USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > The memorial history of Boston : including Suffolk County, Massachusetts, 1630-1880. Vol. I > Part 23
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THE PURITAN COMMONWEALTH.
which we should regard as strictly secular and related to civil polity, were seldom disposed of, in the first three decades of the Colony, till "our honored Magistrates," or " the Court," had sought the advice of the " reverend elders." In fact, John Cotton, in discourses at the Thursday Lecture, was ever ready, not only to give decided counsels on secular mat- ters when his advice was asked, but, when some critical point was in contest before the Court, he would adjudicate on the subject, ostensibly of course, through his "exposition of the word of God."
The early stages of the conflict between the magistrates for retaining their own legitimate and their constructive and usurped authority, on the one side, and the inhabitants at large on the other, tended in many inci- dental matters to unite the non-voters with the freemen as an opposing party. So far, however, as this union was effective, it would prejudice the theocratical principles of the government. The records of the Court and many of the contemporary documents that are now extant reveal to us the fevered state of anxiety and agitation which grave questionings and sharp biekerings induced. Nor is it strange that there should have very soon begun a weeding-out process, not only in the forced exclusion of those whose presence proved objectionable, but in the voluntary withdrawal of others who conceived a strong distaste or disgust for the atmosphere and influences of the place. Some of these last are referred to in that very interesting pamphlet published in London as early as 1643, entitled New England's First Fruits.) While the general account of prosperity and hopefulness in these pages is almost roseate, we read the following: "As some went thither upon sudden undigested grounds, and saw not God's leading them in their way, but were carried by an unstayed spirit, so have they returned upon as sleight, headlesse, unworthy reasons as they went. Others must have elbow-roome, and cannot abide to be so pinioned with the strict government in the Commonwealth, or discipline in the Church." Very tersely and aptly did one of the wiser of the Puritan company express the fervid working of the enterprise, in writing the brief sentence, "While the liquor is boiling, it must needs have a scumming." When we come to take note of the rigid proceedings of the Puritan legisla- tors against those who " disturbed their peace," we shall have to recognize the fact, which to a moderate extent may be taken as palliating their harsh- ness, that the victims of it were not members of their company, partners and freemen of the Commonwealth, but were, with rare exceptions, intruders among them, who themselves had nothing at stake in the enterprise.
But little more than ten years had passed since the settlement of Boston and of the towns which were offshoots from it, before the Colony, in all the elements that constituted it, and in all its prospects for the future, passed through some experiences of gloom and darkness, the dismal impression
1 [This tract is reprinted in Mass. Hist. Coll. original edition is rare, but there are copies in i., and there is a separate modern reprint by the Harvard College Library and in the Prince Sabin, published in New York in 1865. The Library. - ED.]
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
from which is most vividly presented on the pages of Winthrop. Though he nobly held to his constancy of purpose through the trying experience, it is evident that his hope faltered under the apprehension of the threatened failure and abandonment of the Colonial enterprise. It was not, however, mainly from the dissensions and discontents that had been developed among the struggling exiles here, but rather from the agitations and revolu- tionary throes of the mother country at that critical period, that Winthrop was compelled to face the appalling disaster to the fond venture in which he had staked his all. The tyrant monarch of England was at bay ; his subjects were winning the mastery over him; the Parliament was above the throne ; and a work was brewing in which not only some restless spirits, but some heroic and earnest men who were fired by a holy and generous ardor, wished to have a part. Old England was then more attractive to such as these, than even the new Commonwealth rising in the free wilderness. The tide of immigration, which up to that time had set strongly hitherwards, was at once stayed.1 There was almost a tidal wave of return homewards. There were many of those who embarked, - hardly, however, the majority, - of whom the magistrates and elders might be glad to be well rid. But magis- trates and elders, as well as some men of weight, value, and high service, were among the returning company, not alleging that they were going merely for a visit, but intent upon remaining that they might have part and lot in the stir of affairs. It is of these that Winthrop, in his Journal, utters himself in touching pathos, as abandoning by a broken covenant those to whom, for good or for evil fortune, they had pledged joint endeavor and holy fellowship. The interests of the Colony were also temporarily prostrated from the suspension of foreign trade, the value of all products of the Colony depreciated, and debtors could not meet their obligations. It did, for the time, look as if the forests must be left to grow again over our clearings, and one more colonial failure be added to the melancholy list. Winthrop records not only the darkness of the surroundings, but also the spirit of resolve and trust which brought with it cheer and hope. He would abide in his lot and be the stay of others. Only after long and divided counsels did the Court resolve, under the depression of their fortunes, to send three agents to England to have in view the interests of the Colony. With the dignity of a noble pride the agents were strictly cautioned, thus, "that they should not seek supply of our wants in any dishonorable way, as by begging or the like, for we were resolved to wait upon the Lord in the use of all means which were lawful and honorable."
The reader must look to the numerous and fuller sources of historical information, if he wishes to trace out all the stages and processes of the de- velopment in the minds and measures of the more responsible leaders of the scheme of the Puritan Commonwealth. Puritan ideas and institutions are
1 | Dr. Palfrey, Hist. of New England, Preface, this immigration ceased, are the ancestors of considers that the 20,000 persons which consti- the great body of our New England stock. - futed the population of New England when ED.]
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to be studied both through the kind of influence which they exercised and the strength of that influence. It contained in itself elements and agencies corrective of its own mistakes and ill workings. We may compare it in some respects to those fruits and berries which in their unripe and maturing stages are very acrid, but healthful and grateful after passing through the later processes. It is denied by no one, and with rightful boasting it is proudly maintained by the wisest and most candid philosophical historians, that the heritage assured to later generations by Puritanism, as softened and modified by the working of its own self-developed forccs, is eminently fruitful in civil, social, and domestic virtues and prosperitics. The awful sincerity of its stern disciples, and the lofty sanctity of the aims and motives which they avowed as having committed themselves in all things to a holy covenant with God and each other, secured them against the worst forms of disaster from self- seeking and corruption which would inevitably have fallen upon them. The Puritan Commonwealth may ever claim the honor of having trained the spirit and fostered the virtues which redeemed it from its own limitations and errors.
A democracy was the product or result, not by any means the intent, of the enterprise when it was put on trial. On the first intimation or alarm of a tendency in that direction, John Cotton, the clerical oracle of the theocracy, wrote, " Democracy I do not conceive that God ever did ordain as a fit Government either for Church or Commonwealth." But, none the less, how democracy developed and established itself is not only traceable in every stage of its growth, in spite of the shock and the purposed resistance to it, but is also to be accounted to the natural and inevitable conditions of the experiment here on trial. The objects had in view involved democracy, and were consistent only with democracy. The air of the sea and the wilder- ness, the atmosphere of exile, the withdrawal from the scenes, habits, re- straints, and safeguards of the old home, the essential equality of condition to which gentlemen and servants were alike reduced in exposures, straits, and occupations, levelled distinctions and compelled familiarity in intercourse. After the arrival of the colonists here, not one of them, however gentle his degree in England, was free from the necessity of manual labor in the field, the forest, and in building and providing for a home. The Governor's wife made and baked her own batch of bread, and from her dwelling, near the site of the Old South Church, would take pail in hand and go down to fill it from the spring that still flows under the basement of the new Post Office.
The rapid decay of the sense of loyalty to the English monarch, of de- pendence upon or deference to his authority, which followed upon the breathing of this free air, and which antedated Independence long previous to its declaration, was also a direct influence for fostering democracy. The only substitute for allegiance to the King was obedience to laws of their own enactment. In their secret persuasion, the first colonists here probably regarded the claims of dominion of the English monarch over these wild realms as quite unsubstantial and visionary. The possession and subjection VOL. 1 .- 21.
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of them at their own charges, with that shrewd and scrupulous avoidance from the first ovasking or receiving any help or protection from the monarch, give them rights which they persuaded themselves overrode his. One who is keen in hi- search and reading in the more minute details of our history will meet some curious tokens of a seeming arrest of the democratic ten- dency here, and a temporary show of the revival of loyalty after the substi- tution of the provincial for the colonial charter. Self-governed by native magistrates of our own choice, we had become, to all intents and purposes, independents of the democratic pattern. The name of the monarch had been dropped from statutes and writs and legal processes. We had no courtly re- presentatives here, except nominal ones with popular titles and indorsements. Royal birthdays were not among our holidays. But when crown officers were put in authority over us, and came with their commissions, functions, and ceremonials, sometimes with a show of state, in robings, symbols, and equipages, the effect, perceptibly, on a. class of the less sturdy among us was a little dazing and beguiling. The reminder came rudely and unwel- come to the majority, that rank and privilege and prerogative might still exert themselves against a pure democracy. A striking illustration of the collision between the intruding of a revived loyalty and the habit attending its previous decay here is presented in the jealousy and distrust - and even contempt on the part of many -for those two of the Royal Governors of the Province who made the most trouble for the people. These were Gover- nor Joseph Dudley and Governor Thomas Hutchinson, both of them natives of the soil, of the strictest Puritan stock and lineage, baptized and nurtured in the Puritan Church, and pledged by its covenant, and graduates of its college : they were none the less courtiers, and hated - perhaps unduly or unjustly - as recreant to their own heritage. These retrospects and revivals of a specious loyalty, after the change in the charter, attract notice by contrast only, as showing how firmly the spirit of independence and democracy had strengthened under the Puritan Commonwealth. The discomfitures which the theocratic system encountered, and the concessions which it was com- pelled to make to this same democratic spirit were the occasions of the modifications just referred to. Puritanism, like every other moral and reli- gious system, had to deal with human nature.
Five years after the colony was planted, a paper was received by the au- thorities, entitled " Certain proposals made by Lord Say, Lord Brooke, and other persons of quality, as conditions of their removing to New England." The object of those who made these proposals was to secure encouragement in a proposed coming hither, from the assurance that in the government to be here established the hereditary privileges above " the common sort" should be secured to those of gentle blood. Though the accession of such persons was very desirable, the authorities evidently felt embarrassed in the matter, and the answers exhibit a gingerly caution and a shrewd sagacity. They were ready to accord " hereditary honors ; " but " hereditary authority " was quite another matter. Nor could the magistrates admit that the freeholders,
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or voters, should be those who owned a certain personal estate, for the con- dition of the franchise must be membership of some church. The only magistrates they could set in office must be " men fearing God " (Exodus xviii. 21), and these must be "chosen out of their brethren" (Deut. xvii. 15) "by saints" (I. Cor. vi. I).
This frank and emphatic avowal that the Puritan State was founded on and was identical with the Puritan Church brings us back to the original intent in the minds of the chief spirits in the enterprise. The Puritan Commonwealth, as a theocracy, must be administered by "God's people" in church covenant.
What was the material and constitution of the Puritan Church? Seven or more professing Christians, associating themselves together in covenant, constitute a Church for all the uses of Christian edification and enjoyment
of ordinances; nothing being between them and Christ.
The Bible is their
sole sufficient sanction, guide, and statute-book. In the sacred volume are to be found divine directions for the administration and discipline of the Church, a commission and instructions for its teachers and officers, the mat- ter of their teaching, the rule of believing and living for members, and the method of discipline. Men receive their authority and functions as ministers directly from God; their qualifications of heart, mind, and spirit are from Him, in nowise dependent upon any allowance or transmitted privilege from their fellow-men. Such ministers, however, obtain an official position, op- portunity to teach and temporal support, from the free choice of a congre- gation desiring their services. God commissions the man, but the people set him in his place over or among them. The Puritans found a vast and sublime confirmation of their fundamental idea in the grand assertion by St. Paul, that the Gospel made cach Christian to represent to himself the two highest offices, - those of "a King and a Priest unto God." The Protestantism of various communions has in later years certified and fol- lowed these principles of church institution, and has found no bar to the adoption of them, even when under methods of fellowship freely accepted among themselves very many individual churches have been united in a larger brotherhood. But the Puritan discipline proved, on trial, to be impracticable, as crude, incomplete, inconsistent, and hopelessly embarassed by collision with the civil rights of men. Had all the accepted freemen in the colony been members of one single all-inclusive Church, there might, for a time at least, have been a degree of harmony and success in the trial of the theory. But there were many churches soon organized after the Puritan pattern. The theory was that each of them was independent in choosing its pastor, in administering discipline, and in its relations to the civil power. All these assumptions proved misleading and fallacious under the Puritan Commonwealth. A church could not be constituted, and a pas- tor set over it, without deference to the Court or magistracy. It was found necessary that each and all the churches should be mutually answerable, that they should come into accord in doctrine and discipline, and should recognize each other through councils and synods, the authority claimed by
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or yielded to these representative combinations being undecided and always likely to be contested. It would be neither interesting nor edifying to the general reader to follow the rehearsal of the discomfitures and contentions, the controversies and the alienations between brethren, and of the measures of offence and of opposition employed by those not of the brethren, which thwarted the experiment of a theocracy. The asserted right of private judgment did not then, any more than now, carry with it the wise exercise and use of it. Puritanism proved to be a nebulous fire-mist with marvellous potencies in it, requiring, in the processes of evolution from it, time and space and modifying conditions. The development of the theocratical experiment does not engage sympathetic or amiable feelings as we read it. Every session of the Court, every meeting of the Magistrates, the planting of each new Church, the arrival of each new group of men and women of independent or " nimble " spirit, the ever restless inquisitions and searchings of thoroughly honest seckers for truth in the "Word," and the curious con- ceits and notions of all sorts of erratic and mystical idealists continually opened matter of contention, and the fissure was ever enlarging and deep- ening. The ingenious and acrimonious strifes which ensued from the con- flict of opinions, and the disputations about civil and religious polity stand illustrated to us in a marvellous wealth of technical terms, constituting a jargon, antique and comical in its quaintness, not found in the literature of the old English divines outside of the Puritan fold. The series of severe pro- ceedings which were instituted by the Puritan authorities against the repre- sentatives of the more alarming heresies and seditious theories must be noticed by and by. It is enough here to dismiss with the slightest recogni- tion the active workings of the causes already presented in proving how impracticable was the experiment of the Puritan Commonwealth. The Court records testify to the endless complications of the attempt to commingle civil and ecclesiastical legislation, with their multiplying statutes and penal- ties against undefinable heresies, moaning laments about "the decay of religion," with judgments of fines, imprisonment, and banishment. Under the first Charter, five " Synods" of the Churches, -respectively in 1637, 1648, 1662, 1679, and 1680, -were held in the vain attempt to harmonize variances and to construct a platform of discipline.1 Not gradually, but rapidly, the habits and feelings which had been identified with the religious and ecclesiastical associations of their old home yielded under the stress of changed circumstances and fresh elements of thought. Mr. Cotton divested himself of all that once characterized him as the vicar of a prelate with book-services and rites, and was prepared to " clear the Way of Congrega- tional churches." Only that "Way " was constantly obstructed by being coursed in every direction by by-paths and foot-tracks, by misleading sign- boards, and by travellers in all sorts of conveyances, very few of whom seemed to enjoy cach other's company. Seven years after his arrival, Win-
1 [Dr. Dexter has examined the bearing of these Synods in Congregationalismi as seen in its Literature. - ED.]
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throp wrote this distinct averment: "Whereas the way of God hath always been to gather his churches out of ye world, now ye world, or civill state, must be raised out of ye churches."
It would on some accounts be desirable, in the writing of fresh pages for the perusal of the present generation, if the painful and darker incidents in the development of the Puritan Commonwealth could be passed without mention, or dismissed with a sentence in general terms of regret and pre- ferred oblivion. But one constraining reason, to say nothing of others, for pursuing a different course presents itself in the consideration that some of the most essential principles and elements of the stern system here set on trial were made to appear only in the sharp encounters with its opponents and assailants. Only when the Puritan Commonwealth was driven into self- defence against those who struck at its vitality, through denying its authority, insulting its dignity, and in successfully breaking its thraldom, can we under- stand it for what it was. Intolerance and bigotry might be regarded as allowable in defence of a form of Puritanism which held its disciples to lofty aims and found them cheerfully meeting pains and penalties in fidelity to it. But pitiless severity, running at last, by provocation and passionate indulgence, into acts of direful cruelty, brought humiliation upon our an- cient magistrates, left sad and dark stains on a few years of their record, and finally confounded and subverted the original scheme of their government. Yet that austerity of intolerance, that ruthlessness in punitive methods, could alone consist with sincerity and stern fidelity to the Puritan scheme and rule.
Doubtless the odiousness of the Puritan discipline and legislation may be heightened by a trifling and scornful rehearsal of the follies and errors consequent upon it, especially in the outrages visited by it on individuals and classes who, however offensive in their heresies, were upright and pure in life. All harshiness of censure, all contempt and ridicule poured upon the Puritan magistrates, is utterly unjust when it proceeds, as it generally does, upon the implication that the sort of persons whom they are charged with persecuting were in spirit and conduct then what the sort of persons are who are known among us now under the same names and as holding the same opinions. And those sharp criticisms are also equally unjust, when they transfer the standard of intelligence and judgment, and the social securities of our times, to the past of two hundred years. Nor, on the other hand, would any candid person be willing to set up a plea in justification of the Puritan magistrates, and so make himself a party to their harsh pol- icy. It is the simple facts of history that we want, and essential parts of those facts are to be found in the atmosphere of the times, the modes of thinking and believing, and the relations between men, as they then differed widely from what they are in these days. Anything that mitigates or re- lieves the severity of the proceedings against those who voluntarily courted the austere discipline of the Puritan magistracy may be alleged in the inter- est of both the sufferers and the inflictors of the wrong.
The main intent and design of those who " enterprised " the Bay Colony
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
planting itself in Boston has been fully set forth, both as it was conceived by those who planned and guided it, and as the practical trial of it developed its elements and conditions somewhat more elearly than the founders had appre- hended them. Having insufficiently seeured themselves at the start against the intrusion of uncongenial and obnoxious strangers, they would need to devise most stringent measures in dealing with them as they presented themselves. It is important to keep in mind the fact that the repressive and punitive measures adopted against a succession of individuals and classes of persons who made protests and assaults against the civil or religious policy of the Commonwealth were all of them, in the full severity of their inflietion, confined to the first thirty years of the colony. After that brief term there was a sensible relaxation of austerity, and an increase of allowance and tolerance. It is observable, likewise, that as the severe dealing with heretics and dissentients was mitigated, their zeal and fervor and offensiveness were sensibly reduced, and they ceased to present them- selves so obnoxiously. Here we note a very natural relation between the spirit of persecution and the spirit which obstinately and even wantonly or perversely provoked it. The fathers were anxiously, we say morbidly and timidly, dreading lest their bold venture in the wilderness should be pros- trated before it could strike root. Their first years were the years of its darkest uncertainty and its severest trial. Saving the slender colony at Plymouth, all other like enterprises presented to them only warnings, without a gleam of encouragement. The risk which they had most to dread was that from seditions and dissensions among themselves, coming from an assault upon their fundamental principles, - " godliness " and harmony. Their troublers came precisely in the form and shape in which they apprehended them, -in the form and in the sturdy and persistent protests of men and women against their civil and religious principles, and in the shape of active and irrepressible assailants of, and offenders against, their laws. As will soon appear, there was something extraordinary in the odd variety, the grotesque characteristics, and the specially irritating and exasperating course of that strange succession of men and women, of all sorts of odd opinions and notions, who presented themselves during a period of thirty years, seeming to have in common no other object than to grieve and exasperate the Puritan magistrates. We, indeed, can see that they had a higher and nobler mission. But those to whom they were so mischievous and hateful regarded them only as reekless and wanton dis- turbers of their pcace. No sooner had one nuisance of this sort been dis- posed of, fincd, banished, pilloried, whipped, and, in the last dread alterna- tive, swung from the gallows, than another, with a slight variation in the hue of hercsy and the attitude of daring, presented himself. As travellers through the woods and bushes from Boston to Rhode Island in midsummer would then have been vexed by the whole brood of snakes and stinging insects, so that harborage of " conscientious contentious hereties " secmed to furnish an endless variety of the troublers of our Israel. Cotton Mather
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