CHAPTER XIX

EARLY NEW ENGLAND LIFE

(1624-1652)

During the civil war in England the sympathies of Massachusetts, of course, were with Parliament. New England ministers were invited to attend the Westminster assembly of divines held in September, 1642, and several of them returned to England. The most prominent was Rev. Hugh Peter, who was instrumental in procuring the decapitation of Charles I., and paid for the offence, on the restoration of Charles II., with his own life. In 1643 Parliament passed an act[1 ] freeing all commodities carried between England and New England from the payment of "any custom, subsidy, taxation, imposition, or other duty."

The transfer of the supreme authority to the Parliament, though hailed with enthusiasm in New England, increased, if anything, her confidence. In the summer of 1644 a ship bearing a commission from the Parliament attacked and captured in the harbor of Boston another ship friendly to the king; Massachusetts showed her displeasure by addressing a strong protest to Parliament. Not long after another vessel of Parliament attacked a ship belonging to persons from Dartmouth in sympathy with the king. This time Winthrop turned the guns of the battery upon the parliamentary captain and made him pay a barrel of powder for his insolence.[2 ]

The same summary action was adopted in regard to the growing demand for a freer suffrage. In May, 1646, an able and respectful petition was presented to the general court for the removal of the civil disabilities of all members of the churches of England and Scotland, signed by William Vassall, Samuel Maverick, Dr. Robert Child, and four other prominent Presbyterians. The petition was pronounced seditious and scandalous, and the petitioners were roundly fined. When Child set out for England with his grievances, he was arrested and his baggage searched. Then, to the horror of the rulers of Massachusetts, there was discovered a petition addressed to Parliament, suggesting that Presbyterianism should be established in New England and that a general governor should be sent over. The signers, brought before the court, were fined more heavily than before and imprisoned for six months. At length Vassall and his friends contrived to reach England, expecting to receive the aid of the Presbyterian party in Parliament; but misfortune overtook them there as in Massachusetts, for the Independents were now in control and no help could be obtained from them.[3 ]

The agitation in England in favor of Presbyterianism, and the petition of Vassall and his friends in Massachusetts, induced the general court in May, 1646, to invite the clergy to meet at Cambridge, "there to discuss, dispute, and clear up, by the word of God, such questions of church government and discipline as they should think needful and meet," until "one form of government and discipline" should be determined upon. The "synod" met September 1, 1646, and after remaining in session fourteen days they adjourned. In August, 1648, after the downfall of Presbyterianism in England, another meeting was held, and a plan of church government was agreed upon, by which order and unity were introduced among members theoretically independent.[4 ]

By a unanimous vote the synod adopted "a platform" approving the confession of faith of the Westminster divines, except as to those parts which favored the Presbyterian discipline. The bond of union was found in the right of excluding an offending church from fellowship and of calling in the civil power for the suppression of idolatry, blasphemy, heresy, etc. The platform recognized the prerogative of occasional synods to give advice and admonition to churches in their collective capacity, but general officers and permanent assemblies, like those of the Presbyterian and Anglican churches, armed with coercive power to act upon individuals, were disclaimed.[5 ]

Nevertheless, by the organization thus effected, the benumbing influence of the Calvinistic faith upon the intellectual life of New England was fully established, and the deaths of John Winthrop and John Cotton, which happened not long after, were the forerunners of what Charles Francis Adams styles the "glacial period of Massachusetts."[6 ] Both Winthrop and Cotton were believers in aristocracy in state and church, but the bigotry of Winthrop was relieved by his splendid business capacity and that of Cotton by his comparative gentleness and tenderness of heart.

"Their places were taken by two as arrant fanatics as ever breathed"[7]—John Endicott, who was governor for thirteen out of fifteen years following Winthrop's death, and John Norton, an able and upright but narrow and intolerant clergyman. The persecuting spirit which had never been absent in Massachusetts reached, under these leaders, its climax in the wholesale hanging of Quakers and witches.

In the year of Cotton's death (1652), which was the year that Virginia surrendered to the Parliamentary commissioners and the authority of the English Parliament was recognized throughout English America, the population of New England could not have been far short of fifty thousand. For the settlements along the sea the usual mode of communication was by water, but there was a road along the whole coast of Massachusetts. In the interior of the colony, as Johnson boasted, "the wild and uncouth woods were filled with frequented ways, and the large rivers were overlaid with bridges, passable both for horse and foot."[8 ]

All the conditions of New England tended to compress population into small areas and to force the energies of the people into trade. Ship-building was an early industry, and New England ships vied with the ships of Holland and England in visiting distant countries for commerce.[9 ] Manufacturing found early encouragement, and in 1639 a number of clothiers from Yorkshire set up a fulling-mill at Rowley.[10 ] A glass factory was established at Salem in 1641,[11 ] and iron works at Lynn in 1643,[12 ] under the management of Joseph Jenks. The keenness of the New-Englander in bargains and business became famous.

In Massachusetts the town was the unit of representation and taxation, and in local matters it governed itself. The first town government appears to have been that of Dorchester, where the inhabitants agreed, October 8, 1633, to hold a weekly meeting "to settle and sett down such orders as may tend to the general good."[13 ] Not long after a similar meeting was held in Watertown, and the system speedily spread to the other towns. The plan of appointing a body of "townsmen," or selectmen, to sit between meetings of the towns began in February, 1635, in Charlestown.[14 ]

The town-meeting had a great variety of business. It elected the town officers and the deputies to the general court and made ordinances regarding the common fields and pastures, the management of the village herds, roadways, boundary-lines, fences, and many other things. Qualified to share in the deliberations were all freemen and "admitted inhabitants of honest and good conversation" rated at £20 (equivalent to about $500 to-day).[15 ]

In the prevalence of the town system popular education was rendered possible, and a great epoch in the history of social progress was reached when Massachusetts recognized the support of education as a proper function of government. Boston had a school with some sort of public encouragement in 1635,[16 ] and in 1642, before schools were required by law, it was enjoined upon the selectmen to "take account from time to time of parents and masters of the ability of the children to read and understand the principles of religion and the capital lawes of the country."[17 ] In November, 1647, a general educational law required every town having fifty householders or more to appoint some one to teach children how to read and write, and every town having one hundred householders or more to establish a "grammar (Latin) school" to instruct youth "so far as may be fitted for the university."[18 ]

In 1636 the Massachusetts assembly agreed to give £400 towards "a schoole or Colledge,"[19 ] to be built at Newtown (Cambridge). In 1638 John Harvard died within a year after his arrival, and left his library and "one-half his estate, it being in all about £700, for the erecting of the College." In recognition of this kindly act the general court fitly gave his name to the institution,[20 ] the first founded in the United States.

In 1650 Connecticut copied the Massachusetts law of 1647, and a clause declared that the grammar-schools were to prepare boys for college. The results, however, in practice did not come up to the excellence of the laws, and while in some towns in both Massachusetts and Connecticut a public rate was levied for education, more generally the parents had to pay the teachers, and they were hard to secure. When obtained they taught but two or three months during the year.[21 ] Bad spelling and wretched writing were features of the age from which New England was not exempt. Real learning was confined, after all, to the ministers and the richer classes in the New England colonies, pretty much as in the mother-country. In Plymouth and Rhode Island, where the hard conditions of life rendered any legal system of education impracticable, illiteracy was frequent. The class of ignorant people most often met with in New England were fishermen and the small farmers of the inland townships.

Scarcity of money was felt in New England as in Virginia, and resort was had to the use of wampum as a substitute,[22 ] and corn, cattle, and other commodities were made legal tenders in payment of debts.[23 ] In 1652 a mint was established at Boston, and a law was passed providing for the coinage of all bullion, plate, and Spanish coin into "twelve-penny, sixpenny, and threepenny pieces." The master of the mint was John Hull, and the shillings coined by him were called "Pine-Tree Shillings," because they bore on one side the legend "Massachusetts" encircling a tree.[24 ]

Marriage was a mere civil contract, and the burials took place without funeral service or sermon. Stern laws were made against card-playing, long hair, drinking healths, and wearing certain articles, such as gold and silver girdles, hat-bands, belts, ruffs, and beaver hats. There were no Christmas festivals and no saints' days nor recognized saints, though special feasts and thanksgiving days were frequent.[25 ] The penal legislation of New England was harsh and severe, and in Massachusetts and Connecticut there were fifteen crimes punishable with death, while the law took hold also of innumerable petty offences. In addition the magistrates had a discretionary authority, and they often punished persons on mere suspicion.

There can be no doubt that the ideal of the educated Puritan was lofty and high, and that society in New England was remarkably free from the ordinary frivolities and immoralities of mankind; but it would seem that human nature exacted a severe retaliation for the undue suppression of its weaknesses. There are in the works of Bradford and Winthrop, as well as in the records of the colonies, evidence which shows that the streams of wickedness in New England were "dammed" and not dried up. At intervals the impure waters broke over the obstacles in their way, till the record of crime caused the good Bradford "to fear and tremble at the consideration of our corrupt natures."[26 ]

The conveniences of town life gave opportunities for literature not enjoyed by the Virginians, and, though his religion cut the Puritan almost entirely off from the finer fields of poetry and arts, New England in the period of which we have been considering was strong in history and theology. Thus the works of Bradford and Winthrop and of Hooker and Cotton compare favorably with the best productions of their contemporaries in England, and contrast with the later writers of Cotton Mather's "glacial period," when, under the influence of the theocracy, "a lawless and merciless fury for the odd, the disorderly, the grotesque, the violent, strained analogies, unexpected images, pedantics, indelicacies, freaks of allusion, and monstrosities of phrase" were the traits of New England literature.[27 ]