CHAPTER VIII.
SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CONDITIONS IN NEW ENGLAND IN 1700.
74. References.
Bibliographies.—Same as §§ [47] and [63], above; Channing and Hart, Guide, § 130.
Historical Maps.—Same as § [47], above.
General Accounts.—Osgood, Colonies; Doyle, Colonies, III. ch. ix.; Lodge, Colonies, ch. xxii.; W. Weeden, Economic and Social History; J. Bishop, History of American Manufactures; American Statistical Association Publications, No. 1.
Special Histories.—Manners and customs: Earle, Costumes of Colonial Times, Customs and Fashions in Old New England, Sabbath in Puritan New England, and Stage Coach and Tavern Days; W. Bliss, Colonial Times on Buzzard's Bay, and Old Colony Town; F. Child, Colonial Parsons of New England; J. Felt, Customs of New England; Fisher, Men, Women, and Manners, I. chs. ii.-v.; Howe, Puritan Republic, chs. v.-ix.; W. Love, Fast and Thanksgiving Days; M. Ward, Old Colony Days; Wharton, Colonial Days and Dames.—Education: C. Johnson, Old Time Schools and School Books; E. Brown, Making of our Middle Schools.—Theology: B. Adams, Emancipation of Massachusetts; F. Foster, New England Theology; M. Greene, Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut; C. F. Adams, Antinomianism.—Press: C. Duniway, Freedom of Press in Massachusetts; G. Littlefield, Early Massachusetts Press; R. Roden, Cambridge Press.—Slavery: G. Moore, Slavery in Massachusetts; G. Williams, Negro Race in America, 1619-1880; W. Dubois, Suppression of Slave Trade.—On the witchcraft delusion: C. Upham, Salem Witchcraft; S. Drake, Annals of Witchcraft; J. Taylor, Witchcraft Delusion in Connecticut.—Medical practice: O. Holmes, Medical Profession in Massachusetts. See also, biographies of prominent men.
Contemporary Accounts.—Same as § [63], above.
Geography.
North of Cape Cod the shores of New England are rugged and forbidding, though the coast-line is indented by numerous inlets from the sea, affording safe anchorage. To the south of the cape there are also abundant harbors; but the mountains nowhere approach the shore, and the beach is wide, with a sand strip extending for some distance inland, while treacherous shoals are not uncommon. The rivers, except those in Maine and the Merrimac and the Connecticut, are small, and have their sources in innumerable small lakes; the upper streams fall in successions of picturesque cascades, the water-power of which is often profitably utilized in manufacturing; and the larger rivers are held back by great dams, about which have grown up the manufacturing towns of Manchester, Nashua, Lowell, Lawrence, Holyoke, and many others.
Two ranges of mountains traverse New England: the Green Mountains and their continuation, the Berkshire Hills, run nearly north and south from Canada to Connecticut; the White Mountains form a group, rather than a chain, nearer the coast. In the eastern half of Maine the low watershed comes down to within one hundred and forty miles of the sea-shore, and the Atlantic-coast region may be said practically to end there. The highest elevation in the Appalachian system north of North Carolina is Mount Washington (six thousand two hundred and ninety feet), in the White Mountain range. The soil of New England is for the most part thin, and interspersed with rocks and gravel. The banks of some of the principal rivers are enriched by alluvial deposits left by overflows; there are fair pasturage lands in Vermont and New Hampshire, while Maine, back from the shore, has much good soil. The New England hills are rich in quarries of fine building stone. Their mineral wealth is not great; iron and manganese have been found in considerable quantities, together with some anthracite coal, lead, and copper. Originally New England was one vast forest, and the trees had to be cleared away in order to prepare the soil for cultivation. The climate is subject to rapid variations, being generally accounted superb in the summer and autumn; but the winters are long and severe, and the springs late and brief.
The natural obstacles to human welfare in New England were great; but the English settlers were men of tough fibre and rare determination. They were not daunted by rugged hills, gloomy forest, harsh climate, and niggardly soil. With courageous toil they built up thrifty towns along the narrow slope, and erected enduring commonwealths, in which the English institutions to which they had been accustomed were reproduced, and often improved upon.
The population.
The population of New England in 1700, by which time a second generation of Englishmen had arisen in America, is roughly estimated at about a hundred and five thousand souls, of whom seventy thousand were in Massachusetts and Maine, five thousand in New Hampshire, six thousand in Rhode Island, and twenty-five thousand in Connecticut. The people were almost wholly of pure English stock. Up to 1640, when the first great Puritan exodus ceased, full twenty thousand English Dissenters, mainly from the eastern counties of England, came to New England; thenceforth the population, says Palfrey, "continued to multiply on its own soil for a century and a half, in remarkable seclusion from other communities." During this time there was a small infusion of Normans from the Channel Islands, Welsh, Scotch-Irish (chiefly in 1652 and 1719), and Huguenots (1685). It is computed that at the opening of the Revolutionary War ninety-eight per cent of New England people were English or unmixed descendants of Englishmen. Nowhere else in the American colonies was there so homogeneous a population, or one of such uniformly high quality. As said Stoughton, lieutenant-governor of Massachusetts (1692-1701): "God sifted a whole nation, that he might send choice grain over into this wilderness."
76. Social Classes and Professions.
Classes.
Social distinctions were almost as sharply drawn in New England as in the South. There was a powerful and much-respected aristocratic class, beginning with the village "squire" and ending with the Crown officials in the capital towns. "The foundations of rank," says Lodge, "were birth, ancestral or individual service to the State, ability, education, and to some extent wealth." The recognized classes were, in order of precedence, gentlemen, yeomen, merchants, and mechanics; and at church the people were punctiliously seated according to station. Down to 1772 the students in Harvard College were carefully arranged in the catalogue in the order of their social rank, the Hutchinsons, Saltonstalls, Winthrops, and Quincys near the head. There was also a distinction between new-comers and old-comers, the "old family" class laying some pretensions to social superiority. The aristocrats were not men of leisure,—everybody in New England worked; but the public offices and the professions were reserved for gentlemen. Now and then some of them conducted large estates, although aristocracy was not, as in England, supported on landed possessions and primogeniture. The force of public opinion alone separated the classes; with the growth of the democratic idea, social barriers ultimately weakened, although they continued to appear in the politics of the commonwealth down to the middle of the present century.
Slavery.
Slaves were comparatively few in number, the greater part of them being house and body servants, and they were not harshly treated; travellers have left record of the fact that some of the humbler farmers ate at table with their human chattels. The race was, however, generally despised, and in one of the old churches in Boston is still to be seen the lofty "slaves' gallery." Judge Samuel Sewall issued the first public denunciation of slavery in Massachusetts, in a pamphlet issued in 1700, wherein he denounced "the wicked practice." For many years this distinguished jurist and diarist followed up his assaults, allowing no opportunity to escape wherein he might espouse the cause of the oppressed "blackamores" and mitigate the severity of the laws against them. But the colonists in general saw nothing in the system to shock their moral sense, and it was not until the Revolution that anti-slavery ideas began, in New England, to spread beyond a narrow circle of humanitarians.
The legal profession.
There was a full system of courts, ranging from the colonial judges down to the justices of the peace and "commissioners of small causes," appointed by colonial authority in each town. The magistrates were uniformly men of good character, of the upper, well-educated class, and rendered substantial justice, although not specially trained in the law. The legal profession was practically neglected throughout the seventeenth century, doubtless owing in great part to lack of facilities for study and to the overtowering importance of the ministry; we do not read of a professional barrister in Massachusetts until 1688. There was, however, no lack of litigation; personal disputes were rife in Rhode Island, and in Connecticut there were frequent legal contests between towns regarding lands. Between the colonies, also, there were complicated and hotly-contested boundary disputes. The bar gained strength, but it was not till about the middle of the eighteenth century that it stood beside the ministry.
The ministry.
We have had frequent evidences, in preceding chapters, of the large influence of the clergy in the temporal affairs of New England. The ranks of the Puritan ministry contained men of the best ability and station; they were pre-eminently the strongest class, and as the popular leaders, deeply impressed their character upon the laws and institutions of the community. They were held in great affection and reverence; but in a body of sturdy, intelligent parishioners they could maintain their supremacy only by the exercise of superior mental gifts: their calling was one offering rich rewards for excellence, and attracted to it men of the finest calibre, like the Mathers and Hooker. The sloth or the dullard was soon taught by his people that he had mistaken his calling. Jonathan Edwards, although of a later period than that of which we are treating, was a fair type, and his early resolution "to live with all my might while I do live," was an expression of the spirit which dominated his order.
Medicine.
It was an age in which quackery flourished. The regular physicians, though excellent men and highly regarded by the people, depended upon nostrums, and had little medical knowledge; they were in the main "herb-doctors" and "blood-letters." Many of the practitioners were barbers, and others clergymen. "This relation between medicine and theology," writes Dr. Holmes, "has existed from a very early period; from the Egyptian priest to the Indian medicine-man, the alliance has been maintained in one form or another. The partnership was very common among our British ancestors." There were few facilities for the study of medicine in the colonies until after the Revolution. The first medical school in America was established in Philadelphia, about 1760.
77. Occupations.
Domestic manufactures.
Unlike the Southern colonists, New Englanders were dependent on England only for the most important manufactures. Mechanics were sufficiently numerous in every community. The lumber industry was important, and in Connecticut and Massachusetts there was profitable iron mining, which gave rise to several kindred pursuits. There being abundant water-power, small saw and grist mills were numerous; there were many tanneries and distilleries; the Scotch-Irish in Massachusetts and New Hampshire made linens and coarse woollens, and beaver hats and paper were manufactured on a small scale. The people were largely dressed in homespun cloth, and a spinning-wheel was to be found in every farm-house. It was not until after the Revolution, however, that New England manufacturing interests attained much magnitude; the home government, through the Acts of Navigation and Trade (page [104]), had discouraged, as far as possible, American efforts in this direction.
Fisheries.
The fisheries, particularly whale and cod, were an important source of income, those of Massachusetts being estimated, in 1750, at £250,000 per year. Fishers' hamlets, with their great net-reels and drying stages, were strung along the shores. The men engaged in the traffic were hardy and bold, no weather deterring them from long voyages to Newfoundland and Labrador, while whale-fishers ventured into the Arctic seas. From their ranks were largely recruited the superb sailors who made the American navy famous in the two wars with England.
Shipbuilding.
A pinnace, called the "Virginia," was constructed by the Popham colonists in 1607,—the first ocean-going vessel built in New England. Shipbuilding was first undertaken at Plymouth in 1625, and in Massachusetts six years later (1631). By 1650 New England vessels were to be seen all along the coast, and carried the bulk of the export cargoes. Before 1724 English ship carpenters complained of American competition. In 1760 ships to the extent of twenty thousand tons a year were being turned out of American shipyards,—chiefly in New England; and most of them found a market in the mother-country.
Commerce.
Dried fish was the chief commodity carried out of New England, and was exported in American bottoms to Spain, Portugal, and the West Indies. Fish-oil and timber were also sent out of Maine and Massachusetts to foreign countries; hay, grain, and cattle were taken to New York, Philadelphia, and the West Indies. There was an active longshore coasting service by small craft, which ascended the rivers and gathered produce from the farmers; these they took to neighboring ports, and brought back other colonial products in exchange. Larger vessels went with miscellaneous cargoes to the West Indies, and returned with slaves and sugar. New Englanders manufactured rum from West India sugar and molasses, and exported the finished product. There are instances of New England ships taking rum to Africa, where it was exchanged for slaves; these slaves were then transported to the West Indies, to be bartered for sugar and molasses, which was carried home and converted into rum. It was a day when kegs of rum and wines were given to ministers at donation parties, and ministers themselves made brandy by the barrel for domestic use, and sold it to their parishioners. Wines were imported from Madeira and Malaga, and manufactured goods from England and the Continent. A very large and profitable business was done in the general carrying trade, which was developed by enterprising New England men in all the sister colonies. Boston alone employed, by the middle of the eighteenth century, about six hundred vessels in her foreign commerce, and a thousand in her fisheries and coast-trade.
Distribution of occupations.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century the population was in about equal degree engaged in trade and agriculture. Trade was the chief calling in Rhode Island, and agriculture in Connecticut and New Hampshire, while in Maine and Massachusetts both flourished. All of the colonies were also much interested in the fisheries.
78. Social Conditions.
The towns.
Boston, Newport, and New Haven were the chief towns; the former was at this time the centre of political and mercantile life on the North American continent, and there were external evidences of considerable wealth and some luxury. New Haven was famed for its prosperous appearance, and the houses of its rich men were of a better style of architecture than commonly seen in the colonies. Small villages, neighborhood centres of the several townships, abounded everywhere. The houses of the minister and the school-teacher, with the little shops of tradesmen and artisans, formed the nucleus around which the farm-houses were grouped with more or less density. The village streets, overhung with arching elms, were kept in tolerable order by the "hog-reeves," "fence-viewers," and other town officials. The quaint, roomy, gambrel-roofed houses were scrupulously plain and clean, and were presided over by model housewives.
Life and manners.
The people in these rural communities were in moderate financial circumstances, neat in habit, intelligent, and fairly educated; both sexes, young and old, worked hard, were frugal, thrifty, and as a rule rigid in morals. While coldly reserved towards strangers, they were kind and hospitable, and noted far and wide for their acute inquisitiveness. They wore sober-colored garments except on Sunday, the important day of the week, when there was a general display of quaint finery of a sombre character. The men wore long stockings and knee-breeches, with buckled shoes; workmen had breeches and jackets of leather, buckskin, or coarse canvas, while those of higher degree were generally dressed in coarse homespun,—only the richest could afford imported cloths. Their great open fireplaces were ill-adapted to withstand the winter's rigor. Their churches were wholly unprovided with heating accommodations. Their diet was spare. The well-to-do prided themselves on their old silver tableware, and New England kitchens were noted for their displays of brightly burnished pewter and brasses. Cider and New England rum were favorite beverages; but drunkenness was less prevalent than in the other colonies: the New England temperament was not inclined to excesses and roistering. The general tone of life was sedate, even gloomy; the Puritans had "a lurking inherited distrust for enjoyment," yet they cultivated a certain dry humor, and for the young people there was not lacking a round of simple amusements, such as house-raisings, dancing parties, and husking, spinning, quilting, and apple-paring bees, into which the neighborhoods entered with great zest. In the towns there was more pretension and ceremonial; but taking changed conditions into account, the life of the townspeople and their habits of thought differed but little from those of their rural cousins.
Roads and travel.
The highways were generally of fair character, but the larger streams were unbridged. Outside of the neighborhoods of the large towns wheeled vehicles, except for heavy loads, were not common until the time of the Revolution. Horseback was the ordinary mode of travel. A tavern kept by some leading citizen could be found in every town, with good lodgings at reasonable rates, although there was general complaint of the cookery. Nowhere else in the colonies was there so much intercommunication as in New England.
79. Moral and Religious Conditions.
Education.
A system of public education was among the first institutions established by the Puritans. Each town had its school; by 1649 there was no New England colony, except Rhode Island, in which some degree of education was not compulsory. Deep learning was rare, but the people were well drilled in the rudiments; except on the far-off borders of Maine there was no illiteracy in New England when the Revolution broke out. Latin schools and academies soon supplemented parental instruction and the common schools. We have seen that Boston was but six years old when Harvard College was established (1636); and Yale College was opened at New Haven in the year 1700.
Crime.
Crime appears to have been less frequent in New England than in the Southern or the middle colonies; the highways were safe after the close of King Philip's war and the Tarratine trouble; doors and windows were seldom barred in the country, and young women could travel anywhere with perfect safety. The list of capital crimes was a long one in that day, as well in the mother-land as in the colonies, and hangings, particularly of the pirates who infested the coast, were spectacles frequently seen in New England. A more cruel form of punishment was reserved for the negro race. There were several cases of negroes being burned at the stake for murder or arson. Great publicity was given to all manner of punishments; gibbets, stocks, ducking-stools, pillories, and whipping-posts were familiar objects in nearly every town. Criminals might also be branded, mutilated, or compelled to wear, conspicuously sewed to their garments, colored letters indicative of the offences committed. Hawthorne's romance of the "Scarlet Letter" is based on this last-named custom.
Religion.
Organized on the Independent, or Congregational, form, each religious congregation was a law unto itself, electing its own deacons and minister, and was but little influenced by the occasional synods, or councils of churches, which at last fell into disuse. At first the Church was bitterly intolerant; but this spirit gradually softened as it became more and more separated from the State. By the close of the seventeenth century John Eliot complained that religion had declined; in 1749 Douglass was able to write, "At present the Congregationalists of New England may be esteemed among the most moderate and charitable of Christian professions." The introduction of the Church of England under Andros aroused bitter opposition. Episcopalianism was vigorously preached against until the Revolution; but there was no great cause for complaint, as it was not sought to foist it upon the people, but to gain for it a hearing. The name "Bishop's palace," still applied to a house in Cambridge which was supposed when built to have been intended for an imported bishop, bears testimony to the popular feeling against the system. It had no success except among the Tory element in Boston and Portsmouth,—and later (1736-1750) in New Haven. In Rhode Island perfect tolerance made the colony a harboring place for all manner of despised sects and factious disturbers driven out of other communities, and the spirit of turbulence long reigned there.
"The great awakening."
A "great awakening" of religious fervor affected New England between 1713 and 1744. Originating in Northampton, Mass., in revivals under Solomon Stoddard, the popular excitement became almost frenzied under Jonathan Edwards, beginning in 1734. A visit from George Whitefield, the English revivalist, in 1740 caused a great fervor of religious interest, and it is estimated that twenty-five thousand converts were made by the great agitator throughout his New England pilgrimage. By 1744, when Whitefield again visited the scene of his triumphs, the excitement had greatly subsided.
80. The Witchcraft Delusion.
The witchcraft craze.
The witchcraft craze at Salem is commonly thought to have been a legitimate outgrowth of the gloomy religion of the Puritans. It was, however, but one of those panics of fear which during several centuries periodically swept over civilized lands. In the twelfth century thousands of persons in Europe were sacrificed because the people believed them to be witches, in league with the devil, and with the power to ride through the air and vex humanity in many occult ways. Pope Innocent VIII. commanded (1484) that witches be arrested, and hundreds of odd and repulsive old women were burned or hanged in consequence. From King John down to 1712, innocent lives were constantly sacrificed in England on this charge; in the year 1661 alone, one hundred and twenty were hanged there. It was therefore no new frenzy that broke out in Massachusetts. In 1648 Margaret Jones was hanged as a witch at Charlestown; in 1656 the sister of Deputy-Governor Bellingham, for being "too subtle in her perception of what was occurring around her," suffered the same fate; in 1688 an Irish washerwoman named Glover went to the gallows because a spiteful child said she had been bewitched by the poor creature.
The trials.
There was general despondency in Massachusetts in 1692, the result of four small-pox epidemics which had quickly followed each other, the loss of the old charter, a temporary increase in crime, financial depression, and general dread of another Indian outbreak. The time was ripe for an epidemic of superstitious fear. All at once it broke out with great fury in the old town of Salem. Despite the protest of Cotton Mather and other prominent clergymen, who, though believers in witches, condemned unjust methods of procedure, a special court of oyer and terminer was hastily organized (1692) by the governor and council for the trial of the accused. Lieutenant-Governor Stoughton, who presided over this extraordinary tribunal, was in active sympathy with the fanatics who conducted the prosecution. The witnesses were chiefly children, and the testimony the flimsiest ever seriously received in an American court of justice. But the judges, although sober and respectable citizens, were as deluded as the people; while the frenzy lasted, nineteen persons were hanged for having bewitched children in the neighborhood, and one was pressed to death because he would not plead. Of the hundreds of others who were arrested, two died while in prison.
Sewall's repentance.
By the following year the craze had exhausted itself, and there was a general jail-delivery. Many of the children afterwards confessed to the falsity of their testimony. Samuel Sewall was one of the trial judges. He afterwards, while standing in his pew in the Old South Church at Boston, had read at the desk at public declaration expressing his deep repentance that he had been in such grievous error, and asking the congregation to unite with him in praying for the forgiveness of God. Cotton Mather, however, endeavored to vindicate himself by the statement, "I know not that ever I have advanced any opinion in the matter of witchcraft but what all the ministers of the Lord that I know of in the world, whether English or Scotch, or French or Dutch, are of the same opinion with me."
The witchcraft delusion elsewhere in the colonies.
Belief in witchcraft was not confined to Massachusetts. Evidence of this superstition—childish to us of to-day, but a stern reality in the strongest minds of Cotton Mather's time—was noticeable throughout most of the colonies until the middle of the eighteenth century. In 1705 a witch was "ducked" in Virginia. There were trials for witchcraft in Maryland during the last quarter of the seventeenth century, but there is no evidence extant of an execution. In Pennsylvania in 1683 a woman was tried as a witch, and bound to good behavior. In 1779, during a similar panic among the French creoles at Cahokia, Ill., two negro slaves were condemned to be hanged, and another to be burned alive while chained to a post, on the charge of practising sorcery; there is, however, no evidence that the sentence was carried out.
81. Political Conditions.
Administration.
The town was in New England the political unit. The town-meeting was a primary assembly, at which were transacted all local affairs,—those which came nearest to the individual. The colonial government dealt with general interests; the colonial machinery of administration might break down, and yet the immediate needs of the people would have been for a time subserved by the town governments. This was the case at the beginning of the Revolution. But the indispensable function of legislation upon property and contracts, the definition of crimes, and all the judicial affairs of the people, were from the first carried out by the colony. In the town-meetings—and in church congregations, which were for a long period scarcely distinguishable from them—the people were trained in self-government; their intellects were sharpened, and there was bred a stout spirit of political self-sufficiency. By the beginning of the eighteenth century a freehold test for suffrage was common in New England, as in most of the American colonies. Taxes raised on land, polls, and personal property were not onerous, as public expenditures were carefully watched and criticised by a frugal people. The introduction of royal governors opened the door to bickerings between the executive and the legislature,—so prominent a feature in eighteenth-century colonial history prior to the Revolution. Up to 1700, with a few exceptions, the political machinery had run quite smoothly, when not subjected to outside interference. The several colonial governments in New England varied in detail, but they were alike in being largely independent of England, in being administered in a spirit of simplicity and economy, and in the extent to which the body of the people were enabled to influence the conduct of affairs.
Summary.
New England men were brave and liberty-loving, stoutly withstanding any attempt on the part of the home government to curtail their rights as Englishmen or hamper their progress. They were not always successful in their resistance, but were vastly more independent than their French and Spanish neighbors; and the principles of popular government were nowhere else, even in the English colonies, so successfully put in practice. They were hard-working, frugal, God-fearing, educated, and virtuous men. They sprang from a high quality of pure English stock, and they had raised indeed "choice grain." They founded an enduring empire amid obstacles that two and a half centuries ago might well have seemed appalling. The creed of the Puritans was harsh, their view of life gloomy, and their church intolerant; but their mission, as they conceived it, was a serious one, and the stormy experience of Rhode Island was not calculated elsewhere to encourage looseness in religious thinking. They were enterprising and thrifty to a high degree. In commerce, domestic trade, manufactures, and political sagacity, for nearly two centuries New England easily led all the American colonies. The nation owes much to the wisdom, the energy, and the fortitude of New England colonial statesmen; and New England institutions are to-day in large measure characteristics of the American commonwealth.