American colonial history reveals the fact that Englishmen, while boastful of the liberty of conscience which they claim as a divine heritage, differed from the Dutch and other Teutonic settlers in America as foremost in seeking to impose religious restrictions upon others and in offending against the doctrines of personal and religious liberty. There was very little of real democracy in the Bay Colony, but much aristocracy, according to Dr. William Elliot Griffis; for only church members had a right to vote. These Puritans could not tolerate the men of other ways of thinking, like the Quakers and the Baptists who came among them, whom they beat, branded and hanged. Both in Holland and America, this authority continues, the Pilgrim Fathers were better treated by the Dutch than by the Puritans.“Toleration is a virtue which Americans have not learned from England or from the Puritans of New England.For the origins of the religious liberty which we enjoy we must look to the Anabaptists, William the Silent and the Dutch republic.” But the Colony did not a little trade in slaves, and one of its industries was the making of manacles for the supply of the African man-stealers and traders in human flesh.
The influence on American life which flowed from the settlements of the Puritans and from Pennsylvania under the charter held by William Penn, was as distinct as night and day. From the ultimate confluence of these two divergent currents of civilization American life and institutions received a certain character of harmony which concretely, may be called Americanism. Had the Puritan current remained uninfluenced by that which flowed from Pennsylvania andNew York, our country would have had the distinct stamp of bigoted middle-class England, leavened to some extent by the gentry spirit of slave-holding Virginia, and we should justly have been called an English, or even Anglo-Saxon people.
But as numerous writers from other than New England regions, have shown, those institutions which we have commonly been taught to be English institutions, did not exist in England, but were brought to America from Holland and the continent, or developed here. The written ballot came from Emden in Germany; freedom of conscience was the common possession of the Teuton peoples, and not of Englishmen. When the Massachusetts Bay Colony numbered 3,000 settlers, there were but 350 freemen among them, as the condition of freemanship was made, not a property or educational test, but a religious qualification. It was not till 1641 that a code of laws was adopted. Prior to this, they had been governed by the common law of England and the precepts of the Bible.
Much has been written of religious and political oppression at home which drove many Germans to settle in Pennsylvania and New York; but the New England settlement owed its founding and growth entirely to religious persecutions at home. If James I chastised the Dissenters with whips, his son Charles chastised them with scorpions. It was William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, above all men, who visited bitter persecutions upon the Puritans in the reign of Charles, and it was Laud who caused the building of the English commonwealth in the New World. The great migration set in with the ascendancy of Laud. More than 1,000 came in 1630, and as the policy of the king and Laud became more intolerable, the tide increased in volume. The people came, not singly, nor as families merely, but frequently as congregations, led by their pastors. On March 18, 1919, the British Consul presented the City of Boston with a casket made from the rails of the docks in the Old Guild Hall at Boston, England, wherein 1,620 of the Puritan refugees were tried for non-conformist proceedings.
The religious differences which the Puritans fought out—and have never fought to a conclusion—in the New World, the Germans and Hollanders had decided in the Thirty Years War. Politically and religiously, the Puritans were uncompromisingly intolerant to all. They expelled Roger Williams for denying the right of the magistrate to punish for violation of the first table of the Decalogue; for denying the right of compelling one to take an oath, denouncing the union of church and state and pronouncing the King’s patent void on the ground that the Indians were the true owners of the soil. In 1656 they persecuted the Quakers; in 1692 they hanged witches. Harvard College was founded in 1636 by the Puritan clergy. Nowhere in the world was paternalism carried to such extremes as in New England.The State was founded on the Hebrew Old Testament and religion was its life. The entire political, social and industrial policy was built on religion, and Puritanism was painfully stern and somber.
Had this civilization been gradually extended, uninfluenced by the institutions which were brought over from the continent by the Hollanders, German Palatines and Delaware Swedes, we should have to form a radically different conception of the American of today. The influence of the Puritans continues to make itself still felt in manifestations of bigotry and intolerance in the form of prohibition, blue laws, race antagonism, etc. Out of its midst have arisen many great and free minds, like beautiful orchids out of a swamp, but rarely great minds uninfluenced by education flowing from or gained on the continent of Europe, while the rank and file at heart remains what it always was, an imponderable mass, excluding light, dealing with external forms and interpreting the passions of life and the spiritual institutions of soul and mind by the fixed standards of an obsolete philosophy, and continues to be harsh, intolerant, hostile and fanatical.
In 1631, Roger Williams arrived at Nantasket. He was a radical who claimed that no one should be bound to maintain worship against his own consent, and that the land belonged to the Indians and they ought to be paid for it. The Massachusetts Bay Colony ordered Williams to leave, and when he and five friends took up lands in Rhode Island, the Plymouth men notified him that the land he had chosen was under their control and intimated that he must move on. The next person to come into contact with colonial intolerance was Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, “a pure woman of much intellectual power,” but for whose preaching and teaching there was no room in Massachusetts. The General Court, after deciding that Mrs. Hutchinson was “like Roger Williams or worse,” banished her. With William Codington and others she bought Rhode Island from the Indians and began the colonies of Portsmouth and Newport. In 1638 Rev. John Wheelwright was expelled from Massachusetts for sympathy with Mrs. Hutchinson.
The Maryland English were more liberal, but their laws did not protect Jews or those who rejected the divinity of Christ. When the Commonwealth was established in England, its Commissioners in Maryland acted in a most intolerant manner, allowing no Catholics to have a seat in the legislature. They repealed the statute of toleration and prohibited Catholic worship. In the Carolinas all Christians lived harmoniously together until Lord Granville attempted to remove the religious privileges of the Colonists, by excluding all who were not members of the Anglican Church from the Colonial legislature.
Massachusetts, in 1656, passed a law pronouncing the death sentence on any Quaker who, having once been banished, should return to theColony. Under this law four were actually hanged. In 1692 hundreds of people accused of witchcraft were thrown into prison; nineteen were hanged; one, an old man, was pressed to death, and two died in jail before the popular madness had run its course.
A valuable contribution to the history of religious intolerance in our country, the result of English civilization, is contained in “American State Papers Bearing on Sunday Legislation,” revised and enlarged edition compiled and annotated by William Addison Blakely of the Chicago Bar and lecturer at the University of Chicago; foreword by Thomas M. Cooley. Published by “Religious Liberty,” Washington, D. C. Here we get the text of the first Sunday law on American soil, passed in Virginia in 1610: