At the moment of departing, there was a quailing of the spirit on the part of some of the emigrants; but Winthrop comforted them; he told them that they must "keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace"; that, in the wilderness, they would see more of God than they could in England; and that their plantation should be of such a quality as that the founders of future plantations should pray that "The Lord make it likely that of New England." These were good words. Nevertheless, there were not a few seceders, and it was not till the year had advanced that the full number of vessels found their way to the port of Boston. But eleven ships, including the Arbella which bore Winthrop, sailed at once, with seven hundred men and women, and every appliance that experience and forethought could suggest for the convenience and furtherance of life in a new country. Their going made a deep impression throughout England.
And well it might! For these people were not unknown and rude, like the Plymouth Pilgrims; they were not fiercely intolerant fanatics, whose sincerity might be respected, but whose company must be irksome to all less extreme than themselves. They were of gentle blood and training; persons whose acquaintance was a privilege; who added to the richness and charm of social life. That people of this kind should remove themselves to the wilderness meant much more, to the average mind, than that religious outcasts like the Pilgrims should do so. For the latter, one place might be as good as another; but that the others should give up their homes and traditions for the hardships and isolation of such an existence seemed incomprehensible; and when no other motive could be found than that which they professed—"the honor of God"—grave thoughts could not but be awakened. The sensation was somewhat the same as if, in our day, a hundred thousand of the most favorably known and highly endowed persons in the country were to remove to Chinese Tartary to escape from the corruption and frivolity of business and social life, and to create an ideal community in the desert. We could smile at such a hegira if Tom, Dick and Harry were concerned in it; but if the men and women of light and leading abandon us, the implied indictment is worth heeding.
The personal character and nature of Winthrop are well known, and may serve as a type for the milder aspect of his companions. He was of a gentle and conciliating temper, affectionate, and prizing the affection of others. There was a certain sweetness about him, a tendency to mild joyousness, a desire to harmonize all conflicts, a disposition to think good, that good might come of it. He was indisposed to violence in opinion as much as in act; he believed that love was the fulfilling of the law, and would dissolve opposition to the law, if it were allowed time and opportunity. His cultivated intellect recognized a certain inevitableness, or preordained growth in mortal affairs, which made him sympathetic even toward those who differed from him, for did they not use the best light they had? He conformed to the English church, and yet he absented himself from England, not being willing to condemn the orthodox ritual, yet feeling that the Gospel in its purity could be more intimately enjoyed in America. He was no believer in the theory of democratic equality; it seemed to him contrary to natural order; there were degrees and gradations in all things, men included; there were those fitted to govern, and those fitted to serve; power should be in the hands of the few, but they should be "the wisest of the best." He had no doubts as to the obligations of loyalty to the King, and yet he gave up home and ease to live where the King was a sentiment rather than a fact. But beneath all this engaging softness there was strength in Winthrop; the fiber of him was fine, but it was of resolute temper. Simple goodness is one of the mightiest of powers, and he was good in all simplicity. He could help his servants in the humblest household drudgery, and yet preserve the dignity befitting the Governor of the people. He was not a man to be bullied or terrified, but his wisdom and forbearance disarmed an enemy, and thus removed all need of fighting him. He dominated those around him spontaneously and involuntarily; they, as it were, insisted upon being led by him, and commanded him to exact their obedience. His influence was purifying, encouraging, uplifting, and upon the whole conservative; had he lived a hundred years later, he would not have been found by the side of Adams, Patrick Henry, and James Otis. Sympathy and courtesy made him seem yielding; yet, like a tree that bends to the breeze, he still maintained his place, and was less changeable than many whose stubbornness did not prevent their drifting. His insight and intelligence may have enabled him to foresee to what a goal the New England settlers were bound; but though he would have sympathized with them, he would not have been swayed to join them. As it was, he wrought only good to them, for they were in the formative stage, when moderation helps instead of hindering. He mediated between the state they were approaching, and that from which they came, and he died before the need of alienating himself from them arrived. His resoluteness was shown in his resistance to Anne Hutchinson and her supporter, Sir Harry Vane, who professed the heresy that faith absolved from obedience to the moral law; they were forced to quit the colony; and so was Roger Williams, as lovely as and in some respects a loftier character than Winthrop. In reviewing the career of this distinguished and engaging man, we are surprised that he should have found it on his conscience to leave England. Endicott was born to subdue the wilderness, and so was many another of the Puritans; but it seems as if Winthrop might have done and said in King Charles's palace all that he did and said in Massachusetts, without offense. But it is probable that his moderation appears greater in the primitive environment than it would have done in the civilized one; and again, the impulse to restrain others from excess may have made him incline more than he would otherwise have done toward the other side.
But tradition has too much disposed us to think of the Puritans as of men who had thrown aside all human tenderness and sympathy, and were sternly and gloomily preoccupied with the darker features of religion exclusively. Winthrop corrects this judgment; he was a Puritan, though he was sunny and gentle; and there were many others who more or less resembled him. The reason that the somber type is the better known is partly because of its greater picturesqueness and singularity, and partly because the early life of New England was on the whole militant and aggressive, and therefore brought the rigid and positive qualities more prominently forward.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the piety of the dominating powers in Massachusetts during the first years of the colony's existence. It was almost a mysticism. That intimate and incommunicable experience which is sometimes called "getting religion"—the Lord knocking at the door of the heart and being admitted—was made the condition of admission to the responsible offices of government. This was to make God the ruler, through instruments chosen by Himself—theoretically a perfect arrangement, but in practice open to the gravest perils. It not merely paved the way to imposture, but invited it; and the most dangerous imposture is that which imposes on the impostor himself. It created an oligarchy of the most insidious and unassailable type: a communion of earthly "saints," who might be, and occasionally were, satans at heart. It is essentially at variance with democracy, which it regards as a surrender to the selfish license of the lowest range of unregenerate human nature; and yet it is incompatible with hereditary monarchy, because the latter is based on uninspired or mechanical selection. The writings of Cotton Mather exhibit the peculiarities and inconsistencies of Puritanism in the most favorable and translucent light, for Mather was himself wedded to them, and of a most inexhaustible fertility in their exposition.
Winthrop was responsible for the "Oath of Fidelity," which required its taker to suffer no attempt to change or alter the government contrary to its laws; and for the law excluding from the freedom of the body politic all who were not members of its church communion. The people, however, stipulated that the elections should be annual, and each town chose two representatives to attend the court of assistants. But having thus asserted their privileges, they forbore to interfere with the judgment of their leaders, and maintained them in office. The possible hostility of England, the strangeness and dangers of their surroundings in America, and the appalling prevalence of disease and mortality among them, possibly drove them to a more than normal fervor of piety. Since God was so manifestly their only sword and shield, and was reputed to be so terrible and implacable in His resentments, it behooved them to omit no means of conciliating His favor.
Winthrop found anything but a land flowing with milk and honey, when he arrived at Salem, where the ships first touched. As when, twenty years before, Delaware came to Jamestown, the people were on the verge of starvation, and it was necessary to send a vessel back to England for supplies. There were acute suffering and scarcity all along the New England coast, and though the spirit of resignation was there, it seemed likely that there would be soon little flesh left through which to manifest it. The physical conditions were intolerable. The hovels in which the people were living were wretched structures of rough logs, roofed with straw, with wooden chimneys and narrow and darksome interiors. They were patched with bark and rags; many were glad to lodge themselves in tents devised of fragments of drapery hung on a framework of boughs. The settlement was in that transition state between crude wilderness and pioneer town, when the appearance is most repulsive and disheartening. There is no order, uniformity, or intelligent procedure. There is a clump of trees of the primeval forest here, the stumps and litter of a half-made clearing there, yonder a patch of soil newly and clumsily planted; wigwams and huts alternate with one another; men are digging, hewing, running to head back straying cattle, toiling in with fragments of game on their shoulders; yonder a grave is being dug in the root-encumbered ground, and hard by a knot of mourners are preparing the corpse for interment. There is no rest or comfort anywhere for eye or heart. The only approximately decent dwelling in Salem at this time was that of John Endicott. Higginson was dying of a fever. Lady Arbella, who had accompanied her husband, Isaac Johnson, had been ailing on the voyage, and lingered here but a little while before finding a grave. In a few months two hundred persons perished. It was no place for weaklings—or for evil-doers either; among the earliest of the established institutions were the stocks and the whipping-post, and they were not allowed to stand idle.
Winthrop and most of the others soon moved on down the coast toward Boston. It had been the original intention to keep the emigrants in one body, but that was found impracticable; they were forced to divide up into small parties, who settled where they best could, over an area of fifty or a hundred miles. Nantasket, Watertown, Charlestown, Saugus, Lynn, Maiden, Roxbury, all had their handfuls of inhabitants. It was exile within exile; for miles meant something in these times. More than a hundred of the emigrants, cowed by the prospect, deserted the cause and returned to England. Yet Winthrop and the other leaders did not lose heart, and their courage and tranquillity strengthened the others. It is evidence of the indomitable spirit of these people that one of their first acts was to observe a day of fasting and prayer; a few days later the members of the congregation met and chose their pastor, John Wilson, and organized the first Church of Boston. They did not wait to build the house of God, but met beneath the trees, or gathered round a rock which might serve the preacher as a pulpit. There was simplicity enough to satisfy the most conscientious. "We here enjoy God and Jesus Christ," wrote Winthrop: "I do not repent my coming: I never had more content of mind."
After a year there were but a thousand settlers in Massachusetts. Among them was Roger Williams, a man so pure and true as of himself to hallow the colony; but it is illustrative of the intolerance which was from the first inseparable from Puritanism, that he was driven away because he held conscience to be the only infallible guide. We cannot blame the Puritans; they had paid a high price for their faith, and they could not but guard it jealously. Their greatest peril seemed to them to be dissension or disagreements on points of belief; except they held together, their whole cause was lost. Williams was no less an exile for conscience' sake than they; but as he persisted in having a conscience strictly his own, instead of pooling it with that of the church, they were constrained to let him go. They did not perceive, then or afterward, that such action argued feeble faith. They could not, after all, quite trust God to take care of His own; they dared not believe that He could reveal Himself to others as well as to them; they feared to admit that they could have less than the whole truth in their keeping. So they banished, whipped, pilloried, and finally even hanged dissenters from their dissent. We, whose religious tolerance is perhaps as excessive as theirs was deficient, are slow to excuse them for this; but they believed they were fighting for much more than their lives; and as for faith in God, it is surely no worse to fall into error regarding it than to dismiss it altogether.
In a community where the integrity of the church was the main subject of concern, it could not be long before religious conservatism would be reflected in the political field. Representative government was conceded in theory; but in practice, Winthrop and others thought that it would be better ignored; the people could not easily meet for deliberations, and how could their affairs be in better hands than those of the saints, who already had charge of them? But the people declined to surrender their liberties; there should be rotation in office; voting should be by ballot instead of show of hands. Taxation was restricted; and in 1635 there was agitation for a written constitution; and the relative authority of the deputies and the assistants was in debate. Our national predisposition to "talk politics" had already been born.