“They rather made choice to enter further among the Indians than to hazard the fury of malignant adversaries who might pursue them, and therefore chose a place situated upon Charles River, between Charlestown and Watertown, where they erected a towne called Newtowne, and where they gathered the 8th Church of Christ.”
It was agreed that the Governor, John Winthrop, the Deputy Governor, Thomas Dudley, and all the councillors, except John Endicott, who had already settled at Salem, should build and occupy houses at Newtowne, but this agreement was never carried out. Winthrop, Dudley and Bradstreet built houses, and the General Court of the colony met alternately at Newtowne and at Boston until 1638, when it finally settled in Boston. Yet in spite of the superior advantages of Boston the new settlement evidently flourished, for in 1633 a traveller—the writer of New England’s Prospect—describes the village as “one of the neatest and best compacted towns in New England, having many fair structures, with many handsome contrived streets. The inhabitants, most of them, are rich and well stored with cattle of all sorts.”
This is doubtless an extravagant picture and true only in comparison with some of the neighboring plantations which were not so favorably situated. Newtowne was really a crude and straggling settlement made up of some sixty or seventy log cabins or poor frame houses stretching along a road which skirted the river marshes and of which the wanderings were prescribed more by the devious channel of the Charles than by mathematical exactness. The meeting-house, built of rough-hewn boards with the crevices sealed with mud, stood at the crossing of the road with the path that led down to the river, where there was a ladder for the convenience of landing. So primitive was the place that Thomas Dudley, the chief man of the town, writing home, could say, “I have no table nor any place to write in than by the fireside on my knee.” Such was the splendor of the whilom capital of New England.
Like most of the Massachusetts towns, Cambridge began as a church. Though Dudley and Bradstreet and Haynes were high in the councils of the infant commonwealth, holding successively or simultaneously the offices of governor and military chief, yet the leading personality of the village was the minister. The roll of Cambridge ministers begins with the great name of Thomas Hooker, the founder of Connecticut, and the man who first visioned and did much to make possible our American democracy. Hooker, with his congregation from Braintree, in Essex, England, came to Massachusetts in 1632, and after a short stay at Mount Wollaston, settled at Newtowne, raising the population to nearly five hundred souls. But the stay of the Braintree church was short. Some adventurous spirits had penetrated the wilderness of the interior until they discovered the charm and fertility of the valley of the Connecticut, and soon Hooker and his company were impelled by “the strong bent of their spirits” to remove thither. They alleged, in petitioning the General Court for permission to remove, that their cattle were cramped for room in Newtowne, and that it behooved the English colonists to keep the Dutch out of Connecticut; but the real motive of the exodus was doubtless ecclesiastical. Hooker did not find himself altogether in accord with the Boston teacher, John Cotton. “Two such eminent stars,” says Hubbard, writing in 1682, “both of the first magnitude, though of different influence, could not well continue in one and the same orb.” Hooker took the more liberal side in the antinomian controversy which had already begun to make trouble, and his subsequent conduct of affairs in Connecticut shows that he did not approve the Massachusetts policy of restricting the suffrage to church members. In the spring of 1636, therefore, Hooker and most of his congregation sold their possessions, and driving one hundred and sixty cattle before them, went on their way to the planting of Hartford and the founding of a new commonwealth.
This was the first of many separations by which Cambridge has become the mother of many sturdy children. The original boundaries of the town stretched from Dedham on the south all the way to the Merrimac River on the north. Gradually, by the gathering of new churches and peaceable partition, this territory has been divided, and out of the original Newtowne have been formed, besides the present Cambridge, Billerica, Bedford, Lexington, Arlington, Brighton and Newton. Governors Dudley and Bradstreet removed to Ipswich, and Simon Willard went to be the chief layman of Concord and a famous builder and defender of towns.
The rude houses of Hooker’s congregation were bought by a newly arrived company, the flock of the Rev. Thomas Shepard. This firm but gentle leader, who left a deep impress on the habit of the town, was a youth of thirty-one, and a graduate, like many of the Massachusetts leaders, of Emanuel College, at Cambridge. He came to New England with a company of earnest followers, actuated, as he wrote, by desire for “the fruition of God’s ordinances. Though my motives were mixed, and I looked much to my own quiet, yet the Lord let me see the glory of liberty in New England, and made me purpose to live among God’s people as one come from the dead to His praise.” His brave young wife died “in unspeakable joy” only a fortnight after his settlement at Cambridge, and was soon followed by the chief man of his flock and his closest friend, Roger Harlakenden, another godly youth of the manly type of English pioneers. At once, too, Shepard was plunged into the stormy debates of the antinomian controversy which nearly caused a permanent division in the Congregational churches. The general election of 1637, which was held on the Common at Newtowne, was a tumultuous gathering, and discussion over the merits of “grace” and “works” ran high till John Wilson, minister of the Boston church, climbed up into a big oak tree, and made a speech which carried the day for John Winthrop to the confusion of the heretical disciples of Anne Hutchinson. Through these stormy waters Shepard
steered his course so discreetly that he came into high favor among all people as a sound and vigilant minister, and Cotton Mather tells us that “it was with a respect unto this vigilancy and the enlightening and powerful ministry of Mr. Shepard, that, when the foundation of a college was to be laid, Cambridge, rather than any other place, was pitched upon to be the seat of that happy seminary.”