Settlement of New England by congregations.
That extreme Puritan theory of ecclesiastical polity, according to which each congregation was to be a little self-governing republic, had much to do with the way in which New England was colonized. The settlers came in congregations, led by their favourite ministers,—such men, for example, as Higginson and Cotton, Hooker and Davenport. When such men, famous in England for their bold preaching and imperilled thereby, decided to move to America, a considerable number of their parishioners would decide to accompany them, and similarly minded members of neighbouring churches would leave their own pastor and join in the migration. Such a group of people, arriving on the coast of Massachusetts, would naturally select some convenient locality, where they might build their houses near together and all go to the same church.
Land grants in Massachusetts.
This migration, therefore, was a movement, not of individuals or of separate families, but of church-congregations, and it continued to be so as the settlers made their way inland and westward. The first river towns of Connecticut were thus founded by congregations coming from Dorchester, Cambridge, and Watertown. This kind of settlement was favoured by the government of Massachusetts, which made grants of land, not to individuals but to companies of people who wished to live together and attend the same church.
Small farms.
It was also favoured by economic circumstances. The soil of New England was not favourable to the cultivation of great quantities of staple articles, such as rice or tobacco, so that there was nothing to tempt people to undertake extensive plantations. Most of the people lived on small farms, each family raising but little more than enough food for its own support; and the small size of the farms made it possible to have a good many in a compact neighbourhood. It appeared also that towns could be more easily defended against the Indians than scattered plantations; and this doubtless helped to keep people together, although if there had been any strong inducement for solitary pioneers to plunge into the great woods, as in later years so often happened at the West, it is not likely that any dread of the savages would have hindered them.
Township and village.
Thus the early settlers of New England came to live in townships. A township would consist of about as many farms as could be disposed within convenient distance from the meeting-house, where all the inhabitants, young and old, gathered every Sunday, coming on horseback or afoot. The meeting-house was thus centrally situated, and near it was the town pasture or “common,” with the school-house and the blockhouse, or rude fortress for defence against the Indians. For the latter building some commanding position was apt to be selected, and hence we so often find the old village streets of New England running along elevated ridges or climbing over beetling hilltops. Around the meeting-house and common the dwellings gradually clustered into a village, and after a while the tavern, store, and town-house made their appearance.
Social position of settlers in New England.
Among the people who thus tilled the farms and built up the villages of New England, the differences in what we should call social position, though noticeable, were not extreme. While in England some had been esquires or country magistrates, or “lords of the manor,”—a phrase which does not mean a member of the peerage, but a landed proprietor with dependent tenants,—some had been yeomen, or persons holding farms by some free kind of tenure; some had been artisans or tradesmen in cities. All had for many generations been more or less accustomed to self-government and to public meetings for discussing local affairs. That self-government, especially as far as church matters were concerned, they were stoutly bent upon maintaining and extending. Indeed, that was what they had crossed the ocean for. Under these circumstances they developed a kind of government which has remained practically unchanged down to the present day. In the town meeting the government is the entire adult male population. Its merits, from a genuine democratic point of view, have long been recognized, but in these days of rampant political quackery they are worth recalling to mind, even at the cost of a brief digression.