The Beginners of a Nation Part 22

[Sidenote: Note 8.]

[Sidenote: Compare Palfrey, i, 371, and Deane's note in Ma.s.s. Hist.

Soc. Proc. 1869, p. 185.]

[Sidenote: Hutchinson's Hist. Ma.s.s., p. 31.]

On the 20th of October Cradock resigned his governors.h.i.+p and Winthrop was chosen in his stead. Puritan ministers were at once elected to the freedom of the company, in order that its proceedings might not want the sanction of prayer. The next year the charter crossed the wide seas, and in 1630 a court of the company was held in the wilderness at Charlestown. But a subordinate government "for financial affairs only"

was maintained in London, with Cradock, the former president, at the head. This seems to have been an effectual blind, and probably the king's government did not know of the flight of the charter until the Privy Council in 1634 summoned Cradock to bring that doc.u.ment to the Council Board. Thomas Morton, the expelled master of Merrymount, writes of the wrath of Laud, who had been foiled by this pretty ruse: "My lord of Canterbury and my lord privy seal, having caused all Mr.

Cradock's letters to be viewed and his apology for the brethren particularly heard, protested against him and Mr. Humfries that they were a couple of imposturous knaves." Laud had thought to crush the government of Ma.s.sachusetts by destroying the company, whose office remained in London, with Cradock still apparently its head. The archbishop found too late that he had eagerly pounced upon a dummy. He devised many things afterward to achieve his purpose, but the charter remained over seas.

XII.

From the point of view of our later age, the removal of the charter government to America is the event of chief importance in this migration of Winthrop's company. The ultimate effect of this brilliant stroke was so to modify a commercial corporation that it became a colonial government as independent as possible of control from England. By the admission of a large number of the colonists to be freemen--that is, to vote as stockholders in the affairs of the company, which was now the colony itself, and a little later by the development of a second chamber--the government became representative.

[Sidenote: The main purpose.]

But we may not for a moment conceive that the colonists understood the importance of their act in the light of its consequences. In their minds the government was merely a setting and support for the church.

The founding of a new church establishment, after what they deemed the primitive model, was the heart of the enterprise. This is shown in many words uttered by the chief actors, and it appears in strong relief in an incident that occurred soon after the arrival of Winthrop's company. Isaac Johnston, the wealthiest man of the party, succ.u.mbed to disease and hards.h.i.+p, but "he felt much rejoiced at his death that the Lord had been pleased to keep his eyes open so long as to see one church of Christ gathered before his death." Here we have the Puritan pa.s.sion for a church whose discipline and services should realize their ideals--a pa.s.sion that in the stronger men suffered no abatement in the midst of the inevitable pestilence and famine that were wont to beset newly arrived colonists in that time.

XIII.

[Sidenote: Influence of Plymouth.]

One salient fact in the history of the Ma.s.sachusetts Bay colony is the dominant influence of the example of Plymouth. The Puritans of the Ma.s.sachusetts colony were not Separatists. No one had been more severe in controversy with the Separatists than some of the Puritans who remained in the Church of England. They were eagerly desirous not to be confounded with these schismatics. When the great migration of 1630 took place, the emigrants published a pathetic farewell, protesting with the sincerity of homesick exiles their attachment to the Church of England, "ever acknowledging that such hope and part as we have obtained in the common salvation we have received in her bosom and sucked at her b.r.e.a.s.t.s."

[Sidenote: Differences among the Puritans.]

It is to be remembered that these Puritans did not agree among themselves. Puritanism was of many shades. There were some, like the Brownes whom Endecott sent out of the colony, that were even unwilling to surrender the prayer book. The greater part of the earlier Puritans had desired to imitate the Presbyterianism of Scotland and Geneva, and in Elizabeth's time they had organized presbyteries. Nothing seemed more probable beforehand than the revival in New England of the presbyteries of the days of Cartwright. But what happened was unexpected even by the Puritans. The churches of Ma.s.sachusetts were formed on the model of John Robinson's Independency.

[Sidenote: Effect of emigration.]

[Sidenote: Roger Clap's Memoirs, 40.]

[Sidenote: Note 9.]

There must have been a certain exhilarant reaction in the minds of the Puritans when at last they were clear of the English coast and free from the authority that had put so many constraints upon them. There were preachings and expoundings by beloved preachers with no fear of pursuivants. The new religious freedom was delightful to intoxication.

"Every day for ten weeks together," writes one pa.s.senger, they had preaching and exposition. On one s.h.i.+p the watches were set by the Puritan captain with the accompaniment of psalm-singing. Those who all their lives long had made outward and inward compromises between their ultimate convictions and their obligations to antagonistic authority found themselves at length utterly free. It was not that action was freed from the restraint of fear, so much as that thought itself was freed from the necessity for politic compromises. Every s.h.i.+p thus became a seminary for discussion. Every man now indulged in the unwonted privilege of thinking his bottom thought. The tendency to swing to an extreme is all but irresistible in the minds of men thus suddenly liberated. To such enthusiasts the long-deferred opportunity to actualize ultimate ideals in an ecclesiastical vacuum would be accepted with joy. What deductions such companies would finally make from the hints in the New Testament was uncertain. The only sure thing was that every vestige of that which they deemed objectionable in the English church would be repressed, obliterated, in their new organization.

[Sidenote: Rise of the Congregational form in New England.]

[Sidenote: Cotton to Salonstall in Hutch. Papers.]

[Sidenote: Hubbard's Hist. of New Eng., 117.]

With the evils and abuses of the English church more and more exaggerated in their thoughts, the sin of separation readily came to seem less heinous than before. There was no longer any necessity for professing loyalty to the church nor any further temptation to think ill of those at Plymouth, who, like themselves, had suffered much to avoid what both Separatists and Puritans deemed unchristian practices.

A common creed and common sufferings, flight from the same oppression to find refuge in what was henceforth to be a common country, drew them to sympathy and affection for their forerunners at Plymouth. The Plymouth people were not backward to send friendly help to the newcomers. The influence of the physician sent from Plymouth to Endecott's party in the prevailing sickness soon persuaded the naturally radical Endecott to the Plymouth view of church government.

Winthrop's a.s.sociates, or the greater part of them, drifted in the same direction, to their own surprise, no doubt. There was a lack of uniformity in the early Ma.s.sachusetts churches and some clas.h.i.+ng of opinion. Some ministers left the colony dissatisfied; one or more of the churches long retained Presbyterian forms, and some stanch believers in presbyterial government lamented long afterward that New England ecclesiastical forms were not those of the Calvinistic churches of Europe. But the net result was that Robinsonian independency became the established religion in New England, whence it was transplanted to England during the Commonwealth, and later became the prevailing discipline among English dissenters.

[Sidenote: Note 10.]

Thus the church discipline and the form of government in Ma.s.sachusetts borrowed much from Plymouth, but the mildness and semi-toleration--the "toleration of tolerable opinions"--which Robinson had impressed on the Pilgrims was not so easily communicated to their new neighbors who had been trained in another school.

ELUCIDATIONS.

[Sidenote: Note 1, page 191.]

Morton's settlement has become the subject of a literature of its own, and of some rather violent and amusing discussion even in our times.

Morton's New English Canaan has been edited by Mr. C. F. Adams for the Prince Society. His defensive account of himself leaves the impression that the author was just the sort of clever and reckless rake who is most dangerous to settlements in contact with savages, and who might be expelled neck and heels from a frontier community holding no scruples of a Puritan sort. The Royal Proclamation in Rymer's Foedera, xvii, 416 (and Hazard's State Papers, i, 151), 1622, sets forth the evil of the sale of arms to the savages, but it was leveled at earlier offenders than Morton. Compare Sainsbury's Calendar, September 29 and November 24, 1630, pp. 120, 122. There are also references, more or less extended, to Morton in the Ma.s.sachusetts Records, Winthrop's Journal, Bradford's Plimouth Plantation, Dudley's Letter to the Countess of Lincoln in Young's Chronicles of Ma.s.sachusetts, and in other early accounts.

[Sidenote: Note 2, page 193.]

Abbott's account of Laud's rise, Rushworth, i, 440, is traced with a bitter pen, no doubt, but the student Laud, as Abbott draws him, is so much like his later self that one can not but believe that the description of him picking quarrels with the public readers and carrying information against them to the bishop has a basis of fact.

[Sidenote: Note 3, page 199.]

Rushworth, writing under the later date of 1637, says: "The severe Censures in Star Chamber, and the greatness of the Fines, and the rigorous Proceedings to impose Ceremonies, the suspending and silencing Mult.i.tudes of Ministers, for not reading in the Church the Book for Sports to be exercised on the Lord's day, caused many of the Nation, both Ministers and others, to sell their Estates, and to set Sail for New England (a late Plantation in America), where they hold a Plantation by Patent from the King." Part II, vol. i, p. 410.

[Sidenote: Note 4, page 204.]

"We trust you will not be unmindful of the main end of our Plantation, by endeavouring to bring the Indians to a knowledge of the Gospel."

Cradock's letter to Endecott, February 16, 1629, Young's Chronicle, 133; also the official letter, ibid., page 142, where the "propagation of the Gospel" among whites and Indians is the "aim." The Royal Charter itself declared that "to win and invite the natives of the country to the knowledge and obedience of the only true G.o.d and Saviour of mankind ... is the princ.i.p.al end of this Plantation." (A similar provision was inserted in the Connecticut Charter in 1662, in imitation of that of Ma.s.sachusetts.) The common seal of the Ma.s.sachusetts colony, sent over in 1629, bore an Indian with the inscription, "Come over and help us." Young's Chronicles of Ma.s.sachusetts, 155, Instructions to Endecott. The paper of "Reasons,"

attributed to Winthrop, keeps the conversion of the Indians in view, but it is blended with that which was in his mind the main end, the founding of a Puritan church. The first paragraph reads, "It will be a service to the Church of great consequence to carry the Gospell into those parts of the world, to helpe on the comminge of the fullnesse of the Gentiles, & to raise a Bulworke against the kingdome of Ante-Christ which the Jesuites labour to reare up in those parts."

Life and Letters of Winthrop, i, 309. The copy of this paper in Sir John Eliot's handwriting has a preamble written in a nervous style that may well be Eliot's own. This preamble goes back to the conversion of the Indians as a main purpose. The Antapologia of T.

Edwards, 1644, declares that White of Dorchester and others had the conversion of the Indians in view in promoting emigration to New England. Edwards says, page 41, that the establis.h.i.+ng of Congregational churches "was not in the thoughts of them that were the first movers in that or of the ministers that were sent over in the beginning." The statement is quite too strong, but the ecclesiastical purpose seems to have grown rapidly when the number of emigrants revealed the greatness of the opportunity.

[Sidenote: Note 5, page 204.]

Cotton Mather says, Magnalia, Book II, chap. iv, 3, that Winthrop was made a justice at eighteen, but Mather's account of anything marvelous needs support. Winthrop held his first court at Groton Hall several months after he had attained his majority. Life and Letters, i, 62.

Compare page 223 of the same volume.

[Sidenote: Note 6, page 205.]

Of his election to the governors.h.i.+p he wrote to his wife, "The onely thinge that I have comforte of in it is, that heerby I have a.s.surance that my charge is of the Lorde & that he hath called me to this worke." Life and Letters, i, 340.

[Sidenote: Note 7, page 208.]

The government of the colony under Endecott was substantially that prescribed for "particular plantations" in the general order of the Virginia Company at the time the charter for the Pilgrim colony was granted, and like that which was formed at Plymouth under the Compact.

The Ma.s.sachusetts form may have been borrowed from Plymouth. This may be considered the primary form of colony government in the scheme of the Virginia Company. The plan antedates the formation of the Virginia Company by at least twenty years, for it was a form proposed by Ralegh when, in 1587, he organized his colony under the t.i.tle: "The Governor and a.s.sistants of the city of Ralegh in Virginia." The secondary form of government was that prescribed for Virginia in the charter of 1618, which added a lower house elective by the people. This fully developed government could come only when the population had become large enough to render a representative system possible.