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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By the increasing body of their brethren in England, meanwhile, New
England was looked upon as a sort of New Jerusalem, and letters from the
leaders were passed from hand to hand like messages from saints. Up to the
time when Charles and Laud were checked by Parliament, the tide of
emigration set so strongly toward the American shores that measures were
taken by the King to arrest it; by 1638, there were in New England more
than twenty-one thousand colonists. The rise of the power of Parliament
stopped the influx; but the succeeding twenty years of peace gave the
much-needed chance for quiet and well-considered growth and development.
The singular prudence and foresight of Winthrop and others in authority,
during this interregnum, was showed by their declining to accept certain
apparent advantages proffered them in love and good faith by their English
friends. A new patent was offered them in place of their royal charter;
but the colonists perceived that the reign of Parliament was destined to
be temporary, and wisely refused. Other suggestions, likely to lead to
future entanglements, were rejected; among them, a proposition from
Cromwell that they should all come over and occupy Ireland. This is as
curious as that other alleged incident of Cromwell and Hampden having been
stopped by Laud when they had embarked for New England, and being forced
to remain in the country which soon after owed to them its freedom from
kingly and episcopal tyranny.

Material prosperity began to show itself in the new country, now that the
first metaphysical problems were in the way of settlement. In Salem they
were building ships, cotton was manufactured in Boston; the export trade
in furs and other commodities was brisk and profitable. The English
Parliament passed a law exempting them from taxes. After so much
adversity, fortune was sending them a gleam of sunshine, and they were
making their hay. But something of the arrogance of prosperity must also
be accredited to them; the Puritans were never more bigoted and intolerant
than now. The persecution of the Quakers is a blot on their fame, only
surpassed by the witchcraft cruelties of the concluding years of the
century. Mary Dyar, and the men Robinson, Stephenson and Leddra were
executed for no greater crime than obtruding their unwelcome opinions, and
outraging the propriety of the community. The fate of Christison hung for
a while in the balance; he was not less guilty than the others, and he
defied his judges; he told them that where they murdered one, ten others
would arise in his place; the same words that had been heard many a time
in England, when the Puritans themselves were on their trial. Nevertheless
the judges passed the sentence of death; but the people were disturbed by
such bloody proceedings, and Christison was finally set free. It must not
be forgotten that the Quakers of this period were very different from
those who afterward populated the City of Brotherly Love under Penn. They
were fanatics of the most extravagant and incorrigible sort; loud-mouthed,
frantic and disorderly; and instead of observing modesty in their garb,
their women not seldom ran naked through the streets of horrified Boston,
in broad daylight. They thirsted for persecution as ordinary persons do
for wealth or fame, and would not be satisfied till they had provoked
punishment. The granite wall of Puritanism seemed to exist especially for
them to dash themselves against it. Such persons can hardly be deemed
sane; and it is of not the slightest importance what particular creed they
profess. They are opposed to authority and order because they are
authority and order; in our day, we group such folk under the name,
Anarchists; but, instead of hanging them as the Puritans did, we let them
froth and threaten, according to the policy of Roger Williams, until the
lack of echoes leads them to hold their peace.

Although slavery, or perpetual servitude, was forbidden by the statute,
there were many slaves in New England, Indians and whites as well as
negroes. The first importation of the latter was in 1619, by the Dutch, it
is said. No slave could be kept in bondage more than ten years; it was
stipulated that they were to be brought from Africa, or elsewhere, only
with their own consent; and when, in 1638, it appeared that a cargo of
them had been forcibly introduced, they were sent back to Africa.
Prisoners of war were condemned to servitude; and, altogether, the feeling
on the subject of human bondage appears to have been both less and more
fastidious than it afterward became. There was no such indifference as was
shown in the Southern slave trade two centuries later, nor was there any
of the humanitarian fanaticism exhibited by the extreme Abolitionists of
the years before the Civil War. It may turn out that the attitude of the
Puritans had more common-sense in it than had either of the others.

The great event of 1643 was the natural outcome of the growth and
expansion of the previous time. It was the federation of the four colonies
of Massachusetts, Plymouth, New Haven, and Connecticut. Connecticut had
been settled in 1680, but it was not till six years afterward that a party
headed by the renowned Thomas Hooker, the "Son of Thunder," and one of the
most judicious men of that age, journeyed from Boston with the deliberate
purpose of creating another commonwealth in the desert. Connecticut did
not offer assurances of a peaceful settlement; the Indians were numerous
there, and not well-disposed; and in the south, the Dutch of New Amsterdam
were complaining of an infringement of boundaries. These ominous
conditions came to a head in the Pequot war; after which peace reigned for
many years. A constitution of the most liberal kind was created by the
settlers, some of the articles of which led to a correspondence between
Hooker and Winthrop as to the comparative merits of magisterial and
popular governments. Unlearned men, however religious, if elected to
office, must needs call in the assistance of the learned ministers, who,
thus burdened with matters not rightly within their function, might err in
counseling thereon. Of the people, the best part was always the least, and
of that best, the wiser is the lesser.--This was Winthrop's position.
Hooker replied that to allow discretion to the judge was the way to
tyranny. Seek the law at its mouth; it is free from passion, and should
rule the rulers themselves; let the judge do according to the sentence of
the law. In high matters, business should be done by a general council,
chosen by all, as was the practice of the Jewish and other well-ordered
states.--This is an example of the political discussions of that day in
New England; both parties to it concerned solely to come at the truth, and
free from any selfish aim or pride. The soundness of Hooker's view may be
deduced from the fact that the constitution of Connecticut (which differed
in no essential respect from those of the other colonies) has survived
almost unchanged to the present day. Statesmanship, during two and a half
centuries, has multiplied details and improved the nicety of adjustments;
but it has not discerned any principles which had not been seen with
perfect distinctness by the clear and venerable eyes of the Puritan
fathers.

Eaton, another man of similar caliber, was the leading spirit in the New
Haven settlement, assisted by the Reverend Mr. Davenport; many of the
colonists were Second-Adventists, and they called the Bible their
Statute-Book. The date of their establishment was 1638. The incoherent
population of Rhode Island caused it to be excluded from the federation;
but Williams, journeying to London, obtained a patent from the exiled but
now powerful Vane, and took as the motto of his government, "Amor Vincet
Omnia." New Hampshire, which had been united to Massachusetts in 1641,
could have no separate part in the new arrangement; and Maine, an
indeterminate region, sparsely inhabited by people who had come to seek
not God, but fish in the western world, was not considered. The articles
of federation of the four Calvinist colonies aimed to provide mutual
protection against the Indians, against possible encroachment from
England, against Dutch and French colonists: they declared a league not
only for defense and offense, but for the promotion of spiritual truth and
liberty. Nothing was altered in the constitutions of any of the
contracting parties; and an equitable system of apportioning expenses was
devised. Each partner sent two delegates to the common council; all
affairs proper to the federation were determined by a three-fourths vote;
a law for the delivery of fugitive slaves was agreed to; and the
commissioners of the other jurisdictions were empowered to coerce any
member of the federation which should break this contract. The title of
The United Colonies of New England was bestowed upon the alliance. The
articles were the work of a committee of the leading men in the country,
such as Winthrop, Winslow, Haynes and Eaton; and the confederacy lasted
forty years, being dissolved in 1684.

It was a great result from an experiment begun only about a dozen years
before. It was greater even, than its outward seeming, for it contained
within itself the forces which should control the future. This country is
made up of many elements, and has been molded to no small extent by
circumstances hardly to be foreseen; but it seems incontestable that it
would never have endured, and continued to be the goal of all pilgrims who
wish to escape from a restricted to a freer life, had not its corner-stone
been laid, and its outline fixed, by these first colonists of New England.
It has been calculated that in two hundred years the physical increase of
each Puritan family was one thousand persons, dispersed over the territory
of the United States; and the moral influence which this posterity exerted
on the various communities in which they fixed their abode is beyond
computation. But had the Puritan fathers been as ordinary men: had they
come hither for ends of gain and aggrandizement: had they not been united
by the most inviolable ties that can bind men--community in religious
faith, brotherhood in persecution for conscience' sake, and an intense,
inflexible enthusiasm for liberty--their descendants would have had no
spiritual inheritance to disseminate. Many superficial changes have come
upon our society; there is an absence of a fixed national type; there are
many thousands of illiterate persons among us, and of those who are still
ignorant of the true nature of democratic institutions; all the tongues of
Europe and of other parts of the world may be heard within our boundaries;
there are great bodies of our citizens who selfishly pursue ends of
private enrichment and power, indifferent to the patent fact that
multitudes of their fellows are thereby obstructed in the effort to earn a
livelihood in this most productive country in the world; there are many
who have prostituted the name of statesmanship to the gratification of
petty and transient ambitions: and many more who, relieved by the thrift
of their ancestors from the necessity to win their bread, have renounced
all concern in the welfare of the state, and live trivial and empty lives:
all this, and more, may be conceded. But such evil humors, be it repeated,
are superficial, attesting the vigor, rather than the decay, of the
central vitality. America still stands for an idea; there is in it an
immortal soul. It was by the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay that this soul
was implanted; to inspire it was their work. They experienced the
realities, they touched the core of things, us few men have ever done; for
they were born in an age when the world was awakening from the spiritual
slumber of more than fifteen hundred years, and upon its bewildered eyes
was breaking the splendor of a great new light. The Puritans were the
immediate heirs of the Reformation (so called; it might more truly have
been named the New Incarnation, since the outward modifications of visible
form were but the symptoms of a freshly-communicated informing
intelligence). It transfigured them; from men sunk in the gross and
sensual thoughts and aims of an irreligious and priest-ridden age--an age
which ate and drank and slept and fought, and kissed the feet of popes,
and maundered of the divine right of kings--from this sluggish degradation
it roused and transfigured the Englishmen who came to be known as
Puritans. It was a transfiguration, though its subjects were the uncouth,
almost grotesque figures which chronicle and tradition have made familiar
to us. For a people who were what the Puritans were before Puritanism,
cannot be changed by the Holy Ghost into angels of light; their stubborn
carnality will not evaporate like a mist; it clings to them, and being now
so discordant with the impulse within, an awkwardness and uncouthness
result, which suggest some strange hybrid: to the eye and ear, they are
unlovelier and harsher than they were before their illumination; but
Providence regards not looks; it knew what it was about when it chose
these men of bone and sinew to carry out its purposes. Once enlisted, they
never could be quelled, or seduced, or deceived, or wearied; they were in
fatal earnest, and faithful unto death, for they believed that God was
their Captain. They had got a soul; they put it into their work, and it is
in that work even to this day.

It does not manifestly appear to our contemporary vision; it is
overloaded with the rubbish of things, as a Greek statue is covered with
the careless debris of ages; but, as the art of the sculptor is vindicated
when the debris has been removed, so will the fair proportions of the
State conceived by the Puritans, and nourished and defended by their sons,
declare themselves when in the maturity of our growth we have assimilated
what is good in our accretions, and disencumbered ourselves of what is
vain. It is the American principle, and it will not down; it is a solvent
of all foreign substances; in its own way and time it dissipates all
things that are not harmonious with itself. No lesser or feebler principle
would have survived the tests to which this has been subjected; but this
is indestructible; even we could not destroy it if we would, for it is no
inalienable possession of our own, but a gift from on High to the whole of
mankind. But let us piously and proudly remember that it was through the
Puritans that the gift was made. Other nations than the English have
contributed to our substance and prosperity, and have yielded their best
blood to flow in our veins. They are dear to us as ourselves, as how
should they not be, since what, other than ourselves, are they? None the
less is it true that what was worthiest and most unselfish in the impulse
that drove them hither was a reflection of the same impulse that actuated
the Puritans when America was not the most powerful of republics, but a
wilderness. None of us all can escape from their greatness--from the debt
we owe them: not because they were Englishmen, not because they made New
England; but because they were men, inspired of God to make the earth free
that was in bondage.

CHAPTER FOURTH

FROM HUDSON TO STUYVESANT

There are two scenes in the career of Henry Hudson which can never be
forgotten by Americans. One is in the first week in September, 1609. A
little vessel, of eighty tons, is lying on the smooth waters of a large
harbor. She has the mounded stern and bluff bows of the ships of that day;
one of her masts has evidently been lately stepped; the North American
pine of which it is made shows the marks of the ship-carpenter's ax, and
the whiteness of the fresh wood. The square sails have been rent, and
mended with seams and patches; the sides and bulwarks of the vessel have
been buffeted by heavy seas off the Newfoundland coast; the paint and
varnish which shone on them as she dropped down the reaches of the Zuyder
Zee from Amsterdam, five months ago, have become whitened with salt and
dulled by fog and sun and driving spray. Across her stern, above the
rudder of massive oaken plank clamped with iron, is painted the name "HALF
MOON," in straggling letters. On her poop stands Henry Hudson, leaning
against the tiller; beside him is a young man, his son; along the bulwark
lounge the crew, half Englishmen, half Dutch; broad-beamed, salted tars,
with pigtails and rugged visages, who are at home in Arctic fields and in
Equatorial suns, and who now stare out toward the low shores to the north
and west, and converse among themselves in the nameless jargon--the rude
compromise between guttural Dutch, and husky English--which has served
them as a medium of communication during the long voyage. It is a good
harbor, they think, and a likely country. They are impatient for the
skipper to let them go ashore, and find out what grows in the woods.

Meanwhile the great navigator, supporting himself, with folded arms,
against the creaking tiller, absorbs the scene through his deep-set eyes
in silence. Many a haven had he visited in his time; he had been within
ten degrees of the North Pole; he had seen the cliffs of Spitzbergen loom
through the fog, and had heard the sound of Greenland glaciers breaking
into vast icebergs where they overhung the sea; he had lain in the
thronged ports of the Netherlands, where the masts cluster like naked
forests, and the commerce of the world seethes and murmurs continually; he
had dropped anchor in quiet English harbors, under cool gray skies, with
undulating English hills in the distance, and prosperous wharfs and busy
streets in front. He had sweltered, no doubt, beneath the heights of
Hong-Kong, amid a city of swarming junks; and further south had smelled
the breeze that blows through the straits of the Spice Islands. He knew
the surface of the earth, as a farmer knows his farm; but never, he
thought, had he beheld a softer and more inviting prospect than this which
spread before him now, mellowed by the haze of the mild September morning.

On all sides the shores were wooded to the water's edge: a giant forest,
unbroken, dense and tall, flourishing from its own immemorial decay,
matted with wild grape vine, choked with brush, wild as when the Creator
made it; untouched, since then. It was as remote--as lost to mankind--as
it was beautiful. The hum and turmoil of the civilized world was like the
memory of a dream in this tranquil region, where untrammeled nature had
worked her teeming will for centuries upon silent centuries. Here were
such peace and stillness that the cry of the blue jay seemed audacious;
the dive of a gull into the smooth water was a startling event. To the
imaginative mind of Hudson this spot seemed to have been set apart by
Providence, hidden away behind the sandy reaches of the outer coast, so
that irreverent man, who turns all things to gain, might never discover
and profane its august solitudes. Here the search for wealth was never to
penetrate; the only gold was in the tender sunshine, and in the foliage of
here and there a giant tree, which the distant approach of winter was
lulling into golden slumber. But then, with a sigh, he reflected that all
the earth was man's, and the fullness thereof; and that here too, perhaps,
would one day appear clearings in the primeval forest, and other vessels
would ride at anchor, and huts would peep out from beneath the
overshadowing foliage on the shores. But it was hard to conjure up such a
picture; it was difficult to imagine so untamed a wilderness subdued, in
ever so small a degree, by the hand of industry and commerce.

Northwestward, across the green miles of whispering leaves, the land
appeared to rise in long, level bluffs, still thronged with serried trees;
a great arm of the sea, a mile or two in breadth, extended east of north,
and thither, the mariner dreamed, might lie the long-sought pathway to the
Indies. A tongue of land, broadening as it receded, and swelling in low
undulations, divided this wide strait from a narrower one more to the
east. All was forest; and eastward still was more forest, stretching
seaward. Southward, the land was low--almost as low and flat as the
Netherlands themselves; an unexplored immensity, whose fertile soil had
for countless ages been hidden from the sun by the impervious shelter of
interlacing boughs. No--never had Hudson seen a land of such enduring
charm and measureless promise as this: and here, in this citadel of
loneliness, which no white man's foot had ever trod, which, till then,
only the eyes of the corsair Verrazano had seen, near a century before
--here was to arise, like Aladdin's Palace, the metropolis of the western
world; enormous, roaring, hurrying, trafficking, grasping, swarming with
its millions upon millions of striving, sleepless, dauntless, exulting,
despairing, aspiring human souls; the home of unbridled luxury, of abysmal
poverty, of gigantic industries, of insolent idleness, of genius, of
learning, of happiness and of misery; of far-reaching enterprise, of
political glory and shame, of science and art; here human life was to
reach its intensest, most breathless, relentless and insatiable
expression; here was to stand a city whose arms should reach westward over
a continent, and eastward round the world; here were to thunder the
streets and tower the buildings and reek the chimneys and arch the bridges
and rumble the railways and throb the electric wires of American New York,
the supreme product of Nineteenth Century civilization, radiant with the
virtues and grimy with the failings that mankind has up to this time
developed.

On the 23d of June, two years later, Henry Hudson was the central figure
in another scene. He sat in a small, open boat, hoary with frozen spray;
he was muffled in the shaggy hide of a white bear, roughly fashioned into
a coat; a sailor's oilskin hat was drawn down over his brow, and beneath
its rim his eyes gazed sternly out over a wide turbulence of gray waters,
tossing with masses of broken ice. His dark beard was grizzled with frost;
his cheeks were gaunt with the privations of a long, arctic winter spent
amid endless snows, in darkness unrelieved, smitten by storms, struggling
with savage beasts and harried by more inhuman men. He sat with his hand
at the helm; against his other shoulder leaned his son, his inseparable
companion, now sinking into unconsciousness; the six rowers--the stanch
comrades who, with him, had been thrust forth to perish by the mutineers
--plied their work heavily and hopelessly; their rigid jaws were set; no
words nor complaints broke from them, though was slowly settling round
their valiant hearts. Overhead brooded a somber vault of clouds; the
circle of the horizon, which seemed to creep in upon them, was one
unbroken sweep of icy dreariness, save where, to the southeast, the dark
hull of the "Discovery," and her pallid sails, rocked and leaned across
the sullen heave of the waters. She was bound for Europe; but whither is
Hudson bound?

His end befitted his life; he vanished into the unknown, as he had come
from it. There is no record of the time or place of his birth, or of his
early career, nor can any tell where lie his bones; we only know that his
limbs were made in England, and that the great inland sea, called after
him, ebbs and flows above his grave. He first comes into the ken of
history, sailing on the seas, resolute to discover virgin straits and
shores; and when we see him last, he is still toiling onward over the
waves, peering into the great mystery. Possibly, as has been suggested, he
may have been the descendant of the Hudson who was one of the founders of
the Muscovy Company, in whose service the famous navigator afterward
voyaged on various errands. It matters not; he lived, and did his work,
and is no more; his strong heart burned within him; he saw what none had
seen; he triumphed, and he was overcome. But the doubt that shrouds his
end has given him to legend, and the thunder that rolls brokenly among the
dark crags and ravines of the Catskills brings his name to the hearer's
lips.

The Dutch had had many opportunities offered to them to discover New
York, before they accepted the services of Henry Hudson, who was willing
to go out of his own country to find backers, so only that he might be
afloat. Almost every year, from 1581 onward, the mariners of the
Netherlands strove, by east and by west, to pass the barrier that America
interposed between them and the Eastern trade they coveted. The Dutch East
India Company was the first trading corporation of Europe; and after the
war with Spain, during the twelve years' truce, the little country was
overflowing with men eager to undertake any enterprise, and with money to
fit them out. The Netherlands suddenly bloomed out the most prosperous
country in the world.

They would not be hurried; they took their time to think it over, as
Dutchmen will; but at length they conceived an immense project for
acquiring all the trade, or the best part of it, of both the West and the
East. They studied the subject with the patient particularity of their
race; they outclassed Spain on the seas, and they believed they could
starve out her commerce. Some there were, however, who feared that in
finding new countries they would lose their own; Europe was again in a
turmoil, and they were again fighting Spain before New Amsterdam was
founded. But meanwhile, in 1609, quite inadvertently, Henry Hudson
discovered it for them at a moment when they supposed him to be battling
with freezing billows somewhere north of Siberia. When he was stopped by
Nova Zembla ice, he put about and crossed the Atlantic to Nova Scotia, and
so down the coast, as we have seen, to the Chesapeake, the Delaware, and
finally the Hudson. He told his tale in glowing words when he got back;
but the Dutch merchants perhaps fancied he was spinning sailors' yarns,
and heeded not his report till long after.

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