The overthrow of the Pequots was a cardinal event in the planting of New England. It removed the chief obstacle to the colonization of the Connecticut coast, and brought the inland settlements into such unimpeded communication with those on tide-water as to prepare the way for the formation of the New England confederacy. Its first fruits were seen in the direction taken by the next wave of migration, which ended the Puritan exodus from England to America. About a month after the storming of the palisaded village there arrived in Boston a company of wealthy London merchants, with their families. The most prominent among them, Theophilus Eaton, was a member of the Company of Massachusetts Bay. Their pastor, John Davenport, was an eloquent preacher and a man of power. He was a graduate of Oxford, and in 1624 had been chosen vicar of St. Stephen's parish, in Coleman street, London. When he heard that Cotton and Hooker were about to sail for America, he sought earnestly to turn them from what he deemed the error of their ways, but instead he became converted himself and soon incurred the especial enmity of Laud, so that it became necessary for him to flee to Amsterdam. In 1636 he returned to England, and in concert with Eaton organized a scheme of emigration that included men from Yorkshire, Hertfordshire, and Kent. The leaders arrived in Boston in the midst of the Antinomian disputes, and although Davenport won admiration for his skill in battling with heresy, he may perhaps have deemed it preferable to lead his flock to some new spot in the wilderness where such warfare might not be required. The merchants desired a fine harbour and good commercial situation, and the reports of the men who returned from hunting the Pequots told them of just such a spot at Quinnipiack on Long Island Sound. Here they could carry out their plan of putting into practice a theocratic ideal even more rigid than that which obtained in Massachusetts, and arrange their civil as well as ecclesiastical affairs in accordance with rules to be obtained from a minute study of the Scriptures. [Sidenote: The colony of New Haven]
In the spring of 1638 the town of New Haven was accordingly founded. The next year a swarm from this new town settled Milford, while another party, freshly arrived from England, made the beginnings of Guilford. In 1640 Stamford was added to the group, and in 1643 the four towns were united into the republic of New Haven, to which Southold, on Long Island, and Branford were afterwards added. As being a confederation of independent towns, New Haven resembled Connecticut. In other respects the differences between the two reflected the differences between Davenport and Hooker; the latter was what would now be called more radical than Winthrop or Cotton, the former was more conservative. In the New Haven colony none but church-members could vote, and this measure at the outset disfranchised more than half the settlers in New Haven town, nearly half in Guilford, and less than one fifth in Milford. This result was practically less democratic than in Massachusetts where it was some time before the disfranchisement attained such dimensions. The power of the clergy reached its extreme point in New Haven, where each of the towns was governed by seven ecclesiastical officers known as "pillars of the church." These magistrates served as judges, and trial by jury was dispensed with, because no authority could be found for it in the laws of Moses. The legislation was quaint enough, though the famous "Blue Laws" of New Haven, which have been made the theme of so many jests at the expense of our forefathers, never really existed. The story of the Blue Laws was first published in 1781 by the Rev. Samuel Peters, a Tory refugee in London, who took delight in horrifying our British cousins with tales of wholesale tarring and feathering done by the patriots of the Revolution. In point of strict veracity Dr. Peters reminds one of Baron Munchausen; he declares that the river at Bellows Falls flows so fast as to float iron crowbars, and he gravely describes sundry animals who were evidently cousins to the Jabberwok. The most famous passage of his pretended code is that which enacts that "no woman shall kiss her child on the Sabbath," and that "no one shall play on any instrument of music except the drum, trumpet, or jewsharp." [Sidenote: Legend of the "Blue Laws">[
When the Long Parliament met in 1640, the Puritan exodus to New England came to an end. During the twenty years which had elapsed since the voyage of the Mayflower, the population had grown to 26,000 souls. Of this number scarcely 500 had arrived before 1629. It is a striking fact, since it expresses a causal relation and not a mere coincidence, that the eleven years, 1629-1640, during which Charles I. governed England without a parliament, were the same eleven years that witnessed the planting of New England. For more than a century after this there was no considerable migration to this part of North America. Puritan England now found employment for all its energies and all its enthusiasm at home. The struggle with the king and the efforts toward reorganization under Cromwell were to occupy it for another score of years, and then, by the time of the Restoration the youthful creative energy of Puritanism had spent itself. The influence of this great movement was indeed destined to grow wider and deeper with the progress of civilization, but after 1660 its creative work began to run in new channels and assume different forms. [Sidenote: End of the Puritan exodus]
It is curious to reflect what might have been the result, to America and to the world, had things in England gone differently between 1620 and 1660. Had the policy of James and Charles been less formidable, the Puritan exodus might never have occurred, and the Virginian type of society, varied perhaps by a strong Dutch infusion, might have become supreme in America. The western continent would have lost in richness and variety of life, and it is not likely that Europe would have made a corresponding gain, for the moral effect of the challenge, the struggle, and the overthrow of monarchy in England was a stimulus sorely needed by neighbouring peoples. It is not always by avoiding the evil, it is rather by grappling with it and conquering it that character is strengthened and life enriched, and there is no better example of this than the history of England in the seventeenth century.
On the other hand, if the Stuart despotism had triumphed in England, the Puritan exodus would doubtless have been swelled to huge dimensions. New England would have gained strength so quickly that much less irritation than she actually suffered between 1664 and 1689 would probably have goaded her into rebellion. The war of independence might have been waged a century sooner than it was. It is not easy to point to any especial advantage that could have come to America from this; one is rather inclined to think of the peculiarly valuable political training of the eighteenth century that would have been lost. Such surmises are for the most part idle. But as concerns Europe, it is plain to be seen, for reasons stated in my first chapter, that the decisive victory of Charles I. would have been a calamity of the first magnitude. It would have been like the Greeks losing Marathon or the Saracens winning Tours, supposing the worst consequences ever imagined in those hypothetical cases to have been realized. Or taking a more contracted view, we can see how England, robbed of her Puritan element, might still have waxed in strength, as France has done in spite of losing the Huguenots; but she could not have taken the proud position that she has come to occupy as mother of nations. Her preeminence since Cromwell's time has been chiefly due to her unrivalled power of planting self-supporting colonies, and that power has had its roots in English self-government. It is the vitality of the English Idea that is making the language of Cromwell and Washington dominant in the world.
CHAPTER IV. — THE NEW ENGLAND CONFEDERACY.
The Puritan exodus to New England, which came to an end about 1640, was purely and exclusively English. There was nothing in it that came from the continent of Europe, nothing that was either Irish or Scotch, very little that was Welsh. As Palfrey says, the population of 26,000 that had been planted in New England by 1640 "thenceforward continued to multiply on its own soil for a century and a half, in remarkable seclusion from other communities." During the whole of this period New England received but few immigrants; and it was not until after the Revolutionary War that its people had fairly started on their westward march into the state of New York and beyond, until now, after yet another century, we find some of their descendants dwelling in a homelike Salem and a Portland of charming beauty on the Pacific coast. Three times between the meeting of the Long Parliament and the meeting of the Continental Congress did the New England colonies receive a slight infusion of non-English blood. In 1652, after his victories at Dunbar and Worcester, Cromwell sent 270 of his Scottish prisoners to Boston, where the descendants of some of them still dwell. After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, 150 families of Huguenots came to Massachusetts. And finally in 1719, 120 Presbyterian families came over from the north of Ireland, and settled at Londonderry in New Hampshire, and elsewhere. In view of these facts it may be said that there is not a county in England of which the population is more purely English than the population of New England at the end of the eighteenth century. From long and careful research, Mr. Savage, the highest authority on this subject, concludes that more than 98 in 100 of the New England people at that time could trace their origin to England in the narrowest sense, excluding even Wales. As already observed, every English shire contributed something to the emigration, but there was a marked preponderance of people from the East Anglian counties. [Sidenote: The exodus was purely English]
The population of New England was nearly as homogeneous in social condition as it was in blood. The emigration was preeminent for its respectability. Like the best part of the emigration to Virginia, it consisted largely of country squires and yeomen. The men who followed Winthrop were thrifty and prosperous in their old homes from which their devotion to an idea made them voluntary exiles. They attached so much importance to regular industry and decorous behaviour that for a long time the needy and shiftless people who usually make trouble in new colonies were not tolerated among them. Hence the early history of New England is remarkably free from those scenes of violence and disorder which have so often made hideous the first years of new communities. Of negro slaves there were very few, and these were employed wholly in domestic service; there were not enough of them to affect the industrial life of New England or to be worth mentioning as a class. Neither were there many of the wretched people, kidnapped from the jails and slums of English sea-ports, such as in those early days when negro labour was scarce, were sent by ship-loads to Virginia, to become the progenitors of the "white trash." There were a few indented white servants, usually of the class known as "redemptioners," or immigrants who voluntarily bound themselves to service for a stated time in order to defray the cost of their voyage from Europe. At a later time there were many of these "redemptioners" in the middle colonies, but in New England they were very few; and as no stigma of servitude was attached to manual labour, they were apt at the end of their terms of service to become independent farmers; thus they ceased to be recognizable as a distinct class of society. Nevertheless the common statement that no traces of the "mean white" are to be found in New England is perhaps somewhat too sweeping. Interspersed among those respectable and tidy mountain villages, once full of such vigorous life, one sometimes comes upon little isolated groups of wretched hovels whose local reputation is sufficiently indicated by such terse epithets as "Hardscrabble" or "Hell-huddle." Their denizens may in many instances be the degenerate offspring of a sound New England stock, but they sometimes show strong points of resemblance to that "white trash" which has come to be a recognizable strain of the English race; and one cannot help suspecting that while the New England colonies made every effort to keep out such riff raff, it may nevertheless have now and then crept in. However this may be, it cannot be said that this element ever formed a noticeable feature in the life of colonial New England. As regards their social derivation, the settlers of New England were homogeneous in character to a remarkable degree, and they were drawn from the sturdiest part of the English stock. In all history there has been no other instance of colonization so exclusively effected by picked and chosen men. The colonists knew this, and were proud of it, as well they might be. It was the simple truth that was spoken by William Stoughton when he said, in his election sermon of 1688: "God sifted a whole nation, that He might send choice grain into the wilderness." [Sidenote: Respectable character of the emigration]