The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 by Julian Hawthorne

J >> Julian Hawthorne >> The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1

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After his departure there ensued a period of ten years or more, during
which the pressure upon Virginia seemed rather to grow heavier than to
lighten. The acts of Bacon's assembly were repealed; all the former abuses
were restored; the public purse was shamelessly robbed; the suffrage was
restricted; the church was restored to power. In 1677 the Dominion became
the property of one Culpepper, who had the title of governor for life; and
the restraints, such as they were, of its existence as a royal colony were
removed. But Culpepper's course was so corrupt as to necessitate his
removal, and in 1684 the king resumed his sway. James II. reached the
English throne the following year, and his persecutions of his enemies in
England gave good citizens to America. But the Virginians, who could be
wronged and oppressed, but never crushed, protested against the arbitrary
use of the king's prerogative; they were punished for their temerity, but
rose more determined from the struggle. No man could be sent to Virginia
who was strong enough to destroy its resolve for liberty.

And now the English Revolution was at hand; and we are to inquire what
influence the new dispensation was to have on the awakening national
spirit of the American colonies.

CHAPTER SEVENTH

QUAKER, YANKEE, AND KING

The American principle, simple in that its perfection is human liberty,
is of complex make. It is the sum of the ways in which a man may
legitimately be free. But neither Pilgrims, Puritans, New Amsterdamers,
Virginians, Carolinians nor Marylanders were free in all ways. Even the
Providence people had their limitations. It is not meant, merely, that the
old world still kept a grip on them: their several systems were
intrinsically incomplete. Some of them put religious liberty in the first
place; others, political; but each had its inconsistency, or its
shortcoming. None had gone quite to the root of the matter. What was that
root?--or, let us say, the mother lode, of which these were efferent veins?

The Pilgrims and Puritans, heretics in Episcopalian England, had escaped
from their persecution, but had banished heretics in their turn. Tranquil
Lord Baltimore having laid the burden of his doubts at the foot of God's
vicegerent on earth, had sought no further, and was indifferent as to what
other poor mortals might choose to think they thought about the unknown
things. Roger Williams' charity, based on the dogma of free conscience,
drew the line only at atheists. The other colonists, since their salient
contention was on the lower ground of civil emancipation and
self-direction, are not presently considered.

But, to the assembly of religious radicals, there enters a plain Man in
Leather Breeches, and sees fetters on the limbs of all of them. "Does thee
call it freedom, Friend Winthrop," says he, "to fear contact with such as
believe otherwise than thee does? Can truth fear aught? And fear, is it
not bondage? As for thee, George Calvert, thee has delivered up thine
immortal soul into the keeping of a man no different from what thee
thyself is, so to escape the anxious seat; but the dead also are free of
anxiety, and thy bondage is most like unto death. Thee calls thy colony
folk free, because thee lets them believe what they list; but they do but
follow what their fathers taught them, who got it from theirs; which is to
be in bondage to the past. And here is friend Roger, who makes private
conscience free; but what is private conscience but the private reasonings
whereby a man convinceth himself? and how shall he call his conviction the
truth, since all truth is one, but the testimony of no man's private
conscience is the same as another's? Nay, how does thee know that the
atheist, whom thee excludes, is further from the truth than thee thyself
is? Truly, I hear the clanking of the chains on ye all; but if ye will
accept the Inner Light, then indeed shall ye know what freedom is!"

This Man in Leather Breeches, who also wears his hat in the king's
presence, is otherwise known as George Fox, the Leicestershire weaver's
son, the Quaker. In his youth he was much troubled in spirit concerning
mankind, their nature and destiny, and the purpose of God concerning them.
He wandered in lonely places, and fasted, and was afflicted; he sought
help and light from all, but there was none could enlighten him. But at
last light came to him, even out of the bosom of his own darkness; and he
saw that human learning is but vanity, since within a man's self, will he
but look for it, abides a great Inner Light, which changeth not, and is
the same in all; being, indeed, the presence of the Spirit of God in His
creature, a constant guide and revelation, withheld from none, uniting and
equalizing all; for what, in comparison with God, are the distinctions of
rank and wealth, or of learning?--Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His
righteousness, and these things shall be added unto you. In the lowest of
men, not less than in such as are called greatest, burns this lamp of
Divine Truth, and it shall shine for the hind as brightly as for the
prince. In its rays, the trappings of royalty are rags, jewels are dust
and ashes, the lore of science, folly; the disputes of philosophers, the
crackling of thorns under the pot. By the Inner Light alone can men be
free and equal, true sons of God, heirs of a liberty which can never be
taken away, since bars confine not the spirit, nor do tortures or death of
the body afflict it. So said George Fox and his followers; and their lives
bore witness to their words.

The Society of Friends took its rise not from a discovery--for Fox
himself held the Demon of Socrates, and similar traditional phenomena, to
be identical with the Inner Light, or voice of the Spirit--but rather in
the recognition of the universality of something which had heretofore been
regarded as exceptional and extraordinary. In the Seventeenth Century
there was a general revolt of the oppressed against oppression, declaring
itself in all phases of the outer and inner life; of these, there must
needs be one interior to all the rest, and Quakerism seems to have been
it. It was a revolution within revolutions; it saw in the man's own self
the only tyrant who could really enslave him; and by bringing him into the
direct presence of God, it showed him the way to the only real
emancipation. Historically, it was the vital element in all other
emancipating movements; it was their logical antecedent: the hidden spring
feeding all their rivers with the water of life. It enables us to analyze
them and gauge their values; it is their measure and plummet. And this,
not because it is the final or the highest word justifying the ways of God
to man--for it has not proved to be so: but because it indicated, once for
all, in what direction the real solution of the riddle of man was to be
sought: a riddle never to be fully solved, but forever approximately
guessed. Quakerism has not maintained its relative position in religious
thought; but it was the finest perception of its day, and in the turmoil
of the time it fulfilled its purpose. Probably its best effect was the
development it gave to the humbler element of society--to the yeomen and
laborers; affording them the needed justification for the various demands
for recognition that they were urging. Puritanism banished Quakers, and
even hanged them; but the Quaker was the Puritan's spiritual father,
although he knew it not. And therefore the Quaker, who was among the last
to appear in America as a settler in virgin soil, had a right thereto
prior to any one of the others. There must be a soul before there can be a
body.

On the other hand, a soul without a body is not adapted to life in this
world; and an America peopled exclusively by Quakers would have been
unsatisfactory. It is a prevailing tendency of man, having hit upon a
truth, to begin to theorize upon it, and, as the phrase is, run it into
the ground. Quakers would not fight, would not take an oath, would not
baptize, or wear mourning, or flatter the senses with pictures and
statues. A Quaker would resist evil and violence only by enlightening
them. He would not be taxed for measures or objects which he did not
approve. He could see but one way of reforming the world, and thought that
God was equally circumscribed in His methods. But though the leaven may
make bread wholesome, we cannot subsist on leaven alone. The essence of
Americanism may be in a Quaker, but he is far from being a complete
American, and therefore he was fain to take his place only as a noble
ingredient in that wonderful mixture. By degrees, the singularities which
distinguished him were softened; his thee and thy yielded to the common
forms of speech; his drab suit altered its cut and hue; his hat came off
occasionally; his women abated the rigor of their poke bonnets; he was
able to say to the enemy of his country, "Friend, thee is standing just
where I am going to shoot." The disintegration of his individuality set
free the good that was in him to permeate surrounding society; his fellow
flowers in the garden were more beautiful and fragrant for his sake.

When persecution of Quakers was at its worst, they became almost
dehumanized, attaching more value to their willingness to endure ill-usage
than to the spiritual principle for avouching which they were ill-used.
Many persons--such is the oddity of human nature--were drawn to the sect
for love of the persecution; and gave way to extravagances such as Fox
would have been the first to denounce. But when toleration began, these
excesses ceased, and they bethought themselves to make a home in the
wilderness of their own. There was room enough. George Fox returned from
his pilgrimage to the Atlantic colonies in 1674, with good accounts of the
resources of the new country; and the owner of New Jersey sold half of it
to John Fenwick for a thousand pounds; and the next year the latter went
there with many Friends, and picked out a pleasant spot on the east bank
of the Delaware for the first settlement, to which he gave the name of
Salem. It was at this juncture that William Penn became, with two others,
assigns of the proprietor of the colony, and thus took the first step
toward assuming full responsibility for it. He did not, however,
personally visit America till seven years later.

Penn was the son of an English admiral: not the kind of timber,
therefore, out of which one would have supposed a great apostle of
non-resistance could be made. He was brought up to the use of ample
wealth, and his training and education were aristocratic. After leaving
Oxford, he made the grand tour, and came home a finished young man of the
world, with the pleasures and rewards of life before him. He had good
brains and solid qualities, and the old admiral had high hopes of him. No
doubt he would have made a very good figure in the English world of
fashion; but destiny had another career marked out for him.

The plain Man with the Leather Breeches got hold of him; and all the
objurgations, threats, and even the act of disinheritance of the admiral
were powerless to extricate him from that grasp. Penn had found something
which seemed to him more precious than rubies, and he was quite as
resolute as the old hero of the Navy. Penn could endure the beating and
the being turned into the streets, but he could not stop his ears and eyes
to the voice and light of God in his soul. He did not care to conquer
another Jamaica, but he passionately desired to minister to the spiritual
good of his fellow creatures. He was of a sociable and cheerful
disposition; he could disarm his adversary in a duel; he could take charge
of the family estates, and qualify himself for the law; the king was ready
to smile upon him; but all worldly ambitions died away in him when he
heard Thomas Lee testify of the faith that overcomes the world. Nothing
less than that would satisfy Penn. In 1666, when he was two and twenty, he
made acquaintance with the inside of a jail on account of his
conscientious perversities; but the only effect of the experience was to
make him perceive that he had thereby become "his own freeman." When he
got out, his friends cut him and society made game of him; finally, he was
lodged in the Tower, which, he informed Charles II., seemed to him "the
worst argument in the world." They let him out in less than a year, but in
less than a year more he was again arrested and put on trial. The jury,
after having been starved for two days and heartily cursed by the judge,
brought him in not guilty; upon which the judge, with a fine sense of
humor, fined them all heavily and sent him back to prison. But this was
too much for the admiral, who paid his fines and got him out; and, being
then on his death-bed, surrendered at discretion, restoring to him the
inheritance, and observing, not without a pensive satisfaction, that he
and his friends would end by "making an end of the priests."

A six months' term in Newgate was still in store for Penn; but after that
they gave up this method of reforming him. He spent the next years in
exhorting Parliament and reproving princes all over Europe; and in the
midst of these labors he met one of the best and most beautiful women in
England; she had suitors by the score, but she loved William Penn, and
they were married. She was the wife of his mind and soul as well as of his
bed and board. He was now doubly fortified against the world, and doubly
bound to his career of human benevolence. His studies and meditations had
made him a profound philosopher and an able statesman; and in all ways he
was prepared to begin the great work of his life.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, the Quakers in the new world were building up the framework of
their state. They decreed to put the power in the people, and all the
articles of their constitution embody the utmost degree of freedom, with
constant opportunities for the electors to revise or renew their
judgments. When the agent of the Duke of York levied customs on ships
going to New Jersey, the act drew from the colonists a remarkable protest,
which was supported by the courts. They had planted in the wilderness,
they said, in order, among other things, to escape arbitrary taxation; if
they could not make their own laws in a land which they had bought, not
from the Duke, but from the natives, they had lost instead of gaining
liberty by leaving England. Taxes levied upon planting left them nothing
to call their own, and foreshadowed a despotic government in England, when
the Duke should come to the throne. The future James II. gave up his
claim, and in 1680 signed an indenture to that effect. Later, at the
advice of Penn, they so amended their constitution as to give them power
to elect their own governor. A charter was drawn up by Penn and confirmed
in 1681, and he became proprietor. No man ever assumed such a trust with
less of personal ambition or desire for gain than he. "You shall be
governed by laws of your own making," said he; "I shall not usurp the
right of any, or oppress his person." He had already made inroads on his
estate by fighting the cause of his brethren in England in the courts; but
when a speculator offered him six thousand pounds down and an annual
income for the monopoly of Indian trade, he declined it; the trade
belonged to his people. He was ardently desirous to benefit his colony by
putting in operation among them the schemes which his wisdom had evolved;
but he would not override their own wishes; they should be secured even
from his power to do them good; for, as liberty without obedience is
confusion, so is obedience without liberty slavery. Instead therefore of
imposing his designs upon them, he submitted them for their free
consideration. Pennsylvania now occupied its present boundaries, with the
addition of Delaware; and western New Jersey ceased to be the nominal home
of the Friends in America. In 1682, Penn embarked for the Delaware. He had
founded a free colony for all mankind, believing that God is in every
conscience; and he was now going to witness and superintend the working of
his "holy experiment."

On October 29th he was received at Newcastle by a crowd of mixed
nationality, and the Duke of York's agent formally delivered up the
province to him. The journey up the Delaware was continued in an open
boat, and the site of Philadelphia was reached in the first week of
November. There a meeting of delegates from the inhabitants was held and
the rules which were to govern them were reviewed and ratified. Among
these it was stipulated that every Christian sect was eligible to office,
that murder only was a capital crime, that marriage was a civil contract,
that convict prisons should be workhouses, that all who paid duties should
be electors, and that there should be no poor rates or tithes. Then Penn
proceeded to lay out the city of Philadelphia, where they "might improve
an innocent course of life on a virgin Elysian shore." It was here that
the Declaration of Independence was signed ninety-three years afterward.

In March, before the leaves had budded on the tall trees whose colonnades
were as yet the only habitation for the emigrants, the latter set to work
to settle their constitution. "Amend, alter or add as you please," was the
recommendation with which Penn submitted it to them--the work of his
ripest wisdom and loving good-will. To the governor and council it
assigned the suggestion of all laws; these suggestions were then to be
submitted by the assembly to the body of the people, who thus became the
direct law-makers. To Penn was given the power to negative the doings of
the council, he being responsible for all legislation; but he could
originate and enforce nothing. He would accept no revenues; and, indeed,
except in the way of helpfulness and counsel, never in any way imposed
himself upon his people. He was the proprietor; but in all practical
respects, Pennsylvania was a representative democracy. That they should be
free and happy was his sole desire.

In its relations with the Indians, the colony was singularly fortunate;
the doctrine of non-resistance succeeded best where least might have been
expected from it. All lands were purchased, conferences being held and
deeds signed; and the red men were given thoroughly to understand that
nothing but mutual good was intended. They took to the new idea kindly;
the law of retaliation had been the principle of their lives hitherto; but
if a man did good to them, and dealt honestly by them, should not they
retaliate by manifesting the same integrity and good-will? At one time it
was reported that a band of Indians had assembled on the border with the
design of avenging some grievance with a massacre. Six unarmed Quakers
started at once for the scene of trouble, and the Indians subsided. It has
long been admitted that it takes two sides to make a fight; but this was
an indication that it needs resistance to make a massacre. Penn, who was
fond of visiting the Indians in their wigwams, and sharing their
hospitality, formed an excellent opinion of them. He discoursed to them of
their rights as men, and of their privileges as immortal souls; and they
conceded to him his claim to peaceful possession of his province. Not less
remarkable was the fate of witchcraft in Pennsylvania. The Swedes and
Finns believed in witches, upon the authority of their native traditions;
and a woman of their race having acted in a violent and unaccountable
manner, they put her on her trial for witchcraft. Both Swedes and Quakers
composed the jury; there were no hysterics; the matter was dispassionately
canvassed; impressions and prejudices were not accepted as evidence; and
in the end the verdict was that though she was guilty of being called a
witch, a witch she nevertheless was not. The distinction was so well taken
that no more witch trials or panics occurred. This was in 1684, eight
years before the disasters in New England. But newspapers did not exist in
those days, and public opinion was undeveloped.

The colony, receiving a world-wide advertisement by dint of the
excellence of its institutions and the singularity of its principles,
became a magnet to draw to itself the "good and oppressed" of all Europe.
There were a good many of them; and within a couple of years from the time
when Philadelphia meant blaze-marks on trees and three or four cottages,
it had grown to be a real town of six hundred houses. The colony
altogether mustered eight thousand people. With justifiable confidence,
therefore, that all was well, and would stay so, Penn, with many loving
words for his people, returned to England to continue the defense of the
afflicted there. A dispute as to the right boundaries of Delaware and
Maryland was also to be determined; but it proved to be a lingering
negotiation, chiefly noteworthy on account of its leading to the fixing of
the line by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, which afterward became the
recognized boundary between the States where slaves might be owned and
those where they might not. The line was surveyed, finally, in 1767.

Penn being gone, the people applied themselves to experimenting with
their constitution. A constitution which is devised to secure liberty to
the subject, including liberty to modify or change it, is as nearly
unchangeable as any mortal structure can be. The inhabitants of
Pennsylvania had never known before what it was to be free, and they
naturally wished to test the new gift or quality in every way open to
them. Not having the trained brain and unselfish wisdom that belonged to
Penn, of which the constitution was the offspring, they thought that they
could improve its provisions. But the more earnestly they labored to this
end, the more surely were they brought to the confession that he had known
how to make them free better than they themselves did. When they resolved
against taxes, they found themselves without revenue; when they refused to
discipline a debtor, they found that credit was no longer to be had. They
fussed and fretted to their hearts' content, and no great harm came of it,
because the constitution was always awaiting them with forgiveness when
they had tired themselves with abusing it. The only important matter that
came to judgment was the slavery question; Penn himself had slaves, though
he came to doubt the righteousness of the practice, and liberated them in
his will--or would have done so, had the injunction been carried out by
his heirs. Slaves in Pennsylvania were to serve as such for fourteen
years, and then become adscripts of the soil--that is to say, they were
permitted to become the same thing under another name. Penn ultimately
conceived the ambition to vindicate the presence of the Inner Light in the
negroes' souls; but he met with small success--even less than with the
Indians. The problem of the negro was not to be solved in that way, or at
that time. No doubt, if a negro slave could be made to feel that the mere
circumstance of external bondage was nothing, so long as his inner man was
untrammeled, it would add greatly to the convenience both of himself and
his master. But the theory did not seem to carry weight so long as the
practice accompanied it; and the world, even of Pennsylvania, was not
quite ready to abolish negro slavery in 1687.

Of the thirteen colonies, twelve had now had their beginning, and
Georgia, the home of poor debtors, shed little or no fresh light upon the
formation of the American principle. The Revolution of 1688, which put
William of Orange on the English throne, was now at hand; but before
examining its effect upon the American settlements we must cast a glance
at the transactions of the previous dozen years in the New England
division.

The theory of the English government regarding the American colonies had
always been, that they were her property. The people who emigrated had
been English subjects, and--to adapt the Latin proverb--Coelum, non Regem,
mutant, qui trans mare currunt. Moreover, the English, as was the custom
of the age, asserted jurisdiction over all land first seen and claimed by
mariners flying their flag; and though Spain and France might claim
America with quite as much right as England, yet the latter would not
acknowledge their pretensions. A country, then, occupied by English
subjects, and owned by England, could not reasonably assert its private
independence.

Such was England's position, from which she never fully receded until
compelled to do so by force of arms. But the colonists looked at the
matter from a different point of view. They held the right of ownership by
discovery to be unsubstantial; it was a mere sentiment--a matter of
national pride and prestige--not to be valued when it came in conflict
with the natural right conveyed by actual emigration and settlement. The
man who transferred himself, with his family and property, to a virgin
country. Intending to make his permanent home there, should not be subject
to arbitrary interference from any one; his vital interests and welfare
were involved; he should be ruled by authority appointed by himself;
should pay only such taxes as he himself levied for the expenses of his
establishment; and should enjoy the profits of whatever products he raised
and whatever commerce he carried on. He had withdrawn himself from
participation in the advantages of home civilization, and had voluntarily
faced a life of struggle and peril in the wilderness, precisely because he
had counted these things as nothing in comparison with the gain of
controlling his own affairs; but if, nevertheless, the mother country
insisted on managing them, or in any way controlling him, then all
enterprise became vain, all his sacrifices had been fruitless, and he was
in all ways worse off than before he took steps to better himself. An
Englishman living in England might rightly be taxed for the protection to
life and property and the enjoyment of privileges which she afforded him,
and which he, through a representative parliament, created; but England
gave no protection to her colonies, and the colonists were not represented
in her parliament; neither had the English government been put to any
expense or trouble in bringing those colonies into existence; to tax them,
therefore, was an act of despotism; it deprived them of the right which
all Englishmen possessed to the fruits of their own labor; it robbed them
of values for which no equivalent had been yielded; and thus, from
freemen, made them slaves. Not less unjustifiable, for the same reasons,
was interference with colonial governments, and with religious liberties
of all kinds.

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