Thus, in various ways, by different hands and from different parts of the colonial orchard, the precious fruit was gathered for present or future use.
In some of the plantations the proprietors, those
“Gentlemen of England, who sat at home in ease,”
expecting their stone ships to come in, filled with promised colonial stuff for presents to their children, became tired of waiting, and sold out their large airy bills of lading for very small earthly crowns sterling. In other Colonies the heirs of the original grantees, after spending all their ready means in lawsuits with the hard-working settlers, videlicet, “squatters,” guilty in complainants’ eyes, not only of “disturbing the peace of our lord the King,” but of attempting to appropriate unlawfully a piece of his colonial kingdom, compromised, as other parties have before done, for sums barely sufficient to cover the costs of litigation. In a few instances, suitors to the affections of the coy colonial heiresses, thinking by courtly ways to acquire their landed possessions and the common-law right to govern their persons, were dismissed with good-natured assurances that they should continue to look upon them as friends, but declined any more intimate relationships. In a few other cases still—like those of William Penn, Roger Williams, and Cecil Calvert—the tenants were freely and generously left to manage their civil and political affairs, without suit, let, or hindrance, while individual conscience was erected into a high court of equity, with supreme jurisdiction in things spiritual.
Representative government took at first different forms. In some of the settlements legislative grists were put into a mortar and pounded out into a simple, healthy, easily digested, coarse meal. Maryland and Massachusetts set up more luxurious mills, provided with double runs of stone,—an upper and lower one, which was supposed to grind out a finer kind of legislative flour. The brand, we need scarcely add, is now the popular American one, and is being, in limited amounts, exported for foreign use.
In some of these establishments “bolts” were now and then introduced, by some bran-new representative miller, and expectations were immediately held out to the anxious customers of better flour, and of a whiter color,—expectations, we regret to add, that rarely came to anything except increased fatness to the miller’s live stock, always grunting and grubbing around the mill doors.
Woman’s rights, too, thus early took root, sprouting out like young shoots from the old rotting stumps of a decaying civilization. Anne Hutchinson,—not Dickinson,—grieved in soul by the exclusion of her sex from the right to discuss and criticise, at the weekly meeting of the congregation, the last Sunday’s discourse,—a right now practised all over the world,—created by her fiery eloquence such a blaze in Massachusetts, that she soon made the Colony too hot for her. Sir Harry Vane, strange to say, did not turn the way that the wind blew; but, although a governor and a baronet, veered against the current of hot air. Let reformers pluck from these pages a fragrant leaf pressed and preserved for their reading when faint. It was from this little seed capsule, enwrapping a precious life, warmed by the heat of a woman’s mind, there sprang up in a few years that beautiful flower of spiritual liberty that now sends its rippling odor from sea to sea.
Woman’s Rights in 1637.
(p. 158)
Thus in all high places of political power there was a general thaw of royal prerogative and proprietarial claim; and popular rights trickled down upon the plain below. Galileo, in 1633, was condemned for asserting that the earth was a confirmed revolutionist; yet even fifty years after there might have been wafted back over his tomb on the Arno, from the shores of the James, the Susquehanna, and even from the Merrimack, a wind-gram, iterating his own protesting words, “E pur il se muove.”