CHAPTER IV. RELIGIOUS CHARACTER OF THE EARLY COLO- REMARKS. PLYMOUTH* Colony had been planted only three years when it began to have offshoots, one of which, in 1623, settled at Windsor, on the rich alluvial lands of the Connecticut, led thither, however, more by the advantages of the spot as a station for trading in fur, than by the nature of the soil. The report of its fertility having, at length, reached England, the Earl of Warwick bought from the Council for NewEngland, as we have seen that the Plymouth Company was sometimes called, the whole Valley of the Connecticut, which purchase was, the year following, transferred to Lord Say and Seal, Lord Brooke, and John Hampden. Two years later, the Dutch, who, in right of discovery, claimed the whole of the Connecticut territory, sent an expedition from their settlement at Manhattan up the River Connecticut, and attempted to make good their claim by erecting a blockhouse, called Good Hope, at Hartford. In 1635, the younger Winthrop, the future benefactor of Connecticut, came from England with a commission from the proprietors to build a fort at the mouth of the river, and this he did soon after. Yet, even before his arrival, settlers from the neighbourhood of Boston had established themselves at Hartford, Windsor, and Weathersfield. Late in the fall of that year, a party of sixty persons, men, women, and children, set out for the Connecticut, and suffered much from the inclement weather of the winter that followed. In the following June, another party, amounting to about a hundred in number, including some of the best of the Massachusetts Bay settlers, left Boston for the Valley of the Connecticut. They were under the superintendence of Hayes, who had been one year governor of Boston, and of Hooker, who, as a preacher, was rivalled in the New World by none but Cotton, and even Cotton he excelled in force of character, kindliness of disposition, and magnanimity. Settling at the spot where Hartford now stands, they founded the colony of Connecticut. They, too, carried the ark of the Lord with them, and made religion the basis of their institutions. Three years sufficed for the framing of their political government. First, as had been done by the Plymouth * Plymouth in America is often called New Plymouth by early writers, in speaking of New-England. I prefer the name by which exclusively the town is now known. The context will always enable the reader to distinguish it from Plymouth in England. colony, they subscribed a solemn compact, and then drew up a Constitution on the most liberal principles. The magistrates and Legislature were to be chosen every year by ballot, the "towns" were to return representatives in proportion to their population, and all members of the "towns," on taking the oath of allegiance to the commonwealth, were to be allowed to vote at elections. Two centuries have since passed away, but Connecticut still rejoices. in the same principles of civil polity. But before this colony had time to complete its organization, the colonists had to defend themselves and all that was dear to them against their neighbours, the Pequods. This was the first war that broke out between the New-England settlers and the native tribes, and it must be allowed to have been a just one on the part of the former, if war can ever be so. The Pequods brought it upon themselves by the commission of repeated murders. In less than six weeks, hostilities were brought to a close by the annihilation of the tribe. Two hundred only were left alive, and these were either reduced to servitude by the colonists, or incorporated among the Mohigans and Narragansetts. The colony of New-Haven was founded in 1638 by a body of Puritans, who, like all the rest, were of the school of Calvin, and whose religious teacher was the Rev. John Davenport. The excellent Theophilus Eaton was their first governor, and continued to be annually elected to that office for twenty years. Their first Sabbath, in the yet cool month of April, was spent under a branching oak, and there their pastor discoursed to them on the Saviour's "temptation in the wilderness." After spending a day in fasting and prayer, they laid the foundation of their civil government by simply covenanting that "all of them would be ordered by the rules which the Scriptures held forth to them.” A title to their lands was purchased from the Indians. The following year, these disciples of "Him who was cradled in a manger" held their first Constituent Assembly in a barn. Having solemnly come to the conclusion that the Scriptures contain a perfect pattern of a commonwealth, according to that they aimed at constructing theirs. Purity of religious doctrine and discipline, freedom of religious worship, and the service and glory of God, were proclaimed as the great ends of the enterprise. God smiled upon it, so that in a few years the colony could show flourishing settlements rising along the Sound, and on the opposite shores of Long Island. While the colonization of Connecticut was in progress, that of Rhode Island commenced. Roger Williams, a Puritan minister, had arrived in Boston the year im mediately following its settlement by Win- Within twenty years from the planting of throp and his companions; but he soon the colony at Plymouth, all the other chief advanced doctrines on the rights of con- colonies of New-England were founded, science, and the nature and limits of hu- their governments organized, and the coast man government, which were unaccepta- of the Atlantic, from the Kennebec River in ble to the civil and religious authorities of Maine almost to the Hudson in New-York, the colony. For two years he avoided marked by their various settlements. Offcoming into collision with his opponents shoots from these original stocks gradually by residing at Plymouth; but having been appeared, both at intervening points near invited to become pastor of a church in the ocean, and at such spots in the interior Salem, where he had preached for some as attracted settlers by superior fertility of time after his first coming to America, soil or other physical advantages. From he was ordered, at last, to return to Eng-time to time, little bands of adventurers land; whereupon, instead of complying, left the older homesteads, and wandered he sought refuge among the Narragansett forth in search of new abodes. Carrying Indians, then occupying a large part of the their substance with them in wagons, and present State of Rhode Island. Having ever been the steady friend of the Indians, and defender of their rights, he was kindly received by the aged chief, Canonicus, and there, in 1636, he founded the city and plantation of Providence. Two years afterward, the beautiful island called Rhode Island, in Narragansett Bay, was bought from the Indians, by John Clarke, William Coddington, and their friends, when obliged to leave the Massachusetts colony, in consequence of the part which they had taken in the "Antinomian controversy," as it was called, and of which we shall have occasion to speak. These two colonies of Providence and Rhode Island, both founded on the principle of absolute religious freedom, naturally presented an asylum to all who disliked the rigid laws and practices of the Massachusetts colony in religious This rapid advance of the New-England matters; but many, it must be added, fled settlements, during the first twenty years thither only out of hatred to the stern mo- of their existence, must be ascribed, in a rality of the other colonies. Hence Rhode great measure, to the troubled condition Island, to this day, has a more mixed pop- and lowering prospects of the motherulation, as respects religious opinions and country during the same period. The depractices, than any other part of New-Eng-spotic principles of Charles I. as a monland. There is, however, no inconsidera-arch, still more, perhaps, the religious inble amount of sincere piety in the state, tolerance of Archbishop Laud and his parbut the forms in which it manifests itself are numerous. driving before them their cattle, sheep, and hogs, these simple groups wended through the tangled forest, crossed swamps and rivers, and traversed hill and dale, until some suitable resting-place appeared; the silence of the wilderness, meanwhile, was broken by the lowing of their cattle and the bleating of their sheep, as well as by the songs of Zion, with which the pilgrims beguiled the fatigues of the way. Everywhere nature had erected bethels for them, and from beneath the overshadowing oak, morning and night, their orisons ascended to the God of their salvation. Hope of future comfort sustained them amid present toils. They were cheered by the thought that the extension of their settlements was promoting also the extension of the kingdom of Christ. tisans, so fatally abetted by the king, drove thousands from England to the colonies, As early as 1623, small settlements were and hurried on the Revolution that soon folmade, under the grant to Mason, on the lowed at home. The same oppressive and banks of the Piscataqua, in New-Hamp- bigoted policy, indeed, that was convulsing shire; and, in point of date, both Ports- Great Britain, threatened the colonies also; mouth and Dover take precedence of Bos- but in 1639, just as they were on the eve ton. Most of the New-Hampshire settlers of an open collision, the government of came direct from England; some from the that country found itself so beset with difPlymouth colony. Exeter owed its found-ficulties at home, that New-England, hapation to the abandonment of Massachusetts by the Rev. Mr. Wheelwright and his immediate friends, on the occasion of the "Antinomian controversy." pily for its own sake, was forgotten. Nor does the prosperity of the colonial settlements, during those twenty years, seem less remarkable than their multipliThe first permanent settlements made cation and extension over the country. on "the Maine,” as the continental part of The huts in which the emigrants first found the country was called, to distinguish it shelter gave place to well-built houses. from the islands—and hence the name of Commerce made rapid advances. Large the state-date as early, it would appear, quantities of the country's natural producas 1626. The settlers were from Plym- tions, such as furs and lumber, were exouth, and no doubt carried with them the ported; grain was shipped to the West religious institutions cherished in that ear-Indies, and fishing employed many hands. liest of all the New-England colonies. Ship-building was carried to such an ex tent, that, within twenty-five years from the first settlement of New-England, vessels of 400 tons were constructed there. Several kinds of manufactures, even, began to take root in the colonies. It is calculated that 21,200 emigrants had arrived in New-England alone before the Long Parliament met. "One hundred and ninety-eight ships had borne them across the Atlantic, and the whole cost of the plantations had been 1,000,000 of dollars; a great expenditure and a great emigration for that age; yet, in 1832, more than 50,000 persons arrived at the single port of Quebec in one summer, bringing with them a capital exceeding 3,000,000 of dollars."* A great change, in this respect, took place during the next twenty years, embracing the period of the civil war, and the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell and his son. Not only were there few arrivals of emigrants during that interval, but some fiery spirits in the colonies returned to the mother-country, eager to take part in the contest waging there. This, indeed, some of the leading men in New-England were earnestly pressed to do by letters from both houses of Parliament, but they were unwilling to abandon the duties of the posts they occupied in the New World. Upon the whole, from 1640 to 1660 the population of New-England rather diminised than augmented. But while such, during the early years of their existence, was the temporal prosperity of these colonies, not less was their spiritual. In 1647, New-England had forty-three churches united in one communion; in 1650, the number of churches was fifty-eight, that of communicants 7750; and in 1674, there were more than eighty English churches of Christ, composed of known pious and faithful professors only, dispersed through the wilderness. Of these, twelve or thirteen were in Plymouth colony, forty-seven in Massachusetts and the province of New-Hampshire, nineteen in Connecticut, three in Long Island, and one in Martha's Vineyard. Well might one of her pious historians say, "It concerneth New-England always to remember that she is a religious plantation, and not a plantation of trade. The profession of purity of doctrine, worship, and discipline, is written upon her forehead." The New-England colonists may have been "the poorest of the people of God in the whole world," and they settled in a rugged country, the poorest, in fact, in natural resources of all the United States' territories; nevertheless, their industry and other virtues made them increase in wealth, and transformed their hills and valleys into a delightful land. Their commerce soon showed itself in all seas; their manufactures gradually gained ground, notwithstanding_the_ obstacles created by the jealousy of England, and, with the increase of their population, they overspread a large extent of the space included in their charters. Many, indeed, affect to sneer at the founders of New-England; but the sneers of ignorance and prejudice cannot detract from their real merits. Not that we would claim the praise of absolute wisdom for all that was done by the "New-England Fathers." Some of their penal laws were unreasonably and unjustly severe, some were frivolous; some were even ridiculous.* Some of their usages were dictated by false views of propriety. Nor can it be denied that they were intolerant to those who differed from them in religion; that they persecuted Quakers and Baptists, and abhorred Roman Catholics. But all this grew out of the erroneous views which they, in common with almost all the world at that time, entertained on the rights of human conscience and the duties of civil government, in cases where those rights are concerned. We shall see, likewise, that they committed some most serious mistakes, resulting from the same erroneous views, in the civil establishments of religion adopted in most of the colonies. Notwithstanding all this, they will be found to have been far in advance of other nations of their day. With respect to their treatment of the native tribes, they were led into measures which appear harsh and unjust by the fact of their laws being modelled upon those of the Jews. Such, for example, was their making slaves of those Indians whom they made prisoners in war. There were cases, also, of individual wrong done to the Indians. Yet never, I believe, since the world began, have colonies from civilized nations been planted among barbarous tribes with so little injustice being perpe trated upon the whole. The land, in almost all cases where tribes remained to dispose of it, was taken only on indemnification being given, as they fully recognised the right of the natives to the soil. The only exceptions, and these were but * A great deal of misrepresentation and falsehood has been published by ignorant and prejudiced perFor example, pretended specimens of what are callsons at the expense of the New-England Puritans. ed "the Blue Laws of Connecticut" have appeared in the journals of certain European travellers, and have been received by credulous transatlantic readers as perfectly authentic. Yet the greater part of these so-called "laws" are the sheerest fabrications ever palmed upon the world, as is shown by Professor Kingsley in a note appended to his Centennial Discourse, delivered at New-Haven a few years ago. few, were the cases in which the hazards | living for God and promoting his kingdom of war put them in possession of some in the world. They felt that Christianity Indian territory. Nor were they indiffer- was the greatest boon that mankind can ent to the spiritual interests of those poor possess; a blessing which they were bound people. We shall yet see that for these to do their utmost to secure to their posthey did far more than was done by any terity. In going to a new continent they other colonies on the whole American con- were influenced by a double hope, the entinent, and I shall explain why they did largement of Christ's kingdom by the connot do more. version of heathen tribes, and the founding of an empire for their own children, in which His religion should gloriously prevail. Their eyes seemed to catch some glimpses of Messiah's universal reign, when "all nations shall be blessed in him, and call him blessed." Let us now, in conclusion, contemplate for a moment the great features that mark the religious character of the founders of New-England, leaving our remarks on their religious economy to be introduced at another place. First, then, theirs was a religion that Fourth. Their religion prompted to great made much of the BIBLE; I should rather examples of self-denial. Filled with the say, that to them the Bible was every-idea of an empire in which true religion thing. They not only drew their religious might live and flourish, and satisfied from principles from it, but according to it, in a what they had seen of the Old World that great degree, they fashioned their civil the Truth was in bondage there, they sighlaws. They were disposed to refer every-ed for a land in which they might serve thing "to the Law and to the Testimony." God according to his blessed Word. To And although they did not always interpret the Scriptures aright, yet no people ever revered them more, or studied them more carefully. With them the famous motto of Chillingworth had a real meaning and application: THE Bible is the RELIGION OF PROTESTANTS. secure such a privilege to themselves and their children, they were willing to go into a wilderness, and to toil and die. This was something worth making sacrifices for, and much did they sacrifice to obtain it. Though poor in comparison with many others, still they belonged to good families, and might have lived very comfortably in England; but they preferred exile and hardship, in the hope of securing spiritual advantages to themselves and their posterity. Fifth. There was a noble patriotism in their religion. Some of them had long been exiled from England; others had found their mother-country a very unkindly home, and yet England was still dear to them. With them it was not " Farewell, Babylon! farewell, Rome!" but, "Farewell, dear England!"* Though contemptuously treated by James I. and Charles I., yet they spoke of being desirous of "enlarging his majesty's dominions." Plymouth settlers did not wish to remain in Holland, because "their posterity would in a few generations become Dutch, and lose their interest in the English nation; they being desirous to enlarge his majesty's dominions, and to live under their nat The Second. The religion of the founders of New-England was friendly to the diffusion of knowledge, and set a high value on learning. Many of their pastors, especially, were men of great attainments. Not a few of them had been educated at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, in England, and some had brought with them a European reputation. John Cotton, John Wilson, Thomas Hooker, Dunster, and Chauncey, which last two were Presidents of the University at Cambridge, Thomas Thatcher, Samuel Whiting, John Sherman, John Elliot, and several more of the early ministers, were men of great learning. All were well instructed in theology, and thoroughly versed in Hebrew, as well as in Greek and Latin. Some, too, such as Sherman, of Watertown, were fine mathematical scholars. They were the friends and correspondents of Baxter, and Howe, and Selden, and Milton, and other lumina-ural prince." And much as they had sufries among the Puritans of England. Their regard for useful learning they amply proved, by the establishment of schools and academies for all the youth of the colonies, as well as for their own children. Only eight years after the first settlement of Massachusetts colony, they founded, at a great expense for men in their circumstances, the University of Harvard, at Cambridge, near Boston, an institution at which, for a period of more than sixty years, the most distinguished men of New-England receiv ed their academical education. Third. Their religion was eminently fitted to enlarge men's views of the duty of fered from the prelacy of the Established Church, unnatural stepmother as she had been to them, nothing could extinguish the love that they felt for her, and for the many dear children of God whom she retained in her communion. Sixth, and last. Their religion was fayourable to liberty of conscience. Not that they were all sufficiently enlightened to bring their laws and institutions into perfect accordance with that principle at the outset; but even then they were, in this respect, in advance of the age in which * See Mather's Magnalia, b. iii., c. i., s. 12. they lived, and the spirit of that religion | elegance of manners. Nor has time yet which had made them and their fathers, in effaced this original diversity. On the conEngland, the defenders of the rights of the trary, it has been increased and confirmed people, and their tribunes, as it were, by the continuance of slavery in the South, against the domination of the throne and which never prevailed much at any time the altar, caused them, at last, to admit the in the North, but has immensely influenced claims of conscience in their full extent. the tone of feeling and the customs of the Southern States. The Fathers of New-England were no mean men, whether we look to themselves or to those with whom they were associated in England-the Lightfoots, the Gales, the Seldens, the Miltons, the Bunyans, the Baxters, the Bates, the Howes, the Charnocks, the Flavels, and others of scarcely inferior standing among the two thousand who had laboured in the pulpits of the Established Church, but whom the Restoration cast out. If the New-England colonies are chargeable with having allowed their feelings to become alienated from a throne from which they had often been contemptuously spurned, with equal truth might those of the South be accused of going to the opposite extreme, in their attachment to a line of monarchs alike undeserving of their love, and incapable of appreciating their generous loyalty. We might carry the contrast still farther. If New-England was the favourite asylum of the Puritan Roundhead, the South became, in its turn, the retreat of the "Cavalier," upon the joint subversion of the altar and the throne in his native land. And if the re regard of its enemies unfriendly to innocent amusements, and even morose, the other was the religion of the court, and of fashionable life, and did not require so uncompromising a resistance "to the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life." Such were the men who founded the New-England colonies, and their spirit still survives, in a good measure, in their descendants after six generations. With the exception of a few thousands of recentlyarrived Irish and Germans in Boston, and other towns on the seaboard, and of the|ligion of the one was strict, serious, in the descendants of those of the Huguenots who settled in New-England, that country is wholly occupied by the progeny of the English Puritans who first colonized it. But these are not the whole of their descendants in America; for besides the 2,234,202 souls forming the population of the six New-England States in 1840, it is supposed that an equal, if not a still greater number, have emigrated to New-York, the northern parts of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and into all parts of Michigan and Wisconsin, carrying with them, in a large measure, the spirit and the institutions of their glorious ancestors. Descendants of the Puritans are also to be found scattered over all parts of the United States, and many of them prove a great blessing to the neighbourhoods in which they reside. How wonderful, then, was the mission-the mother, in some sense, of the rest, of the founders of New-England! How gloriously accomplished! How rich in its results! CHAPTER V. Not that from this parallelism, which is necessarily general, the reader is to infer that the Northern colonies had exclusive claims to be considered as possessing a truly religious character. All that is meant is to give a general idea of the different aspects which religion bore in the one and the other. Virginia was the first in point of date, as we have already stated, of all the colonies. Among its neighbours in the South it was what Massachusetts was in the North and the dominant colony. Not that the others were planted chiefly from it, but because, from the prominence of its position, the amount of its, population, and their intelligence and wealth, it acquired from the first a preponderating influence which it retains as a state to this day. The records of Virginia furnish indubita RELIGIOUS CHARACTER OF THE EARLY COL- ble evidence that it was meant to be a ONISTS. FOUNDERS OF THE SOUTHERN WIDELY different in character, I have already remarked, were the early colonists of the Southern from those of the Northern States. If New-England may be regarded as colonized by the Anglo-Saxon race, with its simpler manners, its equal institutions, and its love of liberty, the South may be said to have been colonized by men very much Norman in blood, aristocractic in feeling and spirit, and pretend ing to perior dignity of demeanour and Christian colony. The charter enjoined that the mode of worship should conform to that of the Established Church of England. In 1619, for the first time, Virginia had a Legislature chosen by the people; and by an act of that body, the Episcopal Church was, properly speaking, established. In the following year the number of boroughs erected into parishes was eleven, and the number of pastors five, the population at the time being considerably under 3000. In 1621-22, it was enacted that the clergy should receive from their parishion |