USA > Massachusetts > Commonwealth history of Massachusetts, colony, province and state, volume 1 > Part 34
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No one can deny that Bradford's history is literature; un- less we deny that distinction to Caesar's Commentaries. In fact, the founders wrote well. Elizabethan all, (as Wendell was first to point out) in culture, if not in creed. It is only when we come to the Puritans of New England born that the sands run dry. John Winthrop's History of New England, like his diaries is as full of interest as the Paston letters; while Cotton Mather writes his voluminous diaries unenlight- ened by a single touch of literature, though he shows he has some tincture of letters in his Magnalia, which was pub- lished in 1702.
DESCRIPTIVE WORKS
In 1624, New English Canaan was published by Thomas Morton; known to most of us as the leader of the rebels at Merry-Mount, and very far from being a Puritan; detested, attacked, and finally exiled by Bradford, he is for that reason a more interesting writer than the average Puri- tan. His description of New England, its natural history and its unnatural government is both instructive and full of humor. He visited there first in 1622, and kept returning; he joined Sir Christopher Gardiner under the influence of Gorges and Nason in trying to annul the Massachusetts char- ter, with the powerful assistance of Archbishop Laud. When things went wrong with him and the King, Morton disap- peared for seven years; but surprisingly reappeared in Ply- mouth in 1643, was allowed to stay there through the winter, and went to Maine in 1644. Motley, the historian, began his literary labors by attempting a novel about him; but despite the interest of the subject, it has not survived.
Francis Higginson, the first minister of Salem, wrote New England's Plantation in 1629, and a True Relation of the Last Voyage to New England in 1629. It is very interesting as the log of a voyage and a description of New England as it first appeared; the author also praises the "clerre and dry
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NATHANIEL WARD
Aire" and exults that although always ill, living in England, he has had perfect health since he came to Salem; he origi- nated the statement that "a sup of New England Aire is better than a whole draft of old English ale," and died of consumption the following year.
William Wood's New England's Prospect in 1634 comes next, a somewhat more elaborate description of the country and the Indians. It is a vivid gazetter of Massachusetts as it then was. He came over to Saugus in 1629, lived there four years, and went to England in 1633, "and glad to get back." Not being a Puritan, he had an eye for nature-animals, cli- mate, geography and the manners and customs of the Indians. That he is strictly truth-telling may be seen in his statement, "Concerning Lyons, I will not say that I have seen them my- selfe, but some say that they have seen them on Cape Anne."
John Josselyn made his first voyage to New England in 1638 and his second in 1663. His New England Rarities is a book of travel and description; except that the Massachu- setts Governor and people were antipathetic to him, and as he recalls the fact that he was glad to get home to end his days in England, perhaps we should not count him among Massachusetts writers. His style is lively; he talks of a mer- maid and a triton seen in Casco Bay, and a "lyon" on Cape Anne. "These be a sort of stagnant stinking spirits who, like flyes, lye sucking at the botches of carnal pleasures, and never travelled so much Sea, as is between Heth-ferry and Lyon- Key: yet (sitting in the Chair of the Scornful over their whists and draughts of intoxication) will desperately censure the relations, of the greatest travellers". Truly, this is lang- uage! And his account of the fauna, flora, fruits, crops, and particularly of the Indians and the Puritans themselves is fuller and more picturesque than that of the proper New England writers. If one of the functions of literature be to amuse, this is literature.
NATHANIEL WARD
For next we come to a man who certainly was a Massa- chusetts writer; and whose work the great Bodie of Liber- ties, is possibly more enduring-than those of other settlers. This is Nathaniel Ward, "The simple Cobbler of Aga- wam". This book was published in 1647 under the pseudonym
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MASSACHUSETTS IN LITERATURE
of Theodore de la Guard, and is most certainly a piece of lit- erature. It is an extraordinary mixture of humor, patriotism and bigotry. He begins with a defense of Massachusetts, and a plea for religious persecution, and the execution of all heret- ics, worthy of the Spanish Inquisition; also for the extermina- tion of the "Bloodie Irish." Next he devotes his attention to women's fashions and tthe despicable habit of men in wear- ing their hair long. Thereafter he devotes the greater part of his book to a most reasonable and patriotic appeal to King Charles and the Roundheads to make compromise and come together without the horrors of the coming Civil War. He reasons with both parties, but like most Erasmians without success. The king was beheaded and the Commonwealth pro- claimed two years later.
But a decidedly far greater achievement, now well known to be his, The Bodie of Liberties; although adopted by the Massachusetts Council in 1641, remained in manuscript for many years. Ward was a lawyer, but it seems amazing that a comparatively obscure man could draw up a constitutional document which in important matters far transcends the work of Blackstone one hundred years later. It contains 98 sections and no distinction, of course, is made between ordinary statutes and fundamental provisions-which we would call constitu- tional, and many of which have indeed passed into our consti- tutions, state or federal. This indeed would not have been done by an Englishman; to this day there is no difference in origin and sanctity, to the English legal mind, between a statute which in England would be considered part of the constitution, and an ordinary law. If it be questioned whether such high political writing be in truth literature, one may urge that man's intel- lect has hardly a higher exercise. Certainly no one would say that Lincoln's phrase about-"Government by the people" was not literature, nor the famous clause commended as the highest by Daniel Webster in the Massachusetts Bill of Rights, that it be "a Government of laws, and not of men"; nor Ward's paragraphs about personal liberty, containing many American constitutional principles, which are therein first written out, one hundred and thirty-five years before they begin to appear in our state constitutions. These are landmarks in the history of free government.
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THEOLOGICAL AND SERMONS
THEOLOGICAL AND SERMONS
In 1642, John Cotton wrote a book on the Canticles or Song of Solomon, anticipating that of Rénan, more than two hun- dred years later; and in 1643, appeared New England's First Fruits, notable as being the best account of the foundations of Harvard College.
In 1642, T. Lechford published Plain Dealing, or News From New England; but this work is entirely given to church government, etc., and he presently returned to New England. About the same time, Roger Williams began to write; but he was driven from Massachusetts to Rhode Island for a reason that may be divined when we see that about the same year appeared Williams' work, Bloody Tenets of Persecution, and John Cotton's The Way of the Churches of Christ in New England; to which Williams naturally re- torted the next year with a tract, Christening makes not Chris- tians. Most of the writings of these five years are con- cerned with the assertion or denial of liberty of conscience in religion, which is the title of a book published by Cotton in 1649, wherein he bitterly attacks the doctrine.
In 1647, Thomas Shepherd published The Day Breaking, about the carrying of the Gospel to the Indians; and in 1649, the Apostle John Eliot published his first work on the same subject. Meantime Winslow was attacking Roger Williams and Gorton, another emigrant to Providence, with works en- titled Hypocrisie Unmasked and Disturbances by Gorton, who answered with Simplicitie's Defense against Seven-Headed Policy.
The greatest service of early Massachusetts men was in the literature of the science of free government. May 31, 1638, Thomas Hooker, a Massachusetts man from 1632 to 1645, preached his famous sermon-"The choice of public magistrates belongs unto the people by God's own allowance." "They to have the power to appoint officers and magistrates, (it is in their power, also, to set bounds and limitations of the power and place to which they call them)" and therefore, "the foundation of authority is laid, firstly, in the free con- sent of the people." Adams is therefore inaccurate in saying that in the seventeenth century "there is no literature
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MASSACHUSETTS IN LIERATURE
except theological and the few historical accounts brought out by the Indian Wars." We shall find that, little as there was, it was in quality and even volume superior to that of the cen- tury following.
VERSE
In 1650, Anne Bradstreet first began publishing poems ; they are rhymes and metrical and not at all like Walt Whit- man. Perhaps, she is the earliest of those American writers who according to a thesis made and defended before the American Academy of Arts and Letters as late as 1924, de- rived entirely from the English; Anne Bradstreets's verse as poetry, is, however, not so bad as that of Shepherd and Cot- ton Mather. Still, we must concede to Mistress Bradstreet the distinction of being the first person in Massachusetts to attempt literature for literature's sake.
DIARIES
That Elizabethan quality leaves us when we come to the Diaries of Cotton Mather and Judge Sewall. For this reason we have thought best to leave them for the chapter on the eighteenth century. John Winthrop's Diary only half a cen- tury before is entirely Elizabethan in quality. Sewall's and Mather's are more like a Puritan Pepys. Indeed he shares with the functionary of Charles Second's time that curious quality of exaggerated introspection; though we must claim that the self-study of Mather is always directed to the welfare of his soul; that of Pepys rather to his body's satisfaction of material things.
NARRATIVE AND HISTORICAL
In 1654 appeared Johnson's Wonder-Working Providence. Since Morton's New Canaan in 1634, twenty years had passed, and the two books made a curious contrast. Edward horrible verse. The main book is rather a gazetter than a Johnson lived in Woburn, was a captain in the wars, and wrote lively prose which he unfortunately interspersed with
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NARRATIVE AND HISTORICAL
history of New England, although the third and last book does give "the passages of God's providence towards this won- dering Race-Jacobites in these seven years, from the year 1645 till towards the latter end of 51." And the most "ad- mirable Act of Christ-preparing for his people's arrivall in the Western World" was, according to Johnson "a sore con- sumption, sweeping away whole Families, but chiefly young Men and Children, the very seeds of increase," so that "their wigwams lie full of dead Corpes-by this means Christ-not only made room for his people to plant, but also tamed the hard and cruel hearts of those barbarous Indians." The sec- ond book is largely given to the Pequod war, in which he took part : the massacre of the Great Swamp fight is graphically described, and the modern reader is relieved to find that they did not spear the squaws. Immediately follows a long chapter on the first Synod at which he would fain have seen bodily present four classes of persons, to be purged of error; and he would "with a good will have paid their passage out and home againe to England." These were the Prelates, the Pres- byterians, the "Erronists" (or Gortonists and other Machia- vellian followers of Satan) and lastly (and somewhat surpris- ingly) those who despise "Physitians" and Scholarship! Al- together we must rank this epic of the providences of Sion's Saviour in New England with the Magnalia, and assess it distinctly as literature; and the account of the founding of the twenty-seven towns with descriptions of their country and ministers will always be of interest. They are : Salem, Charles- town, Dorchester, Boston, Roxbury, Lynn, Watertown, Cam- bridge, Ipswich, Newbury, Cambridge (Second Church), Con- cord, Hingham, Dedham, Weymouth, Rowley, Hampton, Sal- isbury, Sudbury, Braintree, Gloucester, Dover (now in New Hampshire), Woburn, Reading, Wenham, Haverhill, Spring- field, and Malden-each introduced with an appropriate poem, an especially long one being given to Harvard College.
By this time the unity of Church and State in Massachusetts was well established. About the only things ministers could not do was to marry people ; but one of their special privileges was to preach to the unfortunates who were condemned to death. On the date of their execution they were brought into the Church for this purpose, and Cotton Mather notes with
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MASSACHUSETTS IN LITERATURE
annoyance any instance when that happened on a day on which he was not to preach; and as an "instance of divine provi- dence" when the date of the execution of an unfortunate woman was delayed to fall upon the day of his service; and remarks with pride that he preached to her and the congrega- tion for three hours. By that time she was doubtless well pre- pared for her execution.
CENSORSHIP
The Puritan Church, of course, controlled letters as well as doctrine and politics ; but there were hardly any books pub- lished except on religious subjects. Indeed the first printing press set up at Harvard College in 1639 was subject to the strictest censorship, though Cotton Mather, as we know, and doubtless others had many profane works in their libraries. Among the books which escaped the censor in 1654, we find- J. Norton, The Orthodox Evangelist; and W. Pynchon, The Sabbath. In 1655, C. Chauncy, God's Mercy; and Cotton's The Chief Magistrate's Power in Matters of Religion, and The Pope's Inquisition recently erected in New England.
In 1659, J. Eliot, The Christian Commonwealth; J. Norton, The Heart of New England Rent,-that is, by the Quakers; even Roger Williams published in 1676 a tract entitled George Fox Digged out of his Burrowves. In 1660 The Apostle Eliot also published a tract claiming that Indians are descendants of the Jews; and the next year his first translation of the New Testament into Algonquin and of the Psalms of David into Indian verse; in 1663, the full Bible translation with an inter- esting addition-"Dying Speeches of Several Indians", and in 1669, his Indian Primer.
In 1658, appeared (in London) America Painted to the Life, ascribed on the title pages to Sir Fernando Gorges, but in reality taken bodily by his son from Johnson.
HISTORY
There are, however, some historical works well worthy of mention. Nathaniel (not to be confused with Thomas) Mor- ton's New England Memorial (1669), an interesting his-
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HISTORY
tory of the early settlement, but mainly based on that of Brad- ford; in 1670, J. Mason's History of the Pequot War; in 1674, Daniel Gookin's Historical Collections of the Indians; in 1676, Increase Mather's Brief History of King Philip's War; and New England's Crisis, a poem on the same sub- ject that appeared the year before; and five years later, Wil- liam Hubbard's first general history of New England; while his Troubles with the Indians from earliest times had ap- peared three years before. In 1678, Anne Bradstreet wrote some more poems; but J. Norton, the gloomy divine, shortly after published her Funeral Elegy.
In 1672, had appeared John Josselyn's New England Rari- ties, already mentioned, and in 1674, his Two Voyages dedicated to the Royal Society-perhaps the most readable of all the early descriptions: "Wherein you have the fetting out of a Ship, with the charges; the prices of all necessaries for furnishing a Planter and his family at his first coming; a de- scription of the Countrey, Natives and Creatures, with their Merchantil and Physical use; The Government of the Coun- trey as it is now possessed by the English, &c. A large Chron- ological table of the most remarkable passages from the first discovering of the Continent of America, to the year 1673" -what we should now call the publisher's blurb. This work is full of picturesque observations, as, in New England, how "the men and women keep their complexions, but lose their teeth ; the women pitifully toothshaken. Whether through the coldness of the climate or by sweet-meats, of which they have store, we are not able to affirm;" and on the next page that "the blackness of the Negroes proceeded from the curse upon Cham's posterity." But Josselyn, with Smith and T. Morton certainly the most picturesque of our early writers, went back to die in England.
In 1687 appeared William Penn's The Excellent privilege of Liberty and Property, being the Birthright of the Free-Born Subjects of England; and N. Byfield, the Late Revolution in New England, referring to the accession of William of Or- ange, and the expulsion from Boston of Andros. The same year G. Keith published a book Presbyterian and Independent Churches no True Church of Christ; and Increase Mather, one on The Unlawfulness of the Common Prayer Worship.
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MASSACHUSETTS IN LITERATURE
SCIENCE
In 1676, Foster's The First Almanac appeared; in 1682, Mary Rowlandson's narrative, Captivity among the Indians. The same year, Cotton Mather published his Character of a Virtuous Woman, but it was not until 1685, that he courted and married one; and in 1683, Increase Mather pub- lished his work on comets, being the first sign of interest that any New Englander had shown in any phenomena outside New England, or any celestial body outside Heaven or, more especially Hell; there the very next year, Cotton Mather pub- lished his famous work on witchcraft, full of research and interesting to this day, by no means differing from many mod- ern works on hypnotism or psycho-analysis.
THE MATHERS
Increase Mather was continually starting to England on behalf of the Massachusetts Colony to regain its Charter; he was a diplomat, a man of action, and perhaps we might add, a man of the world; but his son Cotton, was nothing but a preacher, and a research worker, though by far the most voluminous writer that Massachusetts has ever produced. In 1694, he published his Short History of New England, and in 1699, The Long War with the Indians, 1688-1699, King Philip's War; and he was at the trouble of learning Spanish in the Boston of that day, in order to convey "re- ligion" into the Spanish Indies. He assures us that he mastered the language in a few weeks; and in 1699, he did publish in Spanish La Religion Pura, a tract to inform the benighted Catholics of those countries with Puritan truth. Barrett Wen- dell's remarkable biography is the classic authority on the life of Mather, and depicts the thought and environment of Bos- ton, as it was then, in a manner so life-like that one can hardly discuss Massachusetts in the 17th century without mentioning this book.
In 1700, Mather published the Selling of Joseph, which is remarkable as being the first American argument against slavery (although we remember one of the first things for which he spent his money on arriving at majority was to buy his own father a slave) ; and the first prohibition tract had
THE
VVHOLE
BOOKE OF PSALMES Faithfully TRANSLATED . into ENGLISH Metre.
Whereunto is prefixed a difcourfe de - " caring not only the lawfullnes, but alfe the neceffity of the heavenly Ordinance of finging Scripture Plalmes in the Churches of God
Coll. 111. Let the word of God dwell plevisonfly in you, inall wifdome, teaching and exhort- agone another in Pfalmes, Himatt, and Pirituall'Songs, fiaging to the Lord wirb grace'in Jour bearts.
IAmts N. If any be afflicted, let him pray, andif any be merry let bins fing pfalmes.
Imprinted 1640
From the Boston Public Library
THE BAY PSALM BOOK
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THE MATHERS
been written by his father, Increase, as early as 1673, Wo to Drunkards. This, however, is not an argument for total abstinence, but for temperance.
We are rapidly approaching the end of Massachusetts' first century. Practically all of its writers, till we come to Cotton Mather and Sewell, have been born in England. With Cot- ton Mather's best known work Magnalia in 1702-the lit- erature of the founders may be said to end, and as if by coin- cidence, that year old Increase published a book entitled Ichabod.
With the Magnalia, we may well close this brief survey. Winthrop's History of New England is a history which the Magnalia certainly is not. Winthrop's diaries will compare with Pepys; Cotton Mather's form a curious contrast; Win- throp being entirely concerned with New England, the voyage thither and the people outside him. Cotton Mather is con- cerned with nothing that does not affect his own soul. Per- haps the most concise judgment on the Magnalia will be found in a Lowell Lecture given by the first Robert C. Winthrop in 1869. He calls it "a monstrous mass of information and spec- ulation, of error and gossip, of biography and history, of ital- ics and capitals, of classical quotations, Latin and Greek, and the original epitaphs, Latin and English, in prose and in verse," and its author-"the giant of New England early lit- erature, with a voracity for everything relating to our colo- nial conditions and history, as insatiate as his own vanity."
It contains, however, as a first book, "Antiquities," being a history and description of New England, followed by the "His- tory of the Town of Boston," an account of Harvard Uni- versity, lives of all the ministers; and in tthe second volume a further account of Harvard College, its laws and rules of government and memoirs of many other worthy designs. The fifth book, entitled "Acts and Monuments," relates to the Church and its government. The sixth book is a marvellous collection of marvellous occurrences "dictated by Divine Prov- idence" with mercies, judgments and punishments on many persons among the people of New England, which form the most bulky part of the volume and one hardly knows whether to compare it to Munchausen or to Gesta Romanorum. It also has the touch of Herodotus.
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MASSACHUSETTS IN LITERATURE
MILITARY HISTORY
We have passed without mention Hubbard's General His- tory of New England which has a pompous and affected style, which however grows simpler and livelier when later he writes his own narrative of the Pequod War and the Wheelwright and Hutchinson troubles.
Church's King Philip's War, first printed in 1716, fairly belongs to the earlier century; and with the work of Johnson may fairly be added to the classic histories of Bradford and Winthrop, though, of course, not to be compared with them.
New England's first Fruits (1643) belongs only to the cu- riosities of literature. The Day Breaking (1647) is a most interesting repository of Indian folk lore and customs. It is the first and most comprehensive account of the attempt of the Puritans to make Christians of the Indians, and the deeds of the Apostle Eliot, Winslow of Plymouth, Mayhew, head of the Martha's Vineyard mission, and Whitfield.
John Davenport belongs to New Haven; but his discourse (in 1663) on free government, anticipates the famous ser- mon of Thomas Hooker in the matter of the separation of the church and state, though by no means agreeing with him on the other great political doctrine, almost for the first time announced by Hooker, that all government must rest on the consent of the church.
The Magnalia is both the first and the last literary work of the Puritans, in that it is, first, written by a man born on Mas- sachusetts soil; second that it is the last book to represent the old conviction that the Puritan Church, especially that branch of it which was Congregational and independent, could alone preach the Truth of Christ. Jonathan Edwards in the next century was of the same mind, but he wrote only theology. In Cotton Mather, we are discussing also literature. Sewall's diary also; but in spirit he belongs to a later century, and for that we may reserve him.
With all that we have said and discussed of barrenness of the field, particularly as concerns writers who were born or who died in Massachusetts, its literature of the seventeenth cen- tury, in history, autobiography, theology, travel and adventure, is by no means to be neglected. Yet the adventurers went back to England, and only the Puritans remained; writing to amuse
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MILITARY HISTORY
or delight was as much anathema as writing a stage play. Only theology and self-analysis remained. But the greatest of all discoveries of the Puritans-those relating to the gov- ernment of man outside the Church-had their fruition in the eighteenth century. To them, more than to any other writer or people, are due democracy and constitutional government, that government which is introduced to protect the cardinal rights of even minorities.
It always must be remembered that among the early colo- nists there was no literary spirit, or interest in their writings as such. Such Massachusetts books as we have in the seven- teenth century are written mainly for the people in old Eng- land who wish to know about the new. Then again, such lit- erary faculty as the first Massachusetts men possessed was based entirely on the literature of old England, Elizabethan in quality, and this lasted down until the end of the century. Tyler, Wendell, Truslow Adams and Charles Francis Adams are as one in saying that there is practically no pure literature during this early period: C. F. Adams goes so far as to refer to it as the glacial period, into which both letters and arts passed under the Puritan Government. We indicated our dis- sent from this in at least one important domain, that of the science of government and the liberty of man, as well as in the examples of Bradford's Diary and the Magnalia. The Bay Psalm Book and the New England Primer, while of intense contemporary interest, are hardly literature; and the efforts of Anne Bradstreet and Shepherd are hardly poetry ; but the perfection they aimed at was entirely of old Eng- land. That tang of New England air gave no touch to New England writing for nearly two centuries, and the terrible poem of Michael Wigglesworth-"The Day of Doom," be- ginning with its best known lines-
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