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THE MASSACHUSETTS CHARACTER (1620)
In many respects the colony of Massachusetts Bay differed in its inception, in its character, management and personnel from any which had preceded it in the new world, as well as in its chartered rights and privileges. It was composed in no
22
THE WORLD MOVEMENT
general court had made substantial appropriation for a "schoole or colledge" at New Towne presently renamed Cam- bridge after their English home of learning.
Nothing, indeed, better illustrates their progress and the spirit in which they took up their task of founding a common- wealth than the well-known words of one of them describing this foundation. "After God had carried us safe to New- England, and wee had builded our houses, provided neces- saries for our liveli-hood, rear'd convenient places for Gods worship, and setled the Civill Government, One of the next things we longed for, and looked after was to advance Learn- ing, and perpetuate it to Posterity." To this end they estab- lished a school for "the advancement of all good literature, arts and sciences," striving to maintain in the face of the savages and the wilderness not only that system of ordered society in which they had been bred but that great tradition of letters and of scholarship which had been their heritage. Forward looking men in Virginia had, indeed, planned a col- lege in 1623; but not for more than fifty years were they able to follow this example. Among the records of colonial enter- prise must be set in a high place those of the men of Massa- chusetts Bay who summed up their purpose in great phrases which foreshadowed this foundation-faith, houses and sub- sistence, church, civil government and schools-and thus in a fashion set an example to America.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
[See also the bibliographies following Chapters iii (Origin of People) ; iv (Plymouth) ; v (Charter and Colony) ; vii (Winthrop) ; and the Gen- eral Bibliography at the end of Volume V.]
ABBOTT, Wilbur C .- The Expansion of Europe (Rev. ed., N. Y., Holt, 1924) .- For a general background.
ADAMS, William Henry Davenport .- The White King; or Charles the First, and the Men, Women, Life and Manners, Literature and Art of England in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century .- (London, Redway, 1889.)
BARRY, John Stetson .- History of Massachusetts (3 vols., Booton, Phil- lips, Sampson, 1855-1857) .- A good impartial study, but now out of date. See especially Vol. I, Chap. ii.
BARTLETT, William Henry .- The Pilgrim Fathers .- (London, Hall, Virtue, 1853.)
BRADLEY, Rose M .- The English Housewife in the Seventeenth & Eighteenth Centuries .- (London, Arnold, 1912.)
BUSHNELL, Horace .- The Fathers of New England .- (N. Y., Putnam, 1850.)
CAMBRIDGE MODERN HISTORY (13 vols., Cambridge [Eng.] Univ. Press, 1902-1911) .- Especially Vol. VII, chap. i, "First Century of English Colonisation."
CHANNING, Edward; HART, A. B .; and TURNER, F. J .- Guide to the History of the United States. (New and augmented edition 1904) .- See § § 111-114, 127, 128.
COATE, Mary .- Social Life in Stuart England. (London, Methuen, 1924). DOUGLAS, James .- New England and New France. (N. Y., Putnam, 1913) .- Recent and useful.
DOYLE, John Andrew .- English Colonies in America (5 vols., N. Y., Holt, 1882-1907) .- Learned and for the learned.
EGGLESTON, Edward .- Beginners of a Nation (N. Y., Appleton, 1897) .- An interesting popular account of the characterestics of the Colonists.
EEKHOF, A .- Three unknown documents concerning the Pilgrim Fathers in Holland .- (The Hague, Nijhoff, 1920).
ELLIOTT, Charles Wyllys .- The New England History .- (N. Y., Scrib- ner, 1857).
FISKE, John .- Beginnings of New England (7th ed., Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1898) .- Excellent in style; less deeply studied than some other works.
GARDINER, Samuel Ramson .- The History of England (1603-1642) (10 vols., London, Longmans, Green, 1893-1899) .- The standard au- thority for the period.
GILLESPIE, James Edward .- The Influence of Oversea Expansion on England to 1700 .- (N. Y., Columbia Univ. 1920).
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SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
GOODMAN, William .- Social History of Great Britain during the Reigns of the Stuarts .- (N. Y. 1843).
GRIFFIS, William Elliot .- The Influence of The Netherland in the Mak- ing of the English Commonwealth and the American Republic .- (Bos- ton, DeWolfe, Fiske, 1891).
GRIFFIS, William Elliot .- The Pilgrims in Their Three Homes: England, Holland, America .- (Boston, Houghton, Mifflin, 1898).
HUTCHINSON, Thomas .- History of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay (3 vols., Boston, Fleet, 1795-1828) .
JAMES, Bartlett Burleigh .- The Colonization of New England .- (Phila., Barrie, 1904).
LEVERMORE, Charles Herbert .- Forerunners and Competitors of the Pilgrims and Puritans .- (Brooklyn, N. E. Society of Brooklyn, 1912).
PALFREY, John Gorham .- History of New England (5 vols., Boston, Little, Brown, 1858-1890) .- An honest though old fashioned study of the planting and development of New England.
TYLER, Lyon Gardiner .- England in America (1580-1652) (N. Y., Har- per, 1904) .- Brief account, sympathetic.
CHAPTER II
THE GEOGRAPHIC BACKGROUND (1670-1889)
BY JOHN GOULD CURTIS Fellow of The American Geographical Society
GEOGRAPHY DEFINED
Geographic factors are the properties used by God in set- ting the stage of Earth for the human drama of Life. In more literal language, the places men live in have much to do with their lives; and the study of this interrelation between men and the natural factors of their environment is the field of geography in its modern, broad sense.
This human adaptation may be very simple and obvious, as in the case of the castaway or explorer who is obliged to live on the country, and who consequently utilizes such of its wild products as he can readily obtain-animals, fish, nuts or fruit. Other examples are less apparently geographical as, for in- stance, the decline of commercial agriculture in New England, because the pushing of the frontier westward to the prairies made possible large-scale production in farming. Or, what directly affected Massachusetts, the elimination of the whaling industry because spring steel supplanted whalebone, and the discovery of petroleum provided new and cheap and superior materials for the needs which had previously supported the costly and dangerous business of whale-catching.
In Massachusetts the influence of geographic elements may be traced in every significant early industry, and also in nearly all those on which the modern prosperity of the Common- wealth is based. Before we try to analyze and describe these factors and their effects, it may be best to specify just what the principal geographic considerations are. They readily fall into three groups, and the story of Massachusetts may per- haps be made simpler by this division :
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26
THE GEOGRAPHIC BACKGROUND
1. Topographic features: the contour of the earth's sur- face, the nature of the inland water bodies, the character of the ocean shore.
2. Climate: temperature, winds and rainfall and their sea- sonal variations.
3. Natural resources: soils, minerals, indigenous plants and animals.
At the outset one other matter should be mentioned. Al- most all of New England has at one time or another been in substance if not in fact a part of Massachusetts. For this reason it is often not easy to divorce the consideration of Massachusetts within its present boundaries from that of New England as a whole. Where this is the case, no effort has been made to strain the distinction. Particularly with reference to topography and climate is it necessary to con- sider the New England region as a whole. The utilization of natural resources is a story that may with less difficulty be restricted to the area that is Massachusetts as we now know it.
GEOLOGICAL FOUNDATION
Underlying the modern landscape of New England is a long and complex geological history. The great majority of the rocks are very old, even in the sense in which geologists compute age. The picture which they compose tells a story of very ancient rocks, submitted to extreme heat and pressure in the mountain-building processes, folded, crushed, changed in both physical and chemical structure.
Throughout the area of the greater part of modern Massa- chusetts, dikes of basalt made their way into these rock masses. Intrusive rock masses came into position underneath, failed to force an opening to the surface, and cooled very slowly, at great depth under the protective covering of thousands of feet of rock. This we know because some of the granites con- tain coarse crystals which can form only under such circum- stances. All of this story we can now reconstruct because the erosion of subsequent ages has removed at least 5,000 feet of rock that originally overlaid the present land surface; and it is possible that the cover was several times that thickness.
27
EROSION HISTORY
Less complicated is the structure of the Connecticut valley lowland, where relatively soft and uncontorted sandstones, shales and conglomerates are exposed in substantially hori- zontal beds.
Distinct from either of these areas is the region comprising Cape Cod, Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, and the islands in their vicinity. These are the northernmost unsubmerged rem- nants of the Atlantic coastal plain. They are composed prin- cipally of unconsolidated sands, and are quite different from the upland area.
COASTLINE
Approached from the ocean, New England presents a rough, mountainous, and deeply indented shore. The estuaries, or submerged river mouths, give evidence of a depression of the land in relation to the sea, a phenomenon which has produced the broad open mouths of such rivers as the Kennebec and Penobscot in Maine, the harbors at Boston and Portland, and such bodies of water as Narragansett Bay and Buzzard's Bay. A further proof of this depression is in the islands bordering the Maine coast, which are but the unsubmerged tops of hills that are mostly beneath the water.
Since the depression of the coast there has been a subse- quent elevation, as may be seen from the shoreline terraces at various levels up to some 200 feet above the present water line. These mark elevations where waves and shore currents have done their work in relatively recent times. This uplift is also in part responsible for the shallowness of the water over the broad continental shelf off-shore; and the shallowness, in- turn, helps to conserve the cool waters of the southward-mov- ing Labrador current, and materially to enhance the advan- tages of the area as a fishing ground. To the uplift must be credited also the power generated by rivers that have consid- erable falls not far from the sea.
EROSION HISTORY
The New England landscape as we now see it has been modified through the erosion of streams and glaciers. We know that great overlying masses have been worn away, be-
28
THE GEOGRAPHIC BACKGROUND
cause certain formations now appearing at the surface could have had their origin only at great depth.
What geologists call the base plane of erosion is a theore- tical plane, touching the sea level at the margin of the con- tinent, and rising inland with a slope so slight that the rain water would not run off with sufficient force to carry more of the soil to the ocean. The processes of erosion tend to reduce all land masses to this plane, and though it is never actually reached, the landscape is sometimes worn down to what is called a peneplain.
Now the mountains of New England are the remnants of older and higher mountains. The tops of these mountains would present, if a line were drawn connecting them, an al- most level horizon; they are therefore recognized as all that remains of a former peneplain. After the land was reduced to a monotonous surface of low relief, it was again elevated relative to the ocean, and the streams were given impetus to begin with renewed energy their work of cutting new valleys and reducing the land mass once more to the base plane. Be- fore this work was completed, however, a new elevation of the land took place, and the streams began to dissect the second peneplain. Much of the evidence with respect to erosion cycles in New England is extremely complicated and obscure, but we may be certain that at least two partially completed cycles preceded the one to which our modern valleys belong.
GLACIATION
One of the factors that has confounded the natural record of erosion was the advent of the great ice sheet which came slowly down from its center of origin in the Laurentian region to the northward. As it moved, the ice mass picked up the loose rocks of the country, and with these frozen in its base used them as the tools to scrape away the soils and to grind down the solid rocks of the mountains. The northward sides of the hills were rasped by rocks which have left their marks to this day. As the ice passed the hillcrests and moved down the southern slopes, it plucked out great fragments of rock to replenish its supply of tools. Thus the northern slopes of the
29
LANDSCAPE
hills were made gentler, and the southern slopes were made steeper by the plucking action of the glacier.
Some of the debris carried by the ice was deposited during the advance of the ice sheet. More of it was deposited when the ice mass melted; some was modified by the streams that flowed from the melting ice, and some was left utterly without order. To the first class belong the outwash plains, the round, stratified sandy mounds called kames, and the winding, strati- fied sandy ridges called eskers. The kames have always been popular as cemetery sites, not so much because of the slight dignity of their elevation as because they are well drained and very easy on the grave-diggers. The unmodified glacial drift makes up the moraines.
At the margin of maximum advance of the ice front is the terminal moraine which stretches across Martha's Vine- yard, Nantucket and Long Island. Recessional moraines mark temporary halting places of the ice front during its re- treat, and the more scattered deposits called ground moraines represent the quite unconcentrated burden dropped upon the land surface by the ice sheet as it melted away. The elliptical hills composed of unorganized glacial debris and known as drumlins are the result of the pushing about of moraine ma- terial in the course of a fresh advance of the ice sheet over an area from which it had previously retreated.
The mantle of glacial debris ranges in thickness from a few inches to several hundred feet, though a few feet is the usual depth. Its boulders have impeded the cultivation of New England farms from which they have been cleared and piled in the stone walls that are the typical fences of the region. Glacial deposits made in stream courses served to block the drainage and cause the accumulation of ponds and lakes, so that some streams are veritable chains of lakes. The result is the conservation of the rain waters in a fashion that modifies the extremes of flood and drought, and maintains the stream flow more nearly at its mean throughout the year.
LANDSCAPE
The geological history of New England expresses itself in a varied landscape, which composes the worn, round contours
30
THE GEOGRAPHIC BACKGROUND
of ancient mountains, the uncompromising barrenness of boulder-strewn hillsides, and the innumerable swift streams whose passage to the sea is interrupted by lakes and ponds, and sometimes hastened by cascades and mighty falls. West- ward lie the level fields of the fertile valley of the Connecti- cut; eastward the stark dunes of Cape Cod where those men lived who spent their energies in farming the sea.
The Massachusetts mountains are the northernmost out- lyers of the Appalachian system. If three sooty fingers be drawn from northeast to southwest across a map of New England, and if that finger which follows the shore be lifted as it passes Boston, the resulting streaks will mark, in a gen- eral way, the three mountainous belts of this region. At the extreme east is the Coastal Hilly Belt, about 1,000 feet in height, extending from Mt. Desert Island off the coast of Maine to the Blue Hills south of Boston. To the north and west is the range called in New Hampshire the White Moun- tains; it extends southward through Massachusetts and into northern Connecticut, with elevations in Massachusetts some- what in excess of 3,500 feet. Mt. Washington and Mt. Monadnock are the most striking peaks in this range. The third belt comprises the Green Mountains of Vermont and the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts and Connecticut. The highest of these is Mt. Mansfield in Vermont, 4,364 feet.
Between the second and third of these mountain belts is the lowland of the Connecticut valley, only four or five miles wide along the Vermont-New Hampshire boundary, but ex- panding to about twenty miles in southern Massachusetts and Connecticut. This area, quite distinct in its geological his- tory and the character of its soil, is principally composed of a plain or a series of terrace plains.
The country presents a varied and beautiful and restful as- pect. The skyline is moulded in the rounded contours of worn, ancient hills. The valleys are marked with numberless beautiful lakes. The charm of the seacoast is enhanced by its ruggedness and its deep indentations.
Glaciation scraped away whatever soil had previously ac- cumulated on the rocky elevations of this region, and deposited it all mingled with boulders and other debris. The cultivation of such soil is obviously beset with difficulties, but hard work
THE BLUFF COAST SHOWS RECENT UPLIFT
Photographs from Boston and Maine Railroad
LAKE SUNAPEE, N. H. TYPIFIES RESULT OF BLOCKED STREAMS
31
ALLUREMENTS TO COLONISTS
and the intelligent use of each of the small areas of widely differing soil types for the purpose for which it is best suited, have been means to successful agriculture.
This region is not suited by nature to the support of an extremely dense population, but it is attractive as a place to live in, and shows considerable versatility in its resources.
CLIMATE
The climate of New England has been unjustly discredited by some critics. It is not as much affected by the neighboring ocean as has been supposed, because the prevailing winds are from the west. It is true that this region is in the track of almost every storm that sweeps across the United States, whether from the northwest, the Pacific coast, the Gulf of Mexico, or the Florida coast. With all this, however, the total annual precipitation is not too heavy, and the region enjoys the advantage of fairly even distribution of rainfall so as to be of the greatest value to farmers.
In the extreme northern portion of New England the win- ters are apt to be severe; but within the boundaries of the present Commonwealth of Massachusetts they are no more so than in other states of about the same latitude. The sum- mers are seldom offensively hot; and although there is a con- siderable annual variation in temperature, the climate is adapted to satisfactory variety in agriculture and contributes much to making the region a pleasant and stimulating place in which to live and work. This climate is, in the way in which it lends itself to agricultural pursuits, very like that of old England; and this similarity of characteristics was one of the indirect but very potent influences which early turned the attention of the inhabitants to manufacturing industries.
ALLUREMENTS TO COLONISTS
It is a cherished idea of some recent writers that the early colonists of Massachusetts were people who came to these shores with the principal motive of escaping one form of re- ligious intolerance in order that they might set up another. But the Pilgrim fathers were not the first Englishmen to
32
THE GEOGRAPHIC BACKGROUND
undertake the establishment of homes for themselves in this part of the New World. The Popham and Gorges and other early settlements were based, as were the first colonial ven- tures in Massachusetts, upon commercial enterprise.
A new frontier is always attractive because of the possibili- ties which it offers for the acquisition of wealth; it presents to the first settlers an opportunity for what we call getting in on the ground floor. Very often their hope is for a concen- trated form of wealth that is represented by gold. That this was in mind with respect to New England is evidenced by the fact that there are reservations of a share of the bullion derived from mines or workings in the terms of some early grants.
Those Englishmen who actually explored New England were sound-minded men, prompt to appreciate the great possi- bilities of certain commodities which in due time became the staple products of the region. Thus, the first man to note and spread knowledge of the greatest staple of early New England was Bartholomew Gosnold, who sailed along the coast in 1602 and named the most prominent headland Cape Cod. Captain John Smith explored the region more extensively a few years later and published a description of the country to which he gave the name, New England, apparently following an earlier suggestion of Sir Francis Drake.
Smith emphasized the great importance of the fisheries : "The maine Staple, from hence to bee extracted is fish; which howeuer it may seeme a meane and a base com- moditie: yet who will but truely take the pains and consider the sequell, I think will allow it well worth the labour. It is strange to see what great aduentures the hopes of setting forth men of war to rob the industrious innocent, would pro- cure. . [Yet] neuer could the Spaniard with all his Mynes of golde and Siluer, pay his debts, his friends, and army, halfe so truly, as the Hollanders stil haue done by this contemptible trade of fish."
These observations had been anticipated over a hundred years by Basque and Breton fishermen who commenced cast- ing their nets off Newfoundland as early as 1504-perhaps even a half-century before. According to his letter in Hak- luyt, Gilbert found large fleets engaged there when he made
33
AGRICULTURE
his voyage in 1583 ; and the enterprise was proceeding on such a scale that a shipmaster might expect to obtain there any necessary food supplies or repairs for a further voyage.
Furs were also early regarded as a profitable source of rev- enue and Europeans engaged in the trade both as barterers and as trappers. In frontier communities where money is not in common circulation, some staple of relatively high value and small bulk is the usual medium of exchange; and except in the South where prices were expressed in terms of tobacco, furs have at one time or another served this purpose in almost every section of North America. In New England beaver skins were equivalent to sterling; they were actively traded in, and were exported in hogsheads-the standard colonial package-to warm and adorn the wealthy folk of England.
We must keep in mind, however, the fact that the European conception of the new country was made up of a few contribu- tions of first-hand evidence and a vast fund of misinformation, when the immigration of the seventeenth century commenced.
HANDICAPPED AGRICULTURE
It was assumed both by those who urged colonization and by the emigrants who came over, that agriculture would be the principal pursuit of the colonists in the new world. But, as our examination of its geological history has shown, New England soil was not well adapted to commercial farming, even when cleared of its forest cover. For a long time the colonists could not carry their agricultural pursuits beyond the limits of mere subsistence farming, because of the virtual identity of the agricultural products of New England with those of the mother country, with whom it was of course im- possible to compete on her own ground. In later years New England farms developed a modest trade in foodstuffs and live cattle, which were exported with salt fish to the West Indies, and in moderate quantities to the southern colonies; but this was never of very great economic importance.
It is worth mention that farming was for a time placed in some degree on a commercial basis during the years after 1810, when manufacturing industries began to be important, down to about 1860; after which the development of the West
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THE GEOGRAPHIC BACKGROUND
made its competition felt. Towns arose and the surrounding farms fed them, at a profit. Agriculture was considered a prosperous calling, except in such unsuitable areas as the sand dunes of Cape Cod, to which seafaring men even brought soil in ballast from the West Indies, so that they might cultivate little gardens in their dooryards.
In general, however, New England had no agricultural basis of trade with the mother country, and it was necessary for the colonists to turn their energies to other channels in order that they might purchase the foreign commodities which they needed. This urgency led to two important results. It mothered the inventive genius of the New England Yankee who took to manufacturing for himself the things that more opulent people would have imported. It also gave rise to a triangular trade route by which New Englanders traded their local products in the markets of the West Indies and the Medi- terranean either for bills of exchange drawn on London, or for other commodities which were saleable in England.
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