Yes, the world did move! Even that hard part of it, crusted over with stern though earnest religious dogmas, began to stir. The austerity of Puritan faith, conscientious yet severe, which had worn the russet grimness which its own persecution in England had gathered around it—as hard woods, lying in damp, imprisoning places, become clothed with fungus growths—began to feel some of the sunny effects of the Hutchinson illumination. In Virginia time and free discussion were wearing away the granite barriers within which its legislation and loyalty had always sought to hem into a single channel, the Episcopal, the diverging streams of religious convictions.
The narrow bigotries of the times, showing themselves under different aspects, sprang naturally out of the various soils in which the seeds had taken root. The early colonists of New England, escaping like the Jews from Egyptian bondage, and lit by flaming torches and cloudy providences to their promised land, compelled every one, Canaanite and Quaker, independent Philistine and non-conforming Episcopalian, to bring offerings to their cherished altar, under pain of banishment to the wilderness beyond. Those of Virginia, on the contrary, bringing with them their own lares and penates from their father’s house, and fearing the introduction of strange deities, fenced in the sacred images with sharp picket-palings set by legal enactment. Over both, however, the new Evangel of toleration began to break, and voices of those “crying in the wilderness,” divinely sent, cleaving with gentle strokes the consciences of thoughtful men, and heard around the altar and inside the guarded pickets, heralded the coming Emanuel.
We have said that, up to the time of the accession of James II. in 1685, the fruits of civil liberty were gradually maturing in the growing settlements.
Immediately after that event, however, a chilling black frost fell upon them, rolling up the green leaves of the charters and threatening to kill outright all the chance-sown trees, as well as the more promising cultivated grafts. During the three and a half years that this blight continued, the greater part of the popular governments were stunted or destroyed. The Connecticut rocking horse, conjured from King Charles II. by Winthrop’s ring, was hid away in a hollow oak at Hartford. Sir Edmund Andros, a man of narrow spirit and keen temper, was sent out with instructions so large that he swallowed up the governments of all the New England Colonies and New York. A severe fit of indigestion followed, acidulating and fermenting, taking away the general appetite, and causing painful memories of the time when there were no heart-burnings and dangerous blood-rushings headward. And so, when in 1688 the Revolution brought in the Orange Prince, health bloomed again on the colonial cheek, and the constitution seemed to acquire a more vigorous tone than ever.
The colonists had early learned the strength which comes from union. From 1643 onwards for forty years the New England settlements joined hands with each other against the French of New France and Acadia, the French Indian allies, and the Dutch of New York; and while, like man and wife, they had their own healthy troubles, curtain lectures, poutings and make-ups, they stoutly defended the common home against all neighboring invasion. Persons once married are not apt to forget it, nor cease to sigh, after the tie is dissolved, for the benefits which accrued from it. The colonial widowers found it easier afterwards to contract a new union than the bachelor communities to form their first match. Eight years after the death of the first union the bereaved New-Englanders went out on a second courtship,—the trysting place being New York,—and there agreed upon a sort of runaway match to Canada. The honeymoon journey was not as pleasant as bridal trips through the Thousand Isles to Montreal and Quebec now are. In fact, although bound for Quebec, and even reaching it, they were not suffered by the French to enter it. They returned not over well pleased with each other, but particularly out of temper with the armed discourtesy of the French.
This little trip away from home was not the first nor the last which the Colonies were led to make. In fact, our people from the very beginning seem to have been curiously addicted to foreign missionary efforts. They acquired the passion at the outset from European suggestions. Whenever the state skeins there got into a tangle, some of the outside threads were sure to run into a dreadful kink here. No sooner was there a scrubbing and house-cleaning among the old folks on the Thames, Seine, Scheldt, or Rhine, than the brooms were got out on the Hudson, the James, and Connecticut, and up they all went at that standing bother of our colonial housewives, the nest of lively French flies in our northeast corner, or at those old yellow-legged Dutch hornets that had settled down on Manhattan and Long Island. The war between the English and Dutch Commonwealths in 1652, which sent Van Tromp’s broom over the seas, brushing down the red spots of St. George, set the colonial sweepers at work. The big and little brooms were, however, put aside after two years; but in 1663 they were all seized again, and by a single dash New York was swept into the English pan.
Amid all this dust and refuse matter of war one can pick out now and then some stray grains of shining value. Such was Mary’s and William’s College, established in Virginia in 1693, making the second bright college speck in America. Such were the gold and silver ores of thought found by George Fox, Increase Mather, and others, mixed with brown earth or imbedded in quartz, but valuable in any collection. Such, too, the loving messages sent from Friends in England to their brethren here, which we can now pick from that colonial dust-heap where they shine like plates of mica.
The Orange William could not of course long bloom in peace in his new royal bed. His father-in-law, James II., had fled across the channel to Louis XIV., and was selfishly entertained by him at Paris. William objected—as some people do nowadays—to his relative’s prolonged stay in that fascinating capital. This little unpleasantness resulted in a war which lasted until 1697. Of course the Colonies were highly offended too; and as soon as the two rather elderly gentlemen at Versailles and St. James had taken snuff, there was a general sneeze from Passamaquoddy Bay to the Altamaha River. Getting thus very red in the face, the colonists flung out their hands, which of course hit Canada right in the face. The French resented the slap, and pommelled away at New York, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, scratching off many scalps at Dover, Schenectady, and along the Penobscot. A regular settler was aimed back by the Colonies at the very nob of the French settlements, Quebec. An arm-ament, directed by Sir William Phipps, was flung out towards the St. Lawrence, but a skilful fence by the alert French warded off the blow. To heat the pokers in these fires, kindled in Europe, blown over to this side and fed here by wood furnished by the colonists, and often hauled from a great distance, was laborious and expensive. But this was a small care for England who coolly took out the irons when well aglow.
Little, however, did she then imagine that the young arms thus smiting the irons on these French and Indian anvils were making and hardening muscle that would one day resist her own heavy and long-reaching blows. Slowly, slowly, but surely. Wheat left in Egyptian cases for quite other purposes, three thousand years ago, patiently sleeping, sprouts at the call of the sun in after centuries. The colonial seeds carelessly or selfishly cast by royal hands into furrows, seeming like very rugged and ugly blotches on the wide wintry-looking fields of North America, quickened in less than a hundred years by the rain-patters, were to wave in ridges as green and blossoming, as English hedges in June.
None of our illuminated readers will fall down into that exalted, but still very common mistake, of supposing that the great mass of the men, women, and children, living here in the latter half of that seventeenth century, were all the while, or indeed to any great extent, occupied by, interested in, or even measurably affected by, these large public events. The old man who thought it strange that all the millions of people in the Roman Empire, who he naturally supposed, from his reading of history, were present at the killing of Cæsar, did not rise against Brutus, Cassius, and the rest and prevent it, is now dead, but he has left successors to his historical notions. Most people are just as apt to think that everybody at Jerusalem knew King David as certainly as the Skibbareen Irishman that every American whom he meets in Ireland must be acquainted with his cousin whose going off from Skibbareen was so well understood there. Louis Napoleon, in his Life of Cæsar, may magnify the importance and influence over his times of his self-reflecting hero; but we all know that, in fact, as soon as the large imperial microscope is taken off from the single spot, Cæsar goes back again into a speck on the broad Roman sheet. To the ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine Romans in one hundred thousand, it was practically of less consequence whether Cæsar, Antony, or Julius Scipio Smith ruled Rome, than whether the season was wet or dry, or whether their wives and children kept well and healthy. To the few around the court, to the mammas with eligible daughters just in the city of Rome, to a few vestimentary Jenkins who retailed to the dozen families of their set the latest scandals on the Palatine, it was a matter of some moment; to the farmers, mechanics, working-people paving the wide empire with their labor and patient, endless industries, of comparatively little consequence whatever. Doubtless great numbers of these hard-working Romans, in those unfortunate towns where there were no presses or telegraphs, lived forty, fifty, or sixty years after “great Cæsar had turned to clay,” without suspecting that he was not decorated china still at Rome; without dreaming that, while they themselves had been raising pulse and sour wine for their own little house sovereigns in Gaul or Germania, Augustus had succeeded to Cæsar’s power at the capitol, and had set those scribblers, Virgil, Livy, and Horace, to writing, and had made much history for Bohemians since. Little did they know that Tiberius had meanwhile succeeded Augustus and crucified more men at that Roman New York than he had hairs on his hard pate, and so kept on the imperial pastime with a keen appetite, until he was served with the same sauce that he had dished out so freely; nor had they ever heard tell that during the same interval, so uneventful for them in their far-off silent occupations, Caligula had crawled up to the place vacated by Tiberius, and from its slimy top had pitched victims to wild beasts and voracious fish, and amused the bloody pauses in his grim, mad humors by feeding his favorite horse with gilded oats, and would have made him consul had not the least inhuman brute died before his quadripedal instalment into the office which Cicero sought so long and praised so loudly.