Part 4 (2/2)

The freemen sometimes demonstrated their power, but the same men were customarily returned to office year after year. The magistrates and the clergy, a handful of men with practically permanent tenure, men of strong character and of great ability for the most part, virtually governed Ma.s.sachusetts Bay for two generations.

They governed the colony, these ”unmitred popes of a pope-hating commonwealth,” yet not without storm and stress; and of all their difficulties, the quarrel with the freemen over the distribution of political power was far from being the most perplexing. In 1681, Roger Williams, a young minister of engaging personality, with ”many precious parts, but very unsettled in judgemente,” came to Boston. He scrupled to ”officiate to an unseparated people,” and soon went down to Plymouth, where he ”begane to fall into strange oppinions, and from opinion to practise; which caused some controversie, by occasion whereof he left them something abruptly.” Returning to Ma.s.sachusetts, he became minister of Salem Church, which was itself thought to be tinged with radicalism.

But the radicalism of Williams went beyond all reason. He maintained that the land of New England belonged to the Indians, and that the settlers were therefore living ”under a sin of usurpation of others possessions.” And he denied that the state had any rightful authority in matters of conscience, holding with Robert Browne that ”concerning the outward provision and outward justice [the magistrates] are to look to it; but to compell religion, to plant churches by power, and to force a submission to Ecclesiasticall Government by lawes and penalties, belongeth not to them.” By farmer and magistrate alike the man was regarded as a nuisance, and after three troubled years was banished from the colony.

The ideas of Williams were too relevant not to arouse controversy, but too remote from the spirit of the age to win many adherents. Of another sort was Mistress Anne Hutchinson, a woman of ”nimble wit and active spirit,” one of those popular village characters who go about among the poor and sick, bringing wholesome draughts of cordial, gossip, and consolation. As a taster of dry sermons there was none better; so that many women of Boston, and not a few men, fell into the habit of a.s.sembling at her house, where she discoursed on the latest sermon or Thursday lecture, and by exegesis and comment and criticism made all clear. And her doctrine went straight to the heart and intelligence of the average man in the seventeenth century, as it does to-day and has in all ages. ”Come along with me says one of them. I'le bring you to a woman that preaches better Gospell than any of your black-coats that have been at the Niniversity, a woman of another kind of spirit, who hath had many revelations of things to come; and for my part, saith he, I had rather hear such a one that speaks from the mere motion of the spirit, without any study at all, than any of your learned Scollers, although they may be fuller of Scripture.” This, indeed, was the secret of Mistress Anne's power, that she spoke the language of the untutored, and infused into the scholastic categories of theology the elemental and familiar emotions of daily life.

The issue raised by Anne Hutchinson soon pa.s.sed into politics, and the little colony was divided into irreconcilable factions. The good woman had a great following in Boston, including not a few in high places.

Wheelwright was her avowed defender; John Cotton was half convinced. The credit of the party was raised by the accession of the brilliant Sir Harry Vane, lately come from England, and destined to return hither to vex a greater than Winthrop. Vane was as radical in politics as Mistress Anne was in religion; and the two made common cause against the magistrates and clergy. Had the issue been confined to Boston the result could not have been doubtful, for the Boston Church was predominantly Hutchinsonian; but the ministers as a body supported Winthrop and Wilson, and the old magistrates were returned in the election of 1637.

The victory was a crucial one. The erratic Vane went off to England; Cotton returned to his first allegiance; and when the cause of all the trouble was cited to appear before the court in the fall of the same year, the decree of banishment was a foregone conclusion. Like Luther before the diet, Anne Hutchinson pressed for reasons--”I desire to know wherefore I am banished.” It was in the spirit of the Roman Church that Governor Winthrop replied--”say no more; the Court knows wherefore, and is satisfied.”

The direct result of the expulsion of Williams and Anne Hutchinson was the founding of Rhode Island, famous as an early experiment in the separation of Church and State. Williams, with his few followers, denied admittance to Plymouth, went on to the south and founded the town of Providence. Into this region there shortly came the much larger group, including William Coddington, who followed Anne Hutchinson into exile.

The settlements of Portsmouth and New Port, which they established there, were united with Providence, under a patent procured by Williams in 1643, to form the colony of Rhode Island, where flourished, to the scandal of its neighbors, that ”soul liberty” of which Williams was the apostle. Yet not without difficulty. Peopled by those who were too eccentric not to prove troublesome, the history of the little colony was a stormy one--its peace ”like the peace of a man who has the tertian ague”; but its fame is secure, and, its founder, condemned by the common sense of his age, will ever be celebrated as the prophet of those primary American doctrines, democracy and religious toleration.

Rhode Island was founded by those who were not allowed to remain in Ma.s.sachusetts; Connecticut by those who, finding its conditions too restricted, did not wish to remain there. Few facts have been more potent in determining the history of America than the steady migration in search of better opportunities. A decade had not pa.s.sed before the westward movement began. As early as 1633 many people at the Bay, fired by favorable reports which John Oldham brought back from the Connecticut Valley, began to have ”a hankering after it.” In 1634 the people of Newtown, under the leaders.h.i.+p of Thomas Hooker, asked permission of the general court to remove there, advancing, in support of their pet.i.tion, ”their want of accommodation for their cattle, the fruitfulness and commodiousness of Connecticut, and the strong bent of their spirits to remove thither.” The pet.i.tion was at first denied, but in 1636, permission having at last been obtained, a considerable number from the towns of Newtown, Dorchester, Watertown, and Roxbury migrated to the west and south and settled the towns--Hartford, Wethersfield, and Windsor--which became the nucleus of the colony of Connecticut.

While the fertility of the Connecticut Valley was doubtless attractive, some of the motives which actuated Hooker and his followers lie concealed in the nave phrase, ”the strong bent of their spirits.”

Thomas Hooker, and to a less extent John Haynes and Roger Ludlow, were men of outstanding ability. But as their towns were second to Boston, they themselves were overtopped in influence by Winthrop and Cotton, Dudley and Wilson. In the compact community of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay, ideas as well as cattle found accommodation difficult. In religion and politics Hooker was more radical than Winthrop: he was not wholly out of sympathy with Anne Hutchinson; and he defended the proposition that ”the foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people,”

whereas Winthrop maintained that the best part of the people ”is always the least, and of that best part the wiser part is always the lesser.”

And so, when the pet.i.tioners were permitted to leave, the strong bent of their spirits directed them, not only to the Connecticut, but southward without the limits of the Ma.s.sachusetts jurisdiction.

While Hooker and his a.s.sociates, with room for their cattle and their ideas, clear of Boston's shadow and the din of disputes over the negative voice and the covenant of works, were establis.h.i.+ng a more liberal Bible Commonwealth on the Connecticut, Theophilus Eaton, a merchant of ”fair estate and great esteem for religion,” and John Davenport, a dispossessed London minister, were establis.h.i.+ng at New Haven a Bible Commonwealth stricter even than that of Ma.s.sachusetts.

They had arrived, with their congregation of well-to-do middle-cla.s.s Londoners, at Boston in 1637, where they remained during the winter.

Winthrop would have retained them permanently; but Davenport found the colony distracted by the Hutchinson episode, and was as much distressed by the concessions which had been made to the ”mere democracy” as Hooker had been by the restraints in favor of a ”mixed aristocracy.” They therefore moved on, accompanied and followed by some inhabitants of Ma.s.sachusetts, to establish at New Haven a community in which the Scriptures should be the ”only rule attended to in ordering the affairs of government.” But these ”Brahmins of New England Puritanism” did not find the peace which they pursued. The distractions which they left Boston to avoid attended them in the wilderness; and in the end the colony was united with the settlements to the north, where the liberal ideas of Hooker had proved compatible, not only with strict morality and frugal prosperity, but with religious and spiritual concord as well. The charter of 1662 which founded the larger Connecticut embodied the ideas of Hooker rather than those of Davenport, and was so wisely contrived that it stood the shock of the Revolution and survived to the nineteenth century as the fundamental law of Connecticut.

Internal difficulties growing out of conflicting ideals of Church and State had scarcely achieved the dispersion of the New England settlements before external dangers began to draw them together. As early as 1637, and again in 1639, the Connecticut settlements, threatened by the Dutch and the Indians, applied to Ma.s.sachusetts Bay for support against the common danger. The Dutch and the Indians were less dangerous to Ma.s.sachusetts than to Connecticut, but the possibility of royal interference touched her more nearly. In 1634 Laud had obtained the appointment of a commission to inquire into her affairs, and in 1642 the ”ill news we have had out of England concerning the breach between King and Parliament” gave further apprehension with respect to the colony's chartered liberties. Accordingly, the third proposal of Connecticut in 1642 met with a favorable response, and in the following year the New England Confederation was founded. Rhode Island was without the pale, but Ma.s.sachusetts, Connecticut, Plymouth, and New Haven entered into a ”firm and perpetual league of friends.h.i.+p and amity for offense and defense, mutual advice and succor, both for preserving and propagating the truth and liberties of the Gospel, and for their own mutual safety and welfare.” The affairs of the league were to be administered by a board of two commissioners from each colony.

Ma.s.sachusetts, with a greater population than the other three combined, agreed to bear her proper burden in men and money, and presumed at times to exercise a corresponding influence. The smaller colonies were naturally more willing to accept her money than disposed to submit to her dictation; but in spite of disputes, the Confederation was maintained for forty years, an effective influence in its day, and the first of many compromises which led in the end to that more perfect union which still endures.

IV

Neither revolution in England nor the stress of conflicting ideals in the colony turned the first generation of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay leaders from the straight course which they had laid. Magistrates and clergy went steadily forward, emerging from Nonconformity into practical Separatism, as resistant to Parliamentary as to royal control, as cool toward Cromwell as toward Charles. During the quarter-century of their domination, Ma.s.sachusetts maintained a virtual independence of the mother country and the effective leaders.h.i.+p of Now England. Towards the middle of the century the theocratic principle might have seemed more firmly established than ever before. The relative tranquillity which followed the banishment of Anne Hutchinson appeared to be a clear justification of the action of the general court on that occasion. It was therefore without hesitation that the authorities acted when Anne Austin and Mary Fisher, two Quaker missionaries from Barbados, arrived at Boston in 1656. The women were res.h.i.+pped to Barbados; and a law was straightway enacted which decreed the flogging and imprisonment of any of the ”cursed sect of haeritics commonly called Quakers” who might come within the colony's jurisdiction.

In the seventeenth century, it was agreed that, next to the Munster Anabaptists, the Quakers were of all dissenting sects the most pestilent and blasphemous. They used no force in propagating their beliefs or in defending their lives. They were believers in equality, and refused to doff their hats to any man, respecting neither magistrate nor priest.

They were believers in liberty; no man to be restrained in matters of opinion; but every man to go or come, to speak or remain silent, as G.o.d's commands, by direct inner revelation, might be laid upon him. And it appeared that G.o.d had laid his command upon many to go among the unregenerate bearing testimony, and with sharp-tongued reproach and reviling to p.r.i.c.k as with thorns the seared conscience of a perverse and stiff-necked generation. Persecution they welcomed as the martyr's portion, the sure evidence of well-doing. ”Where they are most of all suffered to declare themselves, there they least of all desire to come.”

And so, impelled by the force of the divine spirit, they came among the reserved and seemly Puritans of Boston, with scandalous impropriety of action bringing the staid Sunday sermon or Thursday lecture to irremediable confusion, with voluble harangue and wealth of stinging epithet pouring scorn upon the self-selected leaders of the chosen people.

The hara.s.sed magistrates wished only to be rid of them. But unlike Williams and Anne Hutchinson, the Quakers came back as often as they were banished; and as often as they returned, their conduct became more outrageous, and, the penalties inflicted more severe. Yet oppression bore its proper fruit. Persecution engendered sympathy; sympathy ripened into conviction; and the more heretics were confined in the prisons, the more heresy flourished in the streets. The popularity of Anne Hutchinson's teachings had demonstrated how eagerly the average man turned from the literalism of the Puritan clergy in response to the appeal of one who spoke ”from the mere motion of the spirit.” Quakerism was above all a spiritual gospel addressed to the emotions. Its humane and liberal teachings, obscured but not concealed by the extravagance of speech and conduct in its first apostles, stood out in striking contrast to the repressive policy of the Puritan government as well as to the cold, gray intellectualism of the Puritan religion. The Quakers were a political danger as well as a public nuisance; for whether few or many were likely to profess the Quaker faith, among covenanted and uncovenanted alike their teachings fell on the fruitful soil of discontent. The magistrates were well aware at last that a crisis was impending; and they went steadily forward, with circ.u.mspection and not without apprehension, indeed, but without flinching, to meet the final test. In 1659 and 1660, according to law established and known, five Quakers were condemned to death, and four were hanged on Boston Common.

The event was a significant one in early Ma.s.sachusetts history, for it revealed, in respect to theory and practice alike, the insecure foundation upon which the Church-State rested. In respect to theory, the Quakers were a perplexing problem precisely because they remorselessly pressed the basic principles of Protestantism to their logical conclusion. The doctrine of the inner light, like Anne Hutchinson's notion of personal illumination, was implicit in the premises of Luther, who had grounded the great protest on the conception of a covenant of grace, and had laid it down, as the primary thesis, that ”good works do not make the good man, but the good man does good works.” Luther's revolt had, indeed, raised a vital social question: Are belief and conduct in matters religious to be determined by the social will registered in decrees of Church or State, or by the individual will following the promptings of reason and conscience? For most dissenters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was a logical difficulty in a.s.senting to the first proposition and a practical objection to a.s.senting to the second: it was logically difficult to deny the authority of Rome, which the practice and traditions of centuries had recognized as voicing the will of Christendom, without denying the validity of any external authority whatever; but it was practically impossible to appeal unreservedly to the authority of the individual reason and conscience without running into free thought and allowing religion to dissolve in an infinite variety of opinion. Generally speaking, most Protestant sects appealed from the outer to the inner authority in order to establish their beliefs, and then from the inner to the outer authority in order to maintain them. Luther himself, having denied the right of the Church to compel his conscience, straightway maintained that it was not for _Herr Omnes_ to determine matters of religion, and fell back on the State as the defender of his faith against the dangers of dissent. But it is indeed true that ”the business of dissenters is to dissent”; and the Ma.s.sachusetts magistrates found that the very arguments they had used to deny the authority of Laud were now employed to deny their own. This was the logical opening in the Puritan armor, that the Protestant Church-State or State-Church was but a masked and attenuated Catholicism destined to be destroyed by the very principles upon which it had been originally established.

If in respect to theory the hanging of the Quakers was a confession, in the realm of practical politics it was but a Pyrrhic victory. The authority of magistrate and clergy, strained to the breaking point, never quite recovered its old security. The capital law was itself pa.s.sed by a bare majority, and the successive executions carried popular opposition to the verge of insurrection. Nor did the executions achieve the desired end. The last sentence was never carried into effect, and for years the Quakers continued to molest the colony, pus.h.i.+ng their extravagances sometimes to the farthest limit. To fall to mere flogging after having inflicted the death penalty was a fatal anti-climax which marks a turning-point in Ma.s.sachusetts history--the beginning of the end of Winthrop's Bible Commonwealth.

The end was doubtless hastened by the Stuart Restoration and the recall of the charter; but the theocratic ideal, carrying the germ of its own decay, was predestined to failure. For the founders of the Bible Commonwealth it was an axiom that Church and State were but two sides of the same s.h.i.+eld; a matter of course that the ”body of the commons” must be ”preserved of honest and good men”; a reasonable hope that all good men would be found within the churches. And the circ.u.mstances of the migration seemed, indeed, a miraculous preparation for this easy solution of human government; for persecution was taken to be but ”a strange contrivance of G.o.d” to gather ”a chosen company of men”--the sifted wheat for planting an ideal commonwealth. Yet of the first settlers more than half refused to take the covenant, thus renouncing the privileges of the ideal commonwealth without obtaining relief from its burdens. A most disconcerting circ.u.mstance this at the beginning, and of ill omen for the future! Doubtless some strange perversity of the natural man, some inscrutable judgment of G.o.d for the discipline of his people, must have kept so many outside the fold.

But in truth not all who came to Plymouth or Ma.s.sachusetts were of the sifted wheat. Under the stress of persecution and the stimulus of migration, the ma.s.s of the first settlers doubtless caught something of the spiritual exaltation which inspired the leaders. But it was not for the many to live on that high level of purposeful resolution and enduring courage. It is a significant fact that of those who came over with Winthrop and Dudley two hundred returned in the s.h.i.+ps that brought them out; and of those who remained who shall say how many met the stern realities of the New World with a sinking sense of disillusionment, finding the material conditions of life harder and the spiritual peace less satisfying than they had imagined? And many there were who had never been touched by the Puritan ideal. ”Men being to come over into a wilderness,” says the kindly Bradford, ”in which much labour and servise was to be done about building and planting, such as wanted help in that respecte, when they could not have such as they would, were glad to take such as they could, and so, many untoward servants, sundry of them proved, were thus brought over, both men and women kind; who, when their terms were expired, became families of themselves, which gave increase hereunto. Another and maine reason hereof was, that men, finding so many G.o.dly disposed persons willing to come into these parts, some began to make a trade of it, to transport pa.s.sengers and their goods, and hired s.h.i.+ps for that end; and then, to make up their freight and advance their profite, cared not who the persons were, so they had money to pay them.

And also ther were sente by their freinds some under hope that they would be made better; others that they might be eased of such burthens, and they kept from shame at home that would necessarily follow their dissolute courses. And by this means the country became pestered with many unworthy persons, who, being come over, crept into one place or other.”

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