, escaped to New England in 1660 and were well received there.
+They were gentlemen of high position. Edward Whalley was a cousin of
+Cromwell and Hampden. He had distinguished himself at Naseby and Dunbar,
+and had risen to the rank of lieutenant-general. He had commanded at
+the capture of Worcester, where it is interesting to observe that the
+royalist commander who surrendered to him was Sir Henry Washington, own
+cousin to the grandfather of George Washington. The other regicide,
+William Goffe, as a major-general in Cromwell's army, had won such
+distinction that there were some who pointed to him as the proper person
+to succeed the Lord Protector on the death of the latter. He had married
+Whalley's daughter. Soon after the arrival of these gentlemen, a royal
+order for their arrest was sent to Boston. If they had been arrested and
+sent back to England, their severed heads would soon have been placed
+over Temple Bar. The king's detectives hotly pursued them through the
+woodland paths of New England, and they would soon have been taken but
+for the aid they got from the people. Many are the stories of their
+hairbreadth escapes. Sometimes they took refuge in a cave on a mountain
+near New Haven, sometimes they hid in friendly cellars; and once, being
+hard put to it, they skulked under a wooden bridge, while their pursuers
+on horseback galloped by overhead. After lurking about New Haven and
+Milford for two or three years, on hearing of the expected arrival
+of Colonel Nichols and his commission, they sought a more secluded
+hiding-place near Hadley, a village lately settled far up the
+Connecticut river, within the jurisdiction of Massachusetts. Here the
+avengers lost the trail, the pursuit was abandoned, and the weary
+regicides were presently forgotten. The people of New Haven had been
+especially zealous in shielding the fugitives. Mr. Davenport had not
+only harboured them in his own house, but on the Sabbath before their
+expected arrival he had preached a very bold sermon, openly advising
+his people to aid and comfort them as far as possible. [28] The colony,
+moreover, did not officially recognize the restoration of Charles II. to
+the throne until that event had been commonly known in New England for
+more than a year. For these reasons the wrath of the king was specially
+roused against New Haven, when circumstances combined to enable him at
+once to punish this disloyal colony and deal a blow at the Confederacy.
+We have seen that in restricting the suffrage to church members New
+Haven had followed the example of Massachusetts, but Connecticut had
+not; and at this time there was warm controversy between the two younger
+colonies as to the wisdom Of such a policy. As yet none of the colonies
+save Massachusetts had obtained a charter, and Connecticut was naturally
+anxious to obtain one. Whether through a complaisant spirit connected
+with this desire, or through mere accident, Connecticut had been prompt
+in acknowledging the restoration of Charles II.; and in August, 1661,
+she dispatched the younger Winthrop to England to apply for a charter.
+Winthrop was a man of winning address and of wide culture. His
+scientific tastes were a passport to the favour of the king at a time
+when the Royal Society was being founded, of which Winthrop himself was
+soon chosen a fellow. In every way the occasion was an auspicious one.
+The king looked upon the rise of the New England Confederacy with
+unfriendly eyes. Massachusetts was as yet the only member of the league
+that was really troublesome; and there seemed to be no easier way to
+weaken her than to raise up a rival power by her side, and extend to it
+such privileges as might awaken her jealousy. All the more would such
+a policy be likely to succeed if accompanied by measures of which
+Massachusetts must necessarily disapprove, and the suppression of
+New Haven would be such a measure. [Sidenote: New Haven annexed to
+Connecticut]
+
+In accordance with these views, a charter of great liberality was at
+once granted to Connecticut, and by the same instrument the colony of
+New Haven was deprived of its separate existence and annexed to its
+stronger neighbour. As if to emphasize the motives which had led to this
+display of royal favour toward Connecticut, an equally liberal charter
+was granted to Rhode Island. In the summer of 1664 Charles II. sent a
+couple of ships-of-war to Boston harbour, with 400 troops under command
+of Colonel Richard Nichols, who had been appointed, along with Samuel
+Maverick and two others as royal commissioners, to look after the
+affairs of the New World. Colonel Nichols took his ships to New
+Amsterdam, and captured that important town. After his return the
+commissioners held meetings at Boston, and for a time the Massachusetts
+charter seemed in danger. But the Puritan magistrates were shrewd, and
+months were frittered away to no purpose. Presently the Dutch made war
+upon England, and the king felt it to be unwise to irritate the people
+of Massachusetts beyond endurance. The turbulent state of English
+politics which followed still further absorbed his attention, and New
+England had another respite of several years. [Sidenote: Founding of
+Newark]
+
+In New Haven a party had grown up which was dissatisfied with its
+extreme theocratic policy and approved of the union with Connecticut.
+Davenport and his followers, the founders of the colony, were beyond
+measure disgusted. They spurned "the Christless rule" of the sister
+colony. Many of them took advantage of the recent conquest of New
+Netherland, and a strong party, led by the Rev. Abraham Pierson, of
+Branford, migrated to the banks of the Passaic in June, 1667, and laid
+the foundations of Newark. For some years to come the theocratic idea
+that had given birth to New Haven continued to live on in New Jersey. As
+for Mr. Davenport, he went to Boston and ended his days there. Cotton
+Mather, writing at a later date, when the theocratic scheme of the early
+settlers had been manifestly outgrown and superseded, says of Davenport:
+"Yet, after all, the Lord gave him to see that in this world a
+Church-State was impossible, whereinto there enters nothing which
+defiles."
+
+The theocratic policy, alike in New Haven and in Massachusetts, broke
+down largely through its inherent weakness. It divided the community,
+and created among the people a party adverse to its arrogance and
+exclusiveness. This state of things facilitated the suppression of
+New Haven by royal edict, and it made possible the victory of Wenlock
+Christison in Massachusetts. We can now see the fundamental explanation
+of the deadly hostility with which Endicott and his party regarded the
+Quakers. The latter aimed a fatal blow at the very root of the idea
+which had brought the Puritans to New England. Once admit these heretics
+as citizens, or even as tolerated sojourners, and there was an end of
+the theocratic state consisting of a united body of believers. It was a
+life-and-death struggle, in which no quarter was given; and the Quakers,
+aided by popular discontent with the theocracy, even more than by the
+intervention of the crown, won a decisive victory.
+
+As the work of planting New England took place chiefly in the eleven
+years 1629-1640, during which Charles I. contrived to reign without a
+parliament, so the prosperous period of the New England Confederacy,
+1643-1664, covers the time of the Civil War and the Commonwealth, and
+just laps on to the reign of Charles II. By the summary extinction of
+the separate existence of one of its members for the benefit of another,
+its vigour was sadly impaired. But its constitution was revised so as
+to make it a league of three states instead of four; and the Federal
+Commissioners kept on holding their meetings, though less frequently,
+until the revocation of the Massachusetts charter in 1684. During
+this period a great Indian war occurred, in the course of which this
+concentration of the military strength of New England, imperfect as it
+was, proved itself very useful. In the history of New England, from the
+restoration of the Stuarts until their final expulsion, the two most
+important facts are the military struggle of the newly founded states
+with the Indians, and their constitutional struggle against the British
+government. The troubles and dangers of 1636 were renewed on a much more
+formidable scale, but the strength of the people had waxed greatly in
+the mean time, and the new perils were boldly overcome or skilfully
+warded off; not, however, until the constitution of Massachusetts had
+been violently wrenched out of shape in the struggle, and seeds of
+conflict sown which in the following century were to bear fruit in the
+American Revolution. [Sidenote: Breaking down of the theocratic policy]
+[Sidenote: Weakening of the Confederacy]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+KING PHILIP'S WAR.
+
+
+For eight-and-thirty years after the destruction of the Pequots, the
+intercourse between the English and the Indians was to all outward
+appearance friendly. The policy pursued by the settlers was in the
+main well considered. While they had shown that they could strike with
+terrible force when blows were needed, their treatment of the natives in
+time of peace seems to have been generally just and kind. Except in the
+single case of the conquered Pequot territory, they scrupulously paid
+for every rood of ground on which they settled, and so far as possible
+they extended to the Indians the protection of the law. On these points
+we have the explicit testimony of Josiah Winslow, governor of Plymouth,
+in his report to the Federal Commissioners in May, 1676; and what
+he says about Plymouth seems to have been equally true of the other
+colonies. Says Winslow, "I think I can clearly say that before these
+present troubles broke out, the English did not possess one foot of land
+in this colony but what was fairly obtained by honest purchase of the
+Indian proprietors. Nay, because some of our people are of a covetous
+disposition, and the Indians are in their straits easily prevailed with
+to part with their lands, we first made a law that none should purchase
+or receive of gift any land of the Indians without the knowledge and
+allowance of our Court .... And if at any time they have brought
+complaints before us, they have had justice impartial and speedy, so
+that our own people have frequently complained that we erred on the
+other hand in showing them overmuch favour." The general laws of
+Massachusetts and Connecticut as well as of Plymouth bear out what
+Winslow says, and show us that as a matter of policy the colonial
+governments were fully sensible of the importance of avoiding all
+occasions for quarrel with their savage neighbours. [Sidenote: Puritans
+and Indians]
+
+There can, moreover, be little doubt that the material comfort of the
+Indians was for a time considerably improved by their dealings with the
+white men. Hitherto their want of foresight and thrift had been wont to
+involve them during the long winters in a dreadful struggle with famine.
+Now the settlers were ready to pay liberally for the skin of every
+fur-covered animal the red men could catch; and where the trade thus
+arising did not suffice to keep off famine, instances of generous
+charity were frequent. The Algonquin tribes of New England lived chiefly
+by hunting, but partly by agriculture. They raised beans and corn, and
+succotash was a dish which they contributed to the white man's table.
+They could now raise or buy English vegetables, while from dogs and
+horses, pigs and poultry, oxen and sheep, little as they could avail
+themselves of such useful animals, they nevertheless derived some
+benefit. [29] Better blankets and better knives were brought within
+their reach; and in spite of all the colonial governments could do to
+prevent it, they were to some extent enabled to supply themselves with
+muskets and rum. [Sidenote: Trade with the Indians]
+
+Besides all this trade, which, except in the article of liquor, tended
+to improve the condition of the native tribes, there was on the part of
+the earlier settlers an earnest and diligent effort to convert them
+to Christianity and give them the rudiments of a civilized education.
+Missionary work was begun in 1643 by Thomas Mayhew on the islands of
+Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. The savages at first declared they were
+not so silly as to barter thirty-seven tutelar deities for one, but
+after much preaching and many pow-wows Mayhew succeeded in persuading
+them that the Deity of the white man was mightier than all their
+_manitous._ Whether they ever got much farther than this toward a
+comprehension of the white man's religion may be doubted; but they were
+prevailed upon to let their children learn to read and write, and even
+to set up little courts, in which justice was administered according to
+some of the simplest rules of English law, and from which there lay an
+appeal to the court of Plymouth. In 1646 Massachusetts enacted that the
+elders of the churches should choose two persons each year to go and
+spread the gospel among the Indians. In 1649 Parliament established the
+Society for propagating the Gospel in New England, and presently from
+voluntary contributions the society was able to dispose of an annual
+income of L2000. Schools were set up in which agriculture was taught as
+well as religion. It was even intended that Indians should go to Harvard
+College, and a building was erected for their accommodation, but as none
+came to occupy it, the college printing-press was presently set to work
+there. One solitary Indian student afterward succeeded in climbing to
+the bachelor's degree,--Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck of the class of 1665. It
+was this one success that was marvellous, not the failure of the scheme,
+which vividly shows how difficult it was for the white man of that day
+to understand the limitations of the red man. [Sidenote: Missionary
+work: Thomas Mayhew]
+
+The greatest measure of success in converting the Indians was attained
+by that famous linguist and preacher, the apostle John Eliot. This
+remarkable man was a graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge. He had come
+to Massachusetts in 1631, and in the following year had been settled as
+teacher in the church at Roxbury of which Thomas Welde was pastor. He
+had been distinguished at the university for philological scholarship
+and for linguistic talent--two things not always found in
+connection--and now during fourteen years he devoted such time as he
+could to acquiring a complete mastery of the Algonquin dialect spoken by
+the Indians of Massachusetts bay. To the modern comparative philologist
+his work is of great value. He published not only an excellent Indian
+grammar, but a complete translation of the Bible into the Massachusetts
+language,--a monument of prodigious labour. It is one of the most
+instructive documents in existence for the student of Algonquin speech,
+though the Massachusetts tribe and its language have long been extinct,
+and there are very few scholars living who can read the book. It has
+become one of the curiosities of literature and at auction sales of
+private libraries commands an extremely high price. Yet out of this rare
+book the American public has somehow or other within the last five
+or six years contrived to pick up a word which we shall very likely
+continue to hear for some time to come. In Eliot's Bible, the word which
+means a great chief--such as Joshua, or Gideon, or Joab--is "mugwump."
+
+
+It was in 1646 that Eliot began his missionary preaching at a small
+Indian village near Watertown. President Dunster, of Harvard College,
+and Mr. Shepard, the minister at Cambridge, felt a warm interest in the
+undertaking. These worthy men seriously believed that the aborigines
+of America were the degenerate descendants of the ten lost tribes of
+Israel, and from this strange backsliding it was hoped that they might
+now be reclaimed. With rare eloquence and skill did Eliot devote himself
+to the difficult work of reaching the Indian's scanty intelligence and
+still scantier moral sense. His ministrations reached from the sands of
+Cape Cod to the rocky hillsides of Brookfield. But he soon found that
+single-handed he could achieve but little over so wide an area, and
+accordingly he adopted the policy of colonizing his converts in village
+communities near the English towns, where they might be sequestered from
+their heathen brethren and subjected to none but Christian influences.
+In these communities he hoped to train up native missionaries who might
+thence go and labour among the wild tribes until the whole lump of
+barbarism should be leavened. In pursuance of this scheme a stockaded
+village was built at Natick in 1651 Under the direction of an English
+carpenter the Indians built log-houses for themselves, and most of them
+adopted the English dress. Their simple government was administered by
+tithing-men, or "rulers of tens," chosen after methods prescribed in the
+book of Exodus. Other such communities were formed in the neighbourhoods
+of Concord and Grafton. By 1674 the number of these "praying Indians,"
+as they were called, was estimated at 4000, of whom about 1500 were in
+Eliot's villages, as many more in Martha's Vineyard, 300 in Nantucket,
+and 700 in the Plymouth colony. There seems to be no doubt that these
+Indians were really benefited both materially and morally by the change
+in their life. In theology it is not likely that they reached any higher
+view than that expressed by the Connecticut sachem Wequash who "seeing
+and beholding the mighty power of God in the English forces, how they
+fell upon the Pequots, ... from that time was convinced and persuaded
+that our God was a most dreadful God;" accordingly, says the author of
+"New England's First Fruits," "he became thoroughly reformed according
+to his light." Matters of outward observance, too, the Indians could
+understand; for we read of one of them rebuking an Englishman "for
+profaning the Lord's Day by felling of a tree." The Indian's notions of
+religion were probably confined within this narrow compass; the notions
+of some people that call themselves civilized perhaps do not extend much
+further. [Sidenote: Villages of Christian Indians]
+
+From such facts as those above cited we may infer that the early
+relations of the Puritan settlers to the Algonquin tribes of New England
+were by no means like the relations between white men and red men in
+recent times on our western plains. During Philip's War, as we shall
+see, the Puritan theory of the situation was entirely changed and our
+forefathers began to act in accordance with the frontiersman's doctrine
+that the good Indians are dead Indians. But down to that time it is
+clear that his intention was to deal honourably and gently with his
+tawny neighbour. We sometimes hear the justice and kindness of the
+Quakers in Pennsylvania alleged as an adequate reason for the success
+with which they kept clear of an Indian war. This explanation, however,
+does not seem to be adequate; it does not appear that, on the whole, the
+Puritans were less just and kind than the Quakers in their treatment of
+the red men. The true explanation is rather to be found in the relations
+between the Indian tribes toward the close of the seventeenth century.
+Early in that century the Pennsylvania region had been in the hands
+of the ferocious and powerful Susquehannocks, but in 1672, after a
+frightful struggle of twenty years, this great tribe was swept from the
+face of the earth by the resistless league of the Five Nations. When
+the Quakers came to Pennsylvania in 1682, the only Indians in that
+neighbourhood were the Delawares, who had just been terribly beaten by
+the Five Nations and forced into a treaty by which they submitted to be
+called "women," and to surrender their tomahawks. Penn's famous treaty
+was made with the Delawares as occupants of the land and also with the
+Iroquois league as overlords. [30] Now the great central fact of early
+American history, so far as the relations between white men and red
+men are concerned, is the unshaken friendship of the Iroquois for the
+English. This was the natural consequence of the deadly hostility
+between the Iroquois and the French which began with Champlain's defeat
+of the Mohawks in 1609. During the seventy-three years which intervened
+between the founding of Pennsylvania and the defeat of Braddock there
+was never a moment when the Delawares could have attacked the Quakers
+without incurring the wrath and vengeance of their overlords the Five
+Nations. This was the reason why Pennsylvania was left so long in quiet.
+No better proof could be desired than the fact that in Pontiac's war,
+after the overthrow of the French and when Indian politics had changed,
+no state suffered so much as Pennsylvania from the horrors of Indian
+warfare. [Sidenote: Why Pennsylvania was so long unmolested by the
+Indians]
+
+In New England at the time of Philip's War, the situation was very
+different from what it was between the Hudson and the Susquehanna. The
+settlers were thrown into immediate relations with several tribes whose
+mutual hostility and rivalry was such that it was simply impossible to
+keep on good terms with all at once. Such complicated questions as that
+which involved the English in responsibility for the fate of Miantonomo
+did not arise in Pennsylvania. Since the destruction of the Pequots we
+have observed the Narragansetts and Mohegans contending for the foremost
+place among New England tribes. Of the two rivals the Mohegans were
+the weaker, and therefore courted the friendship of the formidable
+palefaces. The English had no desire to take part in these barbarous
+feuds, but they could not treat the Mohegans well without incurring the
+hostility of the Narragansetts. For thirty years the feeling of the
+latter tribe toward the English had been very unfriendly and would
+doubtless have vented itself in murder but for their recollection of
+the fate of the Pequots. After the loss of their chief Miantonomo their
+attitude became so sullen and defiant that the Federal Commissioners, in
+order to be in readiness for an outbreak, collected a force of 300 men.
+At the first news of these preparations the Narragansetts, overcome with
+terror, sent a liberal tribute of wampum to Boston, and were fain to
+conclude a treaty in which they promised to behave themselves well in
+the future.
+
+It was impossible that this sort of English protectorate over the native
+tribes, which was an inevitable result of the situation, should be other
+than irksome and irritating to the Indians. They could not but see that
+the white man stood there as master, and even in the utter absence
+of provocation, this fact alone must have made them hate him. It is
+difficult, moreover, for the civilized man and the savage to understand
+each other. As a rule the one does not know what the other is thinking
+about. When Mr. Hamilton Gushing a few years ago took some of his Zuni
+friends into a hotel in Chicago, they marvelled at his entering such a
+mighty palace with so little ceremony, and their wonder was heightened
+at the promptness with which "slaves" came running at his beck and call;
+but all at once, on seeing an American eagle over one of the doorways,
+they felt that the mystery was solved. Evidently this palace was the
+communal dwelling of the Eagle Clan of palefaces, and evidently Mr.
+Gushing was a great sachem of this clan, and as such entitled to lordly
+sway there! The Zunis are not savages, but representatives of a remote
+and primitive phase of what Mr. Morgan calls the middle status of
+barbarism. The gulf between their thinking and that of white men is
+wide because there is a wide gulf between the experience of the two.
+[Sidenote: Difficulty of the situation in New England] [Sidenote: It is
+hard for the savage and the civilized man to understand one another]
+
+This illustration may help us to understand an instance in which the
+Indians of New England must inevitably have misinterpreted the actions
+of the white settlers and read them in the light of their uneasy fears
+and prejudices. I refer to the work of the apostle Eliot. His design in
+founding his villages of Christian Indians was in the highest degree
+benevolent and noble; but the heathen Indians could hardly be expected
+to see anything in it but a cunning scheme for destroying them.
+
+Eliot's converts were for the most part from the Massachusetts tribe,
+the smallest and weakest of all. The Plymouth converts came chiefly
+from the tribe next in weakness, the Pokanokets or Wampanoags. The more
+powerful tribes--Narragansetts, Nipmucks, and Mohegans--furnished very
+few converts. When they saw the white intruders gathering members of the
+weakest tribes into villages of English type, and teaching them strange
+gods while clothing them in strange garments, they probably supposed
+that the pale-faces were simply adopting these Indians into their white
+tribe as a means of increasing their military strength. At any rate,
+such a proceeding would be perfectly intelligible to the savage mind,
+whereas the nature of Eliot's design lay quite beyond its ken. As the
+Indians recovered from their supernatural dread of the English, and
+began to regard them as using human means to accomplish their ends,
+they must of course interpret their conduct in such light as savage
+experience could afford. It is one of the commonest things in the world
+for a savage tribe to absorb weak neighbours by adoption, and thus
+increase its force preparatory to a deadly assault upon other
+neighbours. When Eliot in 1657 preached to the little tribe of Podunks
+near Hartford, and asked them if they were willing to accept of Jesus
+Christ as their saviour, their old men scornfully answered No! they had
+parted with most of their land, but they were not going to become the
+white man's servants. A rebuke administered to Eliot by Uncas in 1674
+has a similar implication. When the apostle was preaching one evening in
+a village over which that sachem claimed jurisdiction, an Indian arose
+and announced himself as a deputy of Uncas. Then he said, "Uncas is not
+well pleased that the English should pass over Mohegan river to call
+_his_ Indians to pray to God." [31]
+
+Thus, no matter how benevolent the white man's intentions, he could not
+fail to be dreaded by the Indians as a powerful and ever encroaching
+enemy.
+
+Even in his efforts to keep the peace and prevent tribes from taking the
+warpath without his permission, he was interfering with the red man's
+cherished pastime of murder and pillage. The appeals to the court at
+Plymouth, the frequent summoning of sachems to Boston, to explain
+their affairs and justify themselves against accusers, must have been
+maddening in their effects upon the Indian; for there is one sound
+instinct which the savage has in common with the most progressive
+races, and that is the love of self-government that resents all outside
+interference. All things considered, it is remarkable that peace should
+have been maintained in New England from 1637 to 1675; and probably
+nothing short of the consuming vengeance wrought upon the Pequots could
+have done it. But with the lapse of time the wholesome feeling of dread
+began to fade away, and as the Indians came to use musket instead of bow
+and arrow, their fear of the English grew less, until at length their
+ferocious temper broke forth in an epidemic of fire and slaughter that
+laid waste the land. [Sidenote: It is remarkable that peace should have
+been so long preserved]
+
+Massasoit, chief sachem of the Wampanoags and steadfast ally of the
+Plymouth colonists, died in 1660, leaving two sons, Wamsutta and
+Metacom, or as the English nicknamed them, Alexander and Philip.
+Alexander succeeded to his father's position of savage dignity and
+influence, but his reign was brief. Rumours came to Plymouth that he was
+plotting mischief, and he was accordingly summoned to appear before the
+General Court of that colony and explain himself. He seems to have gone
+reluctantly, but he succeeded in satisfying the magistrates of his
+innocence of any evil designs. Whether he caught cold at Plymouth or
+drank rum as only Indians can, we do not know. At any rate, on starting
+homeward, before he had got clear of English territory, he was seized by
+a violent fever and died. The savage mind knows nothing of pneumonia or
+delirium tremens. It knows nothing of what we call natural death. To
+the savage all death means murder, for like other men he judges of the
+unknown by the known. In the Indian's experience normal death was by
+tomahawk or firebrand; abnormal death (such as we call natural)
+must come either from poison or from witchcraft. So when the honest
+chronicler Hubbard tells us that Philip suspected the Plymouth people of
+poisoning his brother, we can easily believe him. It was long, however,
+before he was ready to taste the sweets of revenge. He schemed and
+plotted in the dark. In one respect the Indian diplomatist is unlike his
+white brethren; he does not leave state-papers behind him to reward
+the diligence and gratify the curiosity of later generations; and
+accordingly it is hard to tell how far Philip was personally responsible
+for the storm which was presently to burst upon New England. [Sidenote:
+Deaths of Massasoit and Alexander] [Sidenote: Philip's designs]
+
+Whether his scheme was as comprehensive as that of Pontiac in 1763,
+whether or not it amounted to a deliberate combination of all red men
+within reach to exterminate the white men, one can hardly say with
+confidence. The figure of Philip, in the war which bears his name, does
+not stand out so prominently as the figure of Pontiac in the later
+struggle. This may be partly because Pontiac's story has been told by
+such a magician as Mr. Francis Parkman. But it is partly because the
+data are too meagre. In all probability, however, the schemes of
+Sassacus the Pequot, of Philip the Wampanoag, and of Pontiac the Ottawa,
+were substantially the same. That Philip plotted with the Narragansetts
+seems certain, and the early events of the war point clearly to a
+previous understanding with the Nipmucks. The Mohegans, on the other
+hand, gave him no assistance, but remained faithful to their white
+allies.
+
+For thirteen years had Philip been chief sachem of his tribe before the
+crisis came. Rumours of his unfriendly disposition had at intervals
+found their way to the ears of the magistrates at Plymouth, but Philip
+had succeeded in setting himself right before them. In 1670 the rumours
+were renewed, and the Plymouth men felt that it was time to strike, but
+the other colonies held them back, and a meeting was arranged between
+Philip and three Boston men at Taunton in April, 1671. There the crafty
+savage expressed humility and contrition for all past offences, and
+even consented to a treaty in which he promised that his tribe should
+surrender all their fire-arms. On the part of the English this was an
+extremely unwise measure, for while it could not possibly be enforced,
+and while it must have greatly increased the irritation of the Indians,
+it was at the same time interpretable as a symptom of fear. With ominous
+scowls and grunts some seventy muskets were given up, but this was all.
+Through the summer there was much uneasiness, and in September Philip
+was summoned to Plymouth with five of his under-sachems, and solemnly
+warned to keep the peace. The savages again behaved with humility and
+agreed to pay a yearly tribute of five wolves' heads and to do no act of
+war without express permission.
+
+For three years things seemed quiet, until late in 1674 the alarm was
+again sounded. Sausamon, a convert from the Massachusetts tribe, had
+studied a little at Harvard College, and could speak and write English
+with facility. He had at one time been employed by Philip as a sort of
+private secretary or messenger, and at other times had preached and
+taught school among the Indian converts at Natick. Sausamon now came to
+Plymouth and informed Governor Winslow that Philip was certainly engaged
+in a conspiracy that boded no good to the English. Somehow or other
+Philip contrived to find out what Sausamon had said, and presently
+coming to Plymouth loudly asseverated his innocence; but the magistrates
+warned him that if they heard any more of this sort of thing his
+arms would surely be seized. A few days after Philip had gone home,
+Sausamon's hat and gun were seen lying on the frozen surface of
+Assowamsett Pond, near Middleborough, and on cutting through the ice his
+body was found with unmistakable marks of beating and strangling. After
+some months the crime was traced to three Wampanoags, who were forthwith
+arrested, tried by a mixed jury of Indians and white men, found guilty,
+and put to death. On the way to the gallows one of them confessed
+that he had stood by while his two friends had pounded and choked the
+unfortunate Sausamon. [Sidenote: Murder of Sausamon]
+
+More alarming reports now came from Swanzey, a pretty village of some
+forty houses not far from Philip's headquarters at Mount Hope. On Sunday
+June 20, while everybody was at church, a party of Indians had stolen
+into the town and set fire to two houses. Messengers were hurried from
+Plymouth and from Boston, to demand the culprits under penalty of
+instant war. As they approached Swanzey the men from Boston saw a sight
+that filled them with horror. The road was strewn with corpses of men,
+women, and children, scorched, dismembered, and mangled with that
+devilish art of which the American Indian is the most finished master.
+The savages had sacked the village the day before, burning the houses
+and slaying the people. Within three days a small force of colonial
+troops had driven Philip from his position at Mount Hope; but while
+they were doing this a party of savages swooped upon Dartmouth, burning
+thirty houses and committing fearful atrocities. Some of their victims
+were flayed alive, or impaled on sharp stakes, or roasted over slow
+fires. Similar horrors were wrought at Middleborough and Taunton; and
+now the misery spread to Massachusetts, where on the 14th of July the
+town of Mendon was attacked by a party of Nipmucks. [Sidenote: Massacres
+at Swanzey and Dartmouth, June, 1675]
+
+At that time the beautiful highlands between Lancaster and the
+Connecticut river were still an untrodden wilderness. On their southern
+slope Worcester and Brookfield were tiny hamlets of a dozen houses each.
+Up the Connecticut valley a line of little villages, from Springfield
+to Northfield, formed the remotest frontier of the English, and their
+exposed position offered tempting opportunities to the Indians. Governor
+Leverett saw how great the danger would be if the other tribes should
+follow the example set by Philip, and Captain Edward Hutchinson was
+accordingly sent to Brookfield to negotiate with the Nipmucks. This
+officer was eldest son of the unfortunate lady whose preaching in Boston
+nearly forty years before had been the occasion of so much strife. Not
+only his mother, but all save one or two of his brothers and sisters
+--and there were not less than twelve of them--had been murdered by
+Indians on the New Netherland border in 1643; now the same cruel fate
+overtook the gallant captain. The savages agreed to hold a parley and
+appointed a time and place for the purpose, but instead of keeping tryst
+they lay in ambush and slew Hutchinson with eight of his men on their
+way to the conference. [Sidenote: Murder of Captain Hutchinson]
+
+Three days afterward Philip, who had found home too hot for him, arrived
+in the Nipmuck country, and on the night of August 2, took part in a
+fierce assault on Brookfield. Thirty or forty men, with some fifty women
+and children--all the inhabitants of the hamlet--took refuge in a large
+house, where they were besieged by 300 savages whose bullets pierced the
+wooden walls again and again. Arrows tipped with burning rags were
+shot into the air in such wise as to fall upon the roof, but they who
+crouched in the garret were watchful and well supplied with water, while
+from the overhanging windows the volleys of musketry were so brisk and
+steady that the screaming savages below could not get near enough to the
+house to set it on fire. For three days the fight was kept up, while
+every other house in the village was destroyed. By this time the Indians
+had contrived to mount some planks on barrels so as to make a kind of
+rude cart which they loaded with tow and chips. They were just about
+setting it on fire and preparing to push it against the house with long
+poles, when they were suddenly foiled by a heavy shower. That noon the
+gallant Simon Willard, ancestor of two presidents of Harvard College, a
+man who had done so much toward building up Concord and Lancaster that
+he was known as the "founder of towns," was on his way from Lancaster to
+Groton at the head of forty-seven horsemen, when he was overtaken by a
+courier with the news from Brookfield. The distance was thirty miles,
+the road scarcely fit to be called a bridle-path, and Willard's years
+were more than threescore-and-ten; but by an hour after sunset he had
+gallopped into Brookfield and routed the Indians who fled to a swamp ten
+miles distant. [Sidenote: Attack on Brookfield]
+
+The scene is now shifted to the Connecticut valley, where on the 25th of
+August Captain Lothrop defeated the savages at Hatfield. On the 1st of
+September simultaneous attacks were made upon Deerfield and Hadley, and
+among the traditions of the latter place is one of the most interesting
+of the stories of that early time. The inhabitants were all in church
+keeping a fast, when the yells of the Indians resounded. Seizing their
+guns, the men rushed out to meet the foe; but seeing the village green
+swarming on every side with the horrid savages, for a moment their
+courage gave way and a panic was imminent; when all at once a stranger
+of reverend aspect and stately form, with white beard flowing on his
+bosom, appeared among them and took command with an air of authority
+which none could gainsay. He bade them charge on the screeching rabble,
+and after a short sharp skirmish the tawny foe was put to flight. When
+the pursuers came together again, after the excitement of the rout,
+their deliverer was not to be found. In their wonder, as they knew not
+whence he came or whither he had gone, many were heard to say that
+an angel had been sent from heaven for their deliverance. It was the
+regicide William Goffe, who from his hiding-place had seen the savages
+stealing down the hillside, and sallied forth to win yet one more
+victory over the hosts of Midian ere death should come to claim him in
+his woodland retreat. Sir Walter Scott has put this pretty story into
+the mouth of Major Bridgenorth in "Peveril of the Peak," and Cooper has
+made use of it in "The Wept of Wish-ton-wish." Like many other romantic
+stories, it rests upon insufficient authority and its truth has been
+called in question. [32] But there seems to be nothing intrinsically
+improbable in the tradition; and a paramount regard for Goffe's personal
+safety would quite account for the studied silence of contemporary
+writers like Hubbard and Increase Mather. [Sidenote: The mysterious
+stranger of Hadley]
+
+This repulse did not check for a moment the activity of the Indians,
+though for a long time we hear nothing more of Philip. On the 2d
+of September they slew eight men at Northfield and on the 4th they
+surrounded and butchered Captain Beers and most of his company of
+thirty-six marching to the relief of that village. The next day but
+one, as Major Robert Treat came up the road with his 100 Connecticut
+soldiers, they found long poles planted by the wayside bearing the heads
+of their unfortunate comrades. They in turn were assaulted, but beat off
+the enemy, and brought away the people of Northfield. That village was
+abandoned, and presently Deerfield shared its fate and the people were
+crowded into Hadley. Yet worse remained to be seen. A large quantity of
+wheat had been left partly threshed at Deerfield, and on the 11th of
+September eighteen wagons were sent up with teamsters and farmers to
+finish the threshing and bring in the grain. They were escorted by
+Captain Lothrop, with his train-band of ninety picked men, known as the
+"Flower of Essex," perhaps the best drilled company in the colony. The
+threshing was done, the wagons were loaded, and the party made a night
+march southward. At seven in the morning, as they were fording a shallow
+stream in the shade of overarching woods, they were suddenly overwhelmed
+by the deadly fire of 700 ambushed Nipmucks, and only eight of them
+escaped to tell the tale. A "black and fatal" day was this, says the
+chronicler, "the saddest that ever befell New England." To this day the
+memory of the slaughter at Bloody Brook survives, and the visitor to
+South Deerfield may read the inscription over the grave in which Major
+Treat's men next day buried all the victims together. The Indians now
+began to feel their power, and on the 5th of October they attacked
+Springfield and burned thirty houses there. [Sidenote: Ambuscade at
+Bloody Brook, September 12]
+
+Things were becoming desperate. For ten weeks, from September 9 to
+November 19, the Federal Commissioners were in session daily in Boston.
+The most eminent of their number, for ability and character, was the
+younger John Winthrop, who was still governor of Connecticut. Plymouth
+was represented by its governor, Josiah Winslow, with the younger
+William Bradford; Massachusetts by William Stoughton, Simon Bradstreet,
+and Thomas Danforth. These strong men were confronted with a difficult
+problem. From Batten's journal, kept during that disastrous summer, we
+learn the state of feeling of excitement in Boston. The Puritans had
+by no means got rid of that sense of corporate responsibility which
+civilized man has inherited from prehistoric ages, and which has been
+one of the principal causes of religious persecution. This sombre
+feeling has prompted men to believe that to spare the heretic is to
+bring down the wrath of God upon the whole community; and now in Boston
+many people stoutly maintained that God had let loose the savages, with
+firebrand and tomahawk, to punish the people of New England for ceasing
+to persecute "false worshippers and especially idolatrous Quakers."
+Quaker meetings were accordingly forbidden under penalty of fine and
+imprisonment. Some harmless Indians were murdered. At Marblehead two
+were assaulted and killed by a crowd of women. There was a bitter
+feeling toward the Christian Indians, many of whom had joined their
+heathen kinsmen in burning and slaying. Daniel Gookin, superintendent of
+the "praying Indians," a gentleman of the highest character, was told
+that it would not be safe to show himself in the streets of Boston.
+Mrs. Mary Pray, of Providence, wrote a letter recommending the total
+extermination of the red men.
+
+The measures adopted by the Commissioners certainly went far toward
+carrying out Mrs. Pray's suggestion. The demeanour of the Narragansetts
+had become very threatening, and their capacity for mischief exceeded
+that of all the other tribes together. In July the Commissioners had
+made a treaty with them, but in October it became known in Boston
+that they were harbouring some of Philip's hostile Indians. When the
+Commissioners sharply called them to account for this, their sachem
+Canonchet, son of Miantonomo, promised to surrender the fugitives
+within ten days. But the ten days passed and nothing was heard from the
+Narragansetts. The victory of their brethren at Bloody Brook had worked
+upon their minds, so that they no longer thought it worth while to keep
+faith with the white men. They had overcome their timidity and were now
+ready to take part in the work of massacre. [33] The Commissioners soon
+learned of their warlike preparations and lost no time in forestalling
+them. The Narragansetts were fairly warned that if they did not at once
+fulfil their promises they must expect the utmost severities of war. A
+thousand men were enlisted for this service and put under command of
+Governor Winslow, and in December they marched against the enemy. The
+redoubtable fighter and lively chronicler Benjamin Church accompanied
+the expedition.
+
+The Indians had fortified themselves on a piece of rising ground, six
+acres in extent, in the middle of a hideous swamp impassable at most
+seasons but now in some places frozen hard enough to afford a precarious
+footing. They were surrounded by rows of tall palisades which formed a
+wall twelve feet in thickness; and the only approach to the single door
+of this stronghold was over the trunk of a felled tree some two feet in
+diameter and slippery with snow and ice. A stout block-house filled with
+sharpshooters guarded this rude bridge, which was raised some five feet
+from the ground. Within the palisaded fortress perhaps not less than
+2000 warriors, with many women and children, awaited the onset of the
+white men, for here had Canonchet gathered together nearly the whole of
+his available force. This was a military mistake. It was cooping up his
+men for slaughter. They would have been much safer if scattered about in
+the wilderness, and could have given the English much more trouble. But
+readily as they acknowledged the power of the white man, they did not
+yet understand it. One man's courage is not another's, and the Indian
+knew little or nothing of that Gothic fury of self-abandonment which
+rushes straight ahead and snatches victory from the jaws of death. His
+fortress was a strong one, and it was no longer, as in the time of the
+Pequots, a strife in which firearms were pitted against bow and arrow.
+Many of the Narragansetts were equipped with muskets and skilled in
+their use, and under such circumstances victory for the English was not
+to be lightly won. [Sidenote: Expedition against the Narragansetts]
+
+On the night of December 18 their little army slept in an open field
+at Pettyquamscott without other blanket than a "moist fleece of snow."
+Thence to the Indian fortress, situated in what is now South Kingston,
+the march was eighteen miles. The morrow was a Sunday, but Winslow
+deemed it imprudent to wait, as food had wellnigh given out. Getting up
+at five o'clock, they toiled through deep snow till they came within
+sight of the Narragansett stronghold early in the afternoon. First came
+the 527 men from Massachusetts, led by Major Appleton, of Ipswich, and
+next the 158 from Plymouth, under Major Bradford; while Major Robert
+Treat, with the 300 from Connecticut, brought up the rear. There were
+985 men in all. As the Massachusetts men rushed upon the slippery bridge
+a deadly volley from the blockhouse slew six of their captains, while
+of the rank and file there were many killed or wounded. Nothing daunted
+they pressed on with great spirit till they forced their way into the
+enclosure, but then the head of their column, overcome by sheer weight
+of numbers in the hand-to-hand fight, was pushed and tumbled out into
+the swamp. Meanwhile some of the Connecticut men had discovered a path
+across the partly frozen swamp leading to a weak spot in the rear, where
+the palisades were thin and few, as undue reliance had been placed upon
+the steep bank crowned with a thick rampart of bushes that had been
+reinforced with clods of turf. In this direction Treat swept along with
+his men in a spirited charge. Before they had reached the spot a heavy
+fire began mowing them down, but with a furious rush they came up, and
+climbing on each other's shoulders, some fought their way over the
+rampart, while others hacked sturdily with axes till such a breach was
+made that all might enter. This was effected just as the Massachusetts
+men had recovered themselves and crossed the treacherous log in a second
+charge that was successful and soon brought the entire English force
+within the enclosure. In the slaughter which filled the rest of that
+Sunday afternoon till the sun went down behind a dull gray cloud, the
+grim and wrathful Puritan, as he swung his heavy cutlass, thought of
+Saul and Agag, and spared not. The Lord had delivered up to him the
+heathen as stubble to his sword. As usual the number of the slain
+is variously estimated. Of the Indians probably not less than 1000
+perished. Some hundreds, however, with Canonchet their leader, saved
+themselves in flight, well screened by the blinding snow-flakes that
+began to fall just after sunset. Within the fortified area had been
+stored the greater part of the Indians' winter supply of corn, and the
+loss of this food was a further deadly blow. Captain Church advised
+sparing the wigwams and using them for shelter, but Winslow seems to
+have doubted the ability of his men to maintain themselves in a position
+so remote from all support. The wigwams with their tubs of corn were
+burned, and a retreat was ordered. Through snowdrifts that deepened
+every moment the weary soldiers dragged themselves along until two hours
+after midnight, when they reached the tiny village of Wickford. Nearly
+one-fourth of their number had been killed or wounded, and many of the
+latter perished before shelter was reached. Forty of these were buried
+at Wickford in the course of the next three days. Of the Connecticut men
+eighty were left upon the swamp and in the breach at the rear of the
+stronghold. Among the spoils which the victors brought away were a
+number of good muskets that had been captured by the Nipmucks in their
+assault upon Deerfield. [Sidenote: Storming of the great swamp fortress,
+December 19]
+
+This headlong overthrow of the Narragansett power completely changed the
+face of things. The question was no longer whether the red men could
+possibly succeed in making New England too hot for the white men, but
+simply how long it would take for the white men to exterminate the red
+men. The shiftless Indian was abandoning his squalid agriculture and
+subsisting on the pillage of English farms; but the resources of the
+colonies, though severely taxed, were by no means exhausted. The dusky
+warriors slaughtered in the great swamp fight could not be replaced;
+but, as Roger Williams told the Indians, there were still ten thousand
+white men who could carry muskets, and should all these be slain, he
+added, with a touch of hyperbole, the Great Father in England could send
+ten thousand more. For the moment Williams seems to have cherished a
+hope that his great influence with the savages might induce them to
+submit to terms of peace while there was yet a remnant to be saved; but
+they were now as little inclined to parley as tigers brought to bay, nor
+was the temper of the colonists a whit less deadly, though it did not
+vent itself in inflicting torture or in merely wanton orgies of cruelty.
+[Sidenote: Effect of the blow]
+
+To the modern these scenes of carnage are painful to contemplate. In the
+wholesale destruction of the Pequots, and to a less degree in that of
+the Narragansetts, the death-dealing power of the white man stands forth
+so terrible and relentless that our sympathy is for a moment called
+out for his victim. The feeling of tenderness toward the weak, almost
+unknown among savages, is one of the finest products of civilization.
+Where murderous emotions are frequently excited, it cannot thrive. Such
+advance in humanity as we have made within recent times is chiefly
+due to the fact that the horrors of war are seldom brought home to
+everybody's door. Either war is conducted on some remote frontier, or if
+armies march through a densely peopled country the conditions of
+modern warfare have made it essential to their efficiency as military
+instruments that depredation and riot should be as far as possible
+checked. Murder and pillage are comparatively infrequent, massacre
+is seldom heard of, and torture is almost or quite as extinct as
+cannibalism. The mass of citizens escape physical suffering, the angry
+emotions are so directed upon impersonal objects as to acquire a strong
+ethical value, and the intervals of strife may find individual soldiers
+of hostile armies exchanging kindly services. Members of a complex
+industrial society, without direct experience of warfare save in this
+mitigated form, have their characters wrought upon in a way that is
+distinctively modern, as they become more and more disinclined to
+violence and cruelty. European historians have noticed, with words
+of praise, the freedom from bloodthirstiness which characterizes the
+American people. Mr. Lecky has more than once remarked upon this humane
+temperament which is so characteristic of our peaceful civilization, and
+which sometimes, indeed, shows the defects of its excellence and tends
+to weaken society by making it difficult to inflict due punishment upon
+the vilest criminals. In respect of this humanity the American of the
+nineteenth century has without doubt improved very considerably upon his
+forefathers of the seventeenth. The England of Cromwell and Milton
+was not, indeed, a land of hard-hearted people as compared with their
+contemporaries. The long experience of internal peace since the War
+of the Roses had not been without its effect; and while the Tudor and
+Stuart periods had atrocities enough, we need only remember what was
+going on at the same time in France and Germany in order to realize how
+much worse it might have been. In England, as elsewhere, however, it
+was, when looked at with our eyes, a rough and brutal time. It was a day
+of dungeons, whipping-posts, and thumbscrews, when slight offenders were
+maimed and bruised and great offenders cut into pieces by sentence of
+court. The pioneers of New England had grown up familiar with such
+things; and among the townspeople of Boston and Hartford in 1675 were
+still many who in youth had listened to the awful news from Magdeburg or
+turned pale over the horrors in Piedmont upon which Milton invoked the
+wrath of Heaven. [Sidenote: Growth of humane sentiment in recent times]
+
+When civilized men are removed from the safeguards of civilization and
+placed in the wilderness amid the hideous dangers that beset human
+existence in a savage state of society, whatever barbarism lies latent
+in them is likely to find many opportunities for showing itself.
+The feelings that stir the meekest of men, as he stands among the
+smouldering embers of his homestead and gazes upon the mangled bodies
+of wife and children, are feelings that he shares with the most
+bloodthirsty savage, and the primary effect of his higher intelligence
+and greater sensitiveness is only to increase their bitterness. The
+neighbour who hears the dreadful story is quick to feel likewise, for
+the same thing may happen to him, and there is nothing so pitiless as
+fear. With the Puritan such gloomy and savage passions seemed to find
+justification in the sacred text from which he drew his rules of life.
+To suppose that one part of the Bible could be less authoritative than
+another would have been to him an incomprehensible heresy; and bound
+between the same covers that included the Sermon on the Mount were tales
+of wholesale massacre perpetrated by God's command. Evidently the
+red men were not stray children of Israel, after all, but rather
+Philistines, Canaanites, heathen, sons of Belial, firebrands of hell,
+demons whom it was no more than right to sweep from the face of the
+earth. Writing in this spirit, the chroniclers of the time were
+completely callous in their accounts of suffering and ruin inflicted
+upon Indians, and, as has elsewhere been known to happen, those who
+did not risk their own persons were more truculent in tone than the
+professional fighters. Of the narrators of the war, perhaps the fairest
+toward the Indian is the doughty Captain Church, while none is more
+bitter and cynical than the Ipswich pastor William Hubbard. [Sidenote:
+Warfare with savages likely to be truculent in character]
+
+While the overthrow of the Narragansetts changed the face of things, it
+was far from putting an end to the war. It showed that when the white
+man could find his enemy he could deal crushing blows, but the Indian
+was not always so easy to find. Before the end of January Winslow's
+little army was partially disbanded for want of food, and its three
+contingents fell back upon Stonington, Boston, and Plymouth. Early in
+February the Federal Commissioners called for a new levy of 600 men to
+assemble at Brookfield, for the Nipmucks were beginning to renew their
+incursions, and after an interval of six months the figure of Philip
+again appears for a moment upon the scene. What he had been doing, or
+where he had been, since the Brookfield fight in August, was never
+known. When in February, 1676, he re-appeared it was still in company
+with his allies the Nipmucks, in their bloody assault upon Lancaster.
+On the 10th of that month at sunrise the Indians came swarming into the
+lovely village. Danger had already been apprehended, the pastor, Joseph
+Rowlandson, the only Harvard graduate of 1652, had gone to Boston to
+solicit aid, and Captain Wadsworth's company was slowly making its
+way over the difficult roads from Marlborough, but the Indians were
+beforehand. Several houses were at once surrounded and set on fire,
+and men, women, and children began falling under the tomahawk. The
+minister's house was large and strongly built, and more than forty
+people found shelter there until at length it took fire and they were
+driven out by the flames. Only one escaped, a dozen or more were slain,
+and the rest, chiefly women and children, taken captive. The Indians
+aimed at plunder as well as destruction; for they were in sore need of
+food and blankets, as well as of powder and ball. Presently, as they saw
+Wadsworth's armed men approaching, they took to flight and got away,
+with many prisoners and a goodly store of provisions. [Sidenote: Attack
+upon Lancaster, February 10, 1676]
+
+Among the captives was Mary Rowlandson, the minister's wife, who
+afterward wrote the story of her sad experiences. The treatment of the
+prisoners varied with the caprice or the cupidity of the captors. Those
+for whom a substantial ransom might be expected fared comparatively
+well; to others death came as a welcome relief. One poor woman with a
+child in her arms was too weak to endure the arduous tramp over the icy
+hillsides, and begged to be left behind, till presently the savages
+lost their patience. They built a fire, and after a kind of demon dance
+killed mother and child with a club and threw the bodies into the
+flames. Such treatment may seem exceptionally merciful, but those modern
+observers who best know the Indian's habits say that he seldom indulges
+in torture except when he has abundance of leisure and a mind quite
+undisturbed. He is an epicure in human agony and likes to enjoy it in
+long slow sips. It is for the end of the march that the accumulation
+of horrors is reserved; the victims by the way are usually despatched
+quickly; and in the case of Mrs. Rowlandson's captors their irregular
+and circuitous march indicates that they were on the alert. Their
+movements seem to have covered much of the ground between Wachusett
+mountain and the Connecticut river. They knew that the white squaw of
+the great medicine man of an English village was worth a heavy ransom,
+and so they treated Mrs. Rowlandson unusually well. She had been
+captured when escaping from the burning house, carrying in her arms her
+little six-year-old daughter. She was stopped by a bullet that grazed
+her side and struck the child. The Indian who seized them placed the
+little girl upon a horse, and as the dreary march began she kept moaning
+"I shall die, mamma." "I went on foot after it," says the mother, "with
+sorrow that cannot be expressed. At length I took it off the horse, and
+carried it in my arms till my strength failed me, and I fell down with
+it .... After this it quickly began to snow, and when night came on they
+stopped. And now down I must sit in the snow, by a little fire, and a
+few boughs behind me, with my sick child in my lap, and calling much for
+water, being now, through the wound, fallen into a violent fever ....
+Oh, may I see the wonderful power of God that my spirit did not utterly
+sink under my affliction; still the Lord upheld me with his gracious and
+merciful spirit." The little girl soon died. For three months the weary
+and heartbroken mother was led about the country by these loathsome
+savages, of whose habits and manners she gives a vivid description. At
+first their omnivorousness astonished her. "Skunks and rattlesnakes, yea
+the very bark of trees" they esteemed as delicacies. "They would pick up
+old bones and cut them in pieces at the joints, ... then boil them and
+drink up the liquor, and then beat the great ends of them in a mortar
+and so eat them." After some weeks of starvation Mrs. Rowlandson herself
+was fain to partake of such viands. One day, having made a cap for one
+of Philip's boys, she was invited to dine with the great sachem. "I
+went," she says, "and he gave me a pancake about as big as two fingers.
+It was made of parched wheat, beaten, and fried in bear's grease; but I
+thought I never tasted pleasanter meat in my life." Early in May she was
+redeemed for 20 pounds, and went to find her husband in Boston, where
+the Old South Church society hired a house for them. [Sidenote: Mrs.
+Rowlandson's narrative]
+
+Such was the experience of a captive whose treatment was, according to
+Indian notions, hospitable. There were few who came off so well. Almost
+every week while she was led hither and thither by the savages. Mrs.
+Rowlandson heard ghastly tales of fire and slaughter. It was a busy
+winter and spring for these Nipmucks. Before February was over, their
+exploit at Lancaster was followed by a shocking massacre at Medfield.
+They sacked and destroyed the towns of Worcester, Marlborough, Mendon,
+and Groton, and even burned some houses in Weymouth, within a dozen
+miles of Boston. Murderous attacks were made upon Sudbury, Chelmsford,
+Springfield, Hatfield, Hadley, Northampton, Wrentham, Andover,
+Bridgewater, Scituate, and Middleborough. On the 18th of April Captain
+Wadsworth, with 70 men, was drawn into an ambush near Sudbury,
+surrounded by 500 Nipmucks, and killed with 50 of his men; six
+unfortunate captives were burned alive over slow fires. But Wadsworth's
+party made the enemy pay dearly for his victory; that afternoon 120
+Nipmucks bit the dust. In such wise, by killing two or three for one,
+did the English wear out and annihilate their adversaries. Just one
+month from that day Captain Turner surprised and slaughtered 300 of
+these warriors near the falls of the Connecticut river which have
+since borne his name, and this blow at last broke the strength of
+the Nipmucks. [Sidenote: Virtual exterminations of the Indians,
+February--August, 1676]
+
+Meanwhile the Narragansetts and Wampanoags had burned the towns of
+Warwick and Providence. After the wholesale ruin of the great "swamp
+fight," Canonchet had still some 600 or 700 warriors left, and with
+these, on the 26th of March, in the neighbourhood of Pawtuxet, he
+surprised a company of 50 Plymouth men under Captain Pierce and slew
+them all, but not until he had lost 140 of his best warriors. Ten days
+later Captain Denison, with his Connecticut company, defeated and
+captured Canonchet, and the proud son of Miantonomo met the same fate
+as his father. He was handed over to the Mohegans and tomahawked. The
+Narragansett sachem had shown such bravery that it seemed, says the
+chronicler Hubbard, as if "some old Roman ghost had possessed the body
+of this western pagan." But next moment this pious clergyman, as if
+ashamed of the classical eulogy just bestowed upon the hated redskin,
+alludes to him as a "damned wretch." [Sidenote: Death of Canonchet]
+
+The fall of Canonchet marked the beginning of the end. In four sharp
+fights in the last week of June, Major Talcott, of Hartford, slew
+from 300 to 400 warriors, being nearly all that were left of the
+Narragansetts; and during the month of July Captain Church patrolled the
+country about Taunton, making prisoners of the Wampanoags. Once more
+King Philip, shorn of his prestige, comes upon the scene. We have seen
+that his agency in these cruel events had been at the outset a potent
+one. Whatever else it may have been, it was at least the agency of the
+match that explodes the powder-cask. Under the conditions of that savage
+society, organized leadership was not to be looked for. In the irregular
+and disorderly series of murdering raids Philip may have been often
+present, but except for Mrs. Rowlandson's narrative we should have known
+nothing of him since the Brookfield fight.
+
+At length in July, 1676, having seen the last of his Nipmuck friends
+overwhelmed, the tattered chieftain showed himself near Bridgewater,
+with a handful of followers. In these his own hunting-grounds some of
+his former friends had become disaffected. The daring and diplomatic
+Church had made his way into the wigwam of Ashawonks, the squaw sachem
+of Saconet, near Little Compton, and having first convinced her that a
+flask of brandy might be tasted without fatal results, followed up his
+advantage and persuaded her to make an alliance with the English. Many
+Indians came in and voluntarily surrendered themselves, in order to
+obtain favourable terms, and some lent their aid in destroying their old
+sachem. Defeated at Taunton, the son of Massasoit was hunted by Church
+to his ancient lair at Bristol Neck and there besieged. His only escape
+was over the narrow isthmus of which the pursuers now took possession,
+and in this dire extremity one of Philip's men presumed to advise his
+chief that the hour for surrender had come. For his unwelcome counsel
+the sachem forthwith lifted his tomahawk and struck him dead at his
+feet. Then the brother of the slain man crept away through the bushes to
+Church's little camp, and offered to guide the white men to the morass
+where Philip lay concealed. At daybreak of August 12 the English
+stealthily advancing beat up their prey. The savages in sudden panic
+rushed from under cover, and as the sachem showed himself running at the
+top of his speed, a ball from an Indian musket pierced his heart, and
+"he fell upon his face in the mud and water, with his gun under him."
+His severed head was sent to Plymouth, where it was mounted on a pole
+and exposed aloft upon the village green, while the meeting-house
+bell summoned the townspeople to a special service of thanksgiving.
+[Sidenote: Death of Philip, August 12]
+
+It may be supposed that in such services at this time a Christian
+feeling of charity and forgiveness was not uppermost. Among the captives
+was a son of Philip, the little swarthy lad of nine years for whom Mrs.
+Rowlandson had made a cap, and the question as to what was to be done
+with him occasioned as much debate as if he had been a Jesse Pomeroy
+[34] or a Chicago anarchist. The opinions of the clergy were, of course,
+eagerly sought and freely vouchsafed. One minister somewhat doubtfully
+urged that "although a precept in Deuteronomy explicitly forbids killing
+the child for the father's sin," yet after all "the children of Saul and
+Achan perished with their parents, though too young to have shared their
+guilt." Thus curiously did this English reverence for precedent, with a
+sort of grim conscientiousness colouring its gloomy wrath, search for
+guidance among the ancient records of the children of Israel. Commenting
+upon the truculent suggestion, Increase Mather, soon to be president of
+Harvard, observed that, "though David had spared the infant Hadad, yet
+it might have been better for his people if he had been less merciful."
+These bloodthirsty counsels did not prevail, but the course that was
+adopted did not lack in harshness. Among the sachems a dozen leading
+spirits were hanged or shot, and hundreds of captives were shipped off
+to the West Indies to be sold into slavery; among these was Philip's
+little son. The rough soldier Church and the apostle Eliot were among
+the few who disapproved of this policy. Church feared it might goad such
+Indians as were still at large to acts of desperation. Eliot, in an
+earnest letter to the Federal Commissioners, observed: "To sell souls
+for money seemeth to me dangerous merchandise." But the plan of
+exporting the captives was adhered to. As slaves they were understood to
+be of little or no value, and sometimes for want of purchasers they were
+set ashore on strange coasts and abandoned. A few were even carried to
+one of the foulest of mediaeval slave-marts, Morocco, where their fate
+was doubtless wretched enough. [Sidenote: Indians sold into slavery]
+
+In spite of Church's doubts as to the wisdom of this harsh treatment,
+it did not prevent the beaten and starving savages from surrendering
+themselves in considerable numbers. To some the Federal Commissioners
+offered amnesty, and the promise was faithfully fulfilled. Among those
+who laid down arms in reliance upon it were 140 Christian Indians, with
+their leader known as James the Printer, because he had been employed at
+Cambridge in setting up the type for Eliot's Bible. Quite early in the
+war it had been discovered that these converted savages still felt the
+ties of blood to be stronger than those of creed. At the attack on
+Mendon, only three weeks after the horrors at Swanzey that ushered in
+the war, it was known that Christian Indians had behaved themselves
+quite as cruelly as their unregenerate brethren. Afterwards they made
+such a record that the jokers and punsters of the day--for such there
+were, even among those sombre Puritans--in writing about the "Praying
+Indians," spelled _praying_ with an _e_. The moral scruples of these
+savages, under the influence of their evangelical training, betrayed
+queer freaks. One of them, says Mrs. Rowlandson, would rather die than
+eat horseflesh, so narrow and scrupulous was his conscience, although it
+was as wide as the whole infernal abyss, when it came to torturing
+white Christians. The student of history may have observed similar
+inconsistencies in the theories and conduct of people more enlightened
+than these poor red men. "There was another Praying Indian," continues
+Mrs. Rowlandson, "who, when he had done all the mischief he could,
+betrayed his own father into the English's hands, thereby to purchase
+his own life; ... and there was another ... so wicked ... as to wear
+a string about his neck, strung with Christian fingers." [Sidenote:
+Conduct of the Christian Indians]
+
+Such incidents help us to comprehend the exasperation of our forefathers
+in the days of King Philip. The month which witnessed his death saw also
+the end of the war in the southern parts of New England; but, almost
+before people had time to offer thanks for the victory, there came news
+of bloodshed on the northeastern frontier. The Tarratines in Maine had
+for some time been infected with the war fever. How far they may have
+been comprehended in the schemes of Philip and Canonchet, it would be
+hard to say. They had attacked settlers on the site of Brunswick as
+early as September, 1675. About the time of Philip's death, Major
+Waldron of Dover had entrapped a party of them by an unworthy stratagem,
+and after satisfying himself that they were accomplices in that
+chieftain's scheme, sent them to Boston to be sold into slavery. A
+terrible retribution was in store for Major Waldron thirteen years
+later. For the present the hideous strife, just ended in southern New
+England, was continued on the northeastern frontier, and there was
+scarcely a village between the Kennebec and the Piscataqua but was laid
+in ashes. [Sidenote: War with the Tarratines, 1676-78]
+
+By midsummer of 1678 the Indians had been everywhere suppressed, and
+there was peace in the land. For three years, since Philip's massacre
+at Swanzey, there had been a reign of terror in New England. Within
+the boundaries of Connecticut, indeed, little or no damage had been
+inflicted, and the troops of that colony, not needed on their own soil,
+did noble service in the common cause.
+
+In Massachusetts and Plymouth, on the other hand, the destruction of
+life and property had been simply frightful. Of ninety towns, twelve had
+been utterly destroyed, while more than forty others had been the scene
+of fire and slaughter. Out of this little society nearly a thousand
+staunch men, including not few of broad culture and strong promise, had
+lost their lives, while of the scores of fair women and poor little
+children that had perished under the ruthless tomahawk, one can hardly
+give an accurate account. Hardly a family throughout the land but was
+in mourning. The war-debt of Plymouth was reckoned to exceed the total
+amount of personal property in the colony; yet although it pinched every
+household for many a year, it was paid to the uttermost farthing; nor
+in this respect were Massachusetts and Connecticut at all behind-hand.
+[Sidenote: Destructiveness of the war]
+
+But while King Philip's War wrought such fearful damage to the English,
+it was for the Indians themselves utter destruction. Most of the
+warriors were slain, and to the survivors, as we have seen, the
+conquerors showed but scant mercy. The Puritan, who conned his Bible so
+earnestly, had taken his hint from the wars of the Jews, and swept
+his New English Canaan with a broom that was pitiless and searching.
+Henceforth the red man figures no more in the history of New England,
+except as an ally of the French in bloody raids upon the frontier. In
+that capacity he does mischief enough for yet a half-century more, but
+from central and southern New England, as an element of disturbance or a
+power to be reckoned with, he disappears forever.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE TYRANNY OF ANDROS.
+
+
+The beginnings of New England were made in the full daylight of modern
+history. It was an age of town records, of registered deeds, of
+contemporary memoirs, of diplomatic correspondence, of controversial
+pamphlets, funeral sermons, political diatribes, specific instructions,
+official reports, and private letters. It was not a time in which
+mythical personages or incredible legends could flourish, and such
+things we do find in the history of New England. There was nevertheless
+a romantic side to this history, enough to envelop some of its
+characters and incidents in a glamour that may mislead the modern
+reader. This wholesale migration from the smiling fields of merry
+England to an unexplored wilderness beyond a thousand leagues of sea was
+of itself a most romantic and thrilling event, and when viewed in the
+light of its historic results it becomes clothed with sublimity. The men
+who undertook this work were not at all free from self-consciousness.
+They believed that they were doing a wonderful thing. They felt
+themselves to be instruments in accomplishing a kind of "manifest
+destiny." Their exodus was that of a chosen people who were at length
+to lay the everlasting foundations of God's kingdom upon earth. Such
+opinions, which took a strong colour from their assiduous study of the
+Old Testament, reacted and disposed them all the more to search its
+pages for illustrations and precedents, and to regard it as an oracle,
+almost as a talisman. In every propitious event they saw a special
+providence, an act of divine intervention to deliver them from the
+snares of an ever watchful Satan. This steadfast faith in an unseen
+ruler and guide was to them a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by
+night. It was of great moral value. It gave them clearness of purpose
+and concentration of strength, and contributed toward making them,
+like the children of Israel, a people of indestructible vitality and
+aggressive energy. At the same time, in the hands of the Puritan
+writers, this feeling was apt to warp their estimates of events and
+throw such a romantic haze about things as seriously to interfere with a
+true historical perspective. [Sidenote: Romantic features in the early
+history of New England]
+
+Among such writings that which perhaps best epitomizes the Puritan
+philosophy is "The Wonder-working Providence of Zion's Saviour in New
+England," by Captain Edward Johnson, one of the principal founders of
+Woburn. It is an extremely valuable history of New England from 1628 to
+1651, and every page is alive with the virile energy of that stirring
+time. With narrative, argument, and apologue, abounding in honesty
+of purpose, sublimity of trust, and grotesqueness of fancy, wherein
+touching tenderness is often alternated with sternness most grim and
+merciless, yet now and then relieved by a sudden gleam of humour,--and
+all in a style that is usually uncouth and harsh, but sometimes bursts
+forth in eloquence worthy of Bunyan,--we are told how the founders of
+New England are soldiers of Christ enlisted in a holy war, and how they
+must "march manfully on till all opposers of Christ's kingly power be
+abolished." "And as for you who are called to sound forth his silver
+trumpets, blow loud and shrill to this chiefest treble tune--for the
+armies of the great Jehovah are at hand." "He standeth not as an idle
+spectator beholding his people's ruth and their enemies' rage, but as an
+actor in all actions, to bring to naught the desires of the wicked, ...
+having also the ordering of every weapon in its first produce, guiding
+every shaft that flies, leading each bullet to his place of settling,
+and weapon to the wound it makes." To men engaged in such a crusade
+against the powers of evil, nothing could seem insignificant or trivial;
+for, as Johnson continues, in truly prophetic phrase, "the Lord Christ
+intends to achieve greater matters by this little handful than the world
+is aware of." [Sidenote: Edward Johnson]
+
+The general sentiment of the early New England writers was like that
+of the "Wonder-working Providence," though it did not always find such
+rhapsodic expression. It has left its impress upon the minds of their
+children's children down to our own time, and has affected the opinions
+held about them by other people. It has had something to do with a
+certain tacit assumption of superiority on the part of New Englanders,
+upon which the men and women of other communities have been heard
+to comment in resentful and carping tones. There has probably never
+existed, in any age or at any spot on the earth's surface, a group of
+people that did not take for granted its own preeminent excellence. Upon
+some such assumption, as upon an incontrovertible axiom, all historical
+narratives, from the chronicles of a parish to the annals of an empire,
+alike proceed. But in New England it assumed a form especially apt to
+provoke challenge. One of its unintentional effects was the setting up
+of an unreal and impossible standard by which to judge the acts and
+motives of the Puritans of the seventeenth century. We come upon
+instances of harshness and cruelty, of narrow-minded bigotry, and
+superstitious frenzy; and feel, perhaps, a little surprised that
+these men had so much in common with their contemporaries. Hence the
+interminable discussion which has been called forth by the history of
+the Puritans, in which the conclusions of the writer have generally been
+determined by circumstances of birth or creed, or perhaps of reaction
+against creed. One critic points to the Boston of 1659 or the Salem of
+1692 with such gleeful satisfaction as used to stir the heart of Thomas
+Paine when he alighted upon an inconsistency in some text of the Bible;
+while another, in the firm conviction that Puritans could do no wrong,
+plays fast and loose with arguments that might be made to justify the
+deeds of a Torquemada. [Sidenote: Acts of the Puritans often judged by a
+wrong standard]
+
+From such methods of criticism it is the duty of historians as far as
+possible to free themselves. If we consider the Puritans in the light
+of their surroundings as Englishmen of the seventeenth century and
+inaugurators of a political movement that was gradually to change for
+the better the aspect of things all over the earth, we cannot fail to
+discern the value of that sacred enthusiasm which led them to regard
+themselves as chosen soldiers of Christ. It was the spirit of the
+"Wonder-working Providence" that hurled the tyrant from his throne at
+Whitehall and prepared the way for the emancipation of modern Europe. No
+spirit less intense, no spirit nurtured in the contemplation of things
+terrestrial, could ever have done it. The political philosophy of a Vane
+or a Sidney could never have done it. The passion for liberty as felt
+by a Jefferson or an Adams, abstracted and generalized from the love
+of particular liberties, was something scarcely intelligible to the
+seventeenth century. The ideas of absolute freedom of thought and
+speech, which we breathe in from childhood, were to the men of that age
+strange and questionable. They groped and floundered among them, very
+much as modern wool growers in Ohio or iron-smelters in Pennsylvania
+flounder and grope among the elementary truths of political economy. But
+the spirit in which the Hebrew prophet rebuked and humbled an idolatrous
+king was a spirit they could comprehend. Such a spirit was sure to
+manifest itself in narrow cramping measures and in ugly acts of
+persecution; but it is none the less to the fortunate alliance of
+that fervid religious enthusiasm with the Englishman's love of
+self-government that our modern freedom owes its existence. [Sidenote:
+Spirit of the Wonder-working Providence]
+
+The history of New England under Charles II. yields abundant proof that
+political liberty is no less indebted in the New World than in the Old
+to the spirit of the "Wonder-working Providence." The theocratic ideal
+which the Puritan sought to put into practice in Massachusetts and
+Connecticut was a sacred institution in faults of the defence of
+which all his faculties were kept perpetually alert. Much as he loved
+self-government he would never have been so swift to detect and so
+stubborn to resist every slightest encroachment on the part of the crown
+had not the loss of self-government involved the imminent danger that
+the ark of the Lord might be abandoned to the worshippers of Dagon.
+It was in Massachusetts, where the theocracy was strongest, that the
+resistance to Charles II. was most dogged and did most to prepare the
+way for the work of achieving political independence a century later.
+Naturally it was in Massachusetts at the same time that the faults
+of the theocracy were most conspicuous. It was there that priestly
+authority most clearly asserted itself in such oppressive acts as are
+always witnessed when too much power is left in the hands of men whose
+primary allegiance is to a kingdom not of this world. Much as we owe to
+the theocracy for warding off the encroachments of the crown, we cannot
+be sorry that it was itself crushed in the process. It was well that
+it did not survive its day of usefulness, and that the outcome of
+the struggle was what has been aptly termed "the emancipation of
+Massachusetts." [Sidenote: Merits and faults of the theocracy]
+
+The basis of the theocratic constitution of this commonwealth was the
+provision by which the exercise of the franchise was made an incident of
+church-membership. Unless a man could take part in the Lord's Supper, as
+administered in the churches of the colony, he could not vote or
+hold office. Church and state, parish and town, were thus virtually
+identified. Here, as in some other aspects of early New England, one is
+reminded of the ancient Greek cities, where the freeman who could
+vote in the market-place or serve his turn as magistrate was the man
+qualified to perform sacrifices to the tutelar deities of the tribe;
+other men might dwell in the city but had no share in making or
+executing its laws. The limitation of civil rights by religious tests is
+indeed one of those common inheritances from the old Aryan world that
+we find again and again cropping out, even down to the exclusion of
+Catholics from the House of Commons from 1562 to 1829. The obvious
+purpose of this policy in England was self-protection; and in like
+manner the restriction of the suffrage in Massachusetts was designed
+to protect the colony against aggressive episcopacy and to maintain
+unimpaired the uniformity of purpose which had brought the settlers
+across the ocean. Under the circumstances there was something to be
+said in behalf of such a measure of self-protection, and the principle
+required but slight extension to cover such cases as the banishment of
+Roger Williams and the Antinomians. There was another side to the case,
+however. From the very outset this exclusive policy was in some ways
+a source of weakness to Massachusetts, though we have seen that the
+indirect effect was to diversify and enrich the political life of New
+England as a whole. [Sidenote: Restriction of the suffrage to church
+members]
+
+At first it led to the departure of the men who founded Connecticut,
+and thereafter the way was certainly open for those who preferred the
+Connecticut policy to go where it prevailed. Some such segregation was
+no doubt effected, but it could not be complete and thorough. Men who
+preferred Boston without the franchise to Hartford with it would remain
+in Massachusetts; and thus the elder colony soon came to possess a
+discontented class of people, always ready to join hand in glove with
+dissenters or mischief-makers, or even with emissaries of the crown. It
+afforded a suggestive commentary upon all attempts to suppress human
+nature by depriving it of a share in political life; instead of keeping
+it inside where you can try conclusions with it fairly, you thrust it
+out to plot mischief in the dark. Within twenty years from the founding
+of Boston the disfranchisement of such citizens as could not participate
+in church-communion had begun to be regarded as a serious political
+grievance. These men were obliged to pay taxes and were liable to be
+called upon for military service against the Indians; and they naturally
+felt that they ought to have a voice in the management of public
+affairs. [Sidenote: It was a source of political discontent]
+
+Besides this fundamental ground of complaint, there were derivative
+grievances. Under the influence of the clergy justice was administered
+in somewhat inquisitorial fashion, there was an uncertainty as to just
+what the law was, a strong disposition to confuse questions of law with
+questions of ethics, and great laxity in the admission and estimation of
+evidence. As early as 1639 people had begun to complain that too much
+power was rested in the discretion of the magistrate, and they clamoured
+for a code of laws; but as Winthrop says, the magistrates and ministers
+were "not very forward in this matter," for they preferred to supplement
+the common law of England by decisions based on the Old Testament rather
+than by a body of statutes. It was not until 1649, after a persistent
+struggle, that the deputies won a decisive victory over the assistants
+and secured for Massachusetts a definite code of laws. In the New Haven
+colony similar theocratic notions led the settlers to dispense with
+trial by jury because they could find no precedent for it in the laws of
+Moses. Here, as in Massachusetts, the inquisitorial administration of
+justice combined with partial disfranchisement to awaken discontent, and
+it was partly for this reason that New Haven fell so easily under the
+sway of Connecticut. [Sidenote: Inquisitorial administration of justice]
+
+In Massachusetts after 1650 the opinion rapidly gained ground that all
+baptized persons of upright and decorous lives ought to be considered,
+for practical purposes, as members of the church, and therefore entitled
+to the exercise of political rights, even though unqualified for
+participation in the Lord's Supper. This theory of church-membership,
+based on what was at that time stigmatized as the "Halfway Covenant,"
+aroused intense opposition. It was the great question of the day. In
+1657 a council was held in Boston, which approved the principle of the
+Halfway Covenant; and as this decision was far from satisfying the
+churches, a synod of all the clergymen in Massachusetts was held five
+years later, to reconsider the great question. The decision of the synod
+substantially confirmed the decision of the council, but there were some
+dissenting voices. Foremost among the dissenters, who wished to retain
+the old theocratic regime in all its strictness, was Charles Chauncey,
+the president of Harvard College, and Increase Mather agreed with him
+at the time, though he afterward saw reason to change his opinion, and
+published two tracts in favour of the Halfway Covenant. Most bitter of
+all toward the new theory of church-membership was, naturally enough,
+Mr. Davenport of New Haven. [Sidenote: The "Halfway Covenant"]
+
+This burning question was the source of angry contentions in the First
+Church of Boston. Its teacher, the learned and melancholy Norton, died
+in 1663, and four years later the aged pastor, John Wilson, followed
+him. In choosing a successor to Wilson the church decided to declare
+itself in opposition to the liberal decision of the synod, and in token
+thereof invited Davenport to come from New Haven to take charge of it.
+Davenport, who was then seventy years old, was disgusted at the recent
+annexation of his colony to Connecticut. He accepted the invitation
+and came to Boston, against the wishes of nearly half of the Boston
+congregation who did not like the illiberal principle which he
+represented. In little more than a year his ministry at Boston was ended
+by death; but the opposition to his call had already proceeded so far
+that a secession from the old church had become inevitable. In 1669
+the advocates of the Halfway Covenant organized themselves into a new
+society under the title of the "Third Church in Boston." A wooden
+meeting-house was built on a lot which had once belonged to the late
+governor Winthrop, in what was then the south part of the town, so that
+the society and its meeting-house became known as the South Church; and
+after a new church founded in Summer Street in 1717 took the name of the
+New South, the church of 1669 came to be further distinguished as the
+Old South. As this church represented a liberal idea which was growing
+in favour with the people, it soon became the most flourishing church
+in America. After sixty years its numbers had increased so that the old
+meeting-house could not contain them; and in 1729 the famous building
+which still stands was erected on the same spot,--a building with a
+grander history than any other on the American continent, unless it be
+that other plain brick building in Philadelphia where the Declaration of
+Independence was adopted and the Federal Constitution framed. [Sidenote:
+Founding of the Old South Church, 1669]
+
+The wrath of the First Church at this secession from its ranks was
+deep and bitter, and for thirteen years it refused to entertain
+ecclesiastical intercourse with the South Church. But by 1682 it had
+become apparent that the king and his friends were meditating an attack
+upon the Puritan theocracy in New England. It had even been suggested,
+in the council for the colonies, that the Church of England should be
+established in Massachusetts, and that none but duly ordained Episcopal
+clergymen should be allowed to solemnize marriages. Such alarming
+suggestions began to impress the various Puritan churches with the
+importance of uniting their forces against the common enemy; and
+accordingly in 1682 the quarrel between the two Boston societies came to
+an end. There was urgent need of all the sympathy and good feeling that
+the community could muster, whereby to cheer itself in the crisis that
+was coming. The four years from 1684 to 1688 were the darkest years in
+the history of New England. Massachusetts, though not lacking in the
+spirit, had not the power to beard the tyrant as she did eighty years
+later. Her attitude toward the Stuarts--as we have seen--had been
+sometimes openly haughty and defiant, sometimes silent and sullen, but
+always independent. At the accession of Charles II. the colonists had
+thought it worth while to send commissioners to England to confer with
+the king and avoid a quarrel. Charles promised to respect their charter,
+but insisted that in return they must take an oath of allegiance to the
+crown, must administer justice in the king's name, and must repeal their
+laws restricting the right of suffrage to church members and prohibiting
+the Episcopal form of worship. [Sidenote: Founding of the Old South
+Church, 1669] [Sidenote: Demands of Charles II.]
+
+When the people of Massachusetts received this message they consented to
+administer justice in the king's name, but all the other matters were
+referred for consideration to a committee, and so they dropped out of
+sight. When the royal commissioners came to Boston in 1664, they were
+especially instructed to ascertain whether Massachusetts had complied
+with the king's demands; but upon this point the legislature stubbornly
+withheld any definite answer, while it frittered away the time in
+trivial altercations with the royal commissioners. The war with Holland
+and the turbulent state of English politics operated for several years
+in favour of this independent attitude of the colonists, though during
+all this time their enemies at court were busy with intrigues and
+accusations. Apart from mere slanders the real grounds of complaint
+were the restriction of the suffrage, whereby members of the Church of
+England were shut out; the claims of the eastern proprietors, heirs
+of Mason and Gorges, whose territory Massachusetts had absorbed;
+the infraction of the navigation laws; and the coinage of pine-tree
+shillings. The last named measure had been forced upon the colonists by
+the scarcity of a circulating medium. Until 1661 Indian wampum had been
+a legal tender, and far into the eighteenth century it remained current
+in small transactions. "In 1693 the ferriage from New York to Brooklyn
+was eight stivers in wampum or a silver twopence." [35] As early as
+1652 Massachusetts had sought to supply the deficiency by the issue of
+shillings and sixpences. It was an affair of convenience and probably
+had no political purpose. The infraction of the navigation laws was a
+more serious matter. "Ships from France, Spain, and the Canaries traded
+directly with Boston, and brought in goods which had never paid duty in
+any English port." [36] The effect of this was to excite the jealousy
+of the merchants in London and other English cities and to deprive
+Massachusetts of the sympathy of that already numerous and powerful
+class of people. [Sidenote: Complaints against Massachusetts]
+
+In 1675, the first year of King Philip's War, the British government
+made up its mind to attend more closely to the affairs of its American
+colonies. It had got the Dutch war off its hands, and could give heed to
+other things. The general supervision of the colonies was assigned to
+a standing committee of the privy council, styled the "Lords of the
+Committee of Trade and Plantations," and henceforth familiarly known
+as the "Lords of Trade." Next year the Lords of Trade sent an agent to
+Boston, with a letter to Governor Leverett about the Mason and Gorges
+claims. Under cover of this errand the messenger was to go about and
+ascertain the sentiments which people in the Kennebec and Piscataqua
+towns, as well as in Boston, entertained for the government of
+Massachusetts. The person to whom this work was entrusted was Edward
+Randolph, a cousin of Robert Mason who inherited the property claim to
+the Piscataqua county. To these men had old John Mason bequeathed his
+deadly feud with Massachusetts, and the fourteen years which Randolph
+now spent in New England were busily devoted to sowing the seeds of
+strife. In 1678 the king appointed him collector and surveyor of customs
+at the port of Boston, with instructions to enforce the navigation laws.
+Randolph was not the man to do unpopular things in such a way as to dull
+the edge of the infliction; he took delight in adding insult to injury.
+He was at once harsh and treacherous. His one virtue was pecuniary
+integrity; he was inaccessible to bribes and did not pick and steal from
+the receipts at the custom-house. In the other relations of life he
+was disencumbered of scruples. His abilities were not great, but his
+industry was untiring, and he pursued his enemies with the tenacity of a
+sleuth-hound. As an excellent British historian observes, "he was one of
+those men who, once enlisted as partisans, lose every other feeling in
+the passion which is engendered of strife." [37] [Sidenote: The Lords of
+Trade] [Sidenote: Edward Randolph]
+
+The arrival of such a man boded no good to Massachusetts. His reception
+at the town-house was a cold one. Leverett liked neither his looks nor
+his message, and kept his peaked hat on while he read the letter; when
+he came to the signature of the king's chief secretary of state, he
+asked, with careless contempt, "Who is this Henry Coventry?" Randolph's
+choking rage found vent in a letter to the king, taking pains to remind
+him that the governor of Massachusetts had once been an officer in
+Cromwell's army. As we read this and think with what ghoulish glee the
+writer would have betrayed Colonel Goffe into the hands of the headsman,
+had any clue been given him, we can quite understand why Hubbard and
+Mather had nothing to say about the mysterious stranger at Hadley.
+Everything that Randolph could think of that would goad and irritate the
+king, he reported in full to London; his letters were specimens of that
+worst sort of lie that is based upon distorted half-truths; and his
+malicious pen but seldom lay idle.
+
+While waiting for the effects of these reports to ripen, Randolph was
+busily intriguing with some of the leading men in Boston who were
+dissatisfied with the policy of the dominant party, and under his
+careful handling a party was soon brought into existence which was ready
+to counsel submission to the royal will. Such was the birth of Toryism
+in New England. The leader of this party was Joseph Dudley, son of
+the grim verse-maker who had come over as lieutenant to Winthrop. The
+younger Dudley was graduated at Harvard in 1665, and proceeded to study
+theology, but soon turned his attention entirely to politics. In 1673 he
+was a deputy from Roxbury in the General Court; in 1675 he took part in
+the storming of the Narragansett fort; in 1677 and the three following
+years he was one of the Federal Commissioners. In character and temper
+he differed greatly from his father. Like the proverbial minister's son
+whose feet are swift toward folly, Joseph Dudley seems to have learned
+in stern bleak years of childhood to rebel against the Puritan theory of
+life. Much of the abuse that has been heaped upon him, as a renegade and
+traitor, is probably undeserved. It does not appear that he ever made
+any pretence of love for the Puritan commonwealth, and there were many
+like him who had as lief be ruled by king as by clergy. But it cannot be
+denied that his suppleness and sagacity went along with a moral nature
+that was weak and vulgar. Joseph Dudley was essentially a self-seeking
+politician and courtier, like his famous kinsman of the previous
+century, Robert, Earl of Leicester. His party in Massachusetts was
+largely made up of men who had come to the colony for commercial
+reasons, and had little or no sympathy with the objects for which it was
+founded. Among them were Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Baptists, who
+were allowed no chance for public worship, as well as many others who,
+like Gallio, cared for none of these things. Their numbers, moreover,
+must have been large, for Boston had grown to be a town of 5000
+inhabitants, the population of Massachusetts was approaching 30,000,
+and, according to Hutchinson, scarcely one grown man in five was a
+church-member qualified to vote or hold office. Such a fact speaks
+volumes as to the change which was coming over the Puritan world. No
+wonder that the clergy had begun to preach about the weeds and tares
+that were overrunning Christ's pleasant garden. No wonder that the
+spirit of revolt against the disfranchising policy of the theocracy was
+ripe. [Sidenote: Joseph Dudley]
+
+It was in 1679, when this weakness of the body politic had been duly
+studied and reported by Randolph, and when all New England was groaning
+under the bereavements and burdens entailed by Philip's war, that the
+Stuart government began its final series of assaults upon Massachusetts.
+The claims of the eastern proprietors, the heirs of Mason and Gorges,
+furnished the occasion. Since 1643 the four Piscataqua towns--Hampton,
+Exeter, Dover, and Portsmouth--had remained under the jurisdiction of
+Massachusetts. After the Restoration the Mason claim had been revived,
+and in 1677 was referred to the chief-justices North and Rainsford.
+Their decision was that Mason's claim had always been worthless as based
+on a grant in which the old Plymouth Company had exceeded its powers.
+They also decided that Massachusetts had no valid claim since the
+charter assigned her a boundary just north of the Merrimack. This
+decision left the four towns subject to none but the king, who forthwith
+in 1679 proceeded to erect them into the royal province of New
+Hampshire, with president and council appointed by the crown, and an
+assembly chosen by the people, but endowed with little authority,--a
+tricksome counterfeit of popular government. Within three years an
+arrogant and thieving ruler, Edward Cranfield, had goaded New Hampshire
+to acts of insurrection. [Sidenote: Royal province of New Hampshire]
+
+To the decisions of the chief-justices Massachusetts must needs submit.
+The Gorges claim led to more serious results. Under Cromwell's rule in
+1652--the same year in which she began coining money--Massachusetts
+had extended her sway over Maine. In 1665 Colonel Nichols and his
+commissioners, acting upon the express instructions of Charles II.,
+took it away from her. In 1668, after the commissioners had gone home,
+Massachusetts coolly took possession again. In 1677 the chief-justices
+decided that the claim of the Gorges family, being based on a grant from
+James I., was valid. Then the young Ferdinando Gorges, grandson of the
+first proprietor, offered to sell the province to the king, who had now
+taken it into his head that he would like to bestow it upon the Duke
+of Monmouth, his favourite son by Lucy Walters. Before Charles had
+responded, Governor Leverett had struck a bargain with Gorges, who ceded
+to Massachusetts all his rights over Maine for L1250 in hard cash. When
+the king heard of this transaction he was furious. He sent a letter to
+Boston, commanding the General Court to surrender the province again on
+repayment of this sum of L1250, and expressing his indignation that
+the people should thus dare to dispose of an important claim off-hand
+without consulting his wishes. In the same letter the colony was
+enjoined to put in force the royal orders of seventeen years before,
+concerning the oath of allegiance, the restriction of the suffrage, and
+the prohibition of the Episcopal form of worship. [Sidenote: The Gorges
+claim]
+
+This peremptory message reached Boston about Christmas, 1679. Leverett,
+the sturdy Ironsides, had died six months before, and his place
+was filled by Simon Bradstreet, a man of moderate powers but great
+integrity, and held in peculiar reverence as the last survivor of those
+that had been chosen to office before leaving England by the leaders of
+the great Puritan exodus. Born in a Lincolnshire village in 1603, he was
+now seventy-six years old. He had taken his degree at Emmanuel College,
+Cambridge, had served as secretary to the Earl of Warwick, and in 1629
+had been appointed member of the board of assistants for the colony
+about to be established on Massachusetts bay. In this position he had
+remained with honour for half a century, while he had also served as
+Federal Commissioner and as agent for the colony in London. His wife,
+who died in 1672, was a woman of quaint learning and quainter verses,
+which her contemporaries admired beyond measure. One of her books was
+republished in London, with the title: "The Tenth Muse, lately sprung up
+in America." John Norton once said that if Virgil could only have heard
+the seraphic poems of Anne Bradstreet, he would have thrown his heathen
+doggerel into the fire. She was sister of Joseph Dudley, and evidently
+inherited this rhyming talent, such as it was, from her father. Governor
+Bradstreet belonged to the moderate party who would have been glad to
+extend the franchise, but he did not go with his brother-in-law in
+subservience to the king. [Sidenote: Simon Bradstreet and his wife]
+
+When the General Court assembled, in May, 1680, the full number of
+eighteen assistants appeared, for the first time in the history of the
+colony, and in accordance with an expressed wish of the king. They
+were ready to yield in trifles, but not in essentials. After wearisome
+discussion, the answer to the royal letter was decided on. It stated in
+vague and unsatisfactory terms that the royal orders of 1662 either had
+been carried out already or would be in good time, while to the demand
+for the surrender of Maine no reply whatever was made, save that "they
+were heartily sorry that any actings of theirs should be displeasing
+to his Majesty." After this, when Randolph wrote home that the king's
+letters were of no more account in Massachusetts than an old London
+Gazette, he can hardly be accused of stretching the truth. Randolph kept
+busily at work, and seems to have persuaded the Bishop of London that
+if the charter could be annulled, episcopacy might be established in
+Massachusetts as in England. In February, 1682, a letter came from the
+king demanding submission and threatening legal proceedings against the
+charter. Dudley was then sent as agent to London, and with him was sent
+a Mr. Richards, of the extreme clerical party, to watch him. [Sidenote:
+Massachusetts answers the king]
+
+Meanwhile the king's position at home had been changing. He had made
+up his mind to follow his father's example and try the experiment of
+setting his people at defiance and governing without a parliament. This
+could not be done without a great supply of money. Louis XIV. had
+plenty of money, for there was no constitution in France to prevent his
+squeezing what he wanted out of the pockets of an oppressed people.
+France was thriving greatly now, for Colbert had introduced a
+comparatively free system of trade between the provinces and inaugurated
+an era of prosperity soon to be cut short by the expulsion of the
+Huguenots. Louis could get money enough for the asking, and would be
+delighted to foment civil disturbances in England, so as to tie the
+hands of the only power which at that moment could interfere with his
+seizing Alsace and Lorraine and invading Flanders. The pretty Louise de
+Keroualle Duchess of Portsmouth, with her innocent baby face and heart
+as cold as any reptile's, was the French Delilah chosen to shear the
+locks of the British Samson. By such means and from such motives a
+secret treaty was made in February, 1681, by which Louis agreed to pay
+Charles 2,000,000 livres down, and 500,000 more in each of the next two
+years, on condition that he should summon no more parliaments within
+that time. This bargain for securing the means of overthrowing the laws
+and liberties of England was, on the part of Charles II., an act no less
+reprehensible than some of those for which his father had gone to the
+block. But Charles could now afford for a while to wreak his evil will.
+He had already summoned a parliament for the 21st of March, to meet at
+Oxford within the precincts of the subservient university, and out of
+reach of the high-spirited freemen of London. He now forced a quarrel
+with the new parliament and dissolved it within a week. A joiner named
+Stephen College, who had spoken his mind too freely in the taverns at
+Oxford with regard to these proceedings, was drawn and quartered. The
+Whig leader Lord Shaftesbury was obliged to flee to Holland. In the
+absence of a parliament the only power of organized resistance to the
+king's tyranny resided in the corporate governments of the chartered
+towns. The charter of London was accordingly attacked by a writ of
+_quo warranto_, and in June, 1683, the time-serving judges declared it
+confiscated. George Jeffreys, a low drunken fellow whom Charles had made
+Lord Chief Justice, went on a circuit through the country; and, as Roger
+North says, "made all the charters, like the walls of Jericho, fall down
+before him, and returned laden with surrenders, the spoils of towns."
+At the same time a terrible blow was dealt at two of the greatest Whig
+families in England. Lord William Russell, son of the Earl of Bedford,
+and Algernon Sidney, younger son of the Earl of Leicester, two of the
+purest patriots and ablest liberal leaders of the day, were tried on a
+false charge of treason and beheaded. [Sidenote: Secret treaty between
+Charles II. and Louis XIV] [Sidenote: Shameful proceedings in England]
+
+By this quick succession of high-handed measures, the friends of law and
+liberty were for a moment disconcerted and paralyzed. In the frightful
+abasement of the courts of justice which these events so clearly showed,
+the freedom of Englishmen seemed threatened in its last stronghold. The
+doctrine of passive obedience to monarchs was preached in the pulpits
+and inculcated by the university of Oxford, which ordered the works of
+John Milton to be publicly burned. Sir Robert Filmer wrote that "not
+only in human laws, but even in divine, a thing may by the king be
+commanded contrary to law, and yet obedience to such a command is
+necessary." Charles felt so strong that in 1684 he flatly refused to
+summon a parliament.
+
+It was not long before the effects of all this were felt in New England.
+The mission of Dudley and his colleague was fruitless. They returned to
+Boston, and Randolph, who had followed them to London, now followed them
+back, armed with a writ of _quo warranto_ which he was instructed not to
+serve until he should have given Massachusetts one more chance to humble
+herself in the dust. Should she modify her constitution to please a
+tyrant or see it trampled under foot? Recent events in England served
+for a solemn warning; for the moment the Tories were silenced; perhaps
+after all, the absolute rule of a king was hardly to be preferred to the
+sway of the Puritan clergy; the day when the House of Commons sat still
+and wept seemed to have returned. A great town-meeting was held in the
+Old South Meeting-House, and the moderator requested all who were for
+surrendering the charter to hold up their hands. Not a hand was lifted,
+and out from the throng a solitary voice exclaimed, with deep-drawn
+breath, "The Lord be praised!" Then arose Increase Mather, president
+of Harvard College, and reminded them how their fathers did win this
+charter, and should they deliver it up unto the spoiler who demanded it
+"even as Ahab required Naboth's vineyard, Oh! their children would be
+bound to curse them." Such was the attitude of Massachusetts, and when
+it was known in London, the blow was struck. For technical reasons
+Randolph's writ was not served; but on the 21st of June a decree in
+chancery annulled the charter of Massachusetts. [Sidenote: Massachusetts
+refuses to surrender her charter] [Sidenote: It is annulled by degree of
+chancery, June 21, 1684]
+
+To appreciate the force of this blow we must pause for a moment and
+consider what it involved. The right to the soil of North America had
+been hitherto regarded in England, on the strength of the discoveries of
+the Cabots, as an appurtenance to the crown of Henry VII.,--as something
+which descended from father to son like the palace at Hampton Court or
+the castle at Windsor, but which the sovereign might alienate by his
+voluntary act just as he might sell or give away a piece of his royal
+domain in England. Over this vast territory it was doubtful how far
+Parliament was entitled to exercise authority, and the rights of
+Englishmen settled there had theoretically no security save in the
+provisions of the various charters by which the crown had delegated its
+authority to individual proprietors or to private companies. It was thus
+on the charter granted by Charles I. to the Company of Massachusetts Bay
+that not only the cherished political and ecclesiastical institutions
+of the colony, but even the titles of individuals to their lands and
+houses, were supposed to be founded. By the abrogation of the charter,
+all rights and immunities that had been based upon it were at once swept
+away, and every rood of the soil of Massachusetts became the personal
+property of the Stuart king, who might, if he should possess the will
+and the power, turn out all the present occupants or otherwise deal with
+them as trespassers. Such at least was the theory of Charles II., and
+to show that he meant to wreak his vengeance with no gentle hand, he
+appointed as his viceroy the brutal Percy Kirke,--a man who would have
+no scruples about hanging a few citizens without trial, should occasion
+require it. [Sidenote: Effect of annulling the charter]
+
+But in February, 1685, just as Charles seemed to be getting everything
+arranged to his mind, a stroke of apoplexy carried him off the scene,
+and his brother ascended the throne. Monmouth's rebellion, and the
+horrible cruelties that followed, kept Colonel Kirke busy in England
+through the summer, and left the new king scant leisure to think about
+America. Late in the autumn, having made up his mind that he could not
+spare such an exemplary knave as Kirke, James II. sent over Sir Edmund
+Andros. In the mean time the government of Massachusetts had been
+administered by Dudley, who showed himself willing to profit by the
+misfortunes of his country. Andros had long been one of James's
+favourites. He was the dull and dogged English officer such as one often
+meets, honest enough and faithful to his master, neither cruel nor
+rapacious, but coarse in fibre and wanting in tact. Some years
+before, when governor of New York, he had a territorial dispute with
+Connecticut, and now cherished a grudge against the people of New
+England, so that, from James's point of view, he was well fitted to be
+their governor. James wished to abolish all the local governments
+in America, and unite them, as far as possible, under a single
+administration. With Plymouth there could be no trouble; she had never
+had a charter, but had existed on sufferance from the outset. In 1687
+the charters of Rhode Island and Connecticut were rescinded, but the
+decrees were not executed in due form. In October of that year Andros
+went to Hartford, to seize the Connecticut charter but it was not
+surrendered. While Sir Edmund was bandying threats with stout Robert
+Treat, the queller of Indians and now governor of Connecticut, in the
+course of their evening conference the candles were suddenly blown out,
+and when after some scraping of tinder they were lighted again the
+document was nowhere to be found, for Captain Wadsworth had carried
+it away and hidden it in the hollow trunk of a mighty oak tree.
+Nevertheless for the moment the colony was obliged to submit to the
+tyrant. Next day the secretary John Allyn wrote "Finis" on the colonial
+records and shut up the book. Within another twelvemonth New York and
+New Jersey were added to the viceroyalty of Andros; so that all the
+northern colonies from the forests of Maine to the Delaware river were
+thus brought under the arbitrary rule of one man, who was responsible to
+no one but the king for whatever he might take it into his head to do.
+[Sidenote: Sir Edmund Andros] [Sidenote: The Charter Oak]
+
+The vexatious character of the new government was most strongly felt at
+Boston where Andros had his headquarters. Measures were at once taken
+for the erection of an Episcopal church, and meantime the royal order
+was that one of the principal meeting-houses should be seized for the
+use of the Church of England. This was an ominous beginning. In the
+eyes of the people it was much more than a mere question of disturbing
+Puritan prejudices. They had before them the experience of Scotland
+during the past ten years, the savage times of "Old Mortality," the
+times which had seen the tyrannical prelate, on the lonely moor, begging
+in vain for his life, the times of Drumclog and Bothwell Brigg, of
+Claverhouse and his flinty-hearted troopers, of helpless women tied to
+stakes on the Solway shore and drowned by inches in the rising tide.
+What had happened in one part of the world might happen in another, for
+the Stuart policy was the same. It aimed not at securing toleration but
+at asserting unchecked supremacy. Its demand for an inch was the prelude
+to its seizing an ell, and so our forefathers understood it. Sir
+Edmund's formal demand for the Old South Meeting-House was flatly
+refused, but on Good Friday, 1687, the sexton was frightened into
+opening it, and thenceforward Episcopal services were held there
+alternately with the regular services until the overthrow of Andros. The
+pastor, Samuel Willard, was son of the gallant veteran who had rescued
+the beleaguered people of Brookfield in King Philip's war. Amusing
+passages occurred between him and Sir Edmund, who relished the
+pleasantry of keeping minister and congregation waiting an hour or
+two in the street on Sundays before yielding to them the use of their
+meeting-house. More kindly memories of the unpopular governor are
+associated with the building of the first King's Chapel on the spot
+where its venerable successor now stands. The church was not finished
+until after Sir Edmund had taken his departure, but Lady Andros, who
+died in February, 1688, lies in the burying-ground hard by. Her gentle
+manners had won all hearts. For the moment, we are told, one touch of
+nature made enemies kin, and as Sir Edmund walked to the townhouse
+"many a head was bared to the bereaved husband that before had remained
+stubbornly covered to the exalted governor." [38] [Sidenote: Episcopal
+services in Boston] [Sidenote: Founding of the King's Chapel, 1689]
+
+The despotic rule of Andros was felt in more serious ways than in the
+seizing upon a meetinghouse. Arbitrary taxes were imposed, encroachments
+were made upon common lands as in older manorial times, and the writ of
+_habeas corpus_ was suspended. Dudley was appointed censor of the press,
+and nothing was allowed to be printed without his permission. All the
+public records of the late New England governments were ordered to be
+brought to Boston, whither it thus became necessary to make a tedious
+journey in order to consult them. All deeds and wills were required
+to be registered in Boston, and excessive fees were charged for the
+registry. It was proclaimed that all private titles to land were to be
+ransacked, and that whoever wished to have his title confirmed must pay
+a heavy quit-rent, which under the circumstances amounted to blackmail.
+The General Court was abolished. The power of taxation was taken from
+the town-meetings and lodged with the governor. Against this crowning
+iniquity the town of Ipswich, led by its sturdy pastor, John Wise, made
+protest. In response Mr. Wise was thrown into prison, fined L50, and
+suspended from the ministry. A notable and powerful character was this
+John Wise. One of the broadest thinkers and most lucid writers of his
+time, he seems like a forerunner of the liberal Unitarian divines of
+the nineteenth century. His "Vindication of the Government of the New
+England Churches," published in 1717, was a masterly exposition of the
+principles of civil government, and became "a text book of liberty for
+our Revolutionary fathers, containing some of the notable expressions
+that are used in the Declaration of Independence." [Sidenote: Tyranny]
+[Sidenote: John Wise of Ipswich]
+
+It was on the trial of Mr. Wise in October, 1687, that Dudley openly
+declared that the people of New England had now no further privileges
+left them than not to be sold for slaves. Such a state of things in the
+valley of the Euphrates would not have attracted comment; the peasantry
+of central Europe would have endured it until better instructed; but in
+an English community it could not last long. If James II. had remained
+upon the throne, New England would surely have soon risen in rebellion
+against Andros. But the mother country had by this time come to repent
+the fresh lease of life which she had granted to the Stuart dynasty
+after Cromwell's death. Tired of the disgraceful subservience of her
+Court to the schemes of Louis XIV., tired of fictitious plots and
+judicial murders, tired of bloody assizes and declarations of indulgence
+and all the strange devices of Stuart tyranny, England endured the
+arrogance of James but three years, and then drove him across the
+Channel, to get such consolation as he might from his French paymaster
+and patron. On the 4th of April, 1689, the youthful John Winslow brought
+to Boston the news of the landing of the Prince of Orange in England.
+For the space of two weeks there was quiet and earnest deliberation
+among the citizens, as the success of the Prince's enterprise was not
+yet regarded as assured. But all at once, on the morning of the 18th,
+the drums beat to arms, the signal-fire was lighted on Beacon Hill, a
+meeting was held at the Town-House, militia began to pour in from the
+country, and Andros, summoned to surrender, was fain to beseech Mr.
+Willard and the other ministers to intercede for him. But the ministers
+refused. Next day the Castle was surrendered, the Rose frigate riding in
+the harbour was seized and dismantled, and Andros was arrested as he was
+trying to effect his escape disguised in woman's clothes. Dudley and the
+other agents of tyranny were also imprisoned, and thus the revolution
+was accomplished. It marks the importance which the New England colonies
+were beginning to attain, that, before the Prince of Orange had fully
+secured the throne, he issued a letter instructing the people of Boston
+to preserve decorum and acquiesce yet a little longer in the government
+of Andros, until more satisfactory arrangements could be made. But
+Increase Mather, who was then in London on a mission in behalf of New
+England, judiciously prevented this letter of instructions from being
+sent. The zeal of the people outstripped the cautious policy of the
+new sovereign, and provisional governments, in accordance with the old
+charters, were at once set up in the colonies lately ruled by Andros.
+Bradstreet now in his eighty-seventh year was reinstated as governor of
+Massachusetts. Five weeks after this revolution in Boston the order to
+proclaim King William and Queen Mary was received, amid such rejoicings
+as had never before been seen in that quiet town, for it was believed
+that self-government would now be guaranteed to New England. [Sidenote:
+Fall of James II.] [Sidenote: Insurrection in Boston, and overthrow of
+Andros, April 18, 1689]
+
+This hope was at least so far realized that from the most formidable
+dangers which had threatened it, New England was henceforth secured.
+The struggle with the Stuarts was ended, and by this second revolution
+within half a century the crown had received a check from which it never
+recovered. There were troubles yet in store for England, but no more
+such outrages as the judicial murders of Russell and Sidney. New England
+had still a stern ordeal to go through, but never again was she to be
+so trodden down and insulted as in the days of Andros. The efforts of
+George III. to rule Englishmen despotically were weak as compared with
+those of the Stuarts. In his time England had waxed strong enough to
+curb the tyrant, America had waxed strong enough to defy and disown him.
+After 1689 the Puritan no longer felt that his religion was in danger,
+and there was a reasonable prospect that charters solemnly granted him
+would be held sacred. William III. was a sovereign of modern type, from
+whom freedom of thought and worship had nothing to fear. In his theology
+he agreed, as a Dutch Calvinist, more nearly with the Puritans than with
+the Church of England. At the same time he had no great liking for so
+much independence of thought and action as New England had exhibited. In
+the negotiations which now definitely settled the affairs of this part
+of the world, the intractable behaviour of Massachusetts was borne in
+mind and contrasted with the somewhat less irritating attitude of
+the smaller colonies. It happened that the decree which annulled the
+charters of Rhode Island and Connecticut had not yet been formally
+enrolled. It was accordingly treated as void, and the old charters were
+allowed to remain in force. They were so liberal that no change in
+them was needed at the time of the Revolution, so that Connecticut was
+governed under its old charter until 1818, and Rhode Island until 1842.
+[Sidenote: Effects of the Revolution of 1689]
+
+There was at this time a disposition on the part of the British
+government to unite all the northern colonies under a single
+administration. The French in Canada were fast becoming rivals to be
+feared; and the wonderful explorations of La Salle, bringing the St.
+Lawrence into political connection with the Mississippi, had at length
+foreshadowed a New France in the rear of all the English colonies,
+aiming at the control of the centre of the continent and eager to
+confine the English to the sea-board. Already the relations of position
+which led to the great Seven Years' War were beginning to shape
+themselves; and the conflict between France and England actually broke
+out in 1689, as soon as Louis XIV.'s hired servant, James II., was
+superseded by William III. as king of England and head of a Protestant
+league. [Sidenote: Need for union among all the northern colonies]
+
+In view of this new state of affairs, it was thought desirable to unite
+the northern English colonies under one head, so far as possible, in
+order to secure unity of military action. But natural prejudices had to
+be considered. The policy of James II. had aroused such bitter feeling
+in America that William must needs move with caution. Accordingly he did
+not seek to unite New York with New England, and he did not think it
+worth while to carry out the attack which James had only begun upon
+Connecticut and Rhode Island. As for New Hampshire, he seems to have
+been restrained by what in the language of modern politics would be
+called "pressure," brought to bear by certain local interests. [39]
+But in the case of the little colony founded by the Pilgrims of the
+Mayflower there was no obstacle. She was now annexed to Massachusetts,
+which also received not only Maine but even Acadia, just won from the
+French; so that, save for the short break at Portsmouth, the coast of
+Massachusetts now reached all the way from Martha's Vineyard to the Gulf
+of St. Lawrence. [Sidenote: Plymouth, Maine, and Acadia, annexed to
+Massachusetts]
+
+But along with this great territorial extension there went some
+curtailment of the political privileges of the colony. By the new
+charter of 1692 the right of the people to be governed by a legislature
+of their own choosing was expressly confirmed. The exclusive right of
+this legislature to impose taxes was also confirmed. But henceforth no
+qualification of church-membership, but only a property qualification,
+was to be required of voters; the governor was to be appointed by the
+crown instead of being elected by the people; and all laws passed by
+the legislature were to be sent to England for royal approval. These
+features of the new charter,--the extension, or if I may so call it, the
+_secularization_ of the franchise, the appointment of the governor
+by the crown, and the power of veto which the crown expressly
+reserved,--were grave restrictions upon the independence which
+Massachusetts had hitherto enjoyed. Henceforth her position was to be
+like that of the other colonies with royal governors. But her history
+did not thereby lose its interest or significance, though it became,
+like the history of most of the colonies, a dismal record of
+irrepressible bickerings between the governor appointed by the crown and
+the legislature elected by the people. In the period that began in 1692
+and ended in 1776, the movements of Massachusetts, while restricted
+and hampered, were at the same time forced into a wider orbit. She was
+brought into political sympathy with Virginia. While two generations
+of men were passing across the scene, the political problems of
+Massachusetts were assimilated to those of Virginia. In spite of all
+the other differences, great as they were, there was a likeness in the
+struggles between the popular legislature and the royal governor which
+subordinated them all. It was this similarity of experience, during
+the eighteenth century, that brought these two foremost colonies into
+cordial alliance during the struggle against George III., and thus made
+it possible to cement all the colonies together in the mighty nation
+whose very name is fraught with so high and earnest a lesson to
+mankind,--the UNITED STATES! [Sidenote: Massachusetts becomes a royal
+province]
+
+For such a far-reaching result, the temporary humiliation of
+Massachusetts was a small price to pay. But it was not until long after
+the accession of William III. that things could be seen in these grand
+outlines. With his coronation began the struggle of seventy years
+between France and England, far grander than the struggle between Rome
+and Carthage, two thousand years earlier, for primacy in the world,
+for the prerogative of determining the future career of mankind. That
+warfare, so fraught with meaning, was waged as much upon American as
+upon European ground; and while it continued, it was plainly for the
+interest of the British government to pursue a conciliatory policy
+toward its American colonies, for without their wholehearted assistance
+it could have no hope of success. As soon as the struggle was ended, and
+the French power in the colonial world finally overthrown, the perpetual
+quarrels between the popular legislatures and the royal governors led
+immediately to the Stamp Act and the other measures of the British
+government that brought about the American revolution. People sometimes
+argue about that revolution as if it had no past behind it and was
+simply the result of a discussion over abstract principles. [Sidenote:
+Seeds of the American Revolution already sown]
+
+We can now see that while the dispute involved an abstract principle of
+fundamental importance to mankind, it was at the same time for Americans
+illustrated by memories sufficiently concrete and real. James Otis
+in his prime was no further distant from the tyranny of Andros than
+middle-aged men of to-day are distant from the Missouri Compromise. The
+sons of men cast into jail along with John Wise may have stood silent in
+the moonlight on Griffin's Wharf and looked on while the contents of the
+tea-chests were hurled into Boston harbour. In the events we have here
+passed in review, it may be seen, so plainly that he who runs may read,
+how the spirit of 1776 was foreshadowed in 1689.
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.
+
+
+An interesting account of the Barons' War and the meeting of the first
+House of Commons is given in Prothero's _Simon de Montfort_, London,
+1877. For Wyclif and the Lollards, see Milman's _Latin Christianity_,
+vol. vii.
+
+The ecclesiastical history of the Tudor period may best be studied in
+the works of John Strype, to wit, _Historical Memorials_, 6 vols.;
+_Annals of the Reformation_, 7 vols.; _Lives of Cranmer, Parker,
+Whitgift, etc._, Oxford, 1812-28. See also _Burnet's History of the
+Reformation of the Church of England_, 3 vols., London, 1679-1715;
+Neal's _History of the Puritans_, London, 1793; Tulloch, _Leaders of the
+Reformation_, Boston, 1859. A vast mass of interesting information is
+to be found in _The Zurich Letters, comprising the Correspondence
+of Several English Bishops, and Others, with some of the Helvetian
+Reformers_, published by the Parker Society, 4 vols., Cambridge, Eng.,
+1845-46. Hooker's _Ecclesiastical Polity_ was published in London, 1594;
+a new edition, containing two additional books, the first complete
+edition, was published in 1622.
+
+For the general history of England in the seventeenth century, there are
+two modern works which stand far above all others,--Gardiner's _History
+of England_, 10 vols., London, 1883-84; and Masson's _Life of Milton,
+narrated in connection with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary
+History of his Time_, 6 vols., Cambridge, Eng., 1859-80. These are
+books of truly colossal erudition, and written in a spirit of judicial
+fairness. Mr. Gardiner's ten volumes cover the forty years from the
+accession of James I. to the beginning of the Civil War, 1603-1643. Mr.
+Gardiner has lately published the first two volumes of his history of
+the Civil War, and it is to be hoped that he will not stop until he
+reaches the accession of William and Mary. Indeed, such books as his
+ought never to stop. My friend and colleague, Prof. Hosmer, tells me
+that Mr. Gardiner is a lineal descendant of Cromwell and Ireton. His
+little book, _The Puritan Revolution_, in the "Epochs of History"
+series, is extremely useful, and along with it one should read Airy's
+_The English Restoration and Louis XIV_., in the same series, New York,
+1889. The best biography of Cromwell is by Mr. Allanson Picton, London,
+1882; see also Frederic Harrison's _Cromwell_, London, 1888, an
+excellent little book. Hosmer's _Young Sir Henry Vane_, Boston, 1888,
+should be read in the same connection; and one should not forget
+Carlyle's _Cromwell_. See also Tulloch, _English Puritanism and its
+Leaders_, 1861, and _Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in
+England in the Seventeenth Century_, 1872; Skeats, _History of the
+Free Churches of England_, London, 1868; Mountfield, _The Church and
+Puritans_, London, 1881. Dexter's _Congregationalism of the Last Three
+Hundred Years_, New York, 1880, is a work of monumental importance.
+
+On the history of New England the best general works are Palfrey,
+_History of New England_, 4 vols., Boston, 1858-75; and Doyle, _The
+English in America--The Puritan Colonies_, 2 vols., London, 1887. In
+point of scholarship Dr. Palfrey's work is of the highest order, and
+it is written in an interesting style. Its only shortcoming is that it
+deals somewhat too leniently with the faults of the Puritan theocracy,
+and looks at things too exclusively from a Massachusetts point of view.
+It is one of the best histories yet written in America. Mr. Doyle's work
+is admirably fair and impartial, and is based throughout upon a careful
+study of original documents. The author is a Fellow of All Souls
+College, Oxford, and has apparently made American history his specialty.
+His work on the Puritan colonies is one of a series which when completed
+will cover the whole story of English colonization in America. I have
+looked in vain in his pages for any remark or allusion indicating that
+he has ever visited America, and am therefore inclined to think that he
+has not done so. He now and then makes a slight error such as would
+not be likely to be made by a native of New England, but this is very
+seldom. The accuracy and thoroughness of its research, its judicial
+temper, and its philosophical spirit make Mr. Doyle's book in some
+respects the best that has been written about New England.
+
+Among original authorities we may begin by citing John Smith's
+_Description of New England_, 1616, and _New England's Trial_, 1622,
+contained in Arber's new edition of Smith's works, London, 1884.
+Bradford's narrative of the founding of Plymouth was for a long time
+supposed to be lost. Nathaniel Morton's _New England's Memorial_,
+published in 1669, was little more than an abridgment of it. After two
+centuries Bradford's manuscript was discovered, and an excellent edition
+by Mr. Charles Deane was published in the _Massachusetts Historical
+Collections_, 4th series, vol. iii., 1856. Edward Winslow's _Journal of
+the Proceedings of the English Plantation settled at Plymouth_, 1622,
+and _Good News from New England_, 1624, are contained, with other
+valuable materials, in Young's _Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers_,
+Boston, 1844. See also Shurtleff and Pulsifer, _Records of Plymouth_,
+12 vols., ending with the annexation of the colony to Massachusetts in
+1692; Prince's _Chronological History of New England_, ed. Drake, 1852;
+and in this connection Hunter's _Founders of New Plymouth_, London,
+1854; Steele's _Life of Brewster_, Philadelphia, 1857; Goodwin's
+_Pilgrim Republic_, Boston, 1887; Bacon's _Genesis of the New England
+Churches_, New York, 1874; Baylies's _Historical Memoir_, 1830;
+Thacher's _History of the Town of Plymouth_, 1832.
+
+Sir Ferdinando Gorges wrote a _Briefe Narration of the Originall
+Undertakings of the advancement of plantations into the parts of
+America, especially showing the beginning, progress, and continuance
+of that of New England_, London, 1658, contained in his grandson's
+collection entitled _America Painted to the Life_. Thomas Morton, of
+Merrymount, gave his own view of the situation in his _New English
+Canaan_, which has been edited for the Prince Society, with great
+learning, by C.F. Adams. Samuel Maverick also had his say in a valuable
+pamphlet entitled _A Description of New England_, which has only come
+to light since 1875 and has been edited by Mr. Deane. Maverick is, of
+course, hostile to the Puritans. See also Lechford's _Plain Dealing in
+New England_, ed. J.H. Trumbull, 1867.
+
+The earliest history of Massachusetts is by Winthrop himself, a work of
+priceless value. In 1790, nearly a century and a half after the author's
+death, it was published at Hartford. The best edition is that of 1853.
+In 1869 a valuable life of Winthrop was published by his descendant
+Robert Winthrop. Hubbard's _History of New England_ (_Mass. Hist.
+Coll._, 2d series, vols. v., vi.) is drawn largely from Winthrop and
+from Nathaniel Morton. There is much that is suggestive in William
+Wood's _New England's Prospect_, 1634, and Edward Johnson's
+_Wonder-working Providence of Zion's Saviour in New England_, 1654; the
+latter has been ably edited by W.F. Poole, Andover, 1867. The records
+of the Massachusetts government, from its founding in 1629 down to the
+overthrow of the charter in 1684, were edited by Dr. Shurtleff in 6
+vols. quarto, 1853-54; and among the documents in the British Record
+Office, published since 1855, three volumes--_Calendar of State Papers_,
+_Colonial America_, vol. i., 1574-1660; vol. v., 1661-1668; vol. vii.,
+1669--are especially useful. Of the later authorities the best is
+Hutchinson's _History of Massachusetts Bay_, the first volume of which,
+coming down to 1689, was published in Boston in 1764. The second volume,
+continuing the narrative to 1749, was published in 1767. The third
+volume, coming down to 1774, was found among the illustrious author's
+MSS. after his death, and was published in London in 1828. Hutchinson
+had access to many valuable documents since lost, and his sound judgment
+and critical acumen deserve the highest praise. In 1769 he published
+a volume of _Original Papers_, illustrating the period covered by the
+first volume of his history. Many priceless documents perished in the
+shameful sacking of his house by the Boston rioters, Aug. 26, 1765. The
+second volume of Hutchinson's _History_ was continued to 1764 by G.R.
+Minot, 2 vols., 1798, and to 1820 by Alden Bradford, 3 vols., 1822-29.
+Of recent works, the best is Barry's _History of Massachusetts_, 3
+vols., 1855-57. Many original authorities are collected in Young's
+_Chronicles of Massachusetts_, Boston, 1846. Cotton Mather's _Magnolia
+Christi Americana_, London, 1702 (reprinted in 1820 and 1853), though
+crude and uncritical, is full of interest.
+
+Many of the early Massachusetts documents relate to Maine. Of later
+books, especial mention should be made of Folsom's _History of Saco and
+Biddeford_, Saco, 1830; Willis's _History of Portland_, 2 vols., 1831-33
+(2d ed. 1865); _Memorial Volume of the Popham Celebration_, Portland,
+1862; Chamberlain's _Maine, Her Place in History_, Augusta, 1877. On New
+Hampshire the best general work is Belknap's _History of New Hampshire_,
+3 vols., Phila., 1784-92; the appendix contains many original
+documents, and others are to be found in the _New Hampshire Historical
+Collections_, 8 vols., 1824-66.
+
+The _Connecticut Colonial Records_ are edited by Dr. J.H. Trumbull,
+12 vols., 1850-82. The _Connecticut Historical Society's Collections_,
+1860-70, are of much value. The best general work is Trumbull's _History
+of Connecticut_, 2 vols., Hartford, 1797. See also Stiles's _Ancient
+Windsor_, 2 vols., 1859-63; Cothren's _Ancient Woodbury_, 3 vols.,
+1854-79. Of the Pequot War we have accounts by three of the principal
+actors. Mason's _History of the Pequod War_ is in the _Mass. Hist.
+Coll._, 2d series, vol. viii.; Underhill's _News from America_ is in the
+3d series, vol. vi.; and Lyon Gardiner's narrative is in the 3d series,
+vol. iii. In the same volume with Underhill is contained _A True
+Relation of the late Battle fought in New England between the English
+and the Pequod Savages_, by Philip Vincent, London, 1638. The _New Haven
+Colony Records_ are edited by C.J. Hoadly, 2 vols., Hartford, 1857-58.
+See also the _New Haven Historical Society's Papers_, 3 vols., 1865-80;
+Lambert's _History of New Haven_, 1838; Atwater's _History of New
+Haven_, 1881; Levermore's _Republic of New Haven_, Baltimore, 1886;
+Johnston's _Connecticut_, Boston, 1887. The best account of the Blue
+Laws is by J.H. Trumbull, _The True Blue Laws of Connecticut and New
+Haven, and the False Blue Laws invented by the Rev. Samuel Peters_,
+etc., Hartford, 1876. See also Hinman's _Blue Laws of New Haven Colony_,
+Hartford, 1838; Barber's _History and Antiquities of New Haven_, 1831;
+Peters's _History of Connecticut_, London, 1781. The story of the
+regicides is set forth in Stiles's _History of the Three Judges_ [the
+third being Colonel Dixwell], Hartford, 1794; see also the _Mather
+Papers_ in _Mass. Hist. Coll._, 4th series, vol. viii.
+
+_The Rhode Island Colonial Records_ are edited by J.R. Bartlett, 7
+vols., 1856-62. One of the best state histories ever written is that
+of S.G. Arnold, _History of the State of Rhode Island and Providence
+Plantations_, 2 vols., New York, 1859-60. Many valuable documents are
+reprinted in the _Rhode Island Historical Society's Collections_. The
+_History of New England, with particular reference to the denomination
+called Baptists_, by Rev. Isaac Backus, 3 vols., 1777-96, has much
+that is valuable relating to Rhode Island. The series of _Rhode Island
+Historical Tracts_, issued since 1878 by Mr. S.S. Rider, is of great
+merit. Biographies of Roger Williams have been written by J.D. Knowles,
+1834; by William Gammell, 1845; and by Romeo Elton, 1852. Williams's
+works have been republished by the Narragansett Club in 6 vols., 1866.
+The first volume contains the valuable _Key to the Indian Languages of
+America_, edited by Dr. Trumbull. Williams's views of religious liberty
+are set forth in his _Bloudy Tenent of Persecution_, London, 1644; to
+which John Cotton replied in _The Bloudy Tenent washed and made White in
+the Blood of the Lamb_, London, 1647; Williams's rejoinder was entitled
+_The Bloudy Tenent made yet more Bloudy through Mr. Cotton's attempt
+to Wash it White_, London, 1652. The controversy was conducted on both
+sides with a candour and courtesy rare in that age. The titles of
+Williams's other principal works, _George Fox digged out of his
+Burrowes_, Boston, 1676; _Hireling Ministry none of Christ's_, London,
+1652; and _Christenings make not Christians_, 1643; sufficiently
+indicate their character. The last-named tract was discovered in the
+British Museum by Dr. Dexter and edited by him in Rider's _Tracts_,
+No. xiv., 1881. The treatment of Roger Williams by the government
+of Massachusetts is thoroughly discussed in Dexter's _As to Roger
+Williams_, Boston, 1876. See also G.E. Ellis on "The Treatment of
+Intruders and Dissentients by the Founders of Massachusetts," in _Lowell
+Lectures_, Boston, 1869.
+
+The case of Mrs. Hutchinson is treated, from a hostile and somewhat
+truculent point of view, in Thomas Welde's pamphlet entitled _A Short
+Story of the Rise, Reign, and Ruin of Antinomians, Familists, and
+Libertines that infected the Churches of New England_, London, 1644. It
+was answered in an anonymous pamphlet entitled _Mercurius Americanus_,
+republished for the Prince Society, Boston, 1876, with prefatory notice
+by C.H. Bell. Cotton's view of the theocracy may be seen in his _Milk
+for Babes, drawn out of the Breasts of both Testaments_, London, 1646;
+_Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven_; and _Way of the Congregational
+Churches Cleared_, London, 1648. See also Thomas Hooker's _Survey of the
+Summe of Church Discipline_, London, 1648. The intolerant spirit of the
+time finds quaint and forcible expression in Nathaniel Ward's satirical
+book, _The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam_, 1647.
+
+For the Gorton controversy the best original authorities are his own
+book entitled _Simplicitie's Defence against Sevenheaded Polity_,
+London, 1646; and Winslow's answer entitled _Hypocracie Unmasked_,
+London, 1646. See also Mackie's _Life of Samuel Gorton_, Boston, 1845,
+and Brayton's _Defence of Samuel Gorton_, in Rider's _Tracts_, No. xvii.
+
+For the early history of the Quakers, see Robert Barclay's _Inner Life
+of the Religious Societies of the Commonwealth_, London, 1876,--an
+admirable book. See also _New England a Degenerate Plant_, 1659;
+Bishop's _New England judged by the Spirit of the Lord_, 1661; Sewel's
+_History of the Quakers_, 1722; Besse's _Sufferings of the Quakers_,
+1753; _The Popish Inquisition newly erected in New England_, London,
+1659; _The Secret Works of a Cruel People made Manifest_, 1659; and the
+pamphlet of the martyrs Stevenson and Robinson, entitled _A Call from
+Death to Life_, 1660. John Norton's view of the case was presented in
+his book, _The Heart of New England Rent at the Blasphemies of the
+Present Generation_, London, 1660. See also J.S. Pike's _New Puritan_,
+New York, 1879; Hallowell's _Pioneer Quakers_, Boston, 1887; and his
+_Quaker Invasion of Massachusetts_, Boston, 1883; Brooks Adams, _The
+Emancipation of Massachusetts_, Boston, 1887; Ellis, _The Puritan Age
+and Rule_, Boston, 1888.
+
+Some additional light upon the theocratic idea may be found in a
+treatise by the apostle Eliot, _The Christian Commonwealth; or, the
+Civil Polity of the Rising Kingdom of Jesus Christ_, London, 1659. An
+account of Eliot's missionary work is given in _The Day breaking, if not
+the Sun rising, of the Gospel with the Indians in New England_, London,
+1647; and _The Glorious Progress of the Gospel amongst the Indians in
+New England_, 1649. See also Shepard's _Clear Sunshine of the Gospel
+breaking forth upon the Indians_, 1648; and Whitfield's _Light appearing
+more and more towards the Perfect Day_, 1651.
+
+The principal authority for Philip's war is Hubbard's _Present State of
+New England, being a Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians_, 1677.
+Church's _Entertaining Passages relating to Philip's War_, published in
+1716, and republished in 1865, with notes by Mr. Dexter, is a charming
+book. See also Mrs. Rowlandson's _True History_, Cambridge, Mass.,
+1682; Mather's _Brief History of the War_, 1676; Drake's _Old Indian
+Chronicle_, Boston, 1836; Gookin's _Historical Collections of the
+Indians in New England_, 1674; and _Account of the Doings and Sufferings
+of the Christian Indians_, in _Archchaeologia Americana_, vol. ii.
+Batten's _Journal_ is the diary of a citizen of Boston, sent to England,
+and it now in MS. among the _Colonial Papers_. Mrs. Mary Pray's letter
+(Oct. 20, 1675) is in _Mass. Hist. Coll._, 5th series, vol. i. p. 105.
+
+The great storehouse of information for the Andros period is the _Andros
+Tracts_, 3 vols., edited for the Prince Society by W.H. Whitmore. See
+also Sewall's _Diary, Mass. Hist. Coll._, 5th series, vols. v.--viii.
+Sewall has been appropriately called the Puritan Pepys. His book is a
+mirror of the state of society in Massachusetts at the time when it was
+beginning to be felt that the old theocratic idea had been tried in the
+balance and found wanting. There is a wonderful charm in such a book. It
+makes one feel as if one had really "been there" and taken part in the
+homely scenes, full of human interest, which it so naively portrays.
+Anne Bradstreet's works have been edited by J.H. Ellis, Charlestown,
+1867.
+
+For further references and elaborate bibliographical discussions, see
+Winsor's _Narrative and Critical History of America_, vol. iii.; and his
+_Memorial History of Boston_, 4 vols., Boston, 1880. There is a good
+account of the principal New England writers of the seventeenth century,
+with illustrative extracts, in Tyler's _History of American Literature_,
+2 vols., New York, 1878. For extracts see also the first two volumes of
+Stedman and Hutchinson's _Library of American Literature_, New York,
+1888.
+
+In conclusion I would observe that town histories, though seldom written
+in a philosophical spirit and apt to be quite amorphous in structure,
+are a mine of wealth for the philosophic student of history.
+
+
+
+
+NOTES:
+
+
+[1] Milman, _Lat. Christ._ vii. 395.
+
+[2] Gardiner, _The Puritan Revolution_, p. 12.
+
+[3] Green, _History of the English People_, iii. 47.
+
+[4] Steele's _Life of Brewster,_ p. 161.
+
+[5] Gardiner, _Puritan Revolution_, p. 50.
+
+[6] It is now 204 years since a battle has been fought in England. The
+last was Sedgmoor in 1685. For four centuries, since Bosworth, in 1485,
+the English people have lived in peace in their own homes, except for
+the brief episode of the Great Rebellion, and Monmouth's slight affair.
+This long peace, unparalleled in history, has powerfully influenced the
+English and American character for good. Since the Middle Ages most
+English warfare has been warfare at a distance, and that does not
+nourish the brutal passions in the way that warfare at home does.
+An instructive result is to be seen in the mildness of temper which
+characterized the conduct of our stupendous Civil War. Nothing like it
+was ever seen before.
+
+[7] Picton's _Cromwell_, pp. 61, 67; Gardiner, _Puritan Revolution_, p.
+72.
+
+[8] Quincy, History of Harvard University, ii. 654.
+
+[9] C.F. Adams, _Sir Christopher Gardiner, Knight_, p. 31.
+
+[10] The compact drawn up in the Mayflower's cabin was not, in the
+strict sense a constitution, which is a document defining and limiting
+the functions of government. Magna Charta partook of the nature of
+a written constitution, as far as it went, but it did not create a
+government.
+
+[11] See Johnston's Connecticut, p. 321, a very brilliant book.
+
+[12] See the passionate exclamation of Endicott, below, p. 190.
+
+[13] Excursions of an Evolutionist: pp. 250, 255.
+
+[14] A glimmer of light upon Gorton may be got from reading the
+title-page of one of his books: "AN INCORRUPTIBLE KEY, composed of the
+CX PSALME, wherewith you may open the Rest of the Holy Scriptures;
+Turning itself only according to the Composure and Art of that Lock, of
+the Closure and Secresie of that great Mystery of God manifest in the
+Flesh, but justified only by the Spirit, which it evidently openeth
+and revealeth, out of Fall and Resurrection, Sin and Righteousness,
+Ascension and Descension, Height and Depth, First and Last, Beginning
+and Ending, Flesh and Spirit, Wisdome and Foolishnesse, Strength
+and Weakness, Mortality and Immortality, Jew and Gentile, Light and
+Darknesse, Unity and Multiplication, Fruitfulness and Barrenness, Curse
+and Blessing, Man and Woman, Kingdom and Priesthood, Heaven and Earth,
+Allsufficiency and Deficiency, God and Man. And out of every Unity made
+up of twaine, it openeth that great two-leafed Gate, which is the sole
+Entrie into the City of God, of New Jerusalem, _into which none but the
+King of glory can enter_; and as that Porter openeth the Doore of the
+Sheepfold, _by which whosoever entreth is the Shepheard of the Sheep_;
+See Isa. 45. 1. Psal. 24. 7, 8, 9, 10. John 10. 1, 2, 3; Or, (according
+to the Signification of the Word translated _Psalme_,) it is a
+Pruning-Knife, to lop off from the Church of Christ all superfluous
+Twigs _of earthly and carnal Commandments_, Leviticall Services or
+Ministery, and fading and vanishing Priests, or Ministers, who are taken
+away and cease, and are not established and confirmed by Death, as
+holding no Correspondency with the princely Dignity, Office, and
+Ministry of our _Melchisedek_, who is the only Minister and Ministry of
+the Sanctuary, and of that true Tabernacle which the Lord pitcht, and
+not Man. For it supplants the Old Man, and implants the New; abrogates
+the Old Testament or Covenant, and confirms the New, unto a thousand
+Generations, or in Generations forever. By Samuel Gorton, _Gent._,
+and at the time of penning hereof, in the Place of Judicature (upon
+Aquethneck, alias Road Island) of Providence Plantations in the
+Nanhyganset Bay, New England. Printed in the Yeere 1647."
+
+[15] Father of Benedict Arnold, afterward governor of Rhode Island, and
+owner of the stone windmill (apparently copied from one in Chesterton,
+Warwickshire) which was formerly supposed by some antiquarians to be a
+vestige of the Northmen. Governor Benedict Arnold was great-grandfather
+of the traitor.
+
+[16] _Gorton, Simplicitie's Defence against Seven-headed Policy_, p. 88.
+
+[17] De Forest, _History of the Indians of Connecticut_, Hartford, 1850,
+p. 198.
+
+[18] Doyle, _Puritan Colonies_, i. 324.
+
+[19] See below, p. 222, note.
+
+[20] See my _Excursions of an Evolutionist,_ pp. 239-242, 250-255,
+286-289.
+
+[21] Gorton's life at Warwick, after all these troubles, seems to have
+been quiet and happy. He died in 1677 at a great age. In 1771 Dr. Ezra
+Stiles visited, in Providence, his last surviving disciple, born in
+1691. This old man said that Gorton wrote in heaven, and none can
+understand his books except those who live in heaven while on earth.
+
+[22] Doyle, _Puritan Colonies_,: i. 369.
+
+[23] Doyle, i.: 372.
+
+[24] Milman, _Latin Christianity_, vii. 390.
+
+[25] Doyle, ii. 133, 134; Rhode Island Records, i. 377, 378.
+
+[26] Colonial Laws of Massachusetts, pp. 14-16; Levermore's Republic of
+New Haven, p. 153.
+
+[27] See my remarks above, p. 145.
+
+[28] The daring passage in the sermon is thus given in Bacon's
+_Historical Discourses_, New Haven, 1838: "Withhold not countenance,
+entertainment, and protection from the people of God--whom men may call
+fools and fanatics--if any such come to you from other countries,
+as from France or England, or any other place. Be not forgetful to
+entertain strangers. Remember those that are in bonds, as bound with
+them. The Lord required this of Moab, saying, 'Make thy shadow as the
+night in the midst of the noonday; hide the outcasts; bewray not him
+that wandereth. Let mine outcasts dwell with thee, Moab; be thou a
+covert to them from the face of the spoiler.' Is it objected--'But so I
+may expose myself to be spoiled or troubled'? He, therefore, to remove
+this objection, addeth, 'For the extortioner is at an end, the spoiler
+ceaseth, the oppressors are consumed out of the land.' While we are
+attending to our duty in owning and harbouring Christ's witnesses, God
+will be providing for their and our safety, by destroying those that
+would destroy his people."
+
+[29] Palfrey, _History of New England,_ in. 138-140.
+
+[30] See Parkman, _Conspiracy of Pontiac_, i. 80-85.
+
+[31] De Forest, _History of the Indians of Connecticut,_ pp. 252, 257.
+
+[32] The story rests chiefly upon the statements of Hutchinson, an
+extremely careful and judicious writer, and not in the least what
+the French call a _gobemouche_. Goffe kept a diary which came into
+Hutchinson's possession, and was one of the priceless manuscripts that
+perished in the infamous sacking of his house by the Boston mob of
+August 26, 1765. What light that diary might have thrown upon the matter
+can never be known. Hutchinson was born in 1711, only thirty-six years
+after the event, so that his testimony is not so very far removed from
+that of a contemporary. Whalley seems to have died in Hadley shortly
+before 1675, and Goffe deemed it prudent to leave that neighbourhood in
+1676. His letters to Increase Mather are dated from "Ebenezer," i. e.,
+wherever in his roamings he set up his Ebenezer. One of these letters,
+dated September 8, 1676, shows that his Ebenezer was then set up in
+Hartford, where probably he died about 1679 In 1676 the arrival of
+Edward Randolph (see below, p. 256) renewed the peril of the regicide
+judge, and his sudden removal from his skilfully contrived hiding-place
+at Hadley might possibly have been due to his having exposed himself
+to recognition in the Indian fight. Possibly even the supernatural
+explanation might have been started, with a touch of Yankee humour, as
+a blind. The silence of Mather and Hubbard was no more remarkable than
+some of the other ingenious incidents which had so long served to
+conceal the existence of this sturdy and crafty man. The reasons for
+doubting the story are best stated by Mr. George Sheldon of Deerfield,
+in _Hist.-Genealogical Register_, October, 1874.
+
+[33] If Philip was half the diplomatist that he is represented in
+tradition, he never would have gone into such a war without assurance of
+Narragansett help. Canonchet was a far more powerful sachem than Philip,
+and played a more conspicuous part in the war. May we not suppose that
+Canonchet's desire to avenge his father's death was one of the principal
+incentives to the war; that Philip's attack upon Swanzey was a premature
+explosion; and that Canonchet then watched the course of events for a
+while before making up his mind whether to abandon Philip or support
+him?
+
+[34] A wretched little werewolf who some few years ago, being then a lad
+of fourteen or fifteen years, most cruelly murdered two or three
+young children, just to amuse himself with their dying agonies. The
+misdirected "humanitarianism," which in our country makes every murderer
+an object of popular sympathy, prevailed to save this creature from
+the gallows. Massachusetts has lately witnessed a similar instance of
+misplaced clemency in the case of a vile woman who had poisoned eight or
+ten persons, including some of her own children, in order to profit
+by their life insurance. Such instances help to explain the prolonged
+vitality of "Judge Lynch," and sometimes almost make one regret the days
+in old England when William Probert, after escaping in 1824 as "king's
+evidence," from the Thurtell affair, got caught and hanged within a
+twelvemonth for horse-stealing. Any one who wishes to study the results
+of allowing criminality to survive and propagate itself should read
+Dugdale's The Jukes; Hereditary Crime, New York, 1877.
+
+[35] Weeden, _Indian Money as a Factor in New England Civilization_,
+Johns Hopkins University Studies, II. viii., ix. p. 30.
+
+[36] Doyle, ii. 253.
+
+[37] Doyle, _Puritan Colonies_, ii. 254.
+
+[38] The quotation is from an unpublished letter of Rev. Robert
+Ratcliffe to the Bishop of London, cited in an able article in the
+_Boston Herald_, January 4, 1888. I have not seen the letter.
+
+[39] Doyle, _Puritan Colonies_, ii. 379, 380.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Beginnings of New England, by John Fiske
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