The Beginners of a Nation Part 33

CHAPTER THE THIRD.

_NEW ENGLAND DISPERSIONS._

I.

[Sidenote: Importance of the Rhode Island colony.]

The removal of Roger Williams and his friends was the beginning of dispersions from the mother colony on Ma.s.sachusetts Bay. The company that settled Providence was too small in number at first to be of great importance. The emigration of Williams and his followers to the Narragansett country was an example that may have turned the scale with Hooker and his party in favor of a removal to the Connecticut instead of to some place in the Ma.s.sachusetts wilderness. Williams certainly prepared a harbor for most of the Hutchinsonians, and pointed the way to Gortonists, Baptists, Quakers, and all others of uneasy conscience. Providence Plantation, and at times all Rhode Island, fell into disorders inevitable in a refuge for scruplers and enthusiasts established by one whose energies were centrifugal and disintegrating. But when at length it emerged from its primordial chaos the community on Narragansett Bay became of capital importance as an example of the secularization of the state, and of the congruity of the largest liberty in religion with civil peace. The system which the more highly organized and orderly commonwealths of Ma.s.sachusetts and Connecticut labored so diligently to establish--a state propping and defending orthodoxy and church uniformity--was early cast into the rubbish heap of the ages. The principle on which the heterogeneous colony of religious outcasts on Narragansett Bay founded itself, was stone rejected that has become the head of the corner.

II.

[Sidenote: The Connecticut migration.]

The emigration to the Connecticut River was already incubating when Williams sat down with his radical seceders in the Narragansett woods.

The Connecticut settlement was impelled by more various and complicated motives than that of Williams, and its origins are not so easy to disentangle. But it, too, has an epic interest; one dominant personality overtops all others in this second of venturesome westward migrations into the wilderness.

[Sidenote: Early life of Hooker.]

[Sidenote: 1630.]

We can trace nothing of Hooker to his birthplace, a little hamlet in Leicesters.h.i.+re, except that the imagery of his discourses in after life sometimes reflected the processes of husbandry he had known in childhood. But that he pa.s.sed through Emmanuel College, Cambridge, while Chaderton was master, is more significant, for Emmanuel was the cradle of Puritan divines, the hatching-place of Puritan crotchets, the college whose chapel stood north and south that it might have no sacred east end, a chapel in which "riming psalms" were sung instead of the hymns, and where lessons different from those appointed in the calendar were read. Hooker was presented to the living of Chelmsford, in Ess.e.x. Here his eloquence attracted wide attention, and unhappily attracted at the same time the notice of his diocesan Laud, then Bishop of London, who drove the preacher from his pulpit. Hooker engaged in teaching a school four miles from Chelmsford, where Eliot, afterward the Indian apostle, became his usher and disciple. But Laud had marked him as one to be brought low. He was cited before the Court of High Commission, whose penalties he escaped by fleeing to Holland.

Thus early in his career Laud unwittingly put in train events that resulted in the founding of a second Puritan colony in New England.

III.

[Sidenote: Hooker's company.]

[Sidenote: Walker's First Church in Hartford, 40.]

[Sidenote: Dudley's Letter to Countess of Lincoln, Young's Chron. of Ma.s.s., 320.]

[Sidenote: Ma.s.s. Records, 14 June, 1631, and 3 February, 1632.]

[Sidenote: Holmes's Hist. Cambridge, 1st Ma.s.s. Hist. Coll., vii, 6-8.]

The persecution of Hooker made a great commotion in Ess.e.x, dividing attention with the political struggle between the king and the people about tonnage and poundage. While Hooker was an exile in Holland a company of people from Braintree and other parts of Ess.e.x, near his old parish of Chelmsford, emigrated to New England, chiefly, one may suppose, for the sake of good gospel, since they came hoping to tempt Hooker to become their pastor. This company settled at Newtown, now Cambridge, which had been projected for a fortified capital of the colony, that should be defensible against Indians and out of reach if a sea force should be sent from England to overthrow the government.

Newtown was palisaded and otherwise improved at the expense of the whole colony. Hooker's company were perhaps ordered to settle there because no place was appropriate to the great divine but the new metropolis.

IV.

[Sidenote: Failure of Newtown as a metropolis.]

[Sidenote: Savage's Winthrop, i, 98, 99. 1632.]

But a metropolis can not be made at will, as many a new community has discovered. It had been arranged that all the "a.s.sistants" or ruling magistrates of Ma.s.sachusetts should live within the palisades of Newtown, but Winthrop, after the frame of his house was erected, changed his mind and took down the timbers, setting them up again at Boston. This was the beginning of unhappiness at Newtown, and the discontent had to do, no doubt, with the rivalry between that place and Boston. It is probable that there was a rise in the value of Boston home lots about the time of the removal of the governor's house. Trade runs in the direction of the least resistance, and peninsular Boston was destined by its situation to be the metropolis of New England in spite of the forces that worked for Salem and Newtown.

[Sidenote: Wonder-working Providence, ch. xxviii.]

[Sidenote: Wood's N. E. Prospect, 1634. Young, 402.]

[Sidenote: October, 1632.]

Newtown, or Cambridge, to call it by its later name, was a long, narrow strip of land, "in forme like a list cut off from the Broad-cloath" of Watertown and Charlestown. The village was compactly built, as became an incipient metropolis, and the houses were unusually good for a new country. In one regard it was superior to Boston. No wooden chimneys or thatched roofs were allowed in it. To this town came Hooker, and if it had continued to be the capital, Hooker and not Cotton might have become the leading spirit of the colony. But a capital at a place to which only small vessels could come up, was not practical, and the magistrates in the year before Hooker's arrival decided by general consent that Boston was the fittest place in the bay for public meetings.

[Sidenote: Hooker's arrival, 1633.]

[Sidenote: Wood's N. E. Prospect.]

[Sidenote: Young, 397, 398.]

The hopes of Newtown were perhaps not wholly extinct for some time after. The arrival of Hooker must have been a great encouragement to the people. But Boston was on the alert. That town had neither forest nor meadow land. Hay, timber, and firewood were brought to its wharf in boats. From the absence of wood and marsh came some advantages--it was plagued with neither mosquitoes nor rattlesnakes, and what cattle there were on the bare peninsula were safe from wolves. Not to be behind in evangelical attractions it secured Cotton to balance Newtown's Hooker, when both arrived in the same s.h.i.+p. That Boston was now recognized as the natural metropolis was shown in the abortive movement to pay a part of Cotton's stipend by a levy on the whole colony.

V.

[Sidenote: Discontent at Newtown.]

[Sidenote: Ma.s.s. Rec., _pa.s.sim_.]

[Sidenote: Wonder-working Providence, ch. x.x.xiii.]

[Sidenote: Compare Holmes's History of Cambridge, 1 Ma.s.s. Hist. Coll., vii, pp. 1, 2.]

[Sidenote: 2d Ma.s.s., vii, 127.]

"Ground, wood, and medowe" were matters of dispute between Newtown and its neighbors as early as 1632, and the frequent references to questions regarding the boundary of Newtown go to show dissatisfaction in the discarded metropolis, the number of whose people was out of proportion to its resources. Cattle were scarce in the colony. Each head was worth about twenty-eight pounds, the equivalent of several hundred dollars of money in our time. The Newtown people saw no prospect of foreign trade, and found the plowable plains of Cambridge dry and sandy. They had given up trying to coax fortunes from the stony hill land of the town with hand labor, and turned their attention to the more profitable pursuit of cattle-raising. They took unusual pains to protect their valuable herd from the wolves by impaling a common pasture. Natural meadow was the only resource for hay in the English agriculture of the seventeenth century, and the low grounds of Cambridge yielded a poor gra.s.s. Shrewd men in Newtown already saw that as an agricultural colony Ma.s.sachusetts was destined to failure, and one Pratt, a surgeon there, was called to account for having written to England that the commonwealth was "builded on rocks, sands, and salt marshes."

VI.

[Sidenote: Cotton and Hooker.]

[Sidenote: Compare Walker's First Church of Hartford, 129-132.]

There is good authority for believing that a rivalry between Hooker and Cotton had quite as much to do with the discontent as straitened boundaries and wiry marsh gra.s.s. Hooker was the greatest debater, perhaps, in the ranks of the Puritans. His theology was somewhat somber, his theory of Christian experience of the most exigent type.

To be saved, according to Hooker, one must become so pa.s.sive as to be willing to be eternally d.a.m.ned. In other regards he was a Puritan of a rather more primitive type than Cotton. He knew no satisfactory evidence of a man's acceptance with G.o.d but his good works. Cotton was less logical but more attractive. His Puritanism grew in a garden of spices. He delighted in allegorical interpretations of the Canticles, his severe doctrines were dulcified with sentiment, and his conception of the inward Christian life was more joyous and mystical and less legal and severe than Hooker's. He was an adept in the windings of non-committal expression, and his intellectual sinuosity was a resource in debate or difficulty. Hooker, on the other hand, had a downrightness not to be mistaken. With an advantage in temperament and the additional advantage of position in the commercial and political center, it is not surprising that Cotton's ideals eloquently and deftly presented soon dominated the colony and that he became the Delphic oracle whose utterances were awaited by the rulers in emergencies.

[Sidenote: Theological differences.]

[Sidenote: Note 1.]