The Beginners of a Nation

I

Importance of the Rhode Island colony. The removal of Roger Williams and his friends was the beginning of dispersions from the mother colony on Massachusetts 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 Massachusetts 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 Massachusetts 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

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.

Early life of Hooker. We can trace nothing of Hooker to his birthplace, a little hamlet in Leicestershire, except that the imagery of his discourses in after life sometimes reflected the processes of husbandry he had known in childhood. But that he passed 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 Essex. 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. 1630. 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

Hooker's company. The persecution of Hooker made a great commotion in Essex, dividing attention with the political struggle between the king and the people about tonnage and poundage. Walker's First Church in Hartford, 40. Dudley's Letter to Countess of Lincoln, Young's Chron. of Mass., 320. While Hooker was an exile in Holland a company of people from Braintree and other parts of Essex, 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. Mass. Records, 14 June, 1631, and 3 February, 1632. 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. Holmes's Hist. Cambridge, 1st Mass. Hist. Coll., vii, 6-8. 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

Failure of Newtown as a metropolis. But a metropolis can not be made at will, as many a new community has discovered. It had been arranged that all the "assistants" or ruling magistrates of Massachusetts 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. Savage's Winthrop, i, 98, 99. 1632. 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.

Wonder-working Providence, ch. xxviii. 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. Wood's N. E. Prospect, 1634. Young, 402. 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. October, 1632. 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.

Hooker's arrival, 1633. 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. Wood's N. E. Prospect. 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. Young, 397, 398. Not to be behind in evangelical attractions it secured Cotton to balance Newtown's Hooker, when both arrived in the same ship. 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

Discontent at Newtown. "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. Mass. Rec., passim. 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. Wonder-working Providence, ch. xxxiii. 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. Compare Holmes's History of Cambridge, 1 Mass. Hist. Coll., vii, pp. 1, 2. 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 grass. 2d Mass., vii, 127. Shrewd men in Newtown already saw that as an agricultural colony Massachusetts 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

Cotton and Hooker. 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 grass. 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 passive as to be willing to be eternally damned. Compare Walker's First Church of Hartford, 129-132. 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 God 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.

Theological differences. Theological differences were early apparent in the teachings of the two leaders. Trivial enough to the modern mind are these questions concerning works as an evidence of justification and concerning active and passive faith in justification. Hooker maintained all by himself that there was "a saving preparation in a Christian soule before unyon with Christ." 115 The other ministers pretended to understand what he meant by this, and at first opposed him unanimously. No doubt, too, Hooker and his disciples found some fault with the outer form of the church as shaped by Cotton. Certain it is that Hooker's theories of civil government were more liberal and modern than Cotton's, though like Cotton's they were hung upon texts of Scripture. Hooker lacked Cotton's superfluity of ingenuity; he had less imagination and less poetic sentiment than Cotton, but his intellect was more rugged, practical, and virile. He was not a man to have visions of a political paradise; he did not attempt to limit citizenship to church members when he framed a constitution for the Connecticut towns. Nor did he give so much power and privilege to the magistrate as was given in Massachusetts. 116 He disapproved of Cotton's aristocratic theory of the permanence of the magistrate's office, as he did apparently of the negative vote of the upper house and of the arbitrary decisions which the Massachusetts magistrates assumed the right to make.

VII

Attractions of Connecticut. One other potent motive there was. Stories of the fertility of the "intervale" land on the Connecticut River came by the mouth of every daring adventurer who had sailed or tramped so far. There one might find pasture for the priceless cattle and hay to last the long winter through, and in that valley one might cultivate plains of great fertility.

VIII

Obstacles to removal. There were dangerous Pequots on the Connecticut, it is true, and the Dutch had already planted a trading house and laid claim to the territory. The Plymouth people who traded there were also claimants. And, more than all, leaving Massachusetts in a time of danger from the machinations of Laud would seem desertion. The government of the Massachusetts Bay colony was anomalous; it partook of the character of the commercial company from which it sprang, yet it had traits of a religious or at least a voluntary society. It was the accepted opinion that those who had taken the freeman's oath were "knit" together "in one body," and that none of them ought to leave the colony without permission. Hooker's party gained the consent of a majority of the representative members of the General Court, but not of a majority of the assistants. Savage's Winthrop, i, 167, 168. This precipitated a debate in the colony on the constitutional question of the right of the assistants, or magistrates, to form an upper house and veto a decision of the chosen deputies of the towns.

IX

Attempts to prevent removal. It is no part of our purpose to unravel the tangle of ecclesiastical and civil politics in which the proposed emigration had now become involved. The Dorchester church and a part of that of Watertown were ready to follow the lead of Hooker and Newtown. Days of fasting and prayer were appointed to prevent the removal of these "candlesticks," as the churches were called, out of their places; but in spite of humiliations and of Cotton's persuasive eloquence, which at one time almost charmed away the discontent, the emigration set in, stragglingly at first.

Explorers and pioneers. John Oldham, an adventurous man of a rather lawless temper – one of those half-ruffians that are most serviceable on an Indian frontier – had been expelled from Plymouth. 1633. He was now a resident of Watertown, one of the centers of discontent and next neighbor to Newtown. He had gone with three others on a trading expedition to the westward overland. Walking along trails from one Indian village to another they discovered a large river, which they found to be the Fresh River of the Dutch and the Connecticut of the Plymouth traders. They probably brought back to Watertown accounts that produced a fever for removal. Oldham was not a man to stand on the manner of his emigration. Waiting for nobody's consent, he led out a small company from Watertown the next year. These settled at what is now Wethersfield. From Dorchester, which had no alewife fishery with which to enrich its fields, settlers removed in 1634 to the Connecticut, where the soil did not need to be "fished." In 1635 the number of emigrants was larger, and there was much suffering during the following winter and many of the cattle perished.

X

Emigration by churches. But the unit of New England migration was the church. No doubt the cohesiveness of the townships, and of the churches which were the nuclei of the towns, was re-enforced by provincial differences between the several communities. 1636. In 1636 Hooker, the real founder of Connecticut, and his congregation of Essex people, sold their houses and meadows and home lots and acre rights in the commonage in Cambridge to a new congregation led by Thomas Shepard. 117 From Newtown and from Dorchester the churches emigrated bodily – pastors, teachers, ruling elders, and deacons – carrying their organization with them through the wilderness like an ark of the covenant. New churches were soon afterward formed in the places they had left. Naturally, town government became the principal feature of civil organization in states thus planted by separate and coherent groups.

XI

The new government. The Connecticut rulers acted at first as a government subordinate to Massachusetts; but the settlements, except that of people from Roxbury at Springfield, were south of the line of the Massachusetts colony, and it was not in the nature of things that Hooker and Haynes should subordinate themselves to Cotton and Winthrop. There was indeed no little exasperation between the two colonies. An independent constitution was adopted in Connecticut, on principles which Hooker thought he found in the first chapter of Deuteronomy, and which were not exactly those that Cotton had managed to deduce from Scripture in his Model of Moses his Judicials. Conn. Hist. Soc. Coll., i, 20, 21. The Massachusetts people, whose government aspired to dominate all New England, seem to have been angered by Hooker's secession and by his refusal to subordinate the new state to their own. Massachusetts asserted its authority over Springfield, which was within its limits, and every effort possible was made to prevent new emigrants who landed at Boston from going to the west. Conn. Hist. Soc. Coll., i, 3, and ff. Even in England accounts adverse to Connecticut were circulated. Hooker, the real head of the new state, resented this in a letter of great vigor and some passion.