THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY vG^cop.S.. REMOTE <=^TORAG r THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND ^ TEXTBOOK EDITION THE CHRONICLES OF AMERICA SERIES ALLEN JOHNSON EDITOR GERHARD R. LOMER CHARLES W. JEFFERYS ASSISTANT EDITORS THE 1.IBB4RY Of THE UNIVEBSITir OF liuum THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND A CHRONICLE OF THE PURITAN COMMONWEALTHS BY CHARLES M. ANDREWS NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS TORONTO: GLASGOW. BROOK & CO. LONDON: HUMPHREY MILPORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1921 Copyright, 1919, by Yale University Press c-^^^ REMOTE srronA' V. 4 ccnp'^ B00KSTACK3 0. • CONTENTS I. THE COMING OF THE PILGRIMS Page 1 II. THE BAY COLONY " 21 IIL COMPLETING THE WORK OF SETTLEMENT " 45 IV. EARLY NEW ENGLAND LIFE " 72 V. AN ATTEMPT AT COLONIAL UNION " 88 VI. WINNING THE CHARTERS " 100 VII. MASSACHUSETTS DEFIANT " 116 VIII. WARS WITH THE INDIANS 129 IX. THE BAY COLONY DISCIPLINED " 147 X. THE ANDROS REGIME IN NEW ENGLAND " 166 XL THE END OF AN ERA " 194 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE " 201 INDEX " 205 vii 634361 ILLUSTRATIONS THE DEPARTURE OF THE MAY- FLOWER, 1621 From the painting by Ferris. In the Ferris Collection of American Historical Paint- ings. Copyright, J. L. G. Ferris. Frontispiece COLONIAL NEW ENGLAND, 1620-1690 Map by W. L. G. Joerg, American Geo- graphical Society. Facing page THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND CHAPTER I THE COMING OF THE PILGRIMS The Pilgrims and Puritans, whose migration to the New World marks the beginning of permanent settlement in New England, were children of the same age as the enterprising and adventurous pioneers of England in Virginia, Bermuda, and the Caribbean. It was the age in which the founda- tions of the British Empire were being laid in the Western Continent. The " spacious times of great Elizabeth " had passed, but the new national spirit born of those times stirred within the English people. The Kingdom had enjoyed sixty years of domestic peace and prosperity, and Englishmen were eager to enter the lists for a share in the ad- vantages which the New World oflFered to those who would venture therein. Both landowning and 1 2 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND landholding classes, gentry and tenant farmers alike, were clamoring, the one for an increase of their landed estates, the other for freedom from the \ feudal^ restraints which still legally bound them. The land-hunger of neither class could be satisfied in a narrow island where the law and the lawgivers were in favor of the maintenance of feudal rights. The expectations of all were aroused by visions of wealth from the El Dorados of the West, or of profit from commercial enterprises which appealed to the cupidity of capitalists and led to invest- ments that promised speedy and ample returns. A desire to improve social conditions and to solve the problem of the poor and the vagrant, which had become acute since the dissolution of the monasteries, was arousing the authorities to deal with the pauper and to dispose of the criminal in such a way as to yield a profitable service to the kingdom. England was full of resolute men, sea-dogs and soldiers of fortune, captains on the land as well as the sea, who in times of peace were seeking employment and profit and who needed an outlet for their energies. Some of these continued in the service of kings and princes in Europe; others conducted enterprises against the Spaniaras in the West Indies and along the Spanish Mainr, i T^Z COMING OF THE PILGRIMS 3 while still others, such as John Smith and Miles Standish became pioneers in the work of English colonization. s /But more important than the promptings of 1 land-hunger and the desire for wealth and ad-\ venture was the call made by a social and religious / movement which was but a phase of the general \ restlessness and popular discontent. ' The Ref or- ^ mation, in which this movement had its origin, was more than a revolt from the organization and doctrines of the mediaeval church; it voiced the yearning of the middle classes for a position com- mensurate with their growing prominence in the national life. Though the feudal tenantry, given over to agriculture and bound by the con- ventions of feudal law, were still perpetuating many of the old customs, the towns were emanci- pating themselves from feudal control, and by means of their wealth and industrial activities were winning recognition as independent and largely self-sufficing units. The gild, a closely compacted brotherhood, existing partly for re- ligious and educational purposes and partly for the control of handicrafts and the exchange of goods, became the center of middle-class energy, and in thousands of instances hedged in the lives 4 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLbko of the humbler artisans. /TThus it was largely from those who knew no wider world than the fields which they cultivated and the gilds which governed their standards and output that the early settlers of New England were recruited* Equally important with the social changes were those which concerned men's faith and religious organization. The Peace of Augsburg, which in 1555 had closed for the moment the warfare result- ing from the Reformation, not only recognized the right of Protestantism to exist, but also handed over to each state, whether kingdom, duchy, or principality, full power to control the creed within its borders. Whoever ruled the state could deter- mine the religion of his subjects, a dictum which denied the right of individuals or groups of in- dividuals to depart from the established faith. Jlence arose a second revolt, not against the medi- aeval church and empire but against the authority of the state and its creed, whether Roman Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, or Calvinist, a revolt in which Huguenot in France battled for his right to believe as he wished, and Puritan in England refused to conform to a manner of worship which retained much of the mediaeval liturgy and ceremonial.j Just as all great revolutionary movements in IE COMING OF THE PILGRIMS 5 churcli or state give rise to men who repudiate tra- dition and all accretions due to human experience, and base their political and religious ideals upon the law of nature, the rights of man, the inner light, or the Word of God; yso, too, in England under Elizabeth and James I, leaders appeared who demanded radical changes in faith and prac- tice, and advocated complete separation from the Anglican Church and isolation from the religious world about them. Of such were the Separatists, who rejected the Anglican and other creeds, severed all bonds with a national church system, cast aside form, ceremony, liturgy, and a hierarchy of church orders, and sought for the true faith and form of worship in the Word of God. For these men the Bible was the only test of religious truth. The Separatists organized themselves into small religious groups, as independent communities or companies of Christians, covenanted with God and keeping the Divine Law in a Holy Communion. They consisted in the main of men and women in the humbler walks of life — artisans, tenant farmers, with some middle-class gentry. Suf- ficient to themselves and knit together in the fashion of a gild or brotherhood, they believed 6 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAIs(i) in a church system of the simplest form aid fol- lowed the Bible, Old and New Testaments alike, as the guide of their lives. / Desiring to withdraw from the world as it was that they might commune together in direct relations with God, they accepted persecution as the test of their faith and wel- comed hardship, banishment, and even death as proofs of righteousness and truth.] Convinced of the scriptural soundness of what they believed and what they practised, and confident of salvation through unyielding submission to God's will as they interpreted it, they became conspicuous because of their radical thought and peculiar forms of worship, and inevitably drew upon themselves the attention of the authorities, both secular and ecclesiastical. The leading centers of Separatism were in London and Norfolk, but the seat of the little congregation that eventually led the way across the sea to New England was in Scrooby in Not- tinghamshire. There — in Scrooby manor-house, where William Brewster, the father, was receiver and bailiff, and his son, the future elder of the Plymouth colony, was acting postmaster; where Richard Clayton preached and John Robinson prayed; and where the youthful William Bradford THE COMING OF THE PILGRIMS 7 was one of its members — there was gathered a small Separatist congregation composed of humble folk of Nottinghamshire and adjoining counties. They were soon discovered worshiping in the manor-house chapel, by the ecclesiastical authori- ties of Yorkshire, and for more than a year were subjected to persecution, some being taken and clapt up in prison, others having their houses besett and watcht night and day and hardly escaped their hands." At length they determined to leave England for Holland. During 1607 and 1608 they escaped secretly, some at one time, some at another, all with great loss and diffi- culty, until by the August of the latter year there were gathered at Amsterdam more than a hundred men, women, and children, armed with faith and patience.'* But Amsterdam proved a disappointing refuge. And in 1609 they moved to Leyden, "a fair and bewtifuU citie," where for eleven years they remained, pursuing such trades as they could, chiefly weaving and the manufacture of cloth, "injoying much sweete and delightful societie and spiritual comfort togeather in the ways of God, under the able ministrie and prudente governmente of Mr. John Robinson and Mr. 8 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND William Brewster/' But at last new and impera- tive reasons arose, demanding a third removal, not to another city in Holland, but this time to the New World called America. They were breaking under the great labor and hard fare; they feared to lose their language and saw no op- portunity to educate their children; they disap- proved of the lax Dutch observance of Sunday and saw in the temptations of the place a menace to the habits and morals of the younger members of the flock, and, in the influences of the world around them, a danger to the purjty of their creed and their practice. They determined to go to a new country ^'devoyd of all civill inhabitants,'* where they might keep their names, their faith, and their nationality. After many misgivings, the fateful decision was reached by the major parte," and prepara- tions for departure were made. But where to go became a troublesome problem. The merits of Guiana and other *'wild coasts'' were debated, but finally Virginia met with general approval, because there they might live as a private associa- tion, a distinct body by themselves, similar to other private companies already established there. To this end they sent two of their number to THE COMING OF THE PILGRIMS 9 England to secure a patent from the Virginia Company of London:j Under this patent and in bond of allegiance to King James, yet acting as a "'body in the most strict and sacred bond and covenant of the Lord/' an independent and abso- lute church, they became a civil community also, with governors chosen for the work from among themselves. But the dissensions in the London Company caused them to lose faith in that as- sociation, and, hearing of the reorganization of the Virginia Company of Plymouth, ^ which about this time obtained a new charter as the New Eng- land Council, they turned from southern to north- ern Virginia — that is, to New England — and resolved to make their settlement where according to reports fishing might become a means of liveli- hood. But their plans could not be executed without assistance; and, coming into touch with a London * In 1606 King James liad granted a charter incorporating two companies, one of which, made up of gentlemen and merchants in and about London, was known as the Virginia Company of London, the other as the Virginia Company of Plymouth. The former was authorized to plant colonies between thirty-four and forty-one degrees north latitude, and the latter between thirty-eight and forty- five, but neither was to plant a colony within one hundred miles of the other. Jamestown, the first colony of the London Company, was now thirteen years old. The Plymouth Company had made no permanent settlement in its domain. 10 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND merchant, Thomas Weston, who promised to aid them, they entered, into what proved to be a long and wearisome negotiation with a group of ad- venturers — gentlemen, merchants, and others, seventy in number — for an advance of money to finance the expedition, tee Pilgrims entered into a partnership with the merchants to form a voluntary joint-stock company. It was under- stood that the merchants, who purchased shares, were to remain in England; that the colonists, who contributed their personal service at a fixed rating, were to go to America/ there to labor at trade, trucking, and fishing for seven years; and that during this time all profits were to remain in a common stock and all lands to be left undivided.J J The conditions were hard and discouraging, but there was no alternative; and at last, embarking at Delfthaven in the Speedwell^ a small ship bought and fitted in Holland, they came to Southampton, where another and larger vessel, the Mayflower^ was in waiting. In August, 1620, the two vessels set sail, but the Speedwell, provmg unseaworthy, put back after two attempts, and the Mgy^ower went on alone, bearing one hundred and two pas- sengers, two-thirds of the whole, picked out as worthy and willing to undertake the voyage. THE COMING OF THE PILGRIMS 11 The Mayflower reached the waters of New Eng- land on the 11th of November after a tedious course of sixty-five days from Plymouth to Cape Cod; but they did not decide on their place of landing until the 21st of December. Four days later they erected on the site of the town of Ply- mouth their first building. The coast of New England was no unknown shore. During the years from 1607 to 1620, while settlers were founding permanent colonies at Jamestown and in Bermuda, explorers and fishermen, both English and French, had skirted its headlands and penetrated its harbors. In 1614, John Smith, the famous Virginia pioneer, who had left the service of the London Company and was in the employ of certain London merchants, had explored the northern coast in an open boat and had given the region its name. These many voyages and ventures at trading and fishing served to arouse enthusiasm in England for a world of good rivers and harbors, rich soil, and wonderful fisaing, and to spread widely a knowledge of the coast|^from Newfoundland to the Hudson River. 'Of this knowledge the Pilgrims reaped the benefit, the captain of the Mayflower, Christopher, nes, against whom any charge of treachery may 12 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND be dismissed, guided them, it is true, to a region unoccupied by Englishmen but not to one un- known or poorly esteemed. / The miseries that con- fronted the Pilgrims during their first year in Plymouth colony were not due to the inhospi- tality of the region, but to the time of year when they landed upon it; and insufficiently provisioned as they were before they left England, it is little wonder that suffering and death should have accompanied their first experience with a New England winter. This little group of men and women landed on territory that had been granted to the New Eng- land Council and they themselves had neither patent for their land nor royal authority to set up a government. But some form of government was absolutely necessary. Before starting from Southampton, they had followed Robinson's in- structions to choose a governor and assistants for each ship "to order the people by the way"; and now that they were at the end of their long voyage, the men of the company met in the cabin of the May flower y and drew up a covenant in i.c- cordance with which they combined themselves to- gether into a body politic for their better order,*| and preservation. This compact, signed by fort 1 THE COMING OF THE PILGRIMS 13 one members, of whom eleven bore the title of ''Mister/' was a plantation covenant, the political counterpart of the church covenant which bound together every Separatist community. It pro- vided that the people should live together in a peaceable and orderly manner under civil authori- ties of their own choosing, and was the first of many such covenants entered into by New Eng- land towns, not defining a government but bind- ing the settlers to unite politically as they had already done for religious worship. / John Carver, who had been chosen governor on the Mayflower ^ was confirmed as governor of the settlement and given one assistant. / After their goods had been set on shore and a few cottages built, the whole body "mette and consulted of lawes and orders, both for their civil and military governmente, still adding therunto as urgent occasion in severall times, and as cases did require. Of this courageous but sorely stricken com- munity more than half died before the first winter was over. But gradually the people became ac- climated, new colonists came out, some from the community at Leyden, in the Fortune^ the Anney V the Charity^ and the Handmaid, and the numbers steadily increased. The settlers were in the 14 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLA1>TD main a homogeneous body, both as to soc iai class and to religious views and purpose. Among them were undesirable members — some were sent out by the English merchants and others came out of their own accord — who played stool-ball on Sun- day, committed theft, or set the community by the ears, as did one notorious offender named Lyford. But their number was not great, for most of them remained but a short time, and then went to Vir- ginia or elsewhere, or were shipped back to Eng- land by the Pilgrims as incorrigibles. / The^life of the people was predominantly agricultural, with fishing, salt-making, and trading with the Indians as allied interests. The partners in England sent overseas cattle, stock, and laborers, and, as their profits depended on the success of the settlement, did what they could to encourage its develop- ment,' The position of the Pilgrims was that of sharers and partners with the merchants, from whom they received directions but not commands. But under the agreement of 1620 with their partners in London, which remained in force for seven years, the Plymouth people could neither divide their land nor dispose of the products of their labor, and so burdensome became this ar- THE COMING OF THE PILGRIMS 15 rangem^^\ c ^hat in 1623 temporary assignments of larld were made which in 1624 became permanent. A« Bradford said, and his comment is full of wisdom : T he experience that was had in this commone course and condition, tried sundrle years, and that amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanitie of that conceite of Platos and other ancients, applauded by some of later times; that the taking away of prop- ertie, and bringing in communitie into a comone wealth, would make them happy and florishing; as if they were wiser then God. For this comunitie (so farr as it was) was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much imployment that would have been to their benefite and comf orte. For the yong-men that were most able and fitte for labour and service did re- pine that they should spend their time and streingth to worke for other mens wives and children, with out any recompence. The strong, or man of parts, had no more in devission of victails and cloaths, than he that was weake and not able to doe a quarter the other could; this was thought injuestice. The aged and graver men to be ranked and equalised in labours, and victails, cloaths, etc., with the meaner and yonger sorte, thought it some indignitie and disrespect unto them. And for mens wives to be commanded to doe servise for other men, as dresing their meate, washing their cloaths, etc., they deemd it a kind of slaverie, neither could many husbands well brooke it. During the two years that followed, so evident was the failure of the joint undertaking that 16 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND efforts were made on both sides to brlir 'it to an end; for the merchants, with no profit from thf enterprise, were anxious to avoid further indebted ness; and the colonists, wearying of the dua control, wished to reap for themselves the fuL reward of their own efforts. Under the new ar- rangement of small private properties, the settlers began ^'to prise corne as more pretious than silver, and those that had some to spare begane to trade one with another for small things, by the quart, potle, and peck, etc., for money they had none/' Later, finding ''their corne, what they could spare from ther necessities, to be a commoditie, (for they sould it at 6s. a bushell) [they] used great dilligence in planting the same. And the Gov[erno]r and shuch as were designed to manage the trade, (for it was retained for the generall good, and none were to trade in particuler,) they followed it to the best advantage they could; and wanting trading goods, they understoode that a plantation which was at Monhigen, and belonged to some marchants of Phmoth [England] was to breake up, and diverse usefull goods was ther to be sould," the governor (Bradford himself) and Edward Winslow "'tooke a boat and some hands and went thither. . . . With these goods, THE COMING OF THE PILGRIMS 17 and their corne after harvest they gott good store of trade, so as they were enabled to pay their ingagements against the time, and to get some cloathing for the people, and had some comodities beforehand.'' ^ Though conditions were hard and often discouraging, the Pilgrims gradually found themselves self-supporting and as soon as this fact became clear, they sent Isaac AUerton to England *'to make a composition with the adven- turers." As a result of the negotiations an " agree- ment or bargen'' was made whereby eight leading members of the colony bought the shares of the merchants for £1800 and distributed the payment among the settlers, who at this time numbered altogether about three hundred. Each share carried with it a certain portion of land and live- stock. The debt was not finally liquidated until 1642. By 1630, the Plymouth colony was fairly on its feet and beginning to grow in outward estate.'' ^he settlers increased in number, prospered financially, and scattered to the outlying districts; and Plymouth the town and Plymouth the colony ceased to be identical. Before 1640, the latter had become a cluster of ten towns, each a cove- nanted community with its church and elder. 2 18 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND ■Though the colony never obtained a charter of incorporation from the Crown, it developed a / form of government arising naturally from its own needs. 7 By 1633 its governor and one assistant had become a governor and seven assistants, elected annually at a primary assembly held in Plymouth town; and the three parts, governor, assistants, and assembly, together constituted the governing body of the colony. i| In 1636, a revision of the laws and ordinances was made in the form of *'The Great Fundamentals,'' a sort of constitu- tion, frequently interspersed with statements of principles, which was printed with additions in 1671. The right to vote was limited at first to those who were members of the company and liable for its debt, but later the suffrage was ex- tended to include others than the first-comers, and in 1633 was exercised by sixty-eight persons altogether. 1 In 1668, a vQter was required to have pj;o^erty, to be "of sober and peaceable conversa- tion," and to take an oath of fidelity, but ap- parently he was never required to take the oath of allegiance to the Crown.j So rapidly did the colony expand that, by 1639, the holding of a primary assembly in Plymouth town became so inconvenient that delegates had to be chosen. THE COMING OF THE PILGRIM^ 19 Thus there was introduced into the colony a form of representative government, though it is to be noted that governor, assistants, and deputies sat together in a common room and never divided into two houses, as did the assembhes in other colonies. The settlement of Plymouth colony is conspicu- ous in New England history because of the faith and courage and suffering of those who engaged in it and because of the ever alluring charm of William Bradford's History of Plimouth Plantation. The greatness of the Pilgrims lay in their illus- trious example and in the influence they exercised upon the church life of the later New England colonies, for^to^the Pilgrims was due the fact that the congregational way of organization and wor- ship became the accepted form in Massachusetts and Connecticut. But in other respects Ply- mouth was vastly overshadowed by her vigorous neighbors. Her people, humble and simple, were\ without importance in the world of thought, 1 literature, or education. Their intellectual and ma- terial poverty, lack of business enterprise, unfavor- able situation, and defenseless position in the eyes of the law rendered them almost a negative factor in the later life of New England. No great move- 20 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND ment can be traced to their initiation, no great leader to birth within their borders, and no great work of art, Hterature, or scholarship to those who belonged to this unpretending company. The Pilgrim Fathers stand rather as an emblem of virtue than a moulding force in the life of the nation. CHAPTER II THE BAY COLONY While the Pilgrims were thus establishing them- selves as the first occupants of the soil of New England, other men of various sorts and motives were trying their fortunes within its borders and were testing the opportunities which it offered for fishing and trade with the Indians. /They came as individuals and companies, men of wan- dering disposition, romantic characters many of them, resembling the rovers and adventurers in the Caribbean or representing some of the many activities prevalent in England at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Thomas Weston, former ally of the Pilgrims, settled with a motley crew of rude fellows at Wessagusset (Qui^cy) and there established a trading post in 1622. Of this settlement, which came to an untimely end after causing the Pilgrims a great deal of trouble, only a blockhouse and stockade remained. Another 21 22 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND irregular trader. Captain WoUaston, with some thirty or forty people, chiefly servants, established himself in 1625 two miles north of Wessagusset, calling the place Mount Wollaston. With him came that wit, versifier, and prince of roysterers, Thomas Morton, who, after WoUaston had moved on to Virginia, became "lord of misrule." Dub- bing his seat Merrymount, drinking, carousing, and corrupting the Indians, affronting the decorous Separatists at Plymouth, Morton later became a serious menace to the peace of Massachusetts Bay. The Pilgrims felt that the coming of such adven- turers and scoffers, who were none too scrupulous in their dealings with either white man or Indian and were given to practices which the Puritans heartily abhorred, was a calamity showing that even in the wilds of America they could not escape the world from which they were anxious to withdraw. ' The settlements formed by these squatters and stragglers were quite unauthorized by the New England Council, which owned the title to the soiTj As this Council had accomplished very little under its patent. Sir Ferdinando Gorges, its most active member, persisted in his efforts to found a colony, brought about a general distribution of the terri- tory among its members, and obtained for him- THE BAY COLONY 23 self and his son Robert, the section around and immediately north of Massachusetts Bay. An expedition was at once launched. | In September, 1623, Robert Gorges with six gentlemen and a well-equipped and well-organized body of settlers reached Plymouth, — the forerunners, it was hoped, of a large number to come. This company of set- tlers was composed of families, the heads of which were mechanics and farmers, and with them were two clergymen, Morrell and Blackstone, the whole constituting the greatest enterprise set on foot in America by the Council. Robert Gorges, bear- ing a commission constituting him Governor-Gen- eral over all New England, made his settlement at Weston's old place at Wessagusset. Here he built houses and stored his goods and began the founding of Weymouth, the second permanent habitation in New England and the first on Massachusetts Bay. Unfortunately, famine, that arch-enemy of all the early settlers, fell upon his company, his father's resources in England proved inadequate, and he and others were obliged to return. Of those that remained a few stayed at Wessagusset; one of the clergy men, William Black- stone, with his wife went to Shawmut (Boston) ; Samuel Maverick and his wife, to Winnissimmet 24 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND (Chelsea); and the Walfords, to Mishawum (Charlestown). Probably all these people were Anglicans; some later became freemen of the Massachusetts colony; others who refused to conform returned to England; but Blackstone remained in his little cottage on the south slope of Beacon Hill, unwilling to join any of the churches, because, as he said, he came from Eng- land to escape the *'Lord Bishops,'' and he did not propose in America to be under the *'Lord Brethren/' The colony of Massachusetts Bay began as a fishing venture with profit as its object. It so hap- pened that the Pilgrims wished to secure a right to fish off Cape Ann, and through one of their number they applied to Lord SheflSeld, a member of the Council who had shared in the distribution of 1623. Sheffield caused a patent to be drawn, which the Plymouth people conveyed to a Dor- chester company desiring to establish a fishing col- ony in New England. The chief promoter of the Dorchester venture was the Reverend John White, a conforming Puritan clergyman, in whose congre- gation was one John Endecott. The company thus organized remained in England but sent some fourteen settlers to Cape Ann in the winter THE BAY COLONY 25 of 1623-1624. Fishing and planting, however, did not go well together, the venture failed, and the settlers removed southward to Naumkeag (Salem). Though many of the English company desired to abandon the undertaking, there were others, among whom were a few Puritans or Non- conformists, who favored its continuance. These men consulted with others of like mind in London, and through the help of the Earl of Warwick, a nobleman friendly to the Puritan cause, a patent was issued by the Council to Endecott and five associates, for land extending from above the Merrimac to below the Charles. This patent, it will be noticed, included the territory already granted to Gorges and his son Robert, and was obtained apparently with the consent of Gorges, who thought that his own and his son's rights would be safely protected. Under this patent, the part- ners sent over Endecott as governor with sixty others to begin a colony at Salem, where the *^old planters'' from Cape Ann had already established themselves. Salem was thus a plantation from September, 1628, to the summer of 1630, on land granted to the associates in England; and the re- lations of these two were much the same as those of Jamestown with the London Company. 26 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND Endecott and his associates soon made it evi- dent, however, that they were planning larger things for themselves and had no intention, if they could help it, of recognizing the claims of Gorges and his son. They wanted complete control of their territory in New England, and to this end they applied to the Crown for a confirmation of their land-patent and for a charter of incorporation as a company with full powers of government. As this application was a deliberate defiance of Gorges and the New England Council, it has always been a mat- ter of surprise that the associates were able to gain the support of the Crown in this effort to oust Gorges and his son from lands that were legally theirs. No satisfactory explanation has ever been advanced, but it is worthy of note that at this junc- ture Gorges was in France in the service of the King, whereas on the side of the associates and their friends was the Earl of Warwick, himself deeply interested in colonizing projects and one of the most powerful men in England. | The charter was obtained March 4, 1629 — how, we- do not know. It created -ar— eerporation of twenty-six members, Anglicans and Nonconformists, known as the Massachusetts Bay Company; But if the original purpose of this company was THE BAY COLONY 27 to engage in a business enterprise for the sake of profit, it soon underwent a noteworthy transforma- tion. In 1629, control passed into the hands of those members of the company in whom a religious motive was uppermost. How far the charter was planned at first as a Puritan contrivance to be used in case of need will never be known. It is equally uncertain whether the particular form of charter, with the place of the company's resi- dence omitted, was selected to facilitate a possible removal of the company from England to America; but it is likely that removal was early in the minds of the Puritan members of the company. At this time a great many people felt as did the Reverend John White, who expressed the hope that God's people should turn with eyes of longing to the free and open spaces of the New World, whither they might flee to be at peace. But, when the charter was granted, the Puritans were not in con- trol of the company^ which remained in England for a year after it was incorporated, superintend- ing the management of its colony just as other trading companies had done. But events were moving rapidly in England. Between March, 1629, and March, 1630, Parlia- ment was dissolved under circumstances of great 28 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND excitement, parliamentary privileges were set aside, parliamentary leaders were sent to the Tower, and the period of royal rule without Par- liament began. The heavy hand of an autocratic government fell on all those within reach who upheld the Puritan cause, among whom was John Winthrop, a country squire, forty-one years of age, who was deprived of his oflSce as attorney in the Court of Wards. Disillusioned as to life in England because of financial losses and family bereavements, and now barred from his customary employment by act of the Government, he turned his thoughts toward America. Acting with the approval of the Earl of Warwick and in conjunction Vith a group of Puritan friends — Thomas Dudley, Isaac Johnson, Richard Saltonstall, and John Humphrey, — he decided in the summer of 1629 to leave England forever, and in September he joined the Massachusetts Bay Company. Almost immediately he showed his capacity for leader- ship, was soon elected governor, and was able dur- ing the following winter to obtain such a control of affairs as to secure a vote in favor of the trans- fer of charter and company to New England. The official organization was remodeled so that only those desiring to remove should be in con- THE BAY COLONY 29 trol, and on March 29, 1630, the company with its charter, accompanied by a considerable number of prospective colonists, set sail from Cowes near the Isle of Wight in four vessels, the Arabella^ the Talbot, the Ambrose, and the Jewel, the remaining passengers following in seven other vessels a week or two later. The voyages of the vessels were long, none less than nine weeks, by way of the Azores and the Maine coast, and the distressed Puritans, seven hundred altogether, scurvy-stricken and reduced in num- bers by many deaths, did not reach Salem until June and July. Hence they moved on to Charles- town, set up their tents on the slope of the hill, and on the 23rd of August, held the first ojBBcial meeting of the company on American soil; but find- ing no running water in the place and still pursued by sickness and death, they again removed, this time to Boston, where they built houses against the winter. With the founding of this colony — the colony of Massachusetts Bay — a new era for New England began. /'This grant of territory to the Massachusetts Bay Company and of the charter confirming the title and conveying powers of government put a complete stop to Gorges's plans for a final proprie- 30 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND torship in New England. Gorges had acquiesced in the first grant by the New England Council because he thought it a sub-grant, like that to Plymouth, in no way injuring his own control. But when in 1632, he learned the true inwardness of the Massachusetts title and discovered that Warwick and the Puritans had outwitted him by obtaining royal confirmation of a grant that ex- tinguished his own proprietary rights, he turned on Warwick, declared that the charter had been s urreptitious ly obtained, and demanded that it be brought to the Council board. Learning that it had gone to New England, he forced the with- drawal of Warwick from the Council, and from that time forward for five years bent all his efforts to overthrow the Puritan colony by obtaining the annulment of its privileges. In this attempt, he was aided by Captain John Mason, an able, energetic promoter of colonizing movements who had already been concerned with settlements in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, and who was zealous to begin a plantation in the prov- ince of Maine. Mason had received grants from the Council, both individually and in partnership with Gorges, and had visited New England in the interest of his claims. Through the influence of THE BAY COLONY 31 Gorges, he was now made a member of the Council and joined in the movement to break the hold of the Puritans upon New England. He and Gorges found useful allies in three men who had been driven out of Massachusetts by the Puritan lead- ers soon after their arrival at Boston — Thomas Morton of Merrymount, Sir Christopher Gardiner, a picturesque, somewhat mysterious personage thought to have been an agent of Gorges in New England, with methods and morals that gave offense to Massachusetts, and Philip Ratcliffe, a much less worthy character given to scandal and invective, who had been deprived of his ears by the Puritan authorities. These men were bitter in their denunciation of the Puritan government. The situation was perilous for the new colony, which was hardly yet firmly established. In direct violation of the royal commands, hundreds of men and women were leaving England — not merely adventurers or humble Separatists, but sober people of the better classes, of mature years and substantial characters. When, therefore, Gorges and the others meeting at Gorges's house at Plymouth brought their complaints to the atten- tion of the Privy Council, they were listened to with attention, and instructions were sent at once I 32 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND to stop the Puritan ships and to bring the charter of the Massachusetts Company to the Council board. To check the Puritan migration and to institute further inquiry into the facts of the case a commission was appointed in 1634, with Arch- bishop Laud at its head, for the special purpose, among others, of revoking charters ^'surreptiti- ously and unduly obtained/* Gorges and Morton appealed to Laud against the Puritans, and Morton wrote his New England Canaan^ which he dedicated to Laud, in the hope of exposing the motives of the colony and of arousing the Archbishop to action. Warwick threw his influence on the side of Massachusetts, being always forward, as Winthrop said, "to do good to our colony"; and the colony itself, fearing attack, began to fortify Castle Island in the harbor and to prepare for defense. Endecott, in wrath, defaced the royal ensign at Salem, and so intense was the excitement and so determined the attitude of the Puritans that, had the Crown attempted to send over a Governor- General or to seize the charter by force, the colony would have resisted to the full extent of its power. Gorges, believing that he could work better through the King and the Archbishop than through the New England Council, brought about the dis- THE BAY COLONY 33 solution of that body in 1635, thus making it pos- sible for the King to deal directly with the New England situation. Before its dissolution the Council had authorized Morton, acting as its law- yer, to bring the case to the attention of the Attor- ney-General of England, who filed in the Court of King's Bench a complaint against Massachusetts, as a result of which a writ of quo warranto was issued against the Company. The outlook was ominous for Puritanism, not only in New England but in old England as well. That year saw the flight of the greatest number of emigrants across the sea, for the persecution in England was at its height, the Puritan aristocracy was suflFering in its estates, and Puritan divines were everywhere silenced or dismissed. Even War- wick was shorn of a part of his power. Young Henry Vane, son of a baronet, had already gone to America, and such men as Lord Saye and Sele, Lord Brooke, and Sir Arthur Haslerigg were thinking of migrating and had prepared a refuge at Saybrook where they might find peace. But the turn of the tide soon came. ^ The royal Govern- ment was bankrupt, the resistance to the payment of ship-money was already making itself felt, and disturbances in the central and eastern countie# 3 34 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND were absorbing the attention and energies of the Government. Gorges, left alone to execute the writ against the colony, joined with Mason in building a ship for the purpose of carrying the quo warranto to New England, but the vessel broke in the launching, and their resources were at an end. Mason died in 1635, and Gorges, an old man of seventy, bankrupt and discouraged, could do no more. Though Morton continued the struggle, and though, in 1638, the Committee of the Council for Foreign Plantations (the Laud Commission) again demanded the charter, the danger was past : conditions in England had be- come so serious for the King that the complaints against Massachusetts were lost to view. At last in 1639 Gorges obtained his charter for a feudal propriety in Maine but no further attempts were made to overthrow the Massachusetts Bay colony. . During the years from 1630 to 1640, the growth of the colony was extraordinarily rapid. In the first year alone seventeen ships with two thousand colonists came over, and it is estimated that by 1641 three hundred vessels bearing twenty thou- sand passengers had crossed the Atlantic. It was a great migration. Inevitably many went back, but the great majority remained and settled in THE BAY COLONY 35 Boston and its neighborhood — Roxbury, Charles- town, Dorchester, Cambridge, and Watertown, where in 1643 were situated according to Win- throp "near half of the commonwealth for number of people and substance." From the first the colo- nists dispersed rapidly, establishing in favorable places settlements which they generally called plan- tations but sometimes towns. In these they lived as petty religious and civil communities, each under its minister, with civil officials chosen from among themselves. ,)ln the decade following 1630 the num- ber of such settlements rose to twenty-two. I The inhabitants were almost purely English in stock, with here and there an Irishman, a few Jews, and an occasional negro from the West Indies. Nearly all the settlers were of Puritan sympathies, and of middle-class origin— tenants from English estates, artisans from English towns, and many inden- tured servants. A few were of the aristocracy, such as Lady .Arabella Johnson, daughter of the Earl of Lincoln, Sir Richard Saltonstall, Lady De- borah Moody, members of the Harlakenden family, young Henry Vane, Thomas Gorges, and a few others. Of "Misters" and "Es- quires" there was a goodly number, such as Winthrop, Haynes, Emanuel Downing, and the 36 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND like. The first leaders were exceptional men, possessed of ability and education, and many were university graduates, who brought with them the books and the habits of the reader and scholar of their day. They were superior to those of the second and third generation in the breadth of their ideas and in the vigor and origin- ality of their convictions. / Migration ceased in 1641, and a time of stress and suffering set in. Commodities grew scarce, prices rose, many colonists returned to England leaving debts behind, and as yet the colony pro- duced no staples to exchange for merchandise from the mother country.'! Some of the settlers, dis- couraged, went to the West Indies; others, fleeing for fear of want, found their way to the Dutch at Long Island. Pressure was brought to bear at various times to persuade the people to migrate elsewhere as a body, to Old Providence and Trini- dad in the Caribbean, to Maryland, and later to Jamaica; but these attempts proved vain. The Puritan was willing to endure hardship and suffer- ing for the sake of civil and religious independence, but he was not willing to lose his identity among those who did not share his faith in the guiding hand of God or who denied the principles accord- THE BAY COLONY 37 ing to which he wished to govern his community. / At first the leaders of the migration were Non- conformists not Separatists. Francis Higginson, Endecott's minister at Salem, had declared in 1629 that they did not go to New England as separatists from the Church of England but only as those who would separate from the corruption in it''; and Winthrop used "Easter" and the customary names of the months until 1635. But the Puritans became essentially Separatists from the day when Dr. Samuel Fuller of Plymouth persuaded the Salem community, even before the company itself had left England, to accept the practices of the Plymouth Church. Each town consequently had its church, pastor, teacher, and covenant, and became an independent Congrega- tional community — a circumstance which left a deep impress upon the life and history of New England. ^The government of the colony was never a democracy in the modern sense of the term. ' At first in 1630, control was assumed by the governor and his assistants, leaving but little power in the hands of the freeman; but such usurpation of power could not last, and in 1632 the freemen w,ere^given the right to elect oflScials, to make and 38 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND enforce laws, raise money, impose taxes, and dispose of lands. Thus was begun the transforma- tion of the court of the company into a parliament, and the company itself into a commonwealth. So self-suflScient did the colony become in these early years of its history that by 1646 Massachu- setts could assert that it owed only allegiance to England and was entirely independent of the British Parliament in all matters of government, in which affairs under its charter it had absolute power- Many denied this contention of the lead- ers, asserting that the company was only a corpora- tion and that any colonist had a right of appeal to England. Winthrop refused definitely to recog- nize this right, and measures were taken to purge the colony of these refractory spirits, among whom were Dr. Robert Child, one of the best educated men of the colony, William Vassall, and Samuel Maverick. All were fined, some clapped in irons, and many banished. Child returned to England, Vassall went to Barbados, and the rest were si- lenced. So menacing was the revolt that Edward Winslow was sent to England to present the case to the parliamentary commissioners, which he did successfully. /But among those who upheld the freedom of . THE BAY COLONY the colony from English interference and control there were many who complained of the form the government was taking. / The franchise was limited to church members, which debarred five- sixths of the population from voting and holding office; the magistrates insisted on exercising a negative vote upon the proceedings of the deputies, because they deemed it necessary to prevent the colony from degenerating into *'a mere demo- cracy and the ministers or elders exercised an influence in purely civil matters that rendered them arbiters in all disputes between the magis- trates and the deputies. Until 1634, the general court had been a primary assembly, but in that year representation was introduced and the towns sent deputies, who soon began to complain of the meagerness of their powers. From this time on, the efforts of the deputies to reduce the authority of the magistrates and to increase their own were continuous and insistent. One bold dissenter was barred from public office in 1635 for daring to deny the magistrates' claim, and others ex- pressed their fear that autocratic rule and a gover- nor for life would endanger the liberty of the people. The dominance of the clergy tended to the main- tenance of an intolerant theocracy and was offensive 40 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND to many in Massachusetts who, having fled from Laud's intolerance at home, had no desire to sub- mit to an equal intolerance in New England. Between 1634 and 1638 the manifestations of this dislike became conspicuous and alarming. The Governor's son, the younger John Winthrop, dissatisfied with the hard regime in Massachu- setts, returned to England in 1634. Henry Vane, though elected Governor in 1636, showed marked discontent, and when defeated the next year left the colony. The English aristocratic Puritans, Saye and Sele, Brooke, and others, who planned to leave England in 1635, found themselves so out of accord vith the Massachusetts policy of limit- ing of the suffrage to church members — and to church membership as determined by the clergy — that they refused to go to Boston, and persisted in their plan for a settlement at Saybrook. / The Massachusetts system had thus become not a constitutional government fashioned after the best liberal thought in England of that day, but a narrow oligarchy in which the political order was determined according to a rigid interpretation of theology; This excessive theocratic concen- tration of" power resulted in driving from the col- ony many of its best men. THE BAY COLONY 41 [More notorious even than the poHtical dissen- sions were the moral and theological disputes which almost disrupted the colony.! The magistrates and elders did not compel men to leave the colony because of political heresy, but they did drive them out because of difference in matters of theo- logy. Even before the company came over, ^^ndecott had sent John and Samuel Browne back to England because they worshiped accord- ing to the Book of Common Prayer. Morton and six others were banished in 1630 as an im- moral influence. Sir Christopher Gardiner, Philip Ratcliffe, Richard Wright, the Walfords, and Henry Lynn were all forced to leave in 1630 and 1631 as *'unmeete to inhabit here." Roger Williams, the tolerationist and upholder of soul- liberty, who complained of the magistrates for oppression and of the elders for injustice and who opposed the close union of church and state, was compelled to leave during the winter of 1635 and 1636. But the great expulsion came in 1637, when an epidemic of heresy struck the colony. A synod at Newtown condemned eighty erroneous opinions, and the general court then disarmed or banished all who persisted in error. ^ A furor of excitement gathered about Anne 42 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND Hutchinson, who claimed to be moved by the spirit and denied that an outward conformity to the letter of the covenant was a suflScient test of true religion unless accompanied with a change in the inner life. She was a nonconformist among those who, refusing to conform to the Church of England, had now themselves become conformists of the strictest type. To Mrs. Hutchinson the vexatious legalism of Puritanism'' was as abhor- rent as had been the practices of the Roman and Anglican churches to the Puritans, and, though the latter did not realize it, they were as unjust to her as Laud had been to them. She broke from a covenant of works in favor of a covenant of grace and in so doing defied the standing authori- ties and the ruling clergy of the colony. Her wit, undeniable power of exhortation, philanthropic disposition, and personal attributes which gave her an ascendency in the Boston church, drew to her a large following and placed the supremacy of the orthodox party in peril. After a long and wordy struggle to check the "misgovernment of a woman's tongue" and to rebuke "'the impudent boldness of a proud dame," Mrs^^Iutch^ was excommunicated and banished; and certain of those^wIio^Lipheld heT^^^^^^'WEeel^^ Coggeshall, THE BAY COLONY 43 Aspinwall, Coddington, and Underbill, all leading men of the colony — were also forced to leave. In Boston and the adjoining towns dozens of men were disarmed for fear of a general uprising against the orthodox government. This discord put a terrible strain on the colony, and one marvels that it weathered the storm. Only an iron discipline that knew neither charity nor tolerance could have successfully resisted the attacks on the standing order. The years from 1635 to 1638 were a critical time in the history of the colony, and the unyielding attitude of magistrates and elders was due in no small part to the danger of attack from England. Deter- mined, on the one hand, to save the colony from the menace of Anglican control, and, on the other, to prevent the admission of liberal and democratic ideas, they struggled to maintain the rule of a minority in behalf of a precise and logically de- fined theocratic system that admitted neither experiment nor compromise. For the moment they were successful, because the Cromwellian victory in England was favorable to their cause. But should independence be overthrown at home, should religion cease to be a deciding factor in political quarrels, and should the monarchy and 44 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND the Established Church gain ascendency once more, then Massachusetts would certainly reap the whirlwind. The harvesting might be long but the garnering would be none the less sure. CHAPTER III COMPLETING THE WORK OF SETTLEMENT Through the portal of Boston at one time or another passed all or nearly all those who were to found additional colonies in New England; and from that portal, willingly or unwillingly, men and women journeyed north, south, and west, searching for favorable locations, buying land of the Indians, and laying the groundwork for per- manent homes and organized communities. In J:his way were begun the colonies of Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Haven, and New Hampshire, ^^^^ in part from the desire for separate religious and political life and in part from the migratory instinct which has always characterized the Englishman in his effort to find a home and a means of livelihood. Sometimes individuals wandered alone or in groups of two or three, but more frequently covenanted com- panies of men and women of like minds moved 45 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND across the face of the land, followed Indian trails, or voyaged by water along the coast and up the rivers, usually remaining where they first found satisfaction, but often, in new combinations, taking up the burden of their journeying and moving on, a second, a third, and even a fourth time in search of homes. Abraham Pierson and his flock migrated four times in thirty years, seeking a place where they might find rest under a government according to God. The frontier Puritan was neither docile nor easily satisfied. He was restless, opinionated, and eager to assert himself and his convictions. The con- troversies among the elect regarding doctrines and morals often became so heated that com- plete separation was the only remedy; and wher- ever there was a migrating leader followers were sure to be found. Hence, despite the dangers from cold, famine, the Indian, and the wilderness, the men of New England were constantly shifting in these earlier years as one motive or another urged them on. Land was plentiful, and, as a rule, easily obtained; opportunities for trade pre- sented themselves to any one who would seek them; and the freedom of earth and sky and of nature unspoiled oflFered an ideal environment for THE WORK OF SETTLEMENT 47 a closer communion with God. Owing to the many varieties of religious opinion that prevailed among these radical pioneers, each new grouping and consequent settlement had an individuality of its own, determined by the personality of its leader and by the ideas that he represented. Thus Williams, Clarke, Coddington, and Gorton influ- enced Rhode Island; Hooker, Haynes, and Ludlow, Connecticut; Davenport, Eaton, and Pierson, New Haven; and Wheelwright and Underhill, New Hampshire. BiOger^JWiniams, the founder of Providence — the first plantation to be settled in what was later the colony of Rhode Island — was driven out of Boston because he called in question the author- ity of the government, denied the legality of its land title as derived from the King, and contested the right of the magistrates to deal with matters ecclesiastical. Making his way through the wil- derness in the winter of 1635-1636, he finally settled on the Mooshassuc River, calling the place Providence; and in the ensuing two years he gathered about him a number of those who found the church system of Massachusetts intolerable and the Erastian doctrines of the magistrates, according to which the sins of believers were to 48 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND be punished by civil authority, distressing to their consciences. They drew up a plantation covenant, promising to subject themselves "in active or passive obedience to all such orders or agreements" as might be made for the public good in an orderly way by the majority vote of the masters of families, "incorporated together into a town fellowship,'^ but "only in civill things/' Thus did the men of Providence put into prac- tice their doctrine of a church separable from the state, and of a political order in which there were no magistrates, no elders exercising civil as well as spiritual authority, and no restraint on soul liberty. A year or two later William Coddington, loyal ally of Anne Hutchinson, with others — Clarke, Coggeshall, and Aspinwall, who resented the ag- gressive attitude of Boston — purchased from the Indians the island of Aquidneck in Narragansett Bay and at the northern end planted Pocasset, afterwards Portsmouth, the second settlement in the colony of Rhode Island. They, too, entered into a covenant to join themselves into a body politic and elected Coddington as their judge and five others as elders. But this modeling of the gov- ernment after the practices of the Old Testament THE WORK OF SETTLEMENT 49 was not pleasing to a majority of the commu- nity, which desired a more democratic organiza- tion. After a few months, in the spring of 1639, Coddington and his followers therefore journeyed southward and established a third settlement at Newport. Here the members adopted a covenant, "engaging'' themselves ''to bear equall charges, answerable to our strength and estates in com- mon," and to be governed " by major voice of judge and elders; the judge to have a double voice." Though differing from the system as developed in Massachusetts, the Newport government at the beginning had a decidedly theocratic character. The last of the Rhode Island settlements was at Shawomet, or Warwick, on the western main- land at the upper end of the Bay. There Samuel Gortonj the mystic and transcendentalist, one of the most individual of men in an era of striking individualities, after many vicissitudes found an abiding place. He was of London, "a clothier and professor of the misteries of Christ," a believer in established authority as the surest guardian of liberty, and an opponent of formalism in all its varieties. Arriving at Boston in 1637 at the height of the Hutchinsonian controversy, he had sought liberty of conscience, first in Boston, then 50 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND in Plymouth, and finally in Portsmouth, where he had become a leader after the withdrawal of Coddington. But in each place his instinct for justice and his too vociferous denial of the legality of verdicts rendered by self -constituted authorities led him to seek further for a home that would shelter him and his followers. No sooner, how- ever, was he settled at Shawomet, than the Mass- achusetts authorities laid claim to the territory, and it was only after arrest, imprisonment, and a narrow escape from the death penalty, followed by a journey to England and the enlist- ing of the sympathies of the Earl of Warwick, that he made good his claim. Gorton returned in 1648 with a letter from Warwick, as Lord Admiral and head of the parliamentary commission on plan- tation affairs, ordering Massachusetts to cease molesting him and his people, and he named the plantation Warwick after his patron, Samuel Gorton played an influential and useful part in the later history of the colony, and his career of peaceful service to Rhode Island belies the opinion, based on Winslow's partisan pamphlet, Hypocrasie Unmasked^ and other contemporary writings, that he was a blasphemer, a "crude and half-crazy thinker,'' a "proud and pestilent sedu- THE WORK OF SETTLEMENT 51 cer," and a "most prodigious minter of exorbitant novelties.'' He preferred ''the universitie of humane reason and reading of the volume of visible creation'' to sectarianism and convention. No wonder the Massachusetts leaders could not comprehend him! He questioned their infalli- bility, their ecclesiastical caste, and their theology, and for their own self-preservation they were bound to resist what they deemed his heresies. Thus Rhode Island at the beginning was formed of four separate and independent communities, each in embryo a petty state, no one of which pos- sessed at first other than an Indian title for its lands and a self-made plantation covenant as the warrant for its government. To settle disputes over land titles and to dispose of town lands, Prov- idence established in 1640 a court of arbitration consisting of five ''disposers," who seem also to have served as a sort of executive board for the town. In all outward relations she remained iso- lated from her neighbors, pursuing a course of strictly local independence. Portsmouth and New- port, for the sake of greater strength, united in March, 1640, and a year later agreed on a form of government which they called "a democratic or popular government/' in which none was to be 52 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND accounted a delinquent for doctrine/' They set up a governor, deputy governor, and four assist- ants, regularly elected, and provided that all laws should be made by the freemen or the major part of them, " orderly assembled/' In the system thus established we can see the influence of the older colonies and the beginning of a stronger government, but at best the experiment was half- hearted, for each town reserved to itself complete control over its own affairs. In 1647 Portsmouth withdrew ''to be as free in their transactions as any other town in the colony,'' and the spirit of separatism was still dominant. But it soon became necessary for the four towns of what is now Rhode Island to have something more legal upon which to base their right to exist than a title derived from their plantation covenants and Indian bargains. Massachusetts was extending her claims southward; Edward Winslow was in England ready to show that the Rhode Island settlements were within the bounds of the Plymouth patent; and certain individuals, traders and land-seekers, were locating in the Narragansett country and taking possession of the soil. To combat these claims, Roger Winiams, who had so vehemently denied the^vaJidity of a THE WORK OF SETTLEMENT 53 \ royal patent a few years before, but influenced now, it may be, by Gorton's insistence that a legal title could be obtaine^^only from England, sailed overseas and secured-ixQm the parliamentary coiiimissioners in March, 1644, a^^harter uniting Providence, Portsmou^^ Newport, under the 1^ nanTFrrfiVovid^ Narragan- sett Bay, and granting them powers of government. For'TIie moment even this document had no certain value, for, in spite of the fact that the par- liamentarians were at war with the King, Charles I was still sovereign of England and should he win in the Civil War the title would be worthless)' However, the patent was not put in force until 1647, after the victory of Cromwell at Naseby had given control into the hands of Parliament; and then a general meeting was held at Ports- mouth consisting of the freemen of Warwick, Portsmouth, and Newport, and ten representatives from Providence. The patent did not state how affairs Were to be managed, and the colonials, meeting in subsequent assemblies, worked out the problem in their own way. They refused to have a governor, and, creating only a presiding officer with four assistants, constituted a court of trials for the hearing of important criminal and civil 54 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND causes. No general court was created by law, but ajegisla^i^^ soon came into existence con- sisting of six deputies from each town. Before this Portsmouth meeting of 1647 adjourned, it adopted a code of laws in which witchcraft trials and imgris^BH^ent for debt^wereiorbiddgn^ capital punishment waslafgely abolished, and divorce was granted for adultery only. In 1652, the assembly passed a noteworthy law against the holding of negrge&^iLsIa^very . But the new patent did not bring peace to the colony. In 1649, Roger Williams wrote to Gover- nor Winthrop: "Our poor colony is in civil dis- sension. Their last meeting [of the assembly] at which I have not been, have fallen into fac- tions. Mr. Coddington and Captain Partridge, etc., are the heads of one, and Captain Clarke, Mr. Easton, etc., the heads of the other." What had happened was this. Coddington, representing the conservative and theocratic wing of the as- sembly and opposing those who were more liber- ally minded, had evidently applied to Massachu- setts and Plymouth for support in the effort to obtain an independent government for Aquidneck. This plan would have destroyed what unity the colony had obtained under the patent, but Cod^ THE WORK OF SETTLEMENT 55 dington wished to be governor of a colony of his own. Both Massachusetts and Plymouth were fav- orable to this plan, as they hoped to further their own claims to the territory of islands and mainland. Twice Coddington made application to the newly formed Confederation of New England for admis- sion, but was refused unless he would bring in Aquid- neck as part of Massachusetts or Plymouth, the lat- ter of which laid claim to it. CoddijigtoBJtiiiasel^ was willing to do this but found the opposition to the plan so vehement that he gave up the attempt and went to England to secure a patent of his own. After long negotiations he was successful in his quest and returned with a document which ap- pointed him governor for life with almost vice- regal powers. But he had reckoned without the people whom he was to govern. Learning of the outcome of Coddington's mission and hearing that he had had secret deal ings also withJheJ^utch at New^instei:dQ,m, the inEabitants of the islands rose m revolt, hanged Captain Partridge and compelled Qpddiijgton to seek safetj;;^Jn_flight. Williams again wenttoHEngliind^^ and pro- cured the recall of Coddington's commission and a confirmation of his own patent, and Coddington in 1656 gave in his submission and was forgiven* 56 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND The early history of Rhode Island thus furnishes a remarkable exhibition of intense individualism | in things religious and a warring of disruptive forces in matters of civil organization. Connecticut was settled during the years 1634^ to 1636 by people from Massachusetts. Knowl- edge of the fertile Connecticut valley had come early to the Dutch, who had planted a block-house, the House of Good Hope, at the southeast corner of the land upon which Hartford now stands. » Plymouth, too, in searching for advantageous trade openings had sent out one William Holmes, who sailed past the Dutch fort and took possession of the site of Windsor. In the autumn of 1634 a certain John Oldham, trader and rover and frequent disturber of the Puritan peace, came with a few companions and began to occupy andv^cul- tivate lands within the bounds of modern Weth- ersfield. Settlers continued to arrive from Massachusetts, either by land or by water, act- uated by land-hunger and stirred to movement westward by the same driving impulse that for years to come was to populate the frontier wherever it stretched. The territory thus possessed was claimed at first by Massachusetts, on the theory that the southern line of the colony, if ex- THE WORK OF SETTLEMENT 57^ tended westward, would include this portion of the Connecticut River. It was also claimed by the group of English lords and gentlemen, Saye and Sele, Brooke, and other Puritans, who, as they supposed, had obtained through the Earl of Warwick from the New England Council a grant of land extending west and southwest from Narragansett Bay forty leagues. These claims were of course irreconciliable, but the English lords, in order to assert their title, sent over in 1635 twenty servants, known as the Stiles party, who reached Connecticut in the summer of that year. Thus by autumn there were on the ground four sets ofTTvaT claimants: the Dutch, the Plymouth traders, various emigrants from Massachusetts, chiefly from the town of Dorchester, and the Stiles party, representing the English lords and gentlemen. Their relations were not harmonious, |or the Dutch tried to drive out the Plymouth traders, and the latter resented in their turn the attempt of the Dorchester men to occupy their lands. The matter was to be settled not by force but by weight of numbers and soundness of title. In 1635, a new and larger migration was under consideration in Massachusetts, prompted by 58 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND various motives: partly personal, as shown in the rivalries of strong men in a colony already overstocked with leaders; partly material, as indicated by the desire for wider fields for culti- vation and especially good pasture; and partly political, as evidenced by the dislike on the part of many for the power of the elders and magistrates in Massachusetts and by the strong inclination of masterful men toward a government of their own. Thomas Hooker, the pastor of the Newtown church, John Haynes, the Governor of Massachu- setts in 1635, and Roger Ludlow, a former magis- trate and deputy governor who had failed of election to the magistracy in the same year, were the leaders of the movement and, if we may judge from later events, were believers in certain political ideas that were not finding application in the Bay Colony. Disappointed because of the rigidity of the Massachusetts system, they seem to have waited for an opportunity to put into practice the principles which they believed essential to the true government of a people. When the decision was finally reached and certain of the inhabitants of Newtown, Water- town, and Roxbury were ready to enter on their removal, the question naturally arose as to the THE WORK OF SETTLEMENT 59 title to the territory. In June, 1635, Massachu- setts had asserted her claim by exercising a sort of supervision over those who had already gone to Connecticut; but in October John Winthrop, Jr.^ the Reverend Hugh Peters, and Henry Vane ar- rived from England with authority from the lords and gentlemen to push their claim, and Winthrop actually bore a commission as governor of the en- tire territory, which included Connecticut. It is hardly possible that Hooker and Haynes would have ignored the demands of these agents, and yet to acknowledge Winthrop as their governor would have been to accept a head who was not of their own choosing. In all probability some arrange- ment was made with Winthrop, according to which the Englishmen's title to the lands was recognized but at the same time the Connecticut settlers were to have full powers of self-govern- ment, and the question of a governor was left for the moment undecided, Winthrop confining his jurisdiction to Saybrook, the settlement which he was to promote at the mouth of the river. This agreement was embodied in a commission which was drawn up by the Massachusetts General Court and issued in March, 1636, "'on behalf of our said members and John Winthrop, Jr.," and 60 THE FATHERS OP NEW ENGLAND was to last for one year. Who actually wrote this commission we do not know, but the Connecti- cut men said afterwards that it arose from the desire of the people who removed, because they did not want to go away without a frame of govern- ment agreed on beforehand and did not want to recognize ''any claymes of the Massachusetts jurisdiction over them by vertew of Patent/' Apparently the people going to Connecticut wanted to get as far away from Massachusetts as possible. Armed with their commission, in the summer of 1636, members of the Newtown church to the number of about one hundred persons, led by Thomas Hooker, their pastor, and Samuel Stone, his assistant, made a famous pilgrimage under summer skies through the woods that lay between Massachusetts and the Connecticut River. Bear- ing Mrs. (^oke^in a litter and driving their cattle before them, these courageous pioneers, men, women, and children, after a fortnight's journey- ing, reached Hart ford , the site of their future home, already occupied by those who had fore- gathered there in number larger even than those who had newly arrived. At about the same time, William Pynchon and others of Roxbury, acting THE WORK OF SETTLEMENT 61 from similar motives, took the same course westward, but instead of continuing down the Connecticut River, as the others had done, stopped at its banks and made their settlement at Agawam (Springfield), where they built a ware- house and a wharf for use in trade with the Indians. The lower settlements, Hartford, Wethersfield, and Windsor, became agricultural communities; but Springfield, standing at the junction of Indian trails and river communication, was destined to become the center of the beaver trade of the region, shipping furs and receiving commodities through Boston, either in shallops around the Cape or on pack-horses overland by the path the emigrants had trod. Pynchon's settlement was one of the towns named in the commission and, for the first year after it was founded, joined with the others in maintaining order in the colony. The commission government came to an end in March, 1637, and there is reason to think that during the last month, an election of committees took place in Hartford, Wethersfield, and Wind- sor, which would show that the Connecticut settlers were exercising the privilege of the franchise more than a year before Hooker preached his famous sermon declaring that the right of government lay 62 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND in the people. There also is some reason to think that the leaders were still undecided whether or not to come to an agreement with the English lords and gentlemen and to put themselves under the latter's jurisdiction. But as Winthrop's com- mission expired at the end of a year and no new governor was appointed — the English Puritans having become absorbed in affairs at home — the Connecticut colony was thrown on its own resources and compelled to set up a government of its own. Pynchon at Springfield now cast in his lot with Massachusetts, and from this time forward Springfield was a part of the Massachu- setts colony, but the men of Connecticut, disliking Pynchon's desertion, determined to act for them- selves. On May 31, 1638, Hooker preached a sermon laying down the principles according to which government should be established; and during the six months that followed, the court, consisting of six magistrates and nine deputies, framed the Fundamental Orders, the laws that were to govern the colony. iThis remarkable document, though deserving all the encomiums passed upon it, was not a con- stitution in any modern sense of the word and established nothing fundamentally new, because THE WORK OF SETTLEMENT 63 the form of government it outlined differed only in certain particulars from that of Massachusetts and Plymoutjhu] It was made up of two parts, a preamble, which is a plantation covenant like that signed in the cabin of the MayfloweVy and a series of laws or orders passed either separately or together by the court which drafted them. This court was a lawmaking body and it made public the laws when they were passed. That this body of laws or, as we may not improperly call it, this frame of government was ratified, as Trumbull says, by all the free planters assembled at Hartford on January 14, 1639, is not impossible, though such action would seem unnecessary as the court was a representative body, and unlikely as the time of year was not favorable for holding a mass- meeting at Hartford. Later courts never hesi- tated to change the articles without referring the changes to the planters. The articles simply confirmed the system of magistrates and deputies already in existence and added provisions for the election of a governor and deputy governor — who had not hitherto been chosen because of doubts regarding the jurisdiction of the English lords and gentlemen. j In matters of detail the Connecticut system 64 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND differed from that of Massachusetts in three particulars : it imposed no religious test for those entitled to vote, but required only that the governor be a church member, though it is prob- able that in practice only those would be admitted freemen who were covenanted Christians; it gave less power to the magistrates and more to the freemen; and it placed the election of the governor in the hands of the voters, limiting their choice only to a church member and a former magistrate, and forbidding reelection until after the expira- tion of a year. Later the qualifications of a freeman were made such that only about one in every two or three voted in the seventeenth cen- tury; the powers of the magistrates were increased; .and the governor was allowed to succeed himself. ^ Connecticut was less democratic than Rhode Island in the seventeenth century and, as the years went on, fewer and fewer of the inhabitants exer- cised the freeman's privilege of voting for the higher oflBcials. By no stretch of the imagination can the political conditions in any of the New Eng- land colonies be called popular or democratic. Government was in the hands of a very few men.J Two more settlements remain to be considered before a survey of the foundations of New England THE WORK OF SETTLEMENT 65 can be called complete. When the Reverend John Wheelwright, the friend of Anne Hutchinson, was driven from Massachusetts and took his way northward to the region of Squamscott Falls where he founded Exeter, he entered a territory of grants and claims and rights of possession that render the early history of New Hampshire a tangle of difficulties. Out of a grant to Gorges and Mason of the stretch of coast between the Merrimac and the Kennebec in 1622, and a con- firmation of Mason's right to the region between the Merrimac and the Piscataqua, arose the settle- ment of Strawberry Bank, or Portsmouth, and accompanying it a controversy over the title to the soil that lasted throughout the colonial period. Mason called his territory New Hampshire; Gorges planned to call the region that he received New Somersetshire; and both designations took root, one as the name of a colony, the other as that of a county in Maine. At an earlier date, merchants of Bristol and Shrewsbury had become interested in this part of New England and had sent over one Edward Hilton, who some time before 1627 began a settlement at Dover. The share of the Bristol merchants was purchased in 1633 by the English lords and gentlemen already 66 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAlSiD concerned in the Connecticut settlement, for the purpose, it may be, of furnishing another refuge in New England, should conditions at home de- mand their withdrawal overseas. But nothing came of their purchase except an unfortunate controversy with Plymouth colony over trading boundaries on the Kennebec. The men established on this northern frontier were often lawless and diflacult to control, of loose habits and morals, and intent on their own profit; and the region itself was inhospitable to organized and settled government. Yet out of these some- what nebulous beginnings, four settlements arose — Portsmouth (Masonian and Anglican), Dover (Anglican and Puritan), Exeter and Hampton (both Puritan), each with its civil compact and each an independent town. The inhabitants were few in number, and "the generality, of mean and low estates,'' and little disposed to union among themselves. But in 1638-1639, when Massachusetts discovered that one interpreta- tion of her charter would carry her northern boundary to a point above them, she took them under her protecting wing. After considerable debate this jurisdiction was recognized and the New Hampshire and Maine towns were brought THE WORK OF SETTLEMENT 67 within her boundaries. Henceforth, for many years a number of these towns, though in part Angh'can communities and never burdened with the requirement that their freemen be church members, were represented in the general court at Boston. Nevertheless the Mason and Gorges adherents — whose Anglican and pro-monarchical sympathies were hostile to Puritan control and who were supported by the persistent efforts of the Mason family in England — were able to obtain the separation of New Uamsphire from Massachusetts in 1678. Maine, however, remained a part of the Bay Colony to the end of the colonial period. **The circumstances attending the settlement of New Haven were wholly unlike those of New Hampshire. John Davenport, a London clergy- man of an extreme Puritan type, Theophilus Eaton, a London merchant in the Baltic trade and a member of the Eastland Company, Samuel Eaton and John Lathrop, two non -conforming ministers, were the leaders of the movement. Lathrop never went to New Haven, and Samuel Eaton early returned to England. The leaders and many of their followers were men of consider- able property for that day, and their interest in trade gave to the colony a marked commercial 68 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND character. The company was composed of men and women from London and its vicinity, and of others who joined them from Kent, Hereford, and Yorkshire. As both Davenport and Theo- philus Eaton were members of the Massachusetts Bay Company, they were familiar with its work; and on coming to America in June, 1637, they stopped at Boston and remained there during the winter. Pressure was brought upon them to make Massachusetts their home, but without success, for though Davenport had much in com- mon with the Massachusetts people, he was not content to remain where he would be merely one among many. Desiring a free place for worship and trade, he sent Eaton voyaging to find one; and the latter, who had heard of Quinnipiac on the Connecticut shore, viewed this spot and re- ported favorably. In March, 1638, the company set sail from Boston and laid the foundatioiis.of the town of New Haven. This company had neither charter nor land grant, and, as far as we know, it had made no at- tempt to obtain either. "The first planters," says Kingsley, "recognized in their acts no human authority foreign to themselves.*' Unlike the Pilgrims in their Mayflower compact, they made THE WORK OF SETTLEMENT 69 no reference in their plantation covenant to the dread sovereign. King James, and in none of their acts and statements did they express a longing for their native country or regard for its authority. Their settlement bears some resemblance to that of the Rhode Island towns, but it was better organized and more orderly from the beginning. The "settlers may have drawn up their covenant before leaving Boston and may have reached Quin- nipiac as a community already united in a common civil and religious bond. Their lands, which they purchased from the Indians, they laid out in their own way. The next year on June 4, 1639, they held a meeting in Robert Newman's barn and there, declaring that the Word of God should be their guide in families and commonwealth and that only church members should be sharers in government, they chose twelve men as the foun- dations of their church state. Two months later these twelve selected "seven pillars'' who proceeded to organize a church by associating others with themselves. Under the leadership of the seven the government continued until October, when they resigned and a gathering of the church members elected Theophilus Eaton as their magistrate and four others to act as assistants, with a secretary 70 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND and a treasurer. Thus was begun a form of government which when perfected was very simi- lar to that of the other New England colonies. While New Haven as a town-colony was taking on form, other plantations were arising near by. Milford was settled partly from New Haven and partly from Wethersfield, where an overplus of clergy was leading to disputes and many with- drawals to other parts. Guilford was settled di- rectly from England. Southold on Long Island was settled also from England, by way of New Haven. Stamford had its origin in a Wethersfield quarrel, when the Reverend Richard Denton, ''blind of one eye but not the least among the seers of Israel," departed with his flock. Branford also was born of a Wethersfield controversy and later received accessions from Long Island. In 1643, Milford, Guilford, and Stamford combined under the common jurisdiction of New Haven, to which Southold and Branford acceded later with a form of government copied after that of Massachusetts, though the colony was distinctly federal in charac- ter, consisting of ''the government of New Haven with the plantations in combination therewith.*' Though there was no special reservation of town rights in the fundamental articles which defined THE WORK OF SETTLEMENT 71 the government, yet the towns, five in number, considered themselves free to withdraw at any time if they so desired. We have thus reviewed the conditions under which some forty towns, grouped under five juris- dictions, were founded in New England. They were destined to treble their number in the next generation and to suffer such regrouping_as to reduce the jurisdictions to four before the end of the century — New Hampshire separating from Massachusetts, New Haven being absorbed by Tlonnecticut, and Plymouth submitting to the authority of Massachusetts under the charter of 1691. In this readjustment we have the origin of four of the six New England States of the present day. I'd ' CHAPTER IV EARLY NEW ENGLAND LIFE The people who inhabited these little New Eng- land towns were from nearly every grade of Eng- lish society, ^but the greater number were men and women of humble birth — laborers, artisans, and petty farmers — drawn from town and country, possessed of scanty education, little or no financial capital, and but slight experience with the larger world. Some were middle-class lawyers, mer- chants, and squires; a few, but very few, were of higher rank, while scores were of the soil, coarse in language and habits, and given to practices characteristic of the peasantry of England at that time. The fact that hardly a fifth of those in Massachusetts were professed Christians renders it doubtful how far religious convictions were the only driving motive that sent hundreds of these men to New England. The leaders were, in a majority of cases, university men familiar with 72 EARLY NEW ENGLAND LIFE 73 good literature and possessed of good libraries, but more cognizant of theology and philosophy than of the law and order of nature, i Some were professional soldiers, simple in thought as they were courageous in action, while others were men of affairs, who had acquired experience before the courts and in the counting houses of England and were often amazingly versatile, able to turn their hands to any business that confronted them. For the great majority there was little opportunity in these early years to practice a trade or a profes- sion. Except for the clergy, who could preach in America with greater freedom than in England, and for the occasional practitioner in physic or the law who as time went on found occasion to apply his knowledge in the household and the courts, there was little else for any one to do than engage in farming, fishing, and trading with the Indians, or turn carpenter and cobbler according to demand. The artisan became a farmer, though still preserving his knack as a craftsman, and ex- pended his skill and his muscle in subduing a tough and unbroken soil. New England was probably overstocked with men of strong minds and assertive dispositions. It was settled by radicals who would never have 74 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND left the mother country had they not possessed well-formed opinions regarding some of the most important aspects of religious and social life. We may call them all Puritans, but as to the details of their Puritanism they often differed as widely as did Roundheads and Cavaliers in Eng- land. Though representative of a common move- ment, they were far from united in their beliefs or consistent in their political practices. There was always something of the inquisitor at Boston and of the monk at Plymouth, and in all the Puri- tan colonies there prevailed a self-satisfied sense of importance as the chosen of God. The contro- versies that arose over jurisdictions and bounda- ries and the niceties of doctrine are not edifying, however honest may have been those who entered into them. Massachusetts and Connecticut always showed a disposition to stretch their demands for territory to the utmost and to take what they could, sometimes with little charity or forbearance^ The dominance of the church over the organization and methods of government and the rigid scrutiny of in- dividual lives and habits, of which the leaders, nota- bly those of Massachusetts, approved, were hardly in accord with democracy or personal liberty, j Of toleration, except in Rhode Island, there was noneT) EARLY NEW ENGLAND LIFE 75 /The unit of New En^and life was the town, a self-governing community, in large measure com- plete in itself, and if left alone capable of main- taining a separate existence. / Within certain limits, it^w^s^nd^pende^^^^^^^ higher authority, and in this respect it was unlike anything to be found in England. At this jgeriod, it was at bottom a religious community which owned and distributed the lands set apart for its occupation, elected its own officials, and passed local ordi- nances for its own well-being. At first, church members, landholders, and inhabitants tended to be identical, but they gradually separated as time went on and as new comers appeared and old resi- dents migrated elsewhere. Before the end of the century, the ecclesiastical society, the board of land proprietors, and the town proper, even when largely composed of the same members, acted as separate groups, though the line of separation was often vague and was sometimes not drawn at all. Town meetings continued to be held in the meeting-house, and land was distributed by the town in its collective capacity. Lands were par- celed out as they were needed in proportion to con- tributions to a common purchase fund or to family need, and later according to the ratable value of 76 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND a man's property. The fathers of Wallingford in Connecticut, "considering that even single persons industrious and laborious might through the blessing of God increase and grow into fami- lies/' distributed to the meanest bachelor "such a quantity of land as might in an ordinary way serve for the comfortable maintenance of a family." Sometimes allotments were equal; often they varied greatly in size, from an acre to fifty acres and even more; but always they were determined by a desire to be fair and just. The land was granted in full right and could be sold or be- queathed, though at first only with the consent of the community. With the grant generally went rights in woodland and pasture; and even meadow land, after the hay was got in, was open to the use of the villagers. The early New Eng- land town took into consideration the welfare and contentment of the individual, but it rated as of even greater importance the interests of the whole body. The settlements of New England inevitably pre- sented great variations of local life and color, stretching as they did from the Plymouth truck- ing posts in Maine, through the fishing villages of Saco and York, and those on the Piscataqua, to the EARLY NEW ENGLAND LIFE 77 towns of Long Island and the frontier com- munities of western Connecticut — Stamford and Greenwich. /The inhabitants to the number of more than thirty thousand in 1640 were not only in possession of the coast but were also pushing their way into the interior. To fishing and agri- culture they added trading, lumbering, and com- merce, and were constantly reaching out for new lands and wider opportunities. The Pil- grims had hardly weathered their first hard winter when they rebuilt one of their shallops and sent it northward on fishing and trading voyages; and later they sent one bark up the Connecticut and another to open up communication with the Dutch at New Amsterdam. Pynchon was mak- ing Springfield the centre of the fur trade of the interior, though an overcrowding of merchants there was reducing profits and compelling the settlers to resort to agriculture for a living. Of all the colonies. New Haven was the most dis- tinctly commercial.' Stephen Goodyear built a trucking house on an island below the great falls of the Housatonic in 1642; other New Haven colonists engaged in ventures on Delaware Bay; and in 1645, the colony endeavored to open a direct trade with England. But nearly every 78 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND New Haven enterprise failed, and by 1660 the wealth of the colony had materially diminished and the settlement had become little else than a colony of discouraged farmers/* Among all the colonies in New England and elsewhere there was considerable coasting traffic, and vessels went to Newfoundland and Bermuda, and even to the distant West Indies, to Madeira, and to Bilboa across the ocean. Ever since Winthrop built the Blessing of the Bay in 1631, the first sea- going craft launched in New England, Massa- chusetts had been the leading commercial colony, and her vessels occasionally made the long tri- angular voyage to Jamaica, and England, and back to the Bay. The vessels carried planks, pipe staves, furs, fish, and provisions, and exchanged them for sugar, molasses, household goods, and other wares and commodities needed for the comfort and convenience of the colonists. The older generation was passing away. By 1660, Winthrop, Cotton, Hooker, Haynes, Brad- ford, and Whiting were dead; Davenport and Roger Williams were growing old; some of the ablest men, Peters, Ludlow, Whitfield, Desborough, Hooke, had returned to England, and others less conspicuous had gone to the West Indies or to EARLY NEW ENGLAND LIFE 79 the adjacent colonies. ^ The younger men were coming on, new arrivals were creeping in, and a loosening of the old rigidity was affecting the social order. ] The Cambridge platform of 1648, which embodied the orthodox features of the Congrega- tional system as determined up to that time, gave place to the Half-Way Covenant of 1657 and 1662, which owed its rise to the coming to maturity of the second generation, the children of the first settlers, now admitted to membership but not to full communion — a wide departure from the original purpose of the founders. Rhode Island continued to be the colony of separatism and soul liberty, where Seeker, Generalist, Anabap- tist, and religious anarchist of the William Harris type found place, though not always peace. Cot- ton Mather later said there had never been "such a variety of religions together on so small a spot as there have been in that colony." The coming of the Quakers to Boston in 1656, bringing with them as they did some of the very religious ideas that had caused Mrs. Hutchinson and John Wheelwright to be driven into exile, revived anew the old issue and roused the ortho- dox colonies to deny admission to ranters, her- etics, Quakers, and the like. Boston burned their 80 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND books as corrupt, heretical, and blasphemous,'* flung these people into prison with every mark of indignity, branded them as enemies of the established order in church and commonwealth, and tried to prove that they were witches and emissaries of Satan. The first-comers were sent back to Barbados whence they came; the next were returned to England; those of 1657 were scourged; those of 1658, under the Massachusetts law of the previous year, were mutilated and, when all these measures had no effect, under the harsher law of October, 1658, four were hanged. One of these, Mary Dyer, though reprieved and ban- ished, persisted in returning to her death. The Quakers were scourged in Plymouth, branded in New Haven, flogged at the cart's tail on Long Island, and chained to a wheelbarrow at New Amsterdam. Upon Connecticut they made al- most no impression; only in Piscataqua, Rhode Island, Nantucket, and Eastern Long Island did they find a resting place. To the awe inspired by the covenant with God was added the terror aroused by the dread power of Satan; and witchcraft inevitably took its place in the annals of New England Puritanism as it had done for a century in the annals of the EARLY NEW ENGLAND LIFE 81 older world. Not one of the colonies, except Rhode Island, was free from its manifestations. Plymouth had two cases which came to trial, but no executions; Connecticut and New Haven had many trials and a number of executions, begin- ning with that of Alse Young in Windsor in 1647, the first execution for witchcraft in New England. The witch panic, a fearful exhibition of human terror, appeared in Massachusetts as early as 1648, and ran its sinister course for more than forty years, involving high and low alike and disclosing an amazing amount of credulity and superstition. To the Puritan the power of Satan was ever imminent, working through friend or foe, and using the human form as an instrument of injury to the chosen of God. The great epi- demic of witchcraft at Salem in 1692, the climax and close of the delusion, resulted in the imprison- ment of over two hundred persons and the execu- tion of nineteen. Some of those who sat in the court of trial later came to their senses and were heartily ashamed of their share in the proceedings. The New Englander of the seventeenth century, courageous as he was and loyal to his religious convictions, was in a majority of cases gifted with but a meager mental outfit. The unknown 6 82 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND world frightened and appalled him; Satan war- ring with the righteous was an ever-present menace to his soul; the will of God controlled the events of his daily life, whether for good or ill. The book of nature and the physiology and ailments of his own body he comprehended with the mind of a child. He believed that the planet upon which he lived was the center of the universe, that the stars were burning vapors, and the moon and comets agencies controlling human destinies. Strange portents presaged disaster or wrought evil works. Many a New Englander's life was governed according to the supposed influence of the heavenly bodies; Bradford believed that there was a connection between a cyclone and an eclipse; and Morton defined an earthquake as a movement of wind shut up in the pores and bowels of the earth. / Of medicine the Puritans knew little and prac- tised less. They swallowed doses of weird and repelling concoctions, wore charms and amulets, found comfort and relief in internal and external remedies that could have had no possible influ- ence upon the cause of the trouble, and when all else failed they fell back upon the mercy and will of God. Surgery was a matter of tooth-pulling EARLY NEW ENGLAND LIFE 83 and bone-setting, and though post-mortems were performed, we have no knowledge of the skill of the practitioner. The healing art, as well as nurs- ing and midwifery, was frequently in the hands of women, one of whom deposed: "I was able to live by my chirurgery, but now I am blind and cannot see a wound, much less dress it or make salves''; and Jane Hawkins of Boston, the bosom friend" of Mrs. Hutchinson, was forbidden by the general courts *'to meddle in surgery or physic, drink, plaisters or oils," as well as religion. The men who practised physic were generally home- bred, making the greater part of their living at farming or agriculture. Some were ministers as well as physicians, and one of them (Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes is sorry to say) ^'took to drink and tumbled into the Connecticut River, and so ended." There were a number of regularly trained doctors, such as John Clark of Newbury, Fuller of Plymouth, Rossiter of Guilford, and others; and the younger Winthrop, though not a physician, had more than a smattering of medicine. The mass of the New Englanders of the seven- {eenth century had but little education and but few opportunities for traveL j tKs early as 1642, Massachusetts required that every child should 84 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND be taught to read, and in 1647 enacted a law ordaining that every township should appoint a schoolmaster, and that the larger towns should each set up a grammar schoolT^f This well-known and much praised enactment, which made educa- tion the handmaid of religion and was designed to stem the tide of religious indifference rising over the colony, was better in intention than in execu- tion. It had little effect at first, and even when under its provisions the common school gradually took root in New England, the education given was of a very primitive variety. Harvard Col- lege itself, chartered in 1636, was a seat of but a moderate amount of learning and at its best had only the training of the clergy in view. In Hart- ford and New Haven, grammar schools were founded under the bequest of Governor Hopkins, but came to little in the seventeenth century. In 1674, one Robert Bartlett left money for the setting up of a free school in New London, for the teaching of Latin to poor children, but the hope was richer than the fulfilment. In truth, of education for the laity at this time in New Eng- land there was scarcely more than the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic. The frugal townspeople of New England generally deemed EARLY NEW ENGLAND LIFE 85 education an unnecessary expense; the school laws were evaded, and when complied with were more honored in the breach than in the observance. Even when honestly carried out, they produced but slender results. Probably most people could sign their names after a fashion, though many extant wills and depositions bear only the marks of their signers. Schoolmasters and town clerks had diflSculties with spelling and grammar, and the rural population were too much engrossed by their farm labors to find much time for the im- provement of the mind. Except in the homes of the clergy and the leading men of the larger towns there were few books, and those chiefly of a reli- gious character. The English Bible and Bunyan's Pilgrim^ s Progress ^ printed in Boston in 1681, were most frequently read, and in the houses of the farmers the British Almanac was occasionally found. There were no newspapers, and printing had as yet made little progress. The daily routine of clearing the soil, tilling the arable land, raising corn, rye, wheat, oats, and flax, of gathering iron ore from bogs and turpentine from pine trees, and in other ways of providing the means of existence, rendered life essentially sta- tionary and isolated, and the mind was but slightly 86 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND quickened by association with the larger world. A little journeying was done on foot, on horseback, or by water, but the trip from colony to colony was rarely undertaken; and even within the colony itself but few went far beyond the borders of their own townships, except those who sat as deputies in the assembly or engaged in hunting, trading, fishing, or in wars with the Indians. A Connecticut man could speak of ''going abroad*' to Rhode Island. Though in the larger towns good houses were built, generally of wood and sometimes of brick, in the remoter districts the buildings were crude, with rooms on one floor and a ladder to the chamber above, where corn was frequently stored. / Along the Pawcatuck River, families lived in cellars along with their pigs. Clapboards and shingles came in slowly as saw- mills increased, but at first nails and glass were rare luxuries. Conditions in such seaports as Boston, where ships came and went and higher standards of living prevailed, must not be taken as typical of the whole country. The buildings of Boston in 1683 were spoken of as ''handsome, join- ing one to another as in London, with many large streets, most of them paved with pebble stone.'* ; Money in the country towns was merchantable EARLY NEW ENGLAND LIFE 87 whe^t, peas, pork, and beef at prices current. Time was reckoned by the farmers according to the sea- sons, not according to the calendar, and men dated events by "sweet corn time," "at the beginning of last hog time,'' "since Indian harvest," and "the latter part of seed time for winter wheat." New England was a frontier land far removed from the older civilizations, and its people were always restive under restraint and convention. They were in the main men and women of good sense, sobriety, and thrift, who worked hard, squandered nothing, feared God, and honored the King, but the equipment they brought with them to America was insufficient at best and had to be replaced, as the years wore on, from resources developed on New England soil. CHAPTER V AN ATTEMPT AT COLONIAL UNION The men who controlled the destinies of New England were deeply concerned not only with pre- serving its faith but also with guarding its rights and liberties as they defined them, and reverentially preserving the letter of its charters. For men who wished to sever their connection with England and to disregard English law and precedent as much as possible, they displayed a remarkable amount of respect for the documents that ema- nated from the British Chancery. In fact, how- ever, they valued these grants and charters, not as expressions of royal favor, but as bulwarks against royal encroachment and outside interference, and in accepting such privileges as were conferred by their charters, they recognized no duty to be performed for the common mother, no obligations resting upon themselves to consider the welfare of England or to cooperate in her behalf. 88 AN ATTEMPT AT COLONIAL UNION 89 The thoughts of these men were of themselves, their faith, and their problems of existence. The strongest ties were those that held together the people of a town, closely knit in the bond of a civil and religious covenant. Next above these were the ties of the colony, with its general court or assembly composed of representatives of the towns, its governor and other oflScials elected by the freemen, and its laws passed by the assembly for the benefit and well-being of all. Higher still was the loose bond of confederation that was fashioned in 1643 for the maintenance of order, peace, and security, in the form of a league of colonies. Highest, but weakest of all, was the bond that united them to England, recognized in sentiment but carrying with it no reciprocal obligations, either legal or otherwise. To the average inhabitant of New England, the mother country was merely the land from which he had come, the home to which he might or might not return. He had practically no knowledge of Eng- land's plans or policy, no comprehension of her purpose toward her colonies or the place of the colonies in her own scheme of expansion. He was absorbed in his own affairs, not in those of England; in the commands of God, not in those of 90 TEIE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND the King; and in the dangers which surrounded him from the foes of the frontier, not in those which confronted England in her relations with her continental rivals. He was dominated by his instinct for self-government and by his compelling fear of the Stuarts and all that they represented. Even during the period of the Commonwealth and the Protectorate, England was three thousand miles away, appeal to her was difficult and costly, and the English brethren were not always as sympathetic as they might have been with the aims and methods of their co-religionists. This very isolation from the mother country, at a time when the New Englanders were pushing their fur-trading activities into the regions claimed by the Dutch and the French, rendered some sort of united action necessary and desirable. The settlers were of one stock and one purpose. De- spite bickerings and disputes, they shared a com- mon desire to enjoy the liberties of the Christian religion and to obtain from the new country into which they had come both subsistence and profit. The determination to open up trading posts on the Penobscot, the Delaware, and the Hudson, and to utilize all waters for their fisheries brought them into conflict with their rivals, at New Am- AN ATTEMPT AT COLONIAL UNION 91 sterdam and in Nova Scotia, and made it im- perative, should any one colony — Plymouth, Massachusetts, Connecticut, or New Haven — attempt to pursue its plans alone, for all to band together in its support. The troubles already en- countered with the Dutch on the Delaware and the Connecticut and with the French in Maine, in the competition for the fur trade of the interior, had rendered the situation acute and led, very early, to the proposal that a combination be effected. But it was not until 1643 that anything was accomplished. In May of that year, at the suggestion of Connecticut and New Haven, com- missioners from these colonies, and from Mas- sachusetts and Plymouth also, met at Boston and drafted a body of articles for a consociation or confederation to be known as the United Colonies of New England, a form of union which found a precedent in the federation of the Netherlands and corresponded in the political field to the con- sociation of churches in the ecclesiastical. Maine was not asked because, as a province belonging to Gorges, the people there (to quote from Win- throp's Journal) "ran a different course from the other colonies, both in their ministry and civil administration, . . . had lately made Acomenti- 92 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND cus (a poor village) a corporation, and had made a taylor their mayor, and had entertained one Hull, an excommunicated person and very contentious, for their minister/' Rhode Island, as a seat of separatism and heresy, was not invited and per- haps not even considered. For managing the affairs of the confederation, the main objects of which were friendship and amity, protection and defense, advice and succor, and the preservation of the truth and purity of the Gospel, eight com- missioners were provided, to be chosen by the assemblies of the colonies and to represent the colonies as independent political units. Meetings were to be held once a year in one or other of the leading towns and a full record was to be kept of the business done. The board thus established never did more than make recommendations and offer advice, as it had no authority to execute any of the plans that it might make; and although the records of its meetings are lengthy and give evidence of elaborate discussion of important matters, the results of its deliberations cannot be said to be particularly significant. The commissioners dealt with a number of local disputes of no great moment and considered certain internal diflSculties that threatened to AN ATTEMPT AT COLONIAL UNION 93 disturb the friendly intercourse among the colo- nies. For instance, Connecticut had levied tolls at Saybrook on vessels going up the Connecticut River to Springfield, and Massachusetts had retaliated by laying duties on goods from other colonies entering her ports. Under pressure from the commissioners both the colonies receded from their positions. Again, the commissioners re- commended the granting of aid to Harvard Col- lege, and that institution consequently received from Connecticut and New Haven annually for many years a regular allowance, in return for which it presented the Connecticut colony with nearly sixty graduates in the ensuing half -century well equipped to combat latitudinarianism and heresy. The commissioners fulfilled their obliga- tion as guardians of the purity of the Gospel, both in their support of the synod of 1646-1648 and in their strenuous efforts to check the increase of religious discontent due to the narrow definition of church membership — efforts which eventually resulted in that "illogical compromise," the Half- Way Covenant. They recommended the driving out of "Quakers, Ranters, and other Herritics of that nature," and urged that the true Gospel might be spread among the Indians. They up- 94 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGL O held the work of the Society for the Promoting and Propagating of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in New England, and they directed and guided the labors of its missionaries, most notable of whom was the famous John Eliot, apostle to the Indians and translator of the Bible into their language. ^ The most important business of the confedera- tion concerned the defense of New England against the Indians, the Dutch, and the French. The Indians were an ever-present menace, near and far; the Dutch disputed the English claims all the way from New Amsterdam to Narragansett Bay, and resented the attempts already made to encroach upon their trading grounds; and the French at this time were strenuously denying the right of the English, particularly those of Ply- mouth, to establish trading-posts at Machias and on the Penobscot, and were laying claim to all the Nova Scotian territory as far west as the Penobscot. Though the French, in their eflFort to drive out all the English settlers east of Pemaquid in Maine, had destroyed two Plymouth posts in that region, the commissioners were called upon to decide not so much what should be done about this act AN ATTEMPT AT COLONIAL UNION 95 of aggression, as which of the claimants among the French themselves it was wiser for the colonies to support. A certain Charles de la Tour had been commissioned by the Governor-General of Acadia or Nova Scotia as lieutenant of the region east of the St. Croix, and another, Charles de Menou, Sieur d'Aulnay-Charnise, as lieutenant of the region between the St. Croix and the Penob- scot. When the Governor-General died in 1635, a contest for the governorship took place between these two men, and not unnaturally volunteers from Massachusetts aided La Tour, whose original jurisdiction was farthest removed from their colony. Trade on these northeastern coasts was deemed essential to the prosperity of the New Englanders, and it was considered of great impor- tance to make no mistake in backing the wrong claimant. D'Aulnay, or more correctly Aulnay, had been partly responsible for the attack on the Plymouth trading-posts, but, on the other hand, he had the stronger title; and Massachusetts was a good deal perplexed as to what course to pur- sue. In 1644, Aulnay sent a commissioner to Boston, who conversed with Governor Endecott in French and with the rest of the magistrates in Latin and endeavored to arrange terms of peace. 96 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND Two years later the same commissioner came again, with two others, and was cordially enter- tained with "'wine and sweetmeats/' The mat- ter was referred to the commissioners of the United Colonies, who decided, with considerable shrewd- ness, that the volunteers in aiding La Tour had acted efficiently but not wisely; and consequently a compromise was reached. Aulnay's commis- sioners abated their claims for damages, and Governor Winthrop consented to send "a small present'' to Aulnay in lieu of compensation. The present was ^'a fair new sedan (worth," says Winthrop, forty or fifty pounds, where it was made, but of no use to us)," having been part of some Spanish booty taken in the West Indies and presented to the Governor. So final peace was made at no expense to the colony; and later, after Aulnay's death in 1650, La Tour married the widow and came to his own in Nova Scotia. The troubles with the Dutch were not so easily settled. England had never acknowledged the Dutch claim to New Amsterdam, and the New England Council in making its grants had paid no attention to the Dutch occupation. Though trade had been carried on and early relations had AN ATTEMPT AT COLONIAL UNION 97 been on the whole amicable, yet, after Connecticut's overthrow of the Pequots in 1637 and the opening of the territory to settlement, the founding of towns as far west as Stamford and Greenwich had rendered acute the conflict of titles. There was no western limit to the English claims, and, as the colonists were perfectly willing to accept Sir William BoswelFs advice to crowd on, crowd- ing the Dutch out of those places which they have occupied, without hostility or any act of vio- lence,'' a collision was bound to come. The Dutch, who in their turn were not abating a jot of their claims, had already destroyed a New Haven settle- ment on the Delaware, and had asserted rights of jurisdiction even in New Haven harbor, by seizing there one of their own ships charged with evading the laws of New Amsterdam. Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch Governor, famous for his short temper and mythical silver leg, visited Hartford in 1650, and negotiated with the commis- sioners of the United Colonies a treaty drawing the boundary line from the west side of Green- wich Bay northward twenty miles. But this treaty, though ratified by the States General of Holland, was never ratified by England, and, when two years later war between the two coun- 98 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND tries broke out overseas, the question of an attack on New Amsterdam was taken up and debated with such heat as nearly to disrupt the Confederation. The absolute refusal of Massa- chusetts to enter on such an undertaking so pro- longed the discussion that the war was over before a decision was reached; but Connecticut seized the Dutch lands at Hartford, and Roger Ludlow, wjio had moved to Fairfield from Windsor after 1640, began an abortive military campaign of his own. The situation remained unchanged as long as the Dutch held New Netherland, and the region between Greenwich and the Bronx continued to be what it had been from the beginning of settle- ment, a territory occupied only by Indians and a few straggling emigrants. There the unfortunate Anne Hutchinson with her family was massacred by the Indians in 1643. The New England Confederation performed the most important part of its work during the first twenty years of its existence, for although it lasted nominally till 1684, it ceased to be effective after 1664, and was of little weight in New Eng- land history after the restoration of the Stuarts. Owing to the fact that it had been formed with- out any authority from England, the Confederation AN ATTEMPT AT COLONIAL UNION 99 was never recognized by the Government there, and with the return of the monarchy it survived chiefly as an occasional committee meeting for debate and advice. CHAPTER VI WINNING THE CHARTERS The accession of Charles II to the throne of England provoked a crisis in the affairs of the Puritans and gave rise to many problems that the New Englanders had not anticipated and did not know how to solve. With a Stuart again in control, there were many questions that might be easilyagked-feut-kss ea§il^:-aiiOT£red. Except JoiT'lJilassachusetts ajra Plymouth^^ a settle- ment had^ a legal'^le to-4fers5irf and except for Massachusetts, not one had ever received a suffi- cient warrant for the government which it had set up. Naturally, therefore, there was disqui- etude in Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Haven; and even Massachusetts, buttressed as she was, feared lest the King might object to many of the things she had done. Entrenched behind her charter and aware of her superiority in wealth, territory, and population, she had taken the leader- 100 WINNING THE CHARTERS 101 ship in New England and had used her oppor- tunity to intimidate her neighbors. Except for New Haven, not a colony or group of settlements but had felt the weight of her claims. Plymouth and Connecticut had protested against her de- mands; the Narragansett towns with diflSculty had evaded her attempt to absorb them; and the settlements at Piscataqua and on the Maine coast — imd finally yielded to her jurisdiction. As long as Cromwell lived and the Government of England was under Puritan direction, Massachusetts had little to fear from protests against her; but, with the Cromwellian regime at an end, she could not expect from the restored monarchy a favoring or friendly attitude. The change in England was not merely one of government; it was one of policy as well. Even during the Cromwellian period. Englishmen awoke to a greater appreciation of the importance of colonies as assets of the mother country, and began to realize, in a fashion unknown to the earlier period, the necessity of extending and strengthening England's possessions in America. England was engaged in a desperate commercial war with Holland, whose vessels had obtained a monopoly of the carrying trade of the world; and 102 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND to win in that conflict it was imperative that her statesmen should husband every resource that the kingdom possessed. The religious agitations of previous years were passing away and the New England colonies were not likely to be troubled on account of their Puritanism. The great ques- tion in England was not religious conformity but national strength based on commercial prosperity. Thus England was fashioning a new system and defining a new policy. By means of navigation acts, she barred the Dutch from the carrying trade and confined colonial commerce in large part to the mother country. She established councils and committees of trade and plantations, and, by the seizure of New Netherland in 1664 and the grant of the Carolinas and the Bahamas in 1663 and 1670, she completed the chain of her posses- sions in America from New England to Barbados. A far-fiung colonial world was gradually taking shape, demanding of the King and his advisers an interest in America of a kind hitherto unknown. It is not surprising that so vast a problem, in- volving the trade and defense of nearly twenty colonies, should have made the internal affairs of New England seem of less consequence to the royal authorities than had been the case in the WINNING THE CHARTERS 103 days of Charles I and Archbishop Laud, when the obtaining of the Massachusetts Bay charter had roused such intensity of feeling in England. What was interesting Englishmen was no longer the matter of religious obedience in the colonies, but rather that of their political and commercial dependence on the mother country. J^^Ss the future of New England was certain to be debated at Whitehall after 1660, the colonies took pains to have representatives on the ground to meet criticisms and complaints, to ward off attacks, and to beg for favors. Rhode Island sent a commission to Dr. John Clarke, one of her founders and leading men, at that time in London, instructing him to ask for royal protection, self- government, liberty of conscience, and a charter. Massachusetts sent Simon Bradstreet and the Reverend John Norton, with a petition that reads like a sermon, praying the King not to listen to other men^s words but to grant the colonists an oppor- tunity to answer for themselves, they being "true men, fearers of God and the King, not given to change, orthodox and peaceable in Israel.^' Con- necticut, with more worldly wisdom, sent John Winthrop, the Governor, a man courtly and tact- ful, with a petition shrewdly worded and to the 104 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND point. Plymouth entrusted her mission also to Winthrop, hoping for a confirmation of her po- litical and religious liberties. All protested their loyalty to the Crown, while Massachusetts, her petition signed by the stiff-necked Endecott, prostrated herself at the royal feet, craving pardon for her boldness, and subscribing herself *'Your Majesties most humble subjects and suppliants.*' Did Endecott remember, we wonder, a certain incident connected with the royal ensign at Salem Against the lesser colonies no complaints were presented, except in the case of New Haven, which was charged by the inhabitants of Shelter Island with usurpation of their goods and terri- tory; but for Massachusetts the restoration of the Stuarts opened a veritable Pandora's box of troubles. In divers complaints, petitions, and other informations concerning New England," she was accused of overbearance and oppression, of seizing the territory of New Hampshire and Maine, of denying the rights of Englishmen to Anglicans and non-freemen of the colony, and of persecuting the Quakers and others of religious views different from her own. She was declared to be seeking independence of Crown and Parlia- ment by forbidding appeals to England, refusing WINNING THE CHARTERS 105 to enforce the oath of allegiance to the King, and in general exceeding the powers laid down in her charter. The new plantations council, commis- sioned by the King in December, 1660, sent a per- emptory letter the following April ordering the colony to proclaim the King "in the most solemn manner/' and to hold herself in readiness to answer complaints by appointing persons well instructed to represent her before itself in England. At the same time, it begged the King to go slowly, giving Massachusetts an opportunity to be heard, and to write a letter "with all possible tenderness,'* pointing out that submission to the royal authority was absolutely essential. This the King did, confirming the charter of Massachusetts, renewing the colony's rights and privileges, and in concilia- tory fashion ascribing all derelictions of duty to the iniquity of the times rather than to any evil intention of the heart. Then declaring that the chief aim of the charter was liberty of conscience, the King struck at the very heart of the Massachu- setts system, by commanding the magistrates to grant full liberty of worship to members of the Anglican Church and the right to vote to all who were "orthodox" in religion and possessed of "competent estates." Though this order was 106 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND evaded by various definitions of " orthodox'* and competent estates'* and was not to be fully executed for many years, yet its meaning was clear — no single religious body would ever again be allowed, by the royal authorities in England, to monopolize the government or control the po- litical destinies of a British colony in America or elsewhere. The policy thus adopted toward Massachusetts became even more conciliatory when applied to the other colonies. It is not improbable that the King's advisers saw in the strengthening of Con- necticut and Rhode Island an opportunity to check the power of Massachusetts and to reduce her importance in New England. However that may be, they lent themselves to the eflForts that Winthrop and Clarke were making to obtain charters for their respective colonies. These agents were able, discreet, and broadminded men. Clarke, a resident in England for a number of years, had acquired no little personal influence; and Winthrop, as an old-time friend of the English lords and gentlemen whose governor he had been at Saybrook, could count on the help of the one surviving member of that group. Lord Saye and Sele, who was a privy councillor, a member of the WINNING THE CHARTERS 107 House of Lords and of the plantations council, and, as we are told. Lord Privy Seal, a position that would be of direct service in expediting the issue of a charter. Winthrop had personal quali- ties, also, that made for success. He was a university man, had made the grand tour of the Continent, and was familiar with official traditions and the ways of the court. Soon after his arrival in England, he became a member of the Royal Society and served on several of its committees, and thus had an opportunity of making friends and of showing his interest in other things than theology. If Cotton Mather was rightly informed, Winthrop was accorded a personal interview with Charles II and presented the King with a ring which Charles I, as Prince of Wales, had given his grandfather, Adam Winthrop. Winthrop made good use of a good cause. Con- necticut had behaved herself well and had incurred no ill-will. She had had no dealings with the Crom- wellian Government, had dutifully proclaimed the King, had been discreet in her attitude toward Whalley and Goffe, the regicides who had fled to New England, and had aroused no resentment against herself among her neighbors. With pro- ceedings once begun, the securing of the charter 108 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND went rapidly forward. Winthrop at first peti- tioned for a confirmation of the old Warwick patent, which had been purchased of the English lords and gentlemen in 1644, but later, encouraged it may be by friends in England, he asked for a charter. The request was granted.^ The docu- ment gave to Connecticut the same boundaries as those of the old patent, and conferred powers of government identical with those of the Funda- mental Orders of 1639. That the main features of the charter were drawn up in the colony before Winthrop sailed is probable, though it is not impossible that they were drafted in London by Winthrop himself. All that the English officials did was to give the text its proper legal form. After the receipt of the charter and its proclama- tion in the colony and after a slight readjustment of the government to meet the few changes re- quired, the general court of Connecticut pro- ceeded to enforce the full territorial rights of the colony. The men of Connecticut had made up their minds, now that the charter had come, to execute its terms to the uttermost and to extend the authority of the colony to the farthest bounds, ' The King's warrant was issued on February 28, the writ of Privy Seal on April 23, and the great seal was affixed on May 10, 1662. WINNING THE CHARTERS 109 so that, next to the government of the Bay, Con- necticut might be the greatest in New England- The court took under its protection the towns of Stamford and Greenwich, and on the ground that the whole territory westward was within its juris- diction warned the Dutch governor not to meddle. It accepted the petition of Southold on Long Island and of certain residents of Guilford, both of the New Haven federation, for annexation, and, sending a force to Long Island to demand the surrender of the western towns there, it seized Captain John Scott, who was planning to estab- lish a separate government over them, and brought him to Hartford for trial. It informed the towns of Mystic and Pawcatuck, lying in the disputed land between Connecticut and Rhode Island, that they were in the Connecticut colony and must henceforth conduct their affairs according to its laws. The relations with Rhode Island were to be a matter of later adjustment, and no immedi- ate trouble followed; but Stuyvesant, the Dutch Governor, protested angrily against Connecticut's claim to Dutch territory and brought the matter to the attention of the commissioners of the United Colonies. On one pretext or another, the latter delayed action; and the matter was not settled 110 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND until England's seizure of New Amsterdam in 1664 brought the Dutch rule to an end and made operative the royal grant of the territory to the Duke of York, thus stopping Connecticut in her somewhat headlong career westward and taking from her the whole of Long Island and all the land west of the Connecticut River. If main- tained, this grant would have reduced the colony by half and would have materially retarded its progress; but Connecticut eventually saved the western portion of her territory as far as the line of 1650. However, her people could do no more crowding on into the region beyond, for the prov- ince of New York now lay directly across the path of her westward expansion. But with New Haven her success was complete. That unfortunate colony, which had made an eflFort to obtain a patent in 1645, when the "great ship," bearing the agent Gregson, had foundered with all on board, had no friends at court, and had been too poor after 1660 to join the other colonies in sending an agent to London. Consequently its right to exist as an independent government was not considered in the negotiations which Winthrop had carried on. Serious complairits had been raised against it; its rigorous theocratic WINNING THE CHARTERS 111 policy had created divisions among its own people, many of whom had begun to protest; it had been friendly with the Cromwellian regime and had proclaimed Charles II unwillingly and after long delay; it had protected the regicides until the messengers sent out for their capture could report the colony as ''obstinate and pertinacious in con- tempt of His Majestic/' Governor Leete, of the younger generation, was not in sympathy with Davenport's persistent refusal of all overtures from Hartford, and would probably have favored union under the charter of 1662 if Connecticut had been less aggressive in her attitude. As it was, the controversy became pungent and was prolonged for more than two years, though the outcome was never uncertain. The New Haven colony was poor, unprotected, and divided against itself. Its population was decreasing; Indian massacres threatened its frontiers; the malcon- tents of Guilford, led by Bray Rossiter, were demanding immediate and unconditional surren- der to Connecticut; and finally in 1664 the suc- cessful capture of New Netherland and the grant to the Duke of York threatened the colony with annexation from that quarter. Rather than be joined to New York, New Haven surrendered. 112 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND One by one the towns broke away until in December of that year only Branford, Guilford, and New Haven remained. On December 13, 1664, the freemen of these towns, with a few others, voted to submit, *'as from a necessity . . . but with a salvo jure of our former right & claime, as a people who have not yet been heard in point of plea." The New Haven federation was dissolved; Davenport withdrew to Boston, where he became a participant in the religious life of that colony; and the strict Puritans of Branford, Guilford, and Milford, led by Abraham Pierson, went to New Jersey and founded Newark. The towns, left loose and at large, joined Connecticut voluntarily and separately, and the New Haven colony ceased to exist. But the dual capital of Connecticut and the alternate meetings of its legislature in Hart- ford and New Haven, marked for more than two hundred years the twofold origin of the colony and the state. In the meantime Rhode Island had become a legally incorporated colony. Even before Win- throp sailed for England, Dr. John Clarke had received a favorable reply to his petition for a charter. But a year passed and nothing was done WINNING THE CHARTERS 113 about the matter, probably owing to the arrival of Winthrop and the feeling of uncertainty aroused by the conflicting boundary claims, which involved a stretch of some twenty-five miles of territory between Narragansett Bay and the Pawcatuck River. A third claimant also appeared, the Ather- ton Company, with its headquarters in Boston, which had purchased lands of the Indians at various points in the area and held them under the jurisdiction of Massachusetts. When Clarke heard that Winthrop, in drawing the bounda- ries for the Connecticut charter of 1662, had in- cluded this Narragansett territory, he protested vehemently to the King, saying that Connecti- cut had "'injuriously swallowed up the one-half of our colonic," and demanding a reconsidera- tion. Finally, after the question had been de- bated in the presence of Clarendon and others, the decision was reached to give Rhode Island the boundaries and charter she desired, but to leave the question of conflicting claims for later settle- ment. Evidently Winthrop, though not agreeing with Clarke in matters of fact regarding the bound- iaries, supported Rhode Island's appeal for a charter, for Clarendon said afterwards that the draft which Clarke presented had in it expressions 8 114 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND that were disliked, but that the charter was granted out of regard for Winthrop. The Rhode Island charter passed the seals July 8, 1663, and was received in the colony four months later with great joy and thanksgiving. It created a common government for all the towns, guaranteeing full liberty "in religious concern- ments'' and freedom from all obligations to con- form to the ''litturgy, formes, and ceremony es of the Church of England, or take or subscribe the oathes and articles made and established in that behalfe." This may have been the phrase that Clarendon, who was a High Churchman, objected to when the draft was presented. The form of government was similar in all essential particulars to that of Connecticut. Rhode Island's enthusiasm in obtaining a char- ter is not difficult to understand. That amphibi- ous colony, consisting of mainland, islands, and a large body of water, was inhabited by "poor de- spised peasants," as Governor Brenton described them, "living remote in the woods" and subject to the "envious and subtle contrivances of our neighbour colonies round about uS;, who are in a combination united together to swallow us up." The colony had not been asked to join the New WINNING THE CHARTERS 116 England Confederation, and its leaders were con- vinced that the members of the Confederation were in league to filch away their lands and, by driving them into the sea, to eliminate the colony altogether. Plymouth, seeking a better harbor than that of Plymouth Bay, claimed the eastern mainland as well as the chief islands. Hog, Co- nanicut, and Aquidneck; Massachusetts claimed Pawtuxet, Warwick, and the Narragansett coun- try generally; while Connecticut wished to push her eastern boundary as far beyond the Pawcatuck River (the present boundary) as she might be able to do. Had each of these colonies made good its claim, there would have been little left of Rhode Island, and we do not wonder that the settlers looked upon themselves as fighting, with their backs to the sea, for their very existence. Hence they welcomed the charter with the joy of one relieved of a great burden, for, though the bound- ary question remained unsettled, the charter assured the colony of its right to exist under royal protection. CHAPTER VII MASSACHUSETTS DEFIANT Massachusetts was yet to be taken in hand. The English authorities had become convinced that a satisfactory settlement of all the difficul- ties in New England could be undertaken not in England, where the facts were hard to get at, but in America. Lord Clarendon, the Chancellor, had been in correspondence with Samuel Maverick, an early settler in New England and for many years a resident of Boston and New Amsterdam. As an Anglican, Maverick had sympathized with the opposition in Massachusetts led by Dr. Robert Child, and had been debarred from all civil and religious rights in the colony; but he was a man of sobriety and good judgment, whose chief cause of offense was a difference of opinion as to how a colony should conduct its government. The fact that he had been able to get on with the Massachusetts men shows that his attitude had 116 MASSACHUSETTS DEFIANT 117 never been seriously aggressive, for though he certainly had no liking for the policy of the colony, he does not appear to have been influenced by any hostility towards Massachusetts. Happening to be in England at this juncture, Maverick was called upon by the Chancellor to state the case against the colony, and this he did in several letters, giving many instances of the colony's disloyalty and injustice, and recommend- ing that its privileges be taken away, just as it had taken away the privileges of others. To this suggestion Clarendon paid no heed, for it was no part of the royal purpose to drive the colonies to desperation at a time when the King was but newly come to his throne and needed all his re- sources in the struggle with the Dutch, But to Maverick's further suggestions that New Nether- land be reduced, that Massachusetts be regulated, and that commissioners be sent over to accomplish these ends, he expressed himself as favorable, and all were finally accepted by the Government. Maverick's opinion that British control should be exercised over a British possession and that the government of such a possession should not be conducted after the fashion of an ecclesiastical society happened to coincide with that of the 118 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND King's advisers and, as Maverick had lived in America for thirty years, his advice was listened to with respect and approval. All thought that, while Massachusetts might not be driven with safety, she could probably be persuaded to admit some alteration in her methods of government by tactful representatives. Had the Duke of York, to whom was entrusted the task of selecting the new commissioners, chosen his men as wisely as Clarendon had shaped his policy, the results, as far as Massachusetts was concerned, might have been more successful. The trouble lay with the character of the work to be done. On the one hand the Dutch colony was to be seized by force of arms, a military under- taking involving boldness and executive ability; on the other, the Puritan colonies were to be re- gulated, a mission which called for the utmost tact. The men chosen for the work were far from the best that might have been selected to bring back to the path of true obedience and impartial justice a colony that was deemed wilful and perverse. They were Richard Nicolls, a favorite of the Duke of York and the only com- missioner possessed of discrimination and wisdom, but who, as governor of the yet unconquered MASSACHUSETTS DEFIANT 119 Dutch colony, was likely to be taken up with his duties to such an extent as to preclude his sharing prominently in the diplomatic part of his mission; Colonel George Cartwright, a soldier, well-mean- ing but devoid of sympathy and ignorant of the conditions that confronted him; Sir Robert Carr, the worst of the four, unprincipled and profligate and without control either of his temper or his passions; and, lastly. Maverick himself, opposed to the existing order in Massachusetts and con- vinced of the necessity of radical changes in the constitution of the colony. NicoUs was liked and respected; Cartwright and Carr were dis- trusted as soldiers and strangers, and their presence was resented; whereas Maverick was objected to as a malcontent who had gone to England to complain and had returned with power to make trouble. When the colony heard of his appointment, it sent a vigorous address of protest to the King. If Clarendon expected from the last three of these men the wisdom and discretion that he said were essential to the task, he strangely misjudged their characters. He thought, to be sure, of adding other commissioners from New England, but he did not know whom to select and was fearful of arousing local jealousies. Yet con- 120 THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND sidering the work to be done, it is doubtful if any commissioners, no matter how wisely selected, could have performed the task, for Massachusetts did not want to be regulated. The general object of the commission was *'to unite and reconcile persons of very different judg- ments and practice in all things,'' particularly concerning ^'the peace and prosperity of the people and their joint submission and obedience to us and our government/' /More specifically, the commissioners were to effect the overthrow of the Dutch, investigate conditions among the Indians, capture the regicides, secure obedience to the navigation acts, look into the question of boundaries, and determine the title to the Nar- ragansett country, henceforth to be called the King's Province. The commissioners were to make it clear that they were not come to interfere with the prevailing religious systems, but to d