USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > The memorial history of Boston : including Suffolk County, Massachusetts, 1630-1880. Vol. I > Part 21
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Though, as has been said, the "Puritan Commonwealth" was not a phrase adopted by the founders of Boston and Massachusetts as the title of the government and State which they set up here, there was a word of equal
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significance and fitness which they did accept for that purpose, - the word " theocracy." From the most careful study of their motives and designs, as meditated by the leaders and tentatively carried out in their legislation and institutions, we draw this inference, -that it was their aim and effort to establish here a Christian commonwealth, which should bear the same rela- tion to the whole Bible, as its Statute-book, which the Jewish commonwealth bore to the Scriptures of the Old Testament.1 Their legislation and institu- tions were not founded upon nor guided by the spirit of the New Testa- ment distinctively. Had they been so, they would doubtless have been in several respects much modified. And though the founders did intend to distinguish between certain ceremonial and institutional elements of the "Old Covenant " which they believed to be abrogated and those which they regarded as of permanent and perpetual authority for "the people of God," they did not draw the dividing line so sharply or so indulgently on the side of larger liberty for Christians as it has been drawn, by general approval, in later times. The punctiliousness, the authority, the judicial severity of the old dispensation, and its blending of the functions of Church and State were adopted as vital principles of the Puritan theocracy. This fact appears alike in their long delay and reluctance to construct anything answering to a code of laws, and in the character of the code which they finally adopted. They felt it to be their solemn duty rather to put into force and require obedience to laws which, as they believed, God had already proclaimed for them than to enact laws of their own. So, while waiting deliberately before engaging in such legislation as the emergency of their condition might re-
1 [Perhaps the best explanation to be found in their own writings of the intent of our New England Puritan's system of church government, as distinguished from that of the Church of Eng- land, is in John Cotton's Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven, 1644, and in his Way of the Churches of Christ in New England, 1645. The prevailing views of the following generation find record in Mather's Magnalia, and still later, with Baptist tendencies, in Backus's Hist. of New England, and it was chiefly upon these two books that, at the suggestion of Neander, Uhden wrote his Geschichte der Congregationalisten in Nett Eng- land bis 1740, of which there is an English translation, with characterization of the chief authorities in an appendix. Views of the aims and significance of the churches from the point taken by those holding with modern qualifica- tions to their transmitted beliefs will be found in Leonard Wood's Theology of the Puritans, and in Leonard Bacon's Genesis of the New Eng- land Churches. The latter book aims rather to show how the neighboring colony of New Ply- mouth exerted an influence upon the gathering churches of the Bay. A distinction has of late been much insisted npon between the principles of these neighboring communities, which came
in the end to be identical. The Pilgrims were separatists, professedly outside the pale of the English Church ; the Puritans but gradually emancipated themselves from its fetters. This is the view taken in the following books : Dr. Waddington's Tracks of the Hidden Church, and more elaborately in his Congregational History, of which there is in the Congregational Quarterly, 1874, a searching review by II. M. Dexter, who also covers the ground in his Congregationalism as seen in its Literature ; articles by I. N. Tarbox on " Plymouth and the Bay" in the Congregational Quarterly, xvii., and " Pilgrims and Puritans " in the Old Colony Hist. Soc. Coll. 1878; Punchard's History of Congregationalism, iii. 443; Benjamin Scott in a lecture, London, 1866, reprinted in Hist. Mag., May, 1867, from which is mostly derived an article, " Pilgrims and Puritans," in Scribner's Monthly, June, 1876. Cf. also Hist. May., May and November, 1867, October, 1869; Baylies's Old Colony, i. ch. i. ; Barry's Massa- chusetts, i. ch. ii .; Palfrey's New England, i. ch. iii. ; Essex Institute Hist. Coll. iv. 145, by A. C. Goodell; and Dr. Bacon on the "Reaction of New England on English Puritanism in the Seventeenth Century," in the New Englander, July, 1878. - ED. ]
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quire, they were content to understand that Scripture should furnish them guidance in their code. And when, after a long deferring of this need- ful work for their government, and many ingenious excuses for their pro- crastination, they were finally compelled by the impatient demands of the people to provide for them a " body of liberties," the influence of the lead- ing spirits prevailed to secure for their legislation a Jewish atisterity, and to reinforce their authority by Old-Testament texts.1
In our attempt to understand and to judge with fairness the intent and purpose of the founders of this New England theocracy, it is of course of prime importance that we view them in the light of their own beliefs and consciences.2 The fundamental condition of their rectitude and sincerity in heart and aim is put beyond all question by their efforts, their sacrifices, their exposing themselves and all they possessed in this world, and com- mitting their hopes for another to the stern deprivations, perils, and suffer- ings involved in their wilderness enterprise. And as to the Scriptural the- ocratical foundation which was the basis of the Puritan Commonwealth, - visionary and impracticable as the scheme seems to us in its own principles, in the discomfitures and errors attending its experimental trial, and in its confessed failure, - a wise review of the past and a knowledge of the work- ings of human nature will at least relieve the scheme of contempt and ridicule. Very many and very visionary, ranging all the way from a noble dignity to a manifest absurdity and folly, have been the theories which have inspired and beguiled companies of men and women for the disposing of themselves in communities with security, prosperity, and happiness. To say nothing of those which have been only set forth in theory and in imagina- tion, like Plato's Republic, More's Utopia, and Harrington's Occana, we find enough of them that have been put on trial, from that of the Essenes to that of the Mormons, - with all that have been in actual experiment between
I [John Cotton had drawn up a code on the years has put us in easy possession of their early laws. Professor Joel Parker has made their re- ligious legislation the subject of a lecture, which is printed in the Lowell Lectures on Massachu- setts and its Early Ilistory. The abstract of the early laws which was printed in 1641 (copy in pattern of " Moses his Judicials " in 1636, which was not adopted ; but it was printed in London in 1641, reprinted in 1655, again in Hutchinson's Collections, p. 161, and in Mass. Ilist. Coll. v. 173. The first code adopted was the "Body of Lib- erties," drawn up in 1638 by Nathaniel Ward, " Harvard College Library) has been reprinted which became authorized in Dec. 1641. Nine- in Force's Tracts, ii. Professor Washburn's Judicial History of Massachusetts will serve as a commentary. A statement of the early edi- tions of the Massachusetts laws is in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc. ii. 576. Of the earliest printed edition, 1648, no copy is known. A few copies remain of the second edition, dated 1660. See Mr. Winthrop's chapter. - ED.| teen MS. copies were distributed to the towns. None were printed. No copy of this was known till, about sixty years ago, a manuscript of it was discovered in the Boston Athenaeum, and in 1843 it was printed in the 3 Mass. Ilist. Coll. viii. 216, with an introduction by Francis C. Gray. Cf. Poole's introduction to Johnson's Wonder-working Providence of Zion's Saviour, 2 [The most flagrant disregard of these con- ditions has brought a great deal of censure upon Peter Oliver's Puritan Commonwealth in Mas- sachusetts, Boston, 1856. Palfrey says it might well have been written by a chaplain of James II. Hildreth, in his History of the United States, rather allows their faults to overshadow their virtues. - ED.] and Historical Magasine, February, 1868. Barry, Hist. of Mass. i. 276, instances, as significant of the really mild sway of New England Puritanism for the times, that the " Body of Liberties " contained but twelve offences punishable by death, while one hundred and fifty were so treated in Eng- land. The printing of the colony records of late VOL. I. -- 19.
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them, - to furnish us with sufficient illustrations of the ingenuity, the fertil- ity, the eccentricity of human inventiveness in this direction. In view of all these human devices, exercised in schemes for reconstituting and amending the social state, -whether having reference solely to mundane objects or fashioned by faith or superstition for religious ends, - it is not at all strange that the basis of a commonwealth on a theocracy or the Bible, such as was attempted here, should, in the developments of time and circumstances, have had its turn for a practical trial. Compared with many other of the vision- ary schemes of men, it has qualities august in nobleness and dignity. In accordance with this view, a considerate study of the better side and aspects of the Puritan scheme can hardly fail to impress us with a sense of the pro- found and cnthralling carnestness, the thorough and intense sincerity, of the master spirits of the enterprise. There is something indeed that we may describe as awful in this their carnestness, the literal closeness and entireness of their religious believings, their unfaltering convictions as to their duty, and their purpose to perform it. Now, it is to this full persuasion and intense earnestness of the founders of the Puritan Commonwealth that we may trace the occasion of their failure, and incidentally of the errors and wrongs into which their policy, legislation, and, so to speak, their consciences, consist- ently as they thought, but none the loss fatally, led them. And to the same cause we are also to refer much that is uncharitable, unfair, and wholly un- . just in the contemptuous criticism and severity of censure and ridicule which have been visited upon the Puritans in these modern times.
The theocratic principles of these leading Puritans, and the legislative, social, and religious enforcement of them, were vitally dependent upon a form of belief and a rule of living which required perfect individual con- viction, and which could not be transferred or imposed upon such as rightly or wrongfully failed to share that conviction. Oppression and intolerance of all their associates who were outside of their covenant, however other- wise concerned for the common security and prosperity, as we shall soon sec, werc inextricably involved with - in fact were - the natural and necessary results of the Puritan administration. The attempt of the most earnest and austere of the leaders to enforce their own principles upon their servants and others - and indeed upon such of their own chosen fellowship as might falter or seem lukewarm in their constancy -led to manifest injustice, to bigotry, and to cruelty. And this same earnestness and consequent sever- ity of the leaders furnish the occasion of much of the harshness of judg- ment, the scorn, contempt, and ridicule that have been visited upon them. Not so much by any individual attainments of our own, but by our share in a general enlightenment and enfranchisement, it has come about that what to those Puritan legislators were the most august and solemn realities of belief and conviction are to us the merest superstitions and bugbears. Their harshness, bigotry, and intolerance were the results of what we re- gard as their false beliefs, their absurd credulity, their conccit that they were " God's elect." Yet their sincerity in their prejudices, convictions,
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and delusions does not avail with all who criticise or judge them to relieve one whit the limitation of the wisdom of the Puritans, or to palliate the odiousness of their principles when put to trial.
The enterprise of transplanting themselves and establishing a colony in the wilderness involved most grave and exacting conditions. It was costly, and beset by many contingencies and risks. It required all the previous forecast of calculating wisdom, a cautious apprehension of possible dis- comfitures, and a prudent watchfulness against external and internal foes. They had before them for warning the disastrous failure of like enterprises at Virginia, St. Christopher's, Newfoundland, and on the coast of Maine, with only at that time the qualified success of the poor settlement at Plymouth. Encouragement and security in any like experiment could be looked for only by a watchful caution against the ill agencies which had wrecked all pre- vious ones. The master motive in the minds of the leaders here --- those who embarked all their estates and prospects in life in the undertaking - is admitted to have been a profoundly religious one, however qualified by its clements and limitations that type of religion may have been. But this religious intent was necessarily dependent upon financial or commercial conditions and accessories. It is to be admitted that only the minority of those who came in the first fleet, and who arrived in increasing numbers for the next score of years, were primarily drawn hither by that master motive of zeal in their peculiar type of religion. Only the minority, too, from the first and onwards, embarked their whole worldly substance and their life- resolve and constancy in the enterprise.
At the meeting of the company in England in which it was resolved to transfer the charter and to set up its local administration here, the religious motive prevailed over merely mercantile or thrifty objects, though the latter were recognized in their place. At that point the enterprise was in the hands, at the charges, and in the direction of its religious leaders. The security and success of the colony would depend primarily upon the condi- tion that these leaders should be intelligent, educated, and upright men, thoroughly conscientious and high-minded, sincerely devout, and secking ends of public good. These prime conditions would ensure the judi- cious exercise of the power which rightfully belonged to them, and would qualify the ill consequences of any arbitrary stretch of it. That these con- ditions were in the main generously and nobly met stands triumphantly certified in the fact that though there were many impediments, mistakes, and discomfitures, many incidental grievances and wrongs, the experiment was never abandoned. No crisis in its trial compelled any radical changes in it, except such as could be allowed without revolution, as in the time and circumstances of them necessary and wise; and the success of it stands to-day a demonstration to the world.
But these leaders, being the few, needed associates and helpers. Servants, " laborers, miners, and engineers," as the record reads, must be engaged, still at the charge of the responsible projectors and the pecuniary resources of the company.
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Thomas Foxcroft, the minister of the First Church in Boston, in a ser- mon preached by him on the first centennial of the settlement, speaks thus of the founders: " The initial generation of New England was very much a select and a puritanical people in the proper sense of the word. They were not (as to the body of them) a promiscuous and heterogeneous assem- blage, but in general of a uniform character, agreeing in the most excellent qualities, principles, and tempers; Christians very much of the primitive stamp. As one of our worthies of the second generation 1 has aptly ex- pressed it, . God sifted a whole nation that he might send a choice grain over into this wilderness.' It was as little of a mixed generation, in regard of their moral character and religious profession, that came over first to New England, as perhaps was ever known in the earth. They were very much a chosen generation, collected from a variety of places, and by a strange conduct of Divine Providence agreeing in the same enterprise, to form a plantation for religion in this distant part of the world. Scarce any of a profane character mingled themselves with the first-comers; and of those that came hither upon secular views, some were disheartened by the toils and difficulties they met with and soon returned, and others, finding this reformed climate disagrecable to their vitiated inclinations, took their speedy flight away. The body of the first-comers were men in their middle age or declining days, who had been inured to sufferings for righteousness' sake." Foxcroft adds, of his own time, "We are now become a very mixt generation ; and may I not add, in consequence thereof, an apostate one? "
The question naturally presents itself, as to what were the measures or safeguards by which the leaders of the colony, its proprietors and officers, sought to protect themselves and their scheme against the intrusion, the intermeddling, or the opposition of uncongenial and mischievous associates or interlopers? They were eager to obtain renewing and reinforcing emi- grants. Indeed, it was essential that they should do so. But how did they plan to guard themselves against the wrong sort of comers? Circumstances favored them in this respect better than any protective measures which they did or could enforce. It is understood that the Corporation held the absolute proprietary right to all the territory covered by their patent, and could also fix the conditions on which new members, frecmen, could be admitted to the company, whose votes and action would afterwards imperil or secure all that depended upon that proprietary right. When the Cor- poration, through its Court, afterwards disposed of parcels of its land to in- dividuals or to townships, it still held, by the right of taxation, a sovereignty over the territory. They found in their Charter this assured privilege or authority for protecting themselves against all unwelcome or dangerous persons -" That it shall and may be lawful to and for ye cheife com- manders, governors, &c., of ye said company, resident in ye said part of New England, for their special defence and safety, to incounter, expulse, repell, and resist by force of armes, as well by sca as by lande, and by all fit-
1 Mr. Stoughton, in his Election Sermon.
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ting waies and meanes whatsoever, all such person and persons as shall at any time hereafter attempt or enterprise ye destruction, invasion, detriment, or annoyance to ye said plantation or inhabitant." The authorities, in their wisdom, interpreted this positive charter privilege as empowering them to order and banish from their territory any one whose presence in it was not desirable to then. They availed themselves of it from the moment of the first sitting of their Court, and proceeded to clear the place of all the squat- ters, scattered settlers, " old planters," and remnants of former companies of adventurers, who were judged " unmeet to inhabit in this jurisdiction."
Still, there was from the first, from the stress of necessity, a door left open by which many persons but in partial sympathy with the aims of the Company, and some secretly or avowedly hostile to it, came in among them. It was essential to the unimpeded success of the Puritan Commonwealth, its firm basis, its fair development, its peace and security, that those who con- stituted it should be in accord and harmony, their loyalty to and love of it being assured by their " piety,"-the piety of the Puritan pattern and spirit. It does not appear that the authorities were sufficiently rigid and watchful in imposing restrictions to an entrance upon their territory, such as would keep out mere adventurers, restless, discontented, and mischievous intruders. So they had to deal with such persons after they had more or less secured a hold by their presence and self-assertion. This was the first occasion of annoyance to them ; and the measures to which they had recourse were such as gradually, under the workings of human nature, involved severity, bitterness, cruelty, and matured into what we regard as their in- tolerant and persecuting spirit. It was quite far from their intent to offer a freehold or asylum for all sorts of unsettled, whimsical, and crotchety spirits. Yet a rare variety of such came in upon them. The Planter's Plca1 made the following somewhat generous, but still guarded invitation as to the sort of persons needed for the colony : " Good Governours, able Ministers, Physitians, Souldiers, Schoolemasters, Mariners, and Mechanicks of all sorts." Men free of ill humours " ought to be willing, constant, industrious, obedient, frugall, lovers of the common good, or at least such as may be easily wrought to this temper." It cannot be expected that all should be such, " but care must be had that ye principalls be so inclined. . .. Mutinies, which one person may kindle, are well nigh as dangerous in a Colony, as in an Armie. .. . Governours and Ministers, especially in New England, must be of piety and blameless life as patterns to ye Heathens." Had the authorities of Massachusetts known what trouble they were to have from Roger Williams, they might from the first have declined to receive him ; for he was not one of those concerned in the enterprise, nor a freeman of the Company. They did not invite him here; but the way was free to him, and he came. It was the attempt of the most carnest and austere of the
1 [This rare tract of John White's, printed in 1630 (of which Mr. Deane has a copy, and another is in the Lenox Library, and two are in
the Brinley Catalogue, Nos. 373, 2,704), is re- printed in Force's Tracts, il., and in part in Young's Chronicles of Mass. - ED.]
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authorities to enforce their principles and standards and tests upon their servants and others, and upon such of their own choicer fellowship as showed lukewarmness, or a failing " godliness," that heightened bigotry and prompted all degrees of harshness.
This seems to be the fitting place to notice, by anticipation, the measure to which the legislators here had so soon a recourse in restricting the fran- chise to "Church-Members." In the lack of, or in the doubtful efficacy, of other securities, their first reliance was upon this. As has been already stated, their charter left them at full liberty to define the conditions on which, by making new members " freemen," they should admit to the company those who, as voters and candidates for office among them, should thus accede to influence and authority in disposing their affairs, their proprietary rights, and property. Our modern democracy makes quite easy the terms for the naturalization among us of foreigners who cast in their lot here, and who soon acquire the right to vote and to ask votes for themselves in all matters concerning our institutions and the property of the community. The franchise, on those easy terms, would have wrecked our colonial enter- prise in its very start. It would soon have numbered among its full partners a heterogeneous multitude who would have had little idea of what " the pub- lic good " required, and less ability and will to labor and suffer for it. Se- dition, dissension, the strong assertion of individual variances of judgment believed to endanger the fabric of government or to provoke a party spirit, were evils which they had most reason to apprehend, and against these the leaders were most anxious to protect their enterprise, especially in its stage of uncertainty and peril. They would naturally, therefore, seek to hold new partners by some solemn pledge of fidelity, and to put this pledge into terms by which they might ever after challenge those who had voluntarily entered into it. So the condition on which they granted the franchise was not one dependent upon social rank, nor upon pecuniary means, but upon hearty sympathy and accord in the religious intent of the enterprise, - that which consecrated it and, as they believed, could alone insure its success. They required that all who wished to share the civil franchise with them should enter into covenant with one of their churches. This rigid Puritan restriction of full civil rights to " church members " has furnished the oc- casion of the sharpest censure and reproach against those who imposed the condition. Waiving for a moment the rightfulness or expediency of the condition, it is enough to say that, having in view the chief intent of the founders of the Puritan Commonwealth, they would have stultified them- selves and confounded their scheme had they failed to impose it. There was no alternative open to them. Nor can the ingenuity of any censor of theirs in our own days propose any other condition of the franchise which would consist with the model of a Theocracy. None the less, however, the condition proved on trial to work simply results of gross injustice and various forms of mischief and trouble. It was especially faulty and vicious in cach of two evil consequences. First, the condition excluded from the
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