The town system. To understand the brief career of Williams at Salem and its catastrophe, we must recall the character of colonial life in Massachusetts at the time. There were already sixteen settlements or "towns" on the shores of Massachusetts Bay, with an indefinite stretch of gloomy wilderness for background, the dwelling place of countless savages and wild beasts. The population of all the settlements may have summed up five thousand people—enough to have made one prosperous village. The inhabitants of the various towns of the bay were from different parts of England; their dress and dialect were diverse, and their Puritanism was of various complexions. The town system, at first a reproduction on new soil of the township field communes that had subsisted in parts of England from ages beyond the fountain heads of tradition, gave some play to local peculiarities and prejudices. There is evidence that the central government relieved itself from strain by means of this rural borough system. The ancient town system in turn appears to have taken on a new youth; it was perhaps modified and developed by the local diversity of the people, and it lent to Massachusetts, at first, something of the elasticity of a federal government. [Note 6.]
Life in the Massachusetts settlements. This community of scattered communes was cut off from frequent intercourse with the world, for the sea was far wider and more to be feared in that day of small ships and imperfect navigation than it is now. 1630 to 1640. The noise of the English controversies in which the settlers had once borne a part reached them at long intervals, like news from another planet. But most of the time these lonesome settlements had no interest greater than the petty news and gossip of little forest hamlets. The visitor who came afoot along Indian trails, or by water, paddling in a canoe, to Boston on lecture day, might bring some news of sickness, accident, or death. Sometimes the traveling story was exciting, as that wolves had slaughtered the cattle at a certain place, while yet cattle were few and precious. Or still more distressing intelligence came that the ruling elder of the church at Watertown had taken the High-church position that Roman churches were Christian churches, or that democratic views had been advanced by Eliot of Roxbury. A new and far-fetched prophetical explanation of a passage in the Book of Canticles, and a tale of boatmen wrecked in some wintry tempest, might divide the attention of the people. Stories of boats capsized, of boatmen cast on islands where there was neither shelter nor food, of boats driven far to sea and heard of no more, were staples of excitement in these half-aquatic towns; and if the inmates of a doomed boat had been particularly profane, these events were accounted edifying—divine judgments on the ungodly. When the governor wandered once and lost himself in the forest, passing the night in a deserted wigwam, there was a sensation of a half-public character. That a snake and a mouse had engaged in a battle, and that the puny mouse had triumphed at last, was in one budget of traveling news that came to Boston. To this event an ominous significance was given by John Wilson, pastor of the Boston church, maker of anagrams, solemn utterer of rhyming prophecies which were sometimes fulfilled, and general theological putterer. Wilson made the snake represent the devil, according to all sound precedents; the mouse was the feeble church in the wilderness, to which God would give the victory over Satan. Thus enhanced by an instructive interpretation from the prophet and seer of the colony, the story no doubt took up its travels once more, and now with its hopeful exegesis on its back. The Massachusetts mouse was an auspicious creature; it is recorded by the governor, and it was no doubt told along the coast, that one got into a library and committed depredations on a book of common prayer only, nibbling every leaf of the liturgy, while it reverently spared a Greek Testament and a Psalter in the same covers.
In a petty state with a range of intellectual interests so narrow, the conflict between Williams and the General Court took place.
VI.
Self-consciousness of the Massachusetts community. It was a community that believed in its own divine mission. It traced the existence of its settlements to the very hand of God—the God who led Israel out of Egypt. The New England colonists never forgot that they were a chosen people. Upon other American settlers—the Dutch in New Netherland, the Virginia churchmen, the newly landed Marylanders, with their admixture of papists—they looked with condescension if not with contempt, accounting them the Egyptians of the New World. [Note 7.] The settlers on the Bay of Massachusetts were certain that their providential exodus was one of the capital events in human history; that it had been predesigned from eternity to plant here, in a virgin world, the only true form of church government and to cherish a church that should be a model to the Old World in turn, and a kind of foreshadowing of the new heaven and the new earth. Some dreamed that the second coming of Christ would take place among the rocky woodlands of New England. The theocratical government was thought to be the one most pleasing to God, and a solemn obligation was felt to import into this new theocracy the harsh Oriental intolerance which had marked that fierce struggle in which the Jewish tribes finally shook off image worship.
John Cotton, 1633. The apostle of theocracy who arrived soon after Williams's return to Salem was John Cotton, a Puritan leader in England, in whom devoutness was combined with extreme discretion, a dominant will with a diplomatic prudence and a temper never ruffled. Cotton's ingenious refinements made him a valuable apologist in an age of polemics, but they often served to becloud his vision of truth and right. He was prone to see himself as he posed, in the character of a protagonist of truth. He gave wise advice to the Massachusetts Puritans at their departure from England. When, a few years later, Laud's penetrating vigilance and relentless thoroughness made even Cotton's well-balanced course of mild non-conformity impossible, he fled from his parish of Boston, in Lincolnshire, to London, and escaped in 1633 with difficulty to the new Boston in New England. As John Cotton had been the shining candle of Puritanism in England, his arrival in America was hailed with joy, and from the time of his settlement in the little capital his was the hand that shaped ecclesiastical institutions in New England, and he did much also to mold the yet plastic state. [Note 8.] Though he usually avoided the appearance of personal antagonism, every formidable rival he had left Massachusetts early. Williams, Hooker, Davenport, and Hugh Peter all found homes beyond the bounds of the colony. There can not be two queen bees in one hive, nor can there well be more than one master mind in the ecclesiastical order of a petty theocratic state. It was the paradox of colonial religious organization that the Episcopal colonies had parishes almost independent of all supervision, while the New England Congregationalists were, from the arrival of Cotton, subject to the dominance of ministers who virtually attained to the authority of bishops.
VII.
Salem refractory. Salem, the oldest town of the commonwealth, was the most ready to pursue an independent course and it was attached to Williams, whose ability attracted new settlers and who maintained a position of independence toward Cotton and the authorities at Boston. To subdue the refractory Salem was no doubt one of the secondary purposes of the proceedings against Williams. There seems to have been no personal animosity toward Williams himself; his amiable character and his never-doubted sincerity were main obstacles to his punishment.
Collision inevitable. The return of Roger Williams to such a place as Salem was naturally a matter of alarm to the ministers and magistrates of Massachusetts. Collision was not a matter of choice on either side. The catastrophe was like one that comes from the irresistible action of physical forces. In a colony planted at great cost to maintain one chosen form of worship and subordinating all the powers of government to this purpose, a preacher who asserted the necessity for a complete separation of religion and government in the interest of soul liberty had no place. His ideal was higher than the prevailing one, but that age could not possibly rise to it.