CHAPTER IX
THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION ON THE CONTINENT
(1500-1625)
In analyzing the forces which affected the colonization of America, the depth of the impression made upon Europe by the Protestant Reformation can hardly be overestimated. Although the direct and immediate influence of this great movement upon the fortunes of America was great, its indirect and remote effects have been still more important. One of these effects was the creation of a religious motive for emigration which, in conjunction with other incentives, was one of the earliest and most constant causes for the peopling of America.
It is true that the desire for religious freedom was only one among many such impelling forces. The desire to better their fortunes was perhaps the most fundamental and enduring consideration that influenced emigrants. Many settlers came because at home they had failed or were burdened with debt, or had become involved in ill repute or crime, and hoped to make a new start in a new land. Many sought the New World as many still press to the frontier, from sheer restlessness and recklessness, from the love of adventure, the hope that luck will do better for them than labor. Many came as a result of urgent inducements offered by projectors of colonies or agents of shipmasters, as in the case of the early "company servants" or the later "redemptioners" or "indentured servants."
No inconsiderable number came because they were forced to come: the earlier planters of colonies and patentees of lands received permission to seize for their uses men and women of the lower classes, much as men were pressed into naval service; paupers were handed over to the colonizing companies to be shipped to their settlements; repeatedly the prisons were emptied to provide colonists, and commissions were appointed, as in England in 1633, "to reprieve able-bodied persons convicted of certain felonies, and to bestow them to be used in discoveries and other foreign employments." [Footnote: Cal. of State Pap, Domestic, 1631-1633, p. 547.]
Somewhat later, transportation to the colonies to labor for a fixed number of years became a familiar form of commutation of the death penalty, and after 1662 it was made the statutory penalty for certain offences.
Yet among this multiplicity of motives for emigration to the colonies religion held a peculiar place. Many men for whom the dominant inducement was a more material one were partly led by religious motives; many of the changes in Europe that unsettled men and made them more ready to leave their old homes were results of the Reformation. Religious motives were the earliest to send any really large body of settlers to the English colonies, and they remained for more than a century probably the most effective motives.
During the first twenty years of the settlement of Virginia, where the religious incentive was least strong, less than six thousand settlers came over; during the first twenty years of the settlement of New England, where it was strongest, there were more than twenty thousand. The later churchmen of Virginia and the Carolinas, the Catholics of Maryland, the Quakers of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and a great body of Presbyterians, Huguenots, Mennonites, Moravians, and adherents of other sects which were products of the Reformation, sought tinder the more liberal laws of the colonies the religious liberty which they could not find at home.
The working of this influence in England will appear in a later chapter on the religious history of that country during this period; its peculiar development in Germany seems to demand a further word of explanation here. Three forms of reformed doctrine and organization— Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Zwinglianism—grew up on German soil in the years between 1517 and 1555, and obtained more or less extensive recognition and power from imperial, princely, or city authorities. Lutheranism, the most moderate and widely accepted form of Protestantism, was officially established in most of the central and northern and in some of the southern states and cities; Calvinism, less widely extended but more strictly organized, held a similar position in the southwest; while the doctrines of Zwingli, which had been adopted and were enforced in the greater part of Switzerland, spread to a number of those southern regions of Germany from which Switzerland was as yet indistinctly separated. [Footnote: Armstrong, The Emperor Charles V., I., 228-231.]