Early New England Life
The people who inhabited these little New England towns were from
nearly every grade of English society, but the greater number were
men and women of humble birth — laborers, artisans, and petty
farmers — drawn from town and country, possessed of scanty
education, little or no financial capital, and but slight experience
with the larger world. Some were middle-class lawyers, merchants,
and squires; a few, but very few, were of higher rank, while scores
were of the soil, coarse in language and habits, and given to
practices characteristic of the peasantry of England at that time.
The fact that hardly a fifth of those in Massachusetts were
professed Christians renders it doubtful how far religious
convictions were the only driving motive that sent hundreds of these
men to New England. The leaders were, in a majority of cases,
university men familiar with good literature and possessed of good
libraries, but more cognizant of theology and philosophy than of the
law and order of nature. Some were professional soldiers, simple in
thought as they were courageous in action, while others were men of
affairs, who had acquired experience before the courts and in the
counting houses of England and were often amazingly versatile, able
to turn their hands to any business that confronted them. For the
great majority there was little opportunity in these early years to
practice a trade or a profession. Except for the clergy, who could
preach in America with greater freedom than in England, and for the
occasional practitioner in physic or the law who as time went on
found occasion to apply his knowledge in the household and the
courts, there was little else for any one to do than engage in
farming, fishing, and trading with the Indians, or turn carpenter
and cobbler according to demand. The artisan became a farmer, though
still preserving his knack as a craftsman, and expended his skill
and his muscle in subduing a tough and unbroken soil.
New England was probably overstocked with men of strong minds and
assertive dispositions. It was settled by radicals who would never
have left the mother country had they not possessed well-formed
opinions regarding some of the most important aspects of religious
and social life. We may call them all Puritans, but as to the
details of their Puritanism they of ten differed as widely as did
Roundheads and Cavaliers in England. Though representative of a
common movement, they were far from united in their beliefs or
consistent in their political practices. There was always something
of the inquisitor at Boston and of the monk at Plymouth, and in all
the Puritan colonies there prevailed a self-satisfied sense of
importance as the chosen of God. The controversies that arose over
jurisdictions and boundaries and the niceties of doctrine are not
edifying, however honest may have been those who entered into them.
Massachusetts and Connecticut always showed a disposition to stretch
their demands for territory to the utmost and to take what they
could, sometimes with little charity or forbearance. The dominance
of the church over the organization and methods of government and
the rigid scrutiny of individual lives and habits, of which the
leaders, notably those of Massachusetts, approved, were hardly in
accord with democracy or personal liberty. Of toleration, except in
Rhode Island, there was none.
The unit of New England life was the town, a self-governing
community, in large measure complete in itself, and if left alone
capable of maintaining a separate existence. Within certain limits,
it was independent of higher authority, and in this respect it was
unlike anything to be found in England. At this period, it was at
bottom a religious community which owned and distributed the lands
set apart for its occupation, elected its own officials, and passed
local ordinances for its own well-being. At first, church members,
landholders, and inhabitants tended to be identical, but they
gradually separated as time went on and as new comers appeared and
old residents migrated elsewhere. Before the end of the century, the
ecclesiastical society, the board of land proprietors, and the town
proper, even when largely composed of the same members, acted as
separate groups, though the line of separation was often vague and
was sometimes not drawn at all. Town meetings continued to be held
in the meeting-house, and land was distributed by the town in its
collective capacity. Lands were parceled out as they were needed in
proportion to contributions to a common purchase fund or to family
need, and later according to the ratable value of a man's property.
The fathers of Wallingford in Connecticut, "considering that even
single persons industrious and laborious might through the blessing
of God increase and grow into families," distributed to the meanest
bachelor "such a quantity of land as might in an ordinary way serve
for the comfortable maintenance of a family." Sometimes allotments
were equal; often they varied greatly in size, from an acre to fifty
acres and even more; but always they were determined by a desire to
be fair and just. The land was granted in full right and could be
sold or bequeathed, though at first only with the consent of the
community. With the grant generally went rights in woodland and
pasture; and even meadow land, after the hay was got in, was open to
the use of the villagers. The early New England town took into
consideration the welfare and contentment of the individual, but it
rated as of even greater importance the interests of the whole body.
The settlements of New England inevitably presented great variations
of local life and color, stretching as they did from the Plymouth
trucking posts in Maine, through the fishing villages of Saco and
York, and those on the Piscataqua, to the towns of Long Island and
the frontier communities of western Connecticut — Stamford and
Greenwich. The inhabitants to the number of more than thirty
thousand in 1640 were not only in possession of the coast but were
also pushing their way into the interior. To fishing and agriculture
they added trading, lumbering, and commerce, and were constantly
reaching out for new lands and wider opportunities. The Pilgrims had
hardly weathered their first hard winter when they rebuilt one of
their shallops and sent it northward on fishing and trading voyages;
and later they sent one bark up the Connecticut and another to open
up communication with the Dutch at New Amsterdam. Pynchon was making
Springfield the centre of the fur trade of the interior, though an
overcrowding of merchants there was reducing profits and compelling
the settlers to resort to agriculture for a living. Of all the
colonies, New Haven was the most distinctly commercial. Stephen
Goodyear built a trucking house on an island below the great falls
of the Housatonic in 1642; other New Haven colonists engaged in
ventures on Delaware Bay; and in 1645, the colony endeavored to open
a direct trade with England. But nearly every New Haven enterprise
failed, and by 1660 the wealth of the colony had materially
diminished and the settlement had become "little else than a colony
of discouraged farmers." Among all the colonies in New England and
elsewhere there was considerable coasting traffic, and vessels went
to Newfoundland and Bermuda, and even to the distant West Indies, to
Madeira, and to Bilboa across the ocean. Ever since Winthrop built
the Blessing of the Bay in 1631, the first seagoing craft launched
in New England, Massachusetts had been the leading commercial
colony, and her vessels occasionally made the long triangular voyage
to Jamaica, and England, and back to the Bay. The vessels carried
planks, pipe staves, furs, fish, and provisions, and exchanged them
for sugar, molasses, household goods, and other wares and
commodities needed for the comfort and convenience of the colonists.
The older generation was passing away. By 1660, Winthrop, Cotton,
Hooker, Haynes, Bradford, and Whiting were dead; Davenport and Roger
Williams were growing old; some of the ablest men, Peter, Ludlow,
Whitfield, Desborough, Hooke, had returned to England, and others
less conspicuous had gone to the West Indies or to the adjacent
colonies. The younger men were coming on, new arrivals were creeping
in, and a loosening of the old rigidity was affecting the social
order. The Cambridge platform of 1648, which embodied the orthodox
features of the Congregational system as determined up to that time,
gave place to the Half-Way Covenant of 1657 and 1662, which owed its
rise to the coming to maturity of the second generation, the
children of the first settlers, now admitted to membership but not
to full communion — a wide departure from the original purpose of
the founders. Rhode Island continued to be the colony of separatism
and soul liberty, where Seeker, Generalist, Anabaptist, and
religious anarchist of the William Harris type found place, though
not always peace. Cotton Mather later said there had never been
"such a variety of religions together on so small a spot as there
have been in that colony."
The coming of the Quakers to Boston in 1656, bringing with them as
they did some of the very religious ideas that had caused Mrs.
Hutchinson and John Wheelwright to be driven into exile, revived
anew the old issue and roused the orthodox colonies to deny
admission to ranters, heretics, Quakers, and the like. Boston burned
their books as "corrupt, heretical, and blasphemous," flung these
people into prison with every mark of indignity, branded them as
enemies of the established order in church and commonwealth, and
tried to prove that they were witches and emissaries of Satan. The
first-corners were sent back to Barbados whence they came; the next
were returned to England; those of 1657 were scourged; those of
1658, under the Massachusetts law of the previous year, were
mutilated and, when all these measures had no effect, under the
harsher law of October, 1658, four were hanged. One of these, Mary
Dyer, though reprieved and banished, persisted in returning to her
death. The Quakers were scourged in Plymouth, branded in New Haven,
flogged at the cart's tail on Long Island, and chained to a
wheelbarrow at New Amsterdam. Upon Connecticut they made almost no
impression; only in Piscataqua, Rhode Island, Nantucket, and Eastern
Long Island did they find a resting place.
To the awe inspired by the covenant with God was added the terror
aroused by the dread power of Satan; and witchcraft inevitably took
its place in the annals of New England Puritanism as it had done for
a century in the annals of the older world. Not one of the colonies,
except Rhode Island, was free from its manifestations. Plymouth had
two cases which came to trial, but no executions; Connecticut and
New Haven had many trials and a number of executions, beginning with
that of Alse Young in Windsor in 1647, the first execution for
witchcraft in New England. The witch panic, a fearful exhibition of
human terror, appeared in Massachusetts as early as 1648, and ran
its sinister course for more than forty years, involving high and
low alike and disclosing an amazing amount of credulity and
superstition. To the Puritan the power of Satan was ever imminent,
working through friend or foe, and using the human form as an
instrument of injury to the chosen of God. The great epidemic of
witchcraft at Salem in 1692, the climax and close of the delusion,
resulted in the imprisonment of over two hundred persons and the
execution of nineteen. Some of those who sat in the court of trial
later came to their senses and were heartily ashamed of their share
in the proceedings.
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