The beginnings of settlement, scattered and unimportant, had in no way presaged the empire which was to develop within a half-century, and not only had territory been granted away recklessly, but the monarchs had been equally heedless of the future in the forms of government which they had permitted to grow up. By the time our story has now reached, the colonial problem, aside from any question of tyranny, undoubtedly called for new treatment. If the Empire were not to be a source of great military weakness, and if the Navigation Acts, upon which its commercial power rested, were to be properly enforced, it was obvious that a much greater degree of administrative unity and control would have to be realized. In particular, the granting of the charters, in which no provision had been made for a royal governor or for any definite channel of communication between the imperial government and the colony, had undoubtedly been a serious administrative blunder, which the attitude of Massachusetts had made at once worse and more obvious.
Indeed, just at a time when a strong administrative control was most necessary, it may well have appeared as if the Empire were drifting toward disruption. However different the material for colonization may have been in the various colonies,—and, in the main, it is now considered as more uniform than was formerly thought to have been the case,—the frontier influence was at work in them all; and the main characteristic which they possessed in common was their insistence upon the right of self-government. Not only among the continental colonies, but among the island ones as well, we find the same spirit from the start, and the same reiterated demand for assemblies and self-taxation. The story varies only in detail, whether we study Tobago, Trinidad, Antigua, Nevis, Jamaica, Barbadoes, Bermuda, or New England.[[904]] These two points were wholly compatible with a well-organized empire, however, and England, for the most part, made no effort to interfere with either.
It was a different matter when the colonies declined to admit that the imperial government possessed any authority over them, or refused to observe those laws made for the regulation of the Empire as a whole. The case of Massachusetts had become notorious, not only throughout the Empire, but even among foreigners; and Colbert's agent in the French West Indies could write that “the English who dwell near Boston will not worry themselves about the prohibitions which the King of England may issue, because they hardly recognize his authority.”[[905]] Although, with reference to Virginia, it was reported that this “New England disease is very catching,”[[906]] it seems to have been indigenous in the soil of most of the colonies. It had long since been reported that many in Barbadoes wished to become independent “and not run any fortune with England either in peace or war,” but to erect their “little limb of the Commonwealth into a free state.”[[907]] In the very year in which Massachusetts lost her charter, the inhabitants of Bermuda were proclaiming that “we are free-born people, our Lands are our own, and wee will doe with our own what wee please, and if wee doe not like of the King's Government wee can desert the Country.”[[908]]
Aside from the influence of the frontier, however, the element of time was also beginning to make itself felt. In New England, practically the entire first generation of settlers had died by the end of Philip's War. The “freemen” who were now guiding her destinies had, for the most part, been born in the settlements, and were colonials, in the strict sense of the word. They possessed no fond memories of the mother-country, or close personal ties with individuals there. Their interests and outlook were provincial and local to a degree that we can hardly realize. They were caught in a little back-water, and the great current of English life was sweeping on with but slight influence upon them. The first planters had been drawn to a large extent from a very sound element in the England of their day, but, with few exceptions, they were men of narrow outlook, which had naturally become still narrower in their laborious, isolated life in America. Among the religious elements in the new communities, the intensity of their faith in the divine nature of their mission, combined with their extraordinary self-consciousness, tended to breed a belief in their own superiority, which infected not only the whole of New England, but much subsequent historical writing. Stoughton's preaching that “God sifted a whole nation that he might send choice grain over into this wilderness” was but a mild expression of what the New Englanders thoroughly believed and loved to be told.[[909]]
We have already expressed our high appreciation of the character of much of the early immigration to that section of the country; but it cannot be claimed that it included any of the real leaders in England in any line of thought or action; and figures which loom large against the background of the wilderness change their proportions materially when measured by the national life in the old country. It has been claimed that Cromwell, at one time, thought seriously of emigrating to New England; and it is illuminating to consider, had he done so, the resultant comparative stature, in view of the new standard of measure thus introduced, of such men as Bradstreet and Stoughton. The New England leaders were, indeed, of a more intellectual type generally than came to the other colonies, and there was, perhaps, more play of mind among the people than in either the southern continental or the island settlements. Common-school education was fostered to a degree unknown elsewhere at the time, and the village school, with the town-meeting and the Congregational church, soon took its place in New England's typical community life. In 1647, Massachusetts passed a law requiring every town of fifty families to maintain a teacher of reading and writing, and each town of one hundred families to establish a grammar school.[[910]] Every town in Connecticut had its provision for elementary education, and each county its Latin school. Even Plymouth, in spite of its poverty, was also fairly well provided.[[911]] In Harvard, which was founded as early as 1636, the colonies long possessed the only English institution of higher learning in the new world, although there was a French college in Quebec, founded at virtually the same time as Harvard.[[912]] The early Virginia settlers were, at first, indeed, as solicitous as the New Englanders about education, but the results of the geographic environment were felt as strongly in this as in the other matters on which we have already touched. With the bad roads and the scattered life of the plantations, it was impossible for the common school to take root as it did in the compact little villages of New England. But if the common schooling was somewhat less diffused, the culture of the educated class was wider, and the private libraries of the Virginians offer to the booklover a refreshing contrast to the dead weight of theology on the New England shelves. Nor were these southern libraries confined, as used to be thought, to a few families, research tending constantly to minimize the supposed difference between New England and the rest of the colonies in this regard.[[913]]
Moreover, although her devotion to education was to bear noble fruit in the years to come, and is one of the chief contributions of New England to our national life, its original object, and almost the sole use to which it was put, was religious, and it may be questioned whether its earlier influence upon the people at large was not narrowing rather than broadening. For, in the absence, for the average citizen in New England, of almost any books other than theological, and of any intellectual stimulus other than the sermon, the earlier result of such education as the people received seems to have been mainly an intensified preoccupation with the problems of Calvinism, and a remarkable extension of the influence of the priesthood. The attitude of Massachusetts, in extirpating so far as possible all ideas opposed to her official theology, in banishing those who persisted in giving expression to them, and in exercising a strict censorship over the only printing-press in New England, nullified, to a great extent, the benefits that might otherwise have been derived from her “educational” system in the sense of schools.[[914]] In the writings of the men who settled Massachusetts or visited it in the earliest period, there is a freshness and charm of outlook and phrase which allures the reader even of to-day. In Smith or Bradford, Higginson or Wood, one feels in the presence of a healthy mind, actively interested in this world or the next; but when these men have passed, the balance of the century leaves us hardly a work which, for a modern reader, possesses any interest other than antiquarian or historical.
In England, men's minds had been profoundly stirred by the great parliamentary struggle, the Civil War, and all the influences of the new period. In science, Ray was founding systematic zoölogy, Harvey had discovered the circulation of the blood, Newton the law of gravitation, Boyle the law of gases which bears his name, and Halley was working in his observatory at Greenwich. Among the numerous contemporary writers whom our educated colonists might have been reading had they been in England, we may mention, at hazard, Locke, Hobbes, Butler, Marvell, Sir Thomas Browne, Milton, Taylor, Izaak Walton, Bunyan, Fuller, Clarendon, Herbert, Dryden, and Herrick. But of all this varied intellectual life, it may be said that practically nothing reached the vast majority of New Englanders, whose science was still made up of the superstitious observances of “special providences,” and whose political life was centred in the meeting of church or town. If they felt the need of verse, they read Uriah Oakes or Michael Wigglesworth, and the need must have been as great as its reward was inadequate. Of other printed literature indigenous to the soil, there was practically none except theological, and the few historical accounts brought out by the Indian wars.[[915]]
Such impoverishment of the intellectual life was a necessary consequence of living in the wilderness in the seventeenth century; but it was none the less a misfortune because inevitable. In New England, however, a peculiar result ensued from the combination of the extreme rarity of the intellectual atmosphere and the partial education of her people. In the other colonies, men may have been more ignorant of books, but they were healthy-minded. In New England, the concentration of an awakened mental life almost wholly upon the problems of election or damnation created a condition of ethical morbidity, and bequeathed to us the legacy of what may almost be called that section's fourth contribution to American life—the New England conscience, with its pathological questionings and elaborate system of taboos. It is an interesting psychological study, not without its immediate historical bearings, to contrast the diaries of such English officials as Pepys or Evelyn with that kept by the active Massachusetts official, Sewall, who could amuse himself all Christmas Day arranging the coffins in the family vault, and pronounce the occupation to have been “an awfull yet pleasing Treat.”[[916]] Toward the end of the seventeenth century, public opinion in New England, economic, religious, political, and social, had grown largely out of touch with that in the old country; but the nature of the case demanded that, in the last analysis, the government of the Empire must be mainly determined by the latter and not by the former.
As in England, however, parties based on civil differences were replacing the old religious ones, so in New England, parties were forming due to the rise of altered economic conditions, and the passing of the early religious spirit. We have already noted the presence in Massachusetts, from the start, of a considerable body of dissent from the doctrine and polity of the colonial state church, and the decline in fervor even within the group of the Saints themselves. Men who, according to the official church theory, were not of the elect, and yet who were conscious of trying to live helpful, honest, God-fearing lives, refused to acknowledge the truth of the denunciations which, under penalty of fine, they were forced to listen to, Sunday after Sunday, hurled at themselves by the leading divines. Hooker might thunder that “no carrion in a ditch smells more loathsomely in the nostrils of man, than a natural man's works do in the nostrils of the Almighty”; or Shepard declare that the mind of the natural man “is a nest of all the foul opinions, heresies, that ever were vented,” and his heart “a foul sink all of atheism, sodomy, blasphemy, murder, whoredom, adultery, witchcraft, buggery.”[[917]] The bow had been bent too long, and had lost its spring. Bradstreet might still demand that “the old stand firm” against “that cursed Bratt Toleration,” but Bishop reported more truly “that many are gospel-glutted and growing weary.”[[918]]
At the time when religion was thus gradually passing as the leading cause of division in New England, other forces were at work to align the citizens into new parties. In a former chapter, we called attention to the early beginning, on a small scale, of the divergence between the life of the frontiers and that of the older and more established settlements. With the growth of a few of the larger centres, notably Boston, there also developed the conflict of economic interests and political outlook between town and country.[[919]] The prosperity of the Empire under the Navigation Acts had increased enormously, and New England, although refusing to obey the laws, had shared to the full in the resultant growth of trade and wealth. From all these causes, there had developed fairly distinct opposing groups—a large element of liberals in theology, as against the maintainers of rigid orthodoxy; a conservative “east” against a radical “west,” a progressive urban population, contrasted with the more narrow-minded, unchanging rural laborers and farmers; and a trading, moneyed class, with views and interests differing from the agricultural.[[920]] The distinctions are real and marked, though the numbers of those in the various parties, and their exact groupings on special questions, can only be approximated. The magistrates, consisting, for the most part, of men of wealth and position chosen from the larger centres, and the deputies, resident in each of the towns from which they were elected, represented, in their differing attitudes, the moderate and radical opinion of the colonies as a whole. In the relations with England, those who were liberal in theology, in closer personal or commercial contact with the old country, and more conservative in their outlook, would naturally favor a conciliatory attitude. Those, on the other hand, who believed that the supreme object at stake was the maintaining of the peculiar ecclesiastical organization of their church-state, with its religious franchise tests, and those who had no direct business relations with England or other countries, would as naturally tend to adopt an unyielding attitude of opposition. There is a direct line of descent from the moderate party of 1676 to the Loyalist party of 1776; and, as the wholesale condemnation of the latter is now considered uncritical, so, also, we cannot off-hand divide the parties of the earlier struggle into traitors and patriots.