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Another game called "puim" was played with fifty or sixty small "bents" (grass spires or small sticks) about a foot long. These were shuffled and divided among the players. He who received the greatest number advanced his count. Noted play- ers of this game sometimes carried the bundle of puims in a perforation in the lobe of his ear in defiance of his antagonists.
Football was played upon broad sandy beaches free from stones. Village played against village, and a large amount of property changed hands, but there was little quarreling. A long line was drawn upon the sand midway between the goals, over which the contesting parties shook hands. The goals were sometimes a mile apart, and the ball was about the size of an English hand ball. This was pitched into the air with their bare feet. Sometimes it was two days before the goal was made, the ground won being marked each day. While the men played, the boys piped, and the women danced and sung.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
[See also the bibliography following Chapter xix (King Philip's War) ; and thte General Bibliography at the end of Volume V.]
ARCHER, Gabriel .- The Relation of Gosnold's Voyage (Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 3rd Series, VIII) .- A brief but clear account of Gosnold's voyage to Cape Cod and Buzzards Bay.
BRERETON, John .- A Brief and True Relation of the Discovery of the North Part of Virginia [first print, 1602], Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 3rd Series, VIII .- An account of Gosnold's voyage, with a short account of the Indians.
CHAMPLAIN, Samuel de .- Voyages, Vol. II, (Boston, Prince Society, reprint Boston, 1878-1882) .- He visited our Harbors and mapped several of them. Excellent descriptions of the Indians, their houses, and gardens.
CHEEVER, George B .- [first print, 1622] The Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth (Cheever's reprint, N. Y., J. Wiley, 1849) .- Contains various accounts of the Pilgrims' early intercourse with the Indians, especially with Massasoit and his people.
GOOKIN, Daniel .- [First print, 1792], Historical Collections of the Indians of New England (Massachusetts Historical Society Collec- tions, I.) .- An excellent general account of the natives, and conditions during middle of 17th century.
JOSSELYN, John .- [First print, 1675] An Account of Two Voyages to New England (Veazie reprint) .- Valuable information about the group of Indians to which the Pennacook belong.
MORTON, Thomas .- [First print Amsterdam, J. F. Stam, 1637], The New English Canaan (Prince Society, reprint, Boston, 1883) .- Mor- ton of Merry-Mount. A most interesting volume; first book con- tains a fund of information about the natives.
VERARZANUS, John .- The Relation of Hakluyt's Divers Voyages (1582) .- Earliest account of the natives. Harmonizes in all details with the later accounts of the Indians of Massachusetts.
WILLIAMS, Roger .- [First print, 1643] A Key into the Language of America (Rhode Island Historical Society, Collections) .- By a keen student of the Algonquin dialect, and also of the customs of several tribes.
WINSOR, Justin .- The Memorial History of Boston, 1630-1680 .- (Bos- ton, Osgood, (1880-1881)-See pp. 241-274, by George E. Ellis.
WOOD, William .- New Englands Prospect [First print, London, Thomas Cotes, 1634] .- (Boynton's reprint, Boston, 1898). Wood came to Massachusetts in 1629 and settled at Lynn. Excellent description of the Indians, the country and its natural history.
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CHAPTER VII
JOHN WINTHROP, COMMONWEALTH BUILDER (1588-1649)
BY ALBERT BUSHNELL HART Professor of Government Emeritus, Harvard University
THE WINTHROP HERITAGE
Writers of history are prone to describe the growth of a nation as though it were the growth of a tree-from the roots to a slip, a sapling, a young trunk; at last the full stately tree. In this realization of a nation as a growth, it is easy to leave out of account that just as the tree is an assemblage of cells, so a community is the combination of the lives of all those individuals who have been parts of the whole.
To portray even the outstanding individuals in the history of Massachusetts would make this work a necrology rather than a history. Nevertheless, it is impossible truly to tell the story of Massachusetts without taking into account in each volume at least one outstanding character, as a representa- tive of the aspirations and the accomplishments of his gener- ation; who exemplifies the standard, the aims, and the successes of the Massachusetts group of which he was a part.
For the seventeenth century of Massachusetts history the selection of such a typical, characteristic person is obvious. John Winthrop, in his life of sixty-one years, passed through the experiences of an English churchman, an English puritan, a colonizer, an American puritan, and an upholder of a new type of community life and enduring popular government, which is interwoven in the fabric of modern American democ- racy. The life of John Winthrop is the inner life of a new community, of which he was the leader and guide in its first critical decades.
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Born in England, in 1588, the year when the destruction of the Armada opened the western seas and lands to English ships and colonists, John Winthrop was in the thick of the growing English nation for forty-three years. His family pedigree has been carefully plotted by his descendants and other American writers. The Winthrop and the Washington families have a family history singularly alike. Both appear in neighboring counties-Robert de Winetorp in Lincolnshire, in 1200 and Sir William de Wessington in Durham in 1187. Both familes acquired sequestered priories, the Washingtons bought Sulgrave, (county of Northampton) ; the Winthrops, the estate of Groton, (county of Suffolk). John Winthrop emigrated to Massachusetts in 1630. John Washington emigrated to Virginia in 1658.
The Winthrop family had the habit of keeping family letters and other data; hence we are tolerably acquainted with three Adam Winthrops in the sixteenth century in succession, all men of mark. The second Adam was a clothier, that is, a merchant of cloth; also an official of Trinity and St. John's College, Cambridge. The third Adam was a lawyer and a master-hand at diary entries in the spaces of his almanacs; his only son John, born at Edwardston, near Ipswich, Janu- ary 12, 1588, was like his father Lord of Groton, though never a peer.
Of the life of John Winthrop as a boy, as a student of Trinity College (entered at the age of fourteen and never graduated) we know much through the family papers. That is, we know that this clearly honorable young man, after- ward wrote of himself in humble Puritan style as infused with "wordly cares-a secret desire after pleasure and after liber- ties and unlawful delights." The only specifications are "sitting up late, eating too much, gunning-or a slighting manner of family worship," In later life he gave up tobacco, apparently on religious grounds. Such self-accusations were the religious stock in trade of the Puritan dispensation.
THE ENGLISHMAN (1600-1628)
John Winthrop was thoroughly a family man. He married four times and was thrice a widower. In 1605 he married Mary Foorth, who bore him six children-the eldest being
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John, Jr. who became a figure in Massachusetts and colonial history. Mary died in 1614; and in 1615 Winthrop married Thomasine Clopston, who lived less than a year. In 1618 he married Margaret Tyndal who bore him eight children, and lived till 1647. In the last months of his life Winthrop married a young wife, Martha Coytman, who survived him.
The letters between John Winthrop and Margaret Winthrop, of which many are extant, are among the choicest flowers of Puritan literature. In one of the earliest the gentleman alluded to the "unequal conflicts which for my sake thou didst lately sustain," apparently in favor of a rival. He fortifies his argument by bringing in the God of Israel; Caleb and Joshua; the World; Christ and his Apostles; Demas; "Solomon's choyse Psal. 37 :5, Phil. 4:6, 7," and "Meanes better than 80 1b. a yeare." The next letter he is able to sign as "thy hus- band by promise." Despite this quaint and businesslike appeal, the spirit of the letters is that of deep tenderness and mutual and lofty confidence. Says she in one later, "I have many reasons to make me love thee whereof I will name two: first, because thou lovest God, and secondly, because thou lovest me."
Like George Washington, in his family relations Winthrop takes great marital responsibilities to himself; for instance, "I send two pieces of Lockerum; cloth for a cloke and sute for Forth & for a night gowne for thyself." Here is what her husband said of Thomasine in 1616: "She was a woman wise, modest, loving, & patient of iniuries; but hir innocent & harmles life was of most observation. She was truly re- ligious, & idustrious therein; plaine hearted, & free from guile, & very humble minded; ffor hir cariage towards my- selfe, it was so amiable & observant as I am not able to ex- presse; it had this onely inconvenience, that it made me de- lighted too muche in hir to enjoye hir longe."
The Winthrops were people of means; John Winthrop must have inherited property from his father, including the Manor of Groton; and also from his wives. He sent his eldest son to college and the young man, without finishing his course became a lawyer. From early in 1626, John Winthrop held an Attorneyship of the Court of Wards and Liveries, which was a kind of special counsellorship; and he was frequently in
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London. He drafted parliamentary bills, including "An Act for the preventing of Drunkenness and of the great waste of Corn." He was co-executor of a will with John Hampden, and was a friend of Sir John Eliot. His income rose to the large sum of £700 a year. Then for reasons now unknown, in 1629 he lost this appointment, much to his chagrin.
THE PURITAN
The first thirty years of Winthrop's life coincide with the first epoch of English colonization in America. He was born thirteen years after the first attempts at American settlement by Raleigh and Gilbert. He was head of a family when the Virginia colony was planted in 1607. He was of the religious and social strain from which came the Plymouth colonists of 1620. He was a close friend of some of the New England Council chartered in 1621 under which settlements were made in the later Maine and New Hampshire. The troubles be- tween King and Parliament greatly disturbed him. Early in 1629 he wrote to his wife, "I am very persuaded, God will bring some heavye Affliction upon this lande & that speedylye; but be of good comfort, if the Lord seeth it wilbe good for us, he will provide a shelter & a hidynge place for us & others."
The Winthrop family was one of the numerous substantial heads of small communities who took on themselves the weighty responsibilities of carrying on the Puritan movement. John Winthrop wrote down the low estimate in which he and his Puritan friends were held by their own class in 1616 as follows :
"All experience tells me, that in this way there is least companie, and those who doe walk openlye in this way shalbe despised, pointed at, hated of the world, made a bye- worde, reviled, slandered, rebuked, made a gazinge-stock, called puritans, nice fools, hipocrites, hair-brainde fellows, rashe, indiscreet, vain-glorious, and all that naught is."
This obloquy was shared by several thousand families of well-to-do Englishmen, who carried the Protestant movement to a rigor and lovelessness matched only in Scotland and Geneva. The extreme of extremes in this respect was reached by the colonists in America who were to be led by
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Winthrop. The significance of Puritanism was that in Eng- land existed from 1575 to 1660 a large number of wealthy families (in many cases titled) who in parting from Rome separated themselves also from the joyousness of religion, and from the sweet and tender spirit of the New Testament. From them passed many strong spirits into America.
The later intimate relations with Isaac Johnson and others prove that John Winthrop must have been early cognizant of the efforts of a group of Puritans to raise money and to secure a charter for a colony in New England on a large scale. The first public step was the Charter of March 4, 1629, con- templating the control of such a colony by authorities resident in England. An evidence of a change of purpose was the "Agreement at Cambridge (Aug. 26, 1629) by which the signatories declared themselves willing to go overseas. To this document John Winthrop subscribed his name.
Negotiations, of which there is now no record other than that it was an expensive process, secured the desired legal decision that the patent might be transferred and operated out of England. October 20, 1629 came a step momentous for the future commonwealth of Massachusetts. At a General Court of the Company held under the charter it was voted that relying on the "extraordinary great commendation of Mr. John Wynthrop, both for his integrity and sufficiency as being one very well fitted and accomplished for the place of gover- nor," he should be governor for the next year. In this vote were combined two influences which were later to create a great colony. At one end of the line, the Puritan gentle- men who were willing to venture their money and influence in the enterprise; and at the other the Puritan gentlemen and commoners who were willing to betake themselves over seas. The two groups were by no means identical.
Following out a lifelong habit Winthrop analyzed the argu- ments for agreeing to this important demand in a document which he called "Particular Considerations"; it is an excellent example of his precision, his logical process and his sense of moral obligations. Here is the list.
"1: It is come to that issue as (in all probabilitye) the well- fare of the Plantation dependes upon his goeinge.
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"2: He acknowledges a satisfactorye callinge, outwarde from those of the Plantation, inwardly by the inclination of his own hearte to the worke, & bothe approved by godly & iuditious Devines. If he should refuse this opportunitye, that talent which God hath bestowed upon him publike service, were like to be buried.
"4: His wife & suche of his children, as are come to years of discreation, are voluntarylye disposed to the same Course. "5: Most of his friends (upon the former considerations) doe consent to his change."
The assemblage of the colonists in England, their prepara- tions for the voyage and their departure in one of the largest fleets which up to that time had ever crossed the seas under the English flag are elsewhere described in this volume. Seventy days they were at sea.
WINTHROP'S JOURNAL (1630-1649)
For Winthrop's posterity by birth, and for his immensely larger political posterity of citizens of Massachusetts, the voyage is especially notable for the beginning of his Journal or History of New England. Some of the manuscript of the Journal is still in existence. All of it was a hundred and fifty years later transferred to print. The entries were not made daily and in many cases were carefully written up after some episode was completed. Two editions have appeared in print, besides a special edition of other documents, all described in the select bibliography for this chapter. Two were enriched with elaborate notes by the learned Savage and the eminent Robert C. Winthrop, the latter of whom added many docu- ments from the family archives of his ancestors. As a liter- ary production, as a basal account of the most fascinating period in Massachusetts annals, as a revelation of the inner life and motives of a noble statesman, it is the most valuable source for the early history of the English colonies in America. Personal and family entries are numerous throughout. To modern ways of thinking a disproportionate space is given to signs and portents and incidents, such as make up much of the tabloid newspapers of the present day: a battle between a mouse and a snake; a bad man shipwrecked and lost, a good man shipwrecked and saved ; accidents, crimes, occurences, even
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scandals. A larger part of the space is devoted to careful and often minute accounts of the discussions on public ques- tions and the organization of a government competent to cope with difficulties and dissensions.
This includes numerous characterizations of his associates, the worthies and unworthies of Massachusetts. The invalu- able portions of the Journal for the historian of Massachu- setts are the careful detailed accounts of controversies or crises during the nineteen years of his public service. In them we read the private thoughts of the governor and his defenses of his own actions. These long summaries and digests of arguments pro and con must have taken up many hours of the time of a busy statesman.
That Winthrop expected his journal to be read by posterity seems certain. The name History of New England, the care with which events are described, the noting of dates, are evi- dences of expectation that he might be still read in our genera- tion. In fact, he was the first critical historian of the English settlements in America, and remains to this day the soundest and most interesting writer on Massachusetts during the seven- teenth century.
Here is an example of the minor entries in the Journal as they run: Longer extracts printed below will bring out the graver and more solid portions of the Journal.
[1631] "A cow died at Plimouth, and a goat at Boston, with eating Indian corn.
"October 23.] Mr. Rossiter, one of the assistants, died.
"25.] "Mr. Colburn (who was chosen deacon by the con- gregation a week before) was invested by imposition of hands of the minister and elder.
"The governor, upon consideration of the inconveniences which had grown in England by drinking one to another, re- strained it at his own table, and wished others to do the like, so as it grew, by little. and little, to disuse."
PRIVATE LIFE IN MASSACHUSETTS (1630-1649)
Winthrop was elected Governor of the Company a second time during the voyage and from the first was indis- putably the most important man in the colony not only from
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his station but from his social standing. So far as we now know he turned all his estates in England (except one settled upon his wife) into ready money, which he invested in the enterprise, and in establishing himself under new conditions. He had an important part in the final selection of Boston as capital of the colony, and at once built a house, handsome for the times, the frame of which had first been set up in New Town. His eldest son, John Winthrop, Jr., came out and lived several years in the colony and then transferred himself to Connecticut where he became Governor and a leading spirit. In his will of 1639 (afterward cancelled) he mentioned his sons Adam, Stephen, Deane and Samuel.
Winthrop was a shrewd hardheaded man with a Yankee eye to the future. The strain of the first few years of want and suffering in the colony bore also upon him. Apparently most of his original capital melted away. Nevertheless he became a landed proprietor, partly from his share as a freeman in several divisions of land, partly from generous grants made by the General Court from time to time. His property in- cluded "fifty acres of meade ground near the Wanuttymies River" (1632) ; "the Ware [Weir] at Watertown with Mathew Cradock," probably the dam of late years ascribed to Leif Erickson; one hundred and fifty acres at Romney Marsh ; particularly the estate of six hundred acres at Ten Hills (1631), within the present bounds of Medford, where he built up a country estate; one thousand acres at Concord (1638) ; Conants Island (1632). By the malfesance of his agent Luxford he suffered heavy losses on his Ten Hills estate.
For several years he took no salary as governor though he did receive some presents from private persons, a practice which he then publicly renounced. A public subscription was raised for him, and he also received a compensation from the General Court as salary. Nevertheless, the inventory of his furniture at his death shows a moderate personal property; and his wealth, whatever its amount, must have been chiefly in land.
He had another wealth of friends because he knew per- sonally all the significant ministers and private men in the early colony and was associated closely with the other states- men of his period. Some he praises and some he excoriates
rohills
From the original map in the Massachusetts Historical Society
GOVERNOR WINTHROP'S ESTATE OF TEN HILLS IN 1687
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in his Journal. The grave and reverend seignors of the Assistants he knew intimately.
Judging not only by the Journal which came from his own hand, but by all the records available, Winthrop was a just and upright man, a good husband, a good father, a kind neighbor, considerate of the Indians, polite even to Catholic clericals who came down from Canada; an example to his times and to later times of a high minded, active, considerate and upright Puritan gentleman. Yet he was always subject to the assumptions and prejudices of a superior among men mostly of lesser importance.
Women were, of course, looked up as not only weaker but less gifted in mind. He records in 1633 that, "At the lecture in Boston a question was propounded about veils. Mr. Cotton concluded, that where (by the custom of the place) they were not a sign of the woman's subjection, they were not com- manded by the apostle. Mr. Endicott opposed, and did maintain it by the general arguments brought by the apostle. After some debate, the governour, perceiving it to grow to some earnestness, interposed, and so it brake off."
Winthrop's nature opinions upon the female sex are summed up in the often quoted discussion of women's rights in the Journal (1645) :
"Mr. Hopkins, the governour of Hartford upon Connecti- cut, came to Boston, and brought his wife with him, (a godly young woman, and of special parts,) who was fallen into a sad infirmity, the loss of her understanding and reason, which had been growing upon her divers years, by occasion of her giving herself wholly to reading and writing, and had written many books. Her husband, being very loving and tender of her, was loathe to grieve her; but he saw his error, when it was too late. For if she had attended her household affairs, and such things as belong to women, and not gone out of her way and calling to meddle in such things as are proper for men, whose minds are stronger, etc., she had kept her wits, and might have improved them usefully and honorably in the place God had set her. He brought her to Boston and left her with her brother, one Mr. Yale, a merchant, to try what means might be had here for her. But no help could be had."
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THE CHARTER (1628-1684)
Keeping in mind this constitutional process, the ground is now cleared for a brief sketch of the development of the government of Massachusetts during Winthrop's life.
The foundation stone was of course the charter, and volumes have been written upon the efforts in England to modify the charter, or to compel its surrender, by efforts renewed from time to time, till in 1684 the charter was judicially declared not to be in force. This struggle is described in later chapters of this volume.
The charter was written in very general terms. Particularly the critical grant of legislative power is stated as follows: "to make, ordeine, and establishe all Manner of wholesome and reasonable Orders, Lawes, Statutes, and Ordinances, Direc- cons, and Instruccons, not contrarie to the Lawes of this our Realme of England, as well for setling of the Formes and Ceremonies of Governmt and Magistracy, fitt and necessary for the said Plantacon, and the Inhabitants there, and for nameing and stiling of all sorts of Officers, both superior and inferior, which they shall finde needefull ."
It did not provide for a delegate legislative system, which therefore had to be improvised, as is described above. It did not clearly define the authority of the governor and assist- ants leaving much to be improvised thereafter. There was no distinct provision for a judicial system and nothing resembling a bill of rights.
THE FREEMAN QUESTION (1630-1649)
Though Winthrop in England once had an inclination toward the ministry, he never carried it into effect. His con- nection in Massachusetts in the beginning was that of president of a colonizing corporation. He was governor of Massachu- setts by annual election twelve years in the twenty years, from 1629 in England, to his death in 1649. The other governors were: Dudley, (1634, 1640, 1645) ; Haynes, (1635) ; Vane (1636) ; Bellingham, (1641); and Endecott, (1644, 1649).
He was usually deputy governor and always assistant, when not in the higher office. To understand his significance in the
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