The Beginners of a Nation Part 21

[Sidenote: Rise of the Ma.s.sachusetts Company.]

[Sidenote: Compare The Planter's Plea.]

The project for a Puritan colony languished at first on account of the failure of the semi-Puritan, semi-commercial Dorchester farming and fishing colony on Cape Ann; but White of Dorchester continued to agitate the planting of a colony. He had, no doubt, efficient help in the proceedings against the Puritan clergy. From Dorchester the plan was carried to London, where it soon became, in the phrase of that time, "vulgar," or, as we should say, popular. Its countenance to the world, and especially toward the government, was that of a commercial venture like the planting of Virginia, but in its heart it was a religious enterprise. In March, 1628, the Council for New England gave to the Ma.s.sachusetts projectors a patent for lands extending from the Merrimack to the Charles and three miles beyond each river. The western boundary of this tract was the Pacific Ocean, for holders of grants could afford to be generous in giving away the interior of an unexplored continent about which nothing was known but that it abounded in savages.

VII.

[Sidenote: Leadership and character of Endecott.]

[Sidenote: 1628.]

[Sidenote: Bentley's Description of Salem.]

[Sidenote: Eliot's Biography, 195.]

In June a small colony was sent to Ma.s.sachusetts under John Endecott.

The next year another company of emigrants was added. Endecott, who was one of the patentees, loved a bold enterprise, and readily consented to take charge of the forerunners of the colony. He lacked the moderation and saneness needed in a leader, and his long career in connection with Ma.s.sachusetts was marked from the beginning by mistakes born of a rash temper and impulsive enthusiasm. Two of the gentlemen emigrants who had been named by the company in London as members of the local Council were not willing to go to the unexpected lengths Endecott favored in the organization of the Salem church, though they were probably Puritans of a moderate type. They held a separate service with a small company, using the prayer book. Endecott appears to have made no effort at conciliation; he promptly shipped John and Samuel Browne, pack and prayer book, back to England. This was precisely the course that even Lord Bacon advised in the treatment of schismatics who should contrive to gain access to a colony, and there is no occasion for surprise that a quixotic enthusiast like Endecott did not hold broader views than those of a philosopher of the same period. But Endecott's rash action endangered the whole enterprise, which required at this stage the extreme of prudence. The alarmed managers in England contrived to settle with the Brownes in private, and the affair had no other result than to ruin Endecott's reputation for prudence. Endecott, however, went on fighting the Lord's battles against the Apollyons of his fancy, regardless of results. Soon after his arrival he marched to the den of Morton, the profligate master of "Merrymount." In the absence of Morton he hewed down the profane Maypole in G.o.d's name, and solemnly dubbed the place Mount Dagon, in memory of the Philistine idol that fell down before the ark of the Lord. At a later period he cut one arm of the cross out of the English colors of the Salem trainband, in order to convert the Union Jack to Protestantism. One of the many manifestations of his pragmatical conscience was his Tartuffian protection of modesty by insisting that the women of Salem should keep their faces veiled at church. He was also a leader in the crusade of the magistrates against the crime of wearing wigs. A strange mixture of rashness, pious zeal, genial manners, hot temper, and harsh bigotry, his extravagances supply the condiment of humor to a very serious history--it is perhaps the princ.i.p.al debt posterity owes him. But there was a side to his career too serious to be humorous. Bold against Maypoles and prayer books and women who presented themselves in church immodestly barefaced, and in the forefront against wigs, he was no soldier either in prudent conduct or vigor of attack. When intrusted with the command of an expedition to demand satisfaction of the Pequots, he proved incapable of anything but a campaign of exasperation. When late in life he was governor of Ma.s.sachusetts, and had become, after the death of Winthrop and Dudley, the dominant political leader, the putting to death of Quakers left an ineffaceable blot on the history of the colony he had helped to found. When the colony was brought to book in England for this severity, Endecott showed himself capable of writing one of the most cringing official letters on record, as full of cant as it was of creeping servility. In him we may clearly apprehend certain unamiable traits of Puritanism and of the early seventeenth century which appear in his character in exaggerated relief. This hearty and energetic bigot must have been representative of a large, though not of the better, element in Ma.s.sachusetts Puritanism, for he was chosen to the governorship oftener than any other man during the continuance of the old charter government.

VIII.

[Sidenote: Leadership of Winthrop.]

It is a pleasure to turn from Endecott to one who was, like him, a seventeenth-century man, and who did not escape the scrupulosity and ridiculosity of Puritanism, but whose amiable personality, magnanimity, and qualities of leadership made him the princ.i.p.al figure in the Puritan migration. Winthrop, like two or three of the conspicuous actors in our later history, owes his distinction to the moral elevation of his character quite as much as to his considerable mental gifts; for character multiplied into sagacity is better than genius for some kinds of work.

[Sidenote: Rise of the great migration of 1630.]

[Sidenote: Note 4.]

He was a late comer in the enterprise. In the year after Endecott had brought over a colony composed mostly of servants of the company and of the individual patentees, a second company of emigrants had been sent over with a commission to Endecott as governor on the place, a.s.sisted by a council. A church had been formed at Salem. Now set in a larger agitation in favor of migration to New England. The course of events in England was so adverse to Puritanism that those who were devoted to that purified church, which was as yet invisible, except to the eye of faith, began to look toward America. Every door for public action in state or church was closed to the Puritans in England, closed and barred by Courts of High Commission, by the Star Chamber, and by the Tower. Into one of the gloomiest rooms of the latter had lately gone, at the arbitrary command of the king, that high-spirited martyr to const.i.tutional liberty, Sir John Eliot. Finding no way by which to come out again except a postern of dishonor, Eliot deliberately chose to languish and die in prison. The almost hopeless outlook at home, the example set by Endecott's emigration to New England in 1628, and by that of Higginson's company in 1629, perhaps also the ever-active propagandism of "Father White" of Dorchester, set agoing among the Puritans a widespread interest in the subject. Some of the leading minds thought it a n.o.ble work to organize a reformed church in a new country, since, in their view, the Church of England, under Laud, had taken up its march backward. This purpose of planting a Puritan church in America now began to take the first place; even the conversion of the Indians, which had been the chief avowed purpose hitherto, fell into the background.

[Sidenote: Winthrop's paper.]

The ma.n.u.script paper ent.i.tled Reasons for New England, to which reference has already been made, was widely but secretly circulated, and frequently copied, after a fashion of that time, prevailing especially in the case of tracts or books of a kind to shrink from print. It contained arguments in favor of removing to New England, with answers to the various objections made against emigration.

Several copies of these Reasons, or Considerations, have come down to us in various handwritings, and the authorship has been attributed now to one, now to another; to Winthrop, to White of Dorchester, to Sir John Eliot himself. It appears to have been in its earliest form the production of Winthrop. There were horseback journeys, some of them by night, made about this time for the purpose of secret consultation.

[Sidenote: His character.]

[Sidenote: Note 5.]

Winthrop, a country gentleman of Groton, in Suffolk, and an attorney in the Court of Wards, was a strict Puritan, desiring above all a reformed church and "the ordinances of G.o.d in their purity," as the phrase of the time went. Precocious in everything, and inclined to ideal aims, he had been religious from boyhood, had married at a little over seventeen years of age, and had been made a justice of the peace while still very young. He studied divinity, and only the dissuasion of friends kept him from entering the ministry. Of judicial temper, he came to be often consulted upon points of conscience, which gave much trouble in that age of casuistry and abounding scruples. His kindly visits to those who were in any trouble of spirit were highly prized. He himself makes much of the corruptions of his own nature and of his juvenile aberrancy, but generosity and purity of spirit like his are born and not acquired. His devoutness, accompanied by a habit of self-criticism in the presence of Infinite Justice, doubtless gave additional vigor to his virtues. For the rest, he was a man of independent estate, of prudent and conciliatory carriage, of a clear but not broad mind. What, as much as anything else, fitted him for his function was, that all his virtues were cast in Puritan molds and all his prejudices had a Puritan set.

[Sidenote: His influence.]

[Sidenote: Note 6.]

When the question of emigration was under discussion other gentlemen who thought of going turned to Winthrop as the natural leader, declaring that they would remain in England if he should desert them.

He was not only the official head, but he was indeed the soul, of the migration of 1630, and he went to America confident of a call divine like that of Moses.

IX.

[Sidenote: Cradock.]

It is a fact worthy of note that the three primary steps toward the establishment of free government in America were due to Englishmen who did not themselves cross the sea. The Great Charter of 1618 to the Virginia colony, and the "large patent" to the Plymouth Pilgrims, were granted, as we have seen, under the leadership of Sir Edwin Sandys, Governor of the Virginia Company of London. The third of the measures which placed colonial government on a popular basis was due to the governor of another corporation engaged in colony planting.

[Sidenote: Cradock's plan.]

[Sidenote: Ma.s.s. Records, July 29, 1629.]

[Sidenote: Sainsbury's Calendar, May 17, 1626.]

On the 28th of July, 1629, while Winthrop and his friends were debating their removal to New England, Mathew Cradock, a wealthy and liberal merchant, who held the office of governor, or, as we should say, president, of the Ma.s.sachusetts Company, read in a "general court" or meeting of the company "certain propositions conceived by himself," as it is carefully recorded. He proposed "that for the advancement of the plantation, the inducing and encouraging persons of worth, quality and rank to transplant themselves and families thither and for other weighty reasons"--reasons which probably it was not thought best to spread upon the records, but which were the core of the whole matter--for these reasons Cradock proposed to "transfer the government of the plantation to those that shall inhabit there," and not to continue it in subordination to a commercial company in London.

The sorrows of the Virginia colony under the administration of Sir Thomas Smyth and the disagreements between the Pilgrims and their "adventurers" in London had taught a wholesome lesson. Three years earlier Sir Francis Wyatt, the best of all the early governors of Virginia, had set forth in an elaborate report that the princ.i.p.al cause of the "slow proceeding of the growth of the plantation" was that the government had been divided between England and Virginia.

Ma.s.sachusetts escaped from this embarra.s.sment.

X.

[Sidenote: Evolution of the Ma.s.s. government.]

[Sidenote: Hubbard, chap. xviii.]

[Sidenote: Note 7.]

The evolution of the Ma.s.sachusetts government may now be traced through its several stages. A company was formed, partly of Dorchester men, but chiefly of residents of London. This company secured a patent to lands in Ma.s.sachusetts Bay from the Council for New England. The patentees intended both a commercial enterprise and a Puritan settlement. They sent Endecott, one of their number, as agent or superintendent, with a company of servants and others, to prepare the way for the migration of other patentees. In March, 1628, they secured a liberal charter from the king, which gave them the right to establish in Ma.s.sachusetts a government subordinate to the company.

The plan was to settle a government in the form rendered familiar by that of the Virginia Company. The Ma.s.sachusetts Company in London sent a commission to Endecott as governor on the place, subject to the orders of the company in England. A council of a.s.sistants was a.s.sociated with him, but there was as yet no provision for giving the people a voice in the government.

[Sidenote: The change of plan.]

Winthrop and his coterie of gentlemen appear to have been dissatisfied with the prospect of living under a government directed from England, and thus subject to English stockholders and liable to interference from the court. Cradock had been a leader and the most liberal investor in the enterprise. He, no doubt, readily foresaw the great advance that the colony would make if Winthrop and his friends should embark their lives and fortunes in it, and he may have intended to emigrate himself. The annulling of the charter of the Virginia Company on frivolous pretexts had shown how easily the Ma.s.sachusetts charter might meet the same fate in a reign far more devoted to arbitrary government than that of James and entirely hostile to Puritanism.

There could hardly be a doubt that the charter would be revoked as soon as its projectors should develop their true purpose before the all-observing eyes of Laud, who was now rising rapidly to dominant influence in the government. It was at this juncture probably that Cradock conceived his ingenious plan. He would resign his place and have the officers of the company chosen from gentlemen about to embark for the plantation. The charter prescribed no place of a.s.sembling to the company, which had been left free apparently to make its headquarters at its birthplace in Dorchester or at its new home in London. It was also free to meet in any other place. The meetings of the company might therefore be held in Ma.s.sachusetts, where the Puritanism of its proceedings would attract less attention. The governor and other officers would then be chosen in the colony; the company and the colony would thus be merged into one, and the charter transported to Ma.s.sachusetts would perhaps be beyond the reach of writs and judgments.

XI.

[Sidenote: The Cambridge agreement.]

[Sidenote: 1629.]

No doubt the influential company of friends who were debating a removal to New England were informed of Cradock's proposition before it was mooted in the company on the 28th of July. The plan was probably thought of in consequence of their objection to emigration under the Virginia system. Cradock's proposition was at least the turning point of their decision. Nearly a month later, on the 26th of August, the leaders of Winthrop's party a.s.sembled to the number of twelve, at Cambridge, and solemnly pledged themselves, "in the presence of G.o.d who is the searcher of all hearts," "to pa.s.s the Seas (under G.o.d's protection) to inhabit and continue in New England." The preamble states the object of this migration. It was not civil liberty, the end that political Puritans had most in view, and certainly there is no hint of a desire for religious liberty. Even the conversion of the Indian is not uppermost in this solemn resolve.

"G.o.d's glory and the church's good" are the words used. This has the true ring of the Puritan churchman. The whole pledge is couched in language befitting men who feel themselves engaged in a religious enterprise of the highest importance.

This pledge contained a notable proviso. The signers agreed to emigrate only on condition that "the whole government together with the patent for said plantation" should be transferred and legally established in the colony by order of the General Court of the Company, and that this should be done before the last of the ensuing month. There was opposition to the removal of the government, and this peremptory condition was necessary. Three days later, after a debate, the company voted that its government should be transferred to Ma.s.sachusetts Bay.

[Sidenote: Removal of the charter.]

[Sidenote: 1629.]