Essays in American history

by Henry Ferguson

In the same manner, in earlier days, when the recollection of the struggle for independence was still vivid, patriotic Americans were unable to recognize anything but arbitrary tyranny in the attempts made from time to time by the English government to give unity and organization to the group of discordant and feeble settlements, or to see anything but what was base and servile in the sentiments that inspired those whom they nicknamed Tories. Now, under the influence of calmer consideration, men are beginning to admit that something may be said for men like Andros, who strove against the separatist spirit which seemed to New England to be the very essence of liberty, and even for those unfortunates who valued the connection with Great Britain more than they did the privileges of self-government, and who were compelled in grief and sorrow, from their devotion to their principles, to leave forever the homes they loved. The war of secession has taught Americans to understand the term, and appreciate the sentiment, of loyalty. It is no longer an unmeaning word, fit only to be ridiculed in scurrilous doggerel by patriot rhymsters, as was the case a hundred years ago, but appeals to an answering chord in the heart of every man who remembers the quick heart-beats and the grand enthusiasm of those four years of struggle, the true heroic age of American history.

The paper upon The Quakers in New England is an enlargement and revision of an article printed in the American Church Review, in April 1889, and that upon Sir Edmund Andros has been printed by the Historical Society of Westchester County, N. Y., before whom it was read in October 1892, but it has been revised and enlarged. Instead of burdening the pages with notes and references, they have been placed together after each essay, so that they may be readily used by those who desire to do so, and yet may not affront the eyes of those who do not desire them.

It is impossible to give credit for every statement to every historian who may have made it; it has been the desire of the author to indicate his principal sources of information, and he has not knowingly omitted any work upon which he has relied for the historical facts presented.

Trinity College, Hartford,
October 1894.

I.
THE QUAKERS IN NEW ENGLAND.

In the year 1656, in the midst of the period of the Commonwealth, the good people of Massachusetts, who were enjoying a brief season of rest after their troubles with the Baptists and the Antinomians, heard to their horror that they were likely to be visited by certain fanatics of whom they had heard from their brethren in England. These were known to them by the invidious name of Quakers, and were confounded with Adamites, Muggletonians, and Ranters, strangely named sects which the confusion of the times had brought forth.[1]

This remarkable body of men, whose history has presented such strange contrasts of wild enthusiasm and imperturbable stolidity, of fanaticism and quietism, of contempt for the world and its rewards on the one side, and of sordid love of peace and money-getting upon the other, had recently come into being as one of the natural results of the unsettling of religious faiths and practices which had accompanied the political revolution in England. The Quaker movement was a revolt at once from the enforced conformity of the Laudian establishment and from the intolerable spiritual oppression of the Calvinistic divines, whose little fingers, when they came into power, had been thicker than the loins of their predecessors.

The great Anglican prelates of the reign of Charles I. were unfortunate in the circumstances amidst which their lives were spent. They were liberal and tolerant in theology, and they were pilloried as bigots; they held an idea of what the Church of England should be, that was utopian in its comprehensiveness, and they are described by every New England writer of school histories or children’s story-books as narrow minded enemies of freedom of thought. The system proposed by Andrewes and Montague was essentially that of Sir Thomas More: liberality in matters of belief, with uniformity in practice and in ritual. The Puritan divines, on the other hand, were despotic in matters of faith and doctrine to a degree rarely equalled in the history of the human mind, while they insisted upon their right of refusing the system of worship which was established by law in the Church of England, and of choosing for themselves religious ordinances to suit their own tastes and fancies. They did not plead for liberty on the ground that the principle of compulsion in religious matters was wrong and illegitimate, but because the services of the Church of England were, in their opinion, unscriptural if not idolatrous. The one party was tolerant in doctrine, and despotic, tyrannical at times, in matters of ritual; the other claimed to be indifferent as to ritual, but was despotic in opinions. The church, by attempting to regulate public worship, was led in some instances to appear to be persecuting men for doctrinal differences; the Puritans, from their zeal for orthodoxy in doctrine, became, when the power was placed in their hands, the strictest possible disciplinarians. The tendency of the one party was to subject the church to the state, and thus make it an instrument of political authority; the other tended to the subjection of the state to the church, making the civil authority little more than the body by which the edicts of the ministers should be registered and their decrees should be enforced.

With the early history of Quakerism we have little to do. Its founder, George Fox, was the son of a weaver at Fenny Drayton (or Drayton in the Clay) in Leicestershire. He had been piously brought up by his parents, who were members of the Church of England, and passed a boyhood and youth of singular purity and innocence. When he was growing up to manhood he passed through a period of deep religious depression, and found no help from any of his friends or from the ministers of the parish churches in his neighborhood (who at this time were mainly Presbyterians) or from the newer lights of the rising separatist bodies. One counselled him to have blood let, another to use tobacco and sing psalms; and the poor distracted boy, whose soul was heavy with a sense of the wrath of God, found no comfort from any of them. A careful study of the Bible made him quick to see the weak points in the systems that surrounded him, and at last he found the comfort he sought in the sense of an immediate communion with God and an indwelling of the Spirit of Christ within the soul. For a time he led a solitary life, leaving home and friends and wandering over the country on foot, clothed in garments of leather, sleeping wherever he could find a lodging, and spending whole days sometimes in the hollows of great trees. Soon it was “borne in upon him” that the presence of the Spirit and the inner light was as good a qualification for the office of preacher as that of being a graduate of Oxford or Cambridge, and he began his public ministry about the year 1646.[2]

With the externals of Quakerism we are all familiar: the morbid conscientiousness that forbade the use of the common forms of courtesy, the simple dress, the refusal to submit to the authority of magistrates or of priests in matters concerning religion, and the unwillingness to pay them the usual compliments due to their position. The true inner nature of Quakerism, which gave it its strength, lay not merely in its abhorrence of forms and formulas, its vigorous protest against any compulsion in matters either of religious thought or religious observance, but essentially in its consciousness of the need of the Divine presence and its belief in the fulfilment of the Saviour’s promise to send his Spirit into the world.