In the winter of 1620 the Mayflower landed its precious cargo on Plymouth Rock. This small band, cheered by the valedictory prayers of its beloved pastor, John Robinson, braved sea and wilderness for the sake of Liberty. In this inspiration our Commonwealth began. That same year, another cargo, of another character, was landed at Jamestown in Virginia. It was twenty slaves,—the first that ever touched and desecrated our soil. Never in history was greater contrast. There was the Mayflower, filled with men, intelligent, conscientious, prayerful, all braced to hardy industry, who before landing united in a written compact by which they constituted themselves “a civil body politic,” bound “to frame just and equal laws.” And there was the Slave-Ship, with its fetters, its chains, its bludgeons, and its whips,—with its wretched victims, forerunners of the long agony of the Slave-Trade, and with its wretched tyrants, rude, ignorant, profane,
“who had learned their only prayers
From curses,”
carrying in their hold that barbarous Slavery, whose single object is to compel labor without wages, which no “just and equal laws” can sanction. Thus in the same year began two mighty influences; and these two influences still prevail far and wide throughout the country. But they have met at last in final grapple, and we are partakers in the holy conflict. The question is simply between the Mayflower and the Slave-Ship,—which of the two to choose?
True to her origin, Massachusetts began at once that noble system of Common Schools which continues her “peculiar institution,” while a College was founded at Cambridge which has grown to be a light throughout the land. Thus together began Common Schools and the College, and together they have flourished always. Said one of her early teachers, in most affecting words,—“After God had carried us safe to New England, and we had builded our houses, provided necessaries for our livelihood, reared convenient places for God’s worship, and settled the civil government, one of the next things we longed for and looked after was to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.”[2] In this spirit it was ordered by the General Court, as early as 1642, “That in every town the chosen men appointed for managing the prudential affairs of the same … shall have power to take account from time to time of all parents and masters, and of their children, concerning their calling and employment of their children, especially of their ability to read and understand the principles of religion and the capital laws of this country.”[3] This was followed only a few years later, in 1647, by that famous law which ordered, “That every township in this jurisdiction, after the Lord hath increased them to the number of fifty householders, shall then forthwith appoint one within their town to teach all such children as shall resort to him to write and read,” and “that, where any town shall increase to the number of one hundred families or householders, they shall set up a grammar school, the master thereof being able to instruct youth so far as they may be fitted for the University”; and this law, in its preamble, assigned as its object the counteraction of “one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures,” and also “that learning may not be buried in the grave of our fathers in the Church and Commonwealth.”[4] To nothing in her history can Massachusetts look with more pride than to this commanding example, which, wherever followed, must open wide the gates of human improvement.
Again, mindful that printing is the indispensable minister of good learning, they established a printing-press without delay. This was at Cambridge, as early as 1639, and the first thing printed was “The Freeman’s Oath.”
Meanwhile the Slave-Ship continued its voyages and discharged its baleful cargoes. Virginia became a Slave State and the natural consequences of Slavery ensued. Of course the Common School was unknown; for, where Slavery rules, the schoolmaster is shut out. One of her Governors, Sir William Berkeley, said in 1671, “I thank God there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience and heresy and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them and libels against the best government. God keep us from both!”[5] These remarkable words, which embodied the political philosophy of Slavery, were in an official reply to interrogatories propounded from England.
Thus early was the contrast manifest, which has increased ever since. The evidence is unimpeachable, whether we consult the faithful historian who tells us that early in the last century Boston alone contained five printing-offices and many booksellers, while there was not a single bookseller in Virginia, Maryland, or Carolina,[6]—or consult the various statistics of the census in our day, where figures speak with most persuasive power for the Mayflower against the Slave-Ship.