THE FAMILY IMMIGRATION TO NEW ENGLAND.
BY THOMAS W. BICKNELL, LL.D.
The unit of society is the individual. The unit of civilization is the family. Prior to December 20, 1620, New-England life had never seen a civilized family or felt its influences. It is true that the Icelandic Chronicles tell us that Lief, the son of Eric the Red, 1001, sailed with a crew of thirty-five men, in a Norwegian vessel, and driven southward in a storm, from Greenland along the coasts of Labrador, wintered in Vineland on the shores of Mount Hope Bay. Longfellow's Skeleton in Armor has revealed their temporary settlement. Thither sailed Eric's son, Thorstein, with his young and beautiful wife, Gudrida, and their twenty-five companions, the following year. His death occurred, and put an end to the expedition, which Thorfinn took up with his marriage to the young widow, Gudrida; with his bride and one hundred and sixty-five persons (five of them young married women), they spent three years on the shores of the Narragansett Bay, where Snorre, the first white child, was born,—the progenitor of the great Danish sculptor, Thorwaldsen. But this is tradition, not history. Later still, came other adventurers to seek fortunes in the New World, but they came as individuals,—young, adventurous men, with all to gain and nothing to lose, and, if successful, to return with gold or fame, as the reward of their sacrifice and daring.
Six hundred years pass, and a colony of one hundred and five men, not a woman in the company, sailed from England for America, and landed at Jamestown, Virginia. Within six months half of the immigrants had perished, and only for the courage and bravery of John Smith, the whole would have met a sad fate. The first European woman seen on the banks of the James was the wife of one of the seventy Virginia colonists who came later, and her maid, Anne Burroughs, who helped to give permanency and character to a fugitive settlement in a colony, which waited two hundred and fifty years to learn the value of a New-England home, and to appreciate the civilization which sprang up in a New-England town, through the agency of a New-England family.
An experience similar to that of the Virginia settlers—disappointment, hardship, death—attended the immigrants who, under George Popham, Raleigh, and Gilbert, attempted to make a permanent home on the coast of Maine, but their house was a log camp, with not a solitary woman to light its gloom or cheer its occupants. Failure, defeat, and death were the inevitable consequences. There was no family, and there could be no permanency of civilization.
The planting of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Colonies was of another sort. Whole families embarked on board the Mayflower, the Fortune, the Ann, the Mary and John, and other ships that brought their precious freight in safety to a New World. Of the one hundred and one persons who came in the Mayflower, in 1620, twenty-eight were females, and eighteen were wives and mothers. They did not leave their homes, in the truest sense,—they brought them with them. Their household goods and hearthstone gods were all snugly stowed beneath the decks of the historic ship, and the multitude of Mayflower relics, now held in precious regard in public and private collections, but testify to the immense inventory of that one little ship of almost fabulous carrying capacity. To the compact signed in Plymouth harbor, in 1620, John Carver signs eight persons, whom he represents; Edward Winslow, five; William Brewster, six; William Mullins, five; William White, five; Stephen Hopkins, Edward Fuller, and John Turner, each, eight; John Chilton, three,—one of whom, his daughter Mary, was the first woman, as tradition says, to jump from the boat upon Plymouth Rock. In the Weymouth Company, under the leadership of the Reverend Joseph Hull, who set sail from Old Weymouth, England, on the twentieth of March, 1635, and landed at Wessaguscus,—now Weymouth, Massachusetts,—there were one hundred and five persons, divided into twenty-one families. Among these were John Whitmarsh, his wife Alice, and four children; Robert Lovell, husbandman, with his good wife Elizabeth and children, two of whom, Ellen and James, were year-old twins; Edward Poole and family; Henry Kingman, Thomas Holbrook, Richard Porter, and not least of all, Zachary Bicknell, his wife Agnes, their son John, and servant John Kitchen.
Families these,—all on board,—households, treasures, all worldly estates, and best of all the rich sympathies and supports of united, trusting hearts, daring to face the perils of an ocean-passage of forty-six days' duration, and the new, strange life in the wilds of America, that they might prove their faith in each other, in their principles, and in God. "He setteth the solitary in families," says the Psalmist; and the truth was never better illustrated than in the isolated and weary life of our ancestry, two and a half centuries ago.
To the Pilgrim and the Puritan, wife, children, house, home, family, church, were the most precious possessions. Nothing human could divorce ties which nature had so strongly woven. And whenever we think of our honored ancestry, it is not as individual adventurers; but we see the good-man, the good-wife, and their children, as the representatives of the great body of those, who with them planted homes, families, society, civilization, in the Western World. They came together, or if alone, to pioneer the way for wife and children or sweetheart by the next ship, and they came to stay, as witness the names of the old families of Plymouth, Weymouth, Salem, Boston, Dorchester, in the leading circles of wealth and social position in all of these old towns. "Behold," says Dr. Bushnell, "the Mayflower, rounding now the southern cape of England, filled with husbands and wives and children; families of righteous men, under covenant with God and each other to lay some good foundation for religion, engaged both to make and keep their own laws, expecting to supply their own wants and bear their own burdens, assisted by none but the God in whom they trust! Here are the hands of industry! the germs of liberty! the dear pledges of order! and the sacred beginnings of a home!" Of such, only, could Mrs. Hemans's inspired hymn have been written:—
"There were men with hoary hair
Amidst that pilgrim band;
Why had they come to wither there,
Away from their childhood's land?
"There was woman's fearless eye,
Lit by her deep love's truth;
There was manhood's brow, serenely high,
And the fiery heart of youth."
REASONS FOR FAMILY REMOVALS.
To understand the reasons why thirty-five thousand loyal and respectable subjects of Charles I should leave Old England for the New, in family relations, between 1620 and 1625, let us look, if we can, through a chink in the wall, into the state of affairs, civil, social, and religious, as they existed in the best land, and under the best government, the sun then shone upon.
Charles I succeeded his father, James I of Scotland, in 1624. The great, good act of James was the translation of our English Bible, known as King James's Version, a work which, for the exercise of learning, scholarship, and a zealous religious faith, has not been surpassed in any age. Take him all in all, James was a bigot, a tyrant, a conceited fool. He professed to be the most ardent devotee of piety, and at the same time issued a proclamation that all lawful recreations, such as dancing, archery, leaping, May-games, etc., might be used after divine service, on Sundays. An advocate of religious freedom, he attempted to enforce the most abject conformity in his own Scottish home, against the well-known independence of that section of his realm, and drove the Puritans to seek an asylum in Holland, where they might find liberty to worship God.
In the county of Somerset, the old king consented to an act of tyranny which would grace the age of Henry VIII. One Reverend Edmund Peacham, a clergyman in Somersetshire, had his study broken open, and a manuscript sermon being there found in which there was strong censure of the extravagance of the king and the oppression of his officers, the preacher was put to the rack and interrogated, "before torture, in torture, between torture, and after torture," in order to draw from him evidence of treason; but this horrible severity could wring no confession from him. His sermon was not found treasonable by the judges of the King's Bench and by Lord Coke; but the unhappy man was tried and condemned, dying in jail before the time set for his execution. Just about this time was the State murder of Overbury, and the execution of Sir Walter Raleigh, one of England's noblest sons, brave and chivalric, who, at the executioner's block, took the axe in his hand, kissed the blade, and said to the sheriff: "'Tis a sharp medicine, but a sound cure for all diseases." These and kindred acts serve to illustrate the history of a king whose personal and selfish interests overruled all sentiments of honor and regard for his subjects, and who publicly declared that "he would govern according to the good of the commonweal, but not according to the common will." With such a king as James on the throne, is it a wonder that the more intelligent and conscientious of his subjects—like the Pilgrims and Puritans—sought a home on this side the Atlantic, where wild beasts and savage men were their only persecutors?
We are told that "the face of the Court was much changed in the change of the king" from James to Charles I; "that the grossness of the Court of James grew out of fashion," but the people were slow to learn the difference. Of the two evils, James was to be preferred. Charles ascends the throne with flattering promises, attends prayers and listens to sermons, pays his father's debts and promises to reform the Court. Let us see what he does. The brilliant but profligate Buckingham is retained as prime minister. Charles marries the beautiful Henrietta Maria, the Roman Catholic princess of France. He fits out fleets against Spain and other quarters, and demands heavy taxes to meet his heavy expenses. Parliament is on its dignity, and demands its proper recognition. He dissolves it, and calls another. That is more rebellious, and that he summarily dissolves. Men of high and low degree go to prison at the king's behest, and the disobedient were threatened with severer penalties.
The people of England are aroused, as the king of the earth sets himself against their claims in behalf of the royal prerogative. The king and the people are at war. Which will come off conquerer? There is only one answer to that question, for the battle is one between the pigmy and the giant. The contest grows sharper as the months go on, and the people are in constant alarm. Murders are common, and even Buckingham, the favorite minister, dies at the point of the assassin's knife, and the murderer goes to the Tower and the scaffold accompanied by the tumultuous cheers of London. Soon comes the Parliament of 1629, in which the popular leaders make their great remonstrance against the regal tyranny. In that House sat a plain young man, with ordinary cloth apparel, as if made by an old-country tailor, "his countenance swollen and reddish, his voice sharp and untonable," with "an eloquence full of fervor." That young man is yet to be heard from. His name is Cromwell, known in history as Oliver Cromwell. His briefly-reported speech of six lines is destined to be weightier than the edicts of a king. The session was brief. Popery and Arminianism, unjust taxation and voluntary payment of taxes not ordered by Parliament, were declared treasonable and hostile principles in Church and State,—so said Parliament. "You are a Parliament of vipers,"—so said the king; and, on the tenth of March, Parliament was dissolved, not to meet again in the old historic hall for eleven long years; until, in 1640, the majesty of an outraged people rises superior to the majesty of an outraging ruler. Now follow the attempted riveting of the chains of a despotic and unscrupulous power, which does not understand the temper of the common people, nor the methods of counteracting a great popular upheaval in society.
It is not easy to resist the iron pressure of a tyrant; but, to our ancestors, it was far better than to accept the peace and profit which might follow abject submission. To borrow the words of De Tocqueville: "They cling to freedom for its native charms independent of its gifts,—the pleasure of speaking, acting, and breathing without restraint, under no master but God and the Law." The Englishmen of the first half of the seventeenth century were the fathers of the men who fired shots at Lexington and Concord, "heard round the world."
But how do the royal prerogatives affect our ancestors in England? Our fathers were of common mould, and feel the unjust demand of the tax-gatherer and the insolent demeanor of the Crown officers, who threaten fines and imprisonment for a refusal to obey. The people are aroused and are united; some are hopeless, some hopeful. The Crown seems to have its sway, but the far-sighted see the people on the coming throne of righteous judgement. What troubles our ancestors most is the interference with their religious life. Archbishop Laud is now supreme, and the Pope never had a more willing vassal. Ministers are examined as to their loyalty to the government, their sermons are read to private judges of their orthodoxy, the confessional is established, and the alter-service is restored. It is a time when earnest men and women cannot be trifled with on soul concerns. Their property may perish or be confiscated, but the right to unmolested worship is older than Magna Charta, and as inalienable as life itself. What is to be done? Resistance or emigration—which? Resist and die, say Cromwell and Wentworth, Eliot and Hampden. Emigrate and live, say the men and women who came by thousands from all parts of England during the reign of this monarch, and made possible the permanent establishment of a new society, on the basis of social order and family life.