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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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.

Among these early inconsistencies and disagreements Roger Williams stood
out as the sole fearless and logical figure. Consistency and bravery were
far from being his only good qualities; in drawing his portrait, the
difficulty is to find shadows with which to set off the lights of his
character. The Puritans feared the world, and even their own constancy;
Williams feared nothing; but he would reverence and obey his conscience as
the voice of God in his breast, before which all other voices must be
hushed. He was not only in advance of his time: he was abreast of any
times; nothing has ever been added to or detracted from his argument. When
John Adams wrote to his son, John Quincy Adams, "Your conscience is the
Minister Plenipotentiary of God Almighty placed in your breast: see to it
that this minister never negotiates in vain," he did but attire in the
diplomatic phraseology which came naturally to him the thought which
Williams had avouched and lived more than a century before. Though
absolutely radical, Williams was never an extremist; he simply went to the
fountain-head of reason and truth, and let the living waters flow whither
they might. The toleration which he demanded he always gave; of those who
had most evilly entreated him he said, "I did ever from my soul honor and
love them, even when their judgment led them to afflict me." His long life
was one of the most unalloyed triumphs of unaided truth and charity that
our history records; and the State which he founded presented, during his
lifetime, the nearest approach to the true Utopia which has thus far been
produced.

Roger Williams was a Welshman, born in 1600, and dying, in the community
which he had created, eighty-five years later. His school was the famous
Charterhouse; his University, Cambridge; and he took orders in the Church
of England. But the protests of the Puritans came to his ears before he
was well installed; and he examined and meditated upon them with all the
quiet power of his serene and penetrating mind. It was not long before he
saw that truth lay with the dissenting party; and, like Emerson long
afterward, he at once left the communion in which he had thought to spend
his life. He came to Massachusetts in 1631, and, as we have seen, was not
long in discovering that he was more Puritan than the Puritans. When
differences arose, he departed to the Plymouth Colony, and there abode for
several useful years.

But though the men of Boston and Salem feared him, they loved him and
recognized his ability; indeed, they never could rid themselves of an
uneasy sense that in all their quarrels it was he who had the best of the
argument; they were often reduced to pleading necessity or expediency,
when he replied with plain truth. He responded to an invitation to return
to Salem, in 1633, by a willing acceptance; but no sooner had he arrived
than a discussion began which continued until he was for the second and
final time banished in 1636. The main bone of contention was the right of
the church to interfere in state matters. He opposed theocracy as
profaning the holy peace of the temple with the warring of civil parties.
The Massachusetts magistrates were all church members, which Williams
declared to be as unreasonable as to make the selection of a pilot or a
physician depend upon his proficiency in theology. He would not admit the
warrant of magistrates to compel attendance at public worship; it was a
violation of natural right, and an incitement to hypocrisy. "But the ship
must have a pilot," objected the magistrates, "And he holds her to her
course without bringing his crew to prayer in irons," was Williams's
rejoinder. "We must protect our people from corruption and punish heresy,"
said they. "Conscience in the individual can never become public property;
and you, as public trustees, can own no spiritual powers," answered he.
"May we not restrain the church from apostasy?" they asked. He replied,
"No: the common peace and liberty depend upon the removal of the yoke of
soul-oppression."

The magistrates were perplexed, and doubtful what to do. Laud in England
was menacing them with episcopacy, and they, as a preparation for
resistance, decreed that all freemen must take an oath of allegiance to
Massachusetts instead of to the King. Williams, of course, abhorred
episcopacy as much as they did; but he would not concede the right to
impose a compulsory oath. A deputation of ministers was sent to Salem to
argue with him: he responded by counseling them to admonish the
magistrates of their injustice. He was cited to appear before the state
representatives to recant; he appeared, but only to affirm that he was
ready to accept banishment or death sooner than be false to his
convictions. Sentence of banishment was thereupon passed against him, but
he was allowed till the ensuing spring to depart; meanwhile, however, the
infection of his opinions spreading in Salem, a warrant was sent to summon
him to embark for England; but he, anticipating this step, was already on
his way through the winter woods southward.

The pure wine of his doctrine was too potent for the iron-headed
Puritans. But it was their fears rather than their hearts that dismissed
him; those who best knew him praised him most unreservedly; and even
Cotton Mather admitted that he seemed "to have the root of the matter in
him."

Williams's journey through the pathless snows and frosts of an
exceptionally severe winter is one of the picturesque and impressive
episodes of the times. During more than three months he pursued his lonely
and perilous way; hollow trees were a welcome shelter; he lacked fire,
food and guides. But he had always pleaded in behalf of the Indians; he
had on one occasion denied the validity of a royal grant unless it were
countersigned by native proprietors; and during his residence in Plymouth
he had learned the Indian language. All this now stood him in good stead.
The man who was outcast from the society of his white brethren, because
his soul was purer and stronger than theirs, was received and ministered
unto by the savages; he knew their ways, was familiar in their wigwams,
championed their rights, wrestled lovingly with their errors, mediated in
their quarrels, and was idolized by them as was no other of his race.
Pokanoket, Massasoit and Canonicus were his hosts and guardians during the
winter and spring; and in summer he descended the river in a birch-bark
canoe to the site of the present city of Providence, so named by him in
recognition of the Divine mercies; and there he pitched his tent beside
the spring, hoping to make the place "a shelter for persons distressed for
conscience."

His desire was amply fulfilled. The chiefs of the Narragansetts deeded
him a large tract of land; oppressed persons locked to him for comfort and
succor, and never in vain; a republic grew up based on liberty of
conscience, and the civil rule of the majority: the first in the world.
Orthodoxy and heresy were on the same footing before him; he trusted truth
to conquer error without aid of force. Though he ultimately withdrew from
all churches, he founded the first Baptist church in the new world; he
twice visited England, and obtained a charter for his colony in 1644.
Williams from first to last sat on the Opposition Bench of life; and we
say of him that he was hardly used by those who should most have honored
him. Yet it is probable that he would have found less opportunity to do
good at either an earlier or a later time. Critics so keen and unrelenting
as he never find favor with the ruling powers; he would have been at least
as "impossible" in the Nineteenth Century as he was in the Seventeenth;
and we would have had no Rhode Island to give him. We can derive more
benefit from his arraignment of society two hundred and fifty years ago
than we should were he to call us to account to-day, because no resentment
mingles with our intellectual appreciation: our withers seem to be
unwrung. The crucifixions of a former age are always denounced by those
who, if the martyr fell into their hands, would be the first to nail him
to the cross.

But the Puritanism of Williams, and that of those who banished him, were
as two branches proceeding from a single stem; their differences, which
were the type of those that created two parties in the community, were the
inevitable result of the opposition between the practical and the
theoretic temperaments. This opposition is organic; it is irreconcilable,
but nevertheless wholesome; both sides possess versions of the same truth,
and the perfect state arises from the contribution made by both to the
common good--not from their amalgamation, or from a compromise between
them, Williams's community was successful, but it was successful, on the
lines he laid down, only during its minority; as its population increased,
civil order was assured by a tacit abatement of the right of individual
independence, and by the insensible subordination of particular to general
interests. In Massachusetts, on the other hand, which from the first
inclined to the practical view--which recognized the dangers surrounding
an organization weak in physical resources, but strong in spiritual
conviction, and which, by reason of the radical nature of those
convictions, was specially liable to interference from the settled power
of orthodoxy:--in Massachusetts there was a diplomatic tendency in the
work of building up the commonwealth. The integrity of Williams's logic
was conceded, but to follow it out to its legitimate conclusions was
deemed inconsistent with the welfare and continuance of the popular
institutions. The condemnation of dissenters from dissent sounded unjust;
but it was the alternative to the more far-reaching injustice of suffering
the structure which had been erected with such pains and sacrifice to fall
to pieces just when it was attaining form and character. The time for
universal toleration might come later, when the vigor and solidity of the
nucleus could no longer be vitiated by fanciful and transient vagaries.
The right of private judgment carried no guarantee comparable with that
which attached to the sober and tested convictions of the harmonious body
of responsible citizens.

When, therefore, the young Henry Vane, coming to Boston with the prestige
of aristocratic birth and the reputation of liberal opinions, was elected
Governor in 1635, and presently laid down the principle that "Ishmael
shall dwell in the presence of his brethren," he at once met with
opposition; and he and Anne Hutchinson, and other visionaries and
enthusiasts, were made to feel that Boston was no place for them. Yet at
the same time there was a conflict between the body of the freemen and the
magistrates as to the limits and embodiments of the governing power; the
magistrates contended that there were manifest practical advantages in
life appointments to office, and in the undisturbed domination of men of
approved good life and intellectual ability; the people replied that all
that might be true, but they would still insist upon electing and
dismissing whom they pleased. Thus was inadvertently demonstrated the
invincible security of democratic principles; the masses are always
willing to agree that the best shall rule, but insist that they, the
multitude, and not any Star Chamber, no matter how impeccable, shall
decide who the best are. Herein alone is safety. The masses, of course,
are not actuated by motives higher than those of the select few; but their
impartiality cannot but be greater, because, assuming that each voter has
in view his personal welfare, their ballots must insure the welfare of the
majority. And if the welfare of the majority be God's will, then the truth
of the old Latin maxim, Vox Populi vox Dei, is vindicated without any
recourse to mysticism. The only genuine Aristocracy, or Rule of the Best,
must in other words be the creation not of their own will and judgment,
but of those of the subjects of their administration.

The political experiments and vicissitudes of these early times are of
vastly greater historical importance than are such external episodes, as,
for example, the Pequot war in 1637. A whole tribe was exterminated, and
thereby, and still more by the heroic action of Williams in preventing, by
his personal intercession, an alliance between the Pequots and the
Narragansetts, the white colonies were preserved. But beyond this, the
affair has no bearing upon the development of the American idea. During
these first decades, the most profound questions of national statesmanship
were discussed in the assemblies of the Massachusetts Puritans, with an
acumen and wisdom which have never been surpassed. The equity and solidity
of most of their conclusions are extraordinary; the intellectual ability
of the councilors being purged and exalted by their ardent religious
faith. The "Body of Liberties," written out in 1641 by Nathaniel Ward,
handles the entire subject of popular government in a masterly manner. It
was a Counsel of Perfection molded, by understanding of the prevailing
conditions, into practical form. The basis of its provisions was the
primitive one which is traced back to the time when the Anglo-Saxon tribes
met to choose their chiefs or to decide on war or other matters of general
concern. It was the basis suggested by nature; for, as the chief historian
of these times has remarked, freedom is spontaneous, but the artificial
distinctions of rank are the growth of centuries. Lands, according to this
instrument, were free and alienable; the freemen of a corporation held
them, but claimed no right of distribution. There should be no monopolies:
no wife-beating: no slavery "Except voluntary": ministers as well as
magistrates should be chosen by popular vote. Authority was given to
approved customs; the various towns or settlements constituting the
commonwealth were each a living political organism. No combination of
churches should control any one church:--such were some of the provisions.
The colonies were availing themselves of the unique opportunity afforded
by their emancipation, in the wilderness, from the tyranny and obstruction
of old-world traditions and licensed abuses.

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