CHAPTER XIII. THE REVOLUTION IN 1776.
Revolt from aristocracy and detestation of “caste” in politics, in religion, and in society, have been the key-notes of the whole history of the Anglo-Saxon race in America. They were the incentives that first led men of that race to seek homes beyond the Atlantic, and have ever been the cardinal principles of the nation those pioneers founded.
The westward movement began with that era of English history marked by the intolerable pretensions, in matters both of Church and State, of the Stuart monarchs. The doctrine of the “divine right of kings,” which cost Charles I. his head, was, with all that it meant, the grievance that drove from England the settlers of the American colonies.
When James I., soon after his accession, was petitioned to allow liberty of assembling and of discussion to all classes and sects of his subjects, he replied that such a privilege “agrees with monarchy as well as God and the devil. Then Jack and Tom and Will and Dick shall meet, and at their pleasure censure me and my council and all our proceedings. Then Will shall stand up and say: ‘It must be thus;’ then Dick shall reply and say: ‘Nay, marry, but we will have it thus;’ and, therefore, here I must say: ‘The king forbids.’”
The king forbade, but the native spirit of English liberty did not acquiesce without a murmur. There were mutterings of the storm that was to burst upon his son and successor in the full fury of rebellion. The subservient Wentworth complained that “the very genius of this nation of people leads them always to oppose, both civilly and ecclesiastically, all that ever authority ordains for them.”
Most outspoken in opposition to royal encroachment were the Puritans—those stern disciples of Calvin, who had furnished England her first Protestant martyrs, Hooper and Rogers, and who, in the early seventeenth century, were, as Hallam says, “the depositories of the sacred fire of liberty.”
Many Puritans preferred to leave their native country rather than submit. In 1607, a company of them were about to take sail for Holland from the Humber, when they were arrested and forced to return to their homes. In the following spring, they again attempted to escape. They reached the Lincolnshire coast, and were embarking, when soldiers, who had been dispatched in pursuit, rode down to the shore, and seized some of the women and children. As the only fault of these prisoners was that they had followed their husbands and fathers, they were afterward released.
The fugitives, whose leaders were John Robinson, their minister, and William Brewster, their ruling elder, first tarried at Amsterdam, and the next year settled at Leyden. There they lived for eleven years—a body of exiles, who did not fraternize with their Dutch neighbors, and who gradually formed a plan of migrating to the new country beyond the Atlantic, where they might be under their old flag, and yet hope for civil and religious liberty.
In 1617, they sent two of their number to England, to secure for their project the consent of the London Company, to which James I. had granted proprietary rights over Virginia—then the general name of the North American coast. The two embassies received a permit, although they put no great trust in it. “If,” said they, “there should afterward be a purpose to wrong us, though we had a seal as broad as the house floor, there would be means enough found to recall or reverse.” They did not foresee their future strength against oppression.
Thus it was that in the August of 1620 the Pilgrims set sail from Delft Haven, and in November landed on the shores of Massachusetts—forty-one families, numbering in all a hundred and two souls. Before they landed, they signed a mutual agreement, covenanting “to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws as shall be thought most convenient for the general good of the colony.” The agreement was loyally kept in the face of hardship and danger from within and without. The colony they planted grew in the spirit of popular liberty as it grew from penury to prosperity.