The issue raised by Anne Hutchinson soon passed into politics, and the little colony was divided into irreconcilable factions. The good woman had a great following in Boston, including not a few in high places. Wheelwright was her avowed defender; John Cotton was half convinced. The credit of the party was raised by the accession of the brilliant Sir Harry Vane, lately come from England, and destined to return hither to vex a greater than Winthrop. Vane was as radical in politics as Mistress Anne was in religion; and the two made common cause against the magistrates and clergy. Had the issue been confined to Boston the result could not have been doubtful, for the Boston Church was predominantly Hutchinsonian; but the ministers as a body supported Winthrop and Wilson, and the old magistrates were returned in the election of 1637. The victory was a crucial one. The erratic Vane went off to England; Cotton returned to his first allegiance; and when the cause of all the trouble was cited to appear before the court in the fall of the same year, the decree of banishment was a foregone conclusion. Like Luther before the diet, Anne Hutchinson pressed for reasons—"I desire to know wherefore I am banished." It was in the spirit of the Roman Church that Governor Winthrop replied—"say no more; the Court knows wherefore, and is satisfied."

The direct result of the expulsion of Williams and Anne Hutchinson was the founding of Rhode Island, famous as an early experiment in the separation of Church and State. Williams, with his few followers, denied admittance to Plymouth, went on to the south and founded the town of Providence. Into this region there shortly came the much larger group, including William Coddington, who followed Anne Hutchinson into exile. The settlements of Portsmouth and New Port, which they established there, were united with Providence, under a patent procured by Williams in 1643, to form the colony of Rhode Island, where flourished, to the scandal of its neighbors, that "soul liberty" of which Williams was the apostle. Yet not without difficulty. Peopled by those who were too eccentric not to prove troublesome, the history of the little colony was a stormy one—its peace "like the peace of a man who has the tertian ague"; but its fame is secure, and, its founder, condemned by the common sense of his age, will ever be celebrated as the prophet of those primary American doctrines, democracy and religious toleration.

Rhode Island was founded by those who were not allowed to remain in Massachusetts; Connecticut by those who, finding its conditions too restricted, did not wish to remain there. Few facts have been more potent in determining the history of America than the steady migration in search of better opportunities. A decade had not passed before the westward movement began. As early as 1633 many people at the Bay, fired by favorable reports which John Oldham brought back from the Connecticut Valley, began to have "a hankering after it." In 1634 the people of Newtown, under the leadership of Thomas Hooker, asked permission of the general court to remove there, advancing, in support of their petition, "their want of accommodation for their cattle, the fruitfulness and commodiousness of Connecticut, and the strong bent of their spirits to remove thither." The petition was at first denied, but in 1636, permission having at last been obtained, a considerable number from the towns of Newtown, Dorchester, Watertown, and Roxbury migrated to the west and south and settled the towns—Hartford, Wethersfield, and Windsor—which became the nucleus of the colony of Connecticut.

While the fertility of the Connecticut Valley was doubtless attractive, some of the motives which actuated Hooker and his followers lie concealed in the naive phrase, "the strong bent of their spirits." Thomas Hooker, and to a less extent John Haynes and Roger Ludlow, were men of outstanding ability. But as their towns were second to Boston, they themselves were overtopped in influence by Winthrop and Cotton, Dudley and Wilson. In the compact community of Massachusetts Bay, ideas as well as cattle found accommodation difficult. In religion and politics Hooker was more radical than Winthrop: he was not wholly out of sympathy with Anne Hutchinson; and he defended the proposition that "the foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people," whereas Winthrop maintained that the best part of the people "is always the least, and of that best part the wiser part is always the lesser." And so, when the petitioners were permitted to leave, the strong bent of their spirits directed them, not only to the Connecticut, but southward without the limits of the Massachusetts jurisdiction.

While Hooker and his associates, with room for their cattle and their ideas, clear of Boston's shadow and the din of disputes over the negative voice and the covenant of works, were establishing a more liberal Bible Commonwealth on the Connecticut, Theophilus Eaton, a merchant of "fair estate and great esteem for religion," and John Davenport, a dispossessed London minister, were establishing at New Haven a Bible Commonwealth stricter even than that of Massachusetts. They had arrived, with their congregation of well-to-do middle-class Londoners, at Boston in 1637, where they remained during the winter. Winthrop would have retained them permanently; but Davenport found the colony distracted by the Hutchinson episode, and was as much distressed by the concessions which had been made to the "mere democracy" as Hooker had been by the restraints in favor of a "mixed aristocracy." They therefore moved on, accompanied and followed by some inhabitants of Massachusetts, to establish at New Haven a community in which the Scriptures should be the "only rule attended to in ordering the affairs of government." But these "Brahmins of New England Puritanism" did not find the peace which they pursued. The distractions which they left Boston to avoid attended them in the wilderness; and in the end the colony was united with the settlements to the north, where the liberal ideas of Hooker had proved compatible, not only with strict morality and frugal prosperity, but with religious and spiritual concord as well. The charter of 1662 which founded the larger Connecticut embodied the ideas of Hooker rather than those of Davenport, and was so wisely contrived that it stood the shock of the Revolution and survived to the nineteenth century as the fundamental law of Connecticut.

Internal difficulties growing out of conflicting ideals of Church and State had scarcely achieved the dispersion of the New England settlements before external dangers began to draw them together. As early as 1637, and again in 1639, the Connecticut settlements, threatened by the Dutch and the Indians, applied to Massachusetts Bay for support against the common danger. The Dutch and the Indians were less dangerous to Massachusetts than to Connecticut, but the possibility of royal interference touched her more nearly. In 1634 Laud had obtained the appointment of a commission to inquire into her affairs, and in 1642 the "ill news we have had out of England concerning the breach between King and Parliament" gave further apprehension with respect to the colony's chartered liberties. Accordingly, the third proposal of Connecticut in 1642 met with a favorable response, and in the following year the New England Confederation was founded. Rhode Island was without the pale, but Massachusetts, Connecticut, Plymouth, and New Haven entered into a "firm and perpetual league of friendship and amity for offense and defense, mutual advice and succor, both for preserving and propagating the truth and liberties of the Gospel, and for their own mutual safety and welfare." The affairs of the league were to be administered by a board of two commissioners from each colony. Massachusetts, with a greater population than the other three combined, agreed to bear her proper burden in men and money, and presumed at times to exercise a corresponding influence. The smaller colonies were naturally more willing to accept her money than disposed to submit to her dictation; but in spite of disputes, the Confederation was maintained for forty years, an effective influence in its day, and the first of many compromises which led in the end to that more perfect union which still endures.

IV

Neither revolution in England nor the stress of conflicting ideals in the colony turned the first generation of Massachusetts Bay leaders from the straight course which they had laid. Magistrates and clergy went steadily forward, emerging from Nonconformity into practical Separatism, as resistant to Parliamentary as to royal control, as cool toward Cromwell as toward Charles. During the quarter-century of their domination, Massachusetts maintained a virtual independence of the mother country and the effective leadership of Now England. Towards the middle of the century the theocratic principle might have seemed more firmly established than ever before. The relative tranquillity which followed the banishment of Anne Hutchinson appeared to be a clear justification of the action of the general court on that occasion. It was therefore without hesitation that the authorities acted when Anne Austin and Mary Fisher, two Quaker missionaries from Barbados, arrived at Boston in 1656. The women were reshipped to Barbados; and a law was straightway enacted which decreed the flogging and imprisonment of any of the "cursed sect of haeritics commonly called Quakers" who might come within the colony's jurisdiction.

In the seventeenth century, it was agreed that, next to the Muenster Anabaptists, the Quakers were of all dissenting sects the most pestilent and blasphemous. They used no force in propagating their beliefs or in defending their lives. They were believers in equality, and refused to doff their hats to any man, respecting neither magistrate nor priest. They were believers in liberty; no man to be restrained in matters of opinion; but every man to go or come, to speak or remain silent, as God's commands, by direct inner revelation, might be laid upon him. And it appeared that God had laid his command upon many to go among the unregenerate bearing testimony, and with sharp-tongued reproach and reviling to prick as with thorns the seared conscience of a perverse and stiff-necked generation. Persecution they welcomed as the martyr's portion, the sure evidence of well-doing. "Where they are most of all suffered to declare themselves, there they least of all desire to come." And so, impelled by the force of the divine spirit, they came among the reserved and seemly Puritans of Boston, with scandalous impropriety of action bringing the staid Sunday sermon or Thursday lecture to irremediable confusion, with voluble harangue and wealth of stinging epithet pouring scorn upon the self-selected leaders of the chosen people.

The harassed magistrates wished only to be rid of them. But unlike Williams and Anne Hutchinson, the Quakers came back as often as they were banished; and as often as they returned, their conduct became more outrageous, and, the penalties inflicted more severe. Yet oppression bore its proper fruit. Persecution engendered sympathy; sympathy ripened into conviction; and the more heretics were confined in the prisons, the more heresy flourished in the streets. The popularity of Anne Hutchinson's teachings had demonstrated how eagerly the average man turned from the literalism of the Puritan clergy in response to the appeal of one who spoke "from the mere motion of the spirit." Quakerism was above all a spiritual gospel addressed to the emotions. Its humane and liberal teachings, obscured but not concealed by the extravagance of speech and conduct in its first apostles, stood out in striking contrast to the repressive policy of the Puritan government as well as to the cold, gray intellectualism of the Puritan religion. The Quakers were a political danger as well as a public nuisance; for whether few or many were likely to profess the Quaker faith, among covenanted and uncovenanted alike their teachings fell on the fruitful soil of discontent. The magistrates were well aware at last that a crisis was impending; and they went steadily forward, with circumspection and not without apprehension, indeed, but without flinching, to meet the final test. In 1659 and 1660, according to law established and known, five Quakers were condemned to death, and four were hanged on Boston Common.

The event was a significant one in early Massachusetts history, for it revealed, in respect to theory and practice alike, the insecure foundation upon which the Church-State rested. In respect to theory, the Quakers were a perplexing problem precisely because they remorselessly pressed the basic principles of Protestantism to their logical conclusion. The doctrine of the inner light, like Anne Hutchinson's notion of personal illumination, was implicit in the premises of Luther, who had grounded the great protest on the conception of a covenant of grace, and had laid it down, as the primary thesis, that "good works do not make the good man, but the good man does good works." Luther's revolt had, indeed, raised a vital social question: Are belief and conduct in matters religious to be determined by the social will registered in decrees of Church or State, or by the individual will following the promptings of reason and conscience? For most dissenters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was a logical difficulty in assenting to the first proposition and a practical objection to assenting to the second: it was logically difficult to deny the authority of Rome, which the practice and traditions of centuries had recognized as voicing the will of Christendom, without denying the validity of any external authority whatever; but it was practically impossible to appeal unreservedly to the authority of the individual reason and conscience without running into free thought and allowing religion to dissolve in an infinite variety of opinion. Generally speaking, most Protestant sects appealed from the outer to the inner authority in order to establish their beliefs, and then from the inner to the outer authority in order to maintain them. Luther himself, having denied the right of the Church to compel his conscience, straightway maintained that it was not for Herr Omnes to determine matters of religion, and fell back on the State as the defender of his faith against the dangers of dissent. But it is indeed true that "the business of dissenters is to dissent"; and the Massachusetts magistrates found that the very arguments they had used to deny the authority of Laud were now employed to deny their own. This was the logical opening in the Puritan armor, that the Protestant Church-State or State-Church was but a masked and attenuated Catholicism destined to be destroyed by the very principles upon which it had been originally established.

If in respect to theory the hanging of the Quakers was a confession, in the realm of practical politics it was but a Pyrrhic victory. The authority of magistrate and clergy, strained to the breaking point, never quite recovered its old security. The capital law was itself passed by a bare majority, and the successive executions carried popular opposition to the verge of insurrection. Nor did the executions achieve the desired end. The last sentence was never carried into effect, and for years the Quakers continued to molest the colony, pushing their extravagances sometimes to the farthest limit. To fall to mere flogging after having inflicted the death penalty was a fatal anti-climax which marks a turning-point in Massachusetts history—the beginning of the end of Winthrop's Bible Commonwealth.

The end was doubtless hastened by the Stuart Restoration and the recall of the charter; but the theocratic ideal, carrying the germ of its own decay, was predestined to failure. For the founders of the Bible Commonwealth it was an axiom that Church and State were but two sides of the same shield; a matter of course that the "body of the commons" must be "preserved of honest and good men"; a reasonable hope that all good men would be found within the churches. And the circumstances of the migration seemed, indeed, a miraculous preparation for this easy solution of human government; for persecution was taken to be but "a strange contrivance of God" to gather "a chosen company of men"—the sifted wheat for planting an ideal commonwealth. Yet of the first settlers more than half refused to take the covenant, thus renouncing the privileges of the ideal commonwealth without obtaining relief from its burdens. A most disconcerting circumstance this at the beginning, and of ill omen for the future! Doubtless some strange perversity of the natural man, some inscrutable judgment of God for the discipline of his people, must have kept so many outside the fold.

But in truth not all who came to Plymouth or Massachusetts were of the sifted wheat. Under the stress of persecution and the stimulus of migration, the mass of the first settlers doubtless caught something of the spiritual exaltation which inspired the leaders. But it was not for the many to live on that high level of purposeful resolution and enduring courage. It is a significant fact that of those who came over with Winthrop and Dudley two hundred returned in the ships that brought them out; and of those who remained who shall say how many met the stern realities of the New World with a sinking sense of disillusionment, finding the material conditions of life harder and the spiritual peace less satisfying than they had imagined? And many there were who had never been touched by the Puritan ideal. "Men being to come over into a wilderness," says the kindly Bradford, "in which much labour and servise was to be done about building and planting, such as wanted help in that respecte, when they could not have such as they would, were glad to take such as they could, and so, many untoward servants, sundry of them proved, were thus brought over, both men and women kind; who, when their terms were expired, became families of themselves, which gave increase hereunto. Another and maine reason hereof was, that men, finding so many godly disposed persons willing to come into these parts, some began to make a trade of it, to transport passengers and their goods, and hired ships for that end; and then, to make up their freight and advance their profite, cared not who the persons were, so they had money to pay them. And also ther were sente by their freinds some under hope that they would be made better; others that they might be eased of such burthens, and they kept from shame at home that would necessarily follow their dissolute courses. And by this means the country became pestered with many unworthy persons, who, being come over, crept into one place or other."

Such unworthy persons doubtless swelled the mass of uncovenanted. Yet the historian is apt to think that for many, honest and good men enough, the cold inner temple of the ideal commonwealth must have proved more forbidding than its wind-swept outer courts. To enter its portals was an ordeal which the average man will not readily undergo, involving, as an initial procedure, a confession of faults and a profession of faith, a public revelation of inner spiritual condition, an exposure of soul to the searching and curious inspection of the sanctified. And the covenant itself was found to be no warmed and cloistered retreat, secure from the rude impact and impertinent gaze of the world. Quite the contrary! To enter the covenant was to renounce all private spiritual possessions, to give one's intimate convictions into the keeping of others, to subscribe to a very communism of the emotional life. This un-Roman Church was after all but a public confessional, in which every brother was a confessor, and life itself a penance for constructive sin. The soul that is constantly exposed grows callous or diseased; and the New England covenant provided a regimen well suited to repel the normal mind or induce in its patients a fatal spiritual anaemia.

And with every decade the house of the covenant became at once more difficult to enter and less comfortable to abide in. The Puritan was not necessarily a sad or solemn person. Yet the light heart and the merry mind were not the salient characteristics even of the cheerful Winthrop or the genial Cotton; while the conditions of life in the wilderness—the unrelieved round of exacting labor, the ever present danger from the lurking Indians, the long cold winters with their certain harvest of death from diseases which could be ascribed only to the will of God and met with resignation instead of skill, the succession of funerals as depressing as they were public and pervading—were well calculated to deepen the somber cast of the Puritan temper and accentuate the critical and introspective tendency of his mind. Inspection of one's own and one's neighbor's conduct was, indeed, always a Puritan duty; shut within the restricted horizon of a New England village, it became a necessity and almost a pleasure. When few stirring events diverted thought from the petty and the personal, when pent-up emotion found little outlet in the graces or amusements of social intercourse, observation and introspection fastened upon the minutiae of life and every eccentricity of speech and conduct was weighed and assessed. Close espionage on conduct was matched by the careful scrutiny accorded every novel opinion. When the weekly sermon was the universal topic of conversation, the refinements of belief were more discussed than essentials; often discussed, they were often questioned—by strict Separatists like Roger Williams; by cavilers at infant baptism like that "anciently religious woman," the Lady Deborah Moodie; by fervid emotionalists, such as Anne Hutchinson or the Quaker missionaries: and every discussion of the creed left it more precisely defined, more narrow, and more official. Under the stress of conflicting opinion and the attrition of acrid debate, the covenant of grace steadily hardened into a covenant of barren works, in which an air of sanctimony became an easy substitute for the sense of sanctification, and the tithe of mint and cummin was allowed to overbalance the weightier matters of the law.

While the covenant became more inelastic, and its rule of life more strictly defined, the call of the world became more insidious and alluring. As the colony became established beyond the fear of failure, and life fell from an artificial and self-conscious venture to be but a natural experience, as wealth increased and opportunities for relaxation and idle amusement multiplied, the elemental instincts of human nature, stronger than decrees of state, would not be denied. During the third decade after the founding, the Christmas festival found its way into the colony, and "dancing in ordinarys upon the marriage of some person" gave occasion for scandal. Extravagance in "apparill both of men and women" became the subject of repeated legislation: "we cannot but to our grief take notice," so runs the law of 1651, "that intolerable excesse and bravery have crept in uppon us, and especially amongst people of mean condition, to the dishonor of God, the scandall of our profession, the coruption of estates, and altogether unsuitable to our povertie." Non-attendance at church did not become a problem for the magistrates until 1646, but the fine then imposed proved ineffective; and year by year the desecration of the Sabbath became more marked and more difficult of correction. Many and sundry abuses were committed "by several persons on the Lord's day, not only by children playing in the streets and other places, but by youthes, maydes, and other persons, both strangers and others, uncivilly walkinge in the streets and fields, travelling from towne to towne, going on shipboard, frequentinge common howses and other places to drinke, sport, and otherwise to misspend that precious time."

"Maydes and youthes!" The words are significant, for by 1653 the first generation of native-born New Englanders had indeed come upon the scene to vex the Puritan fathers. How different from that of the first settlers must have been the outlook of those who had never been in England. They had never been oppressed by bishop or king; had never felt the insidious temptation of a cathedral church, or witnessed the mockery of the mass, or been repelled by a surpliced priesthood desecrating God's house with incense and music; had never seen a maypole with its accompaniment of licentious revelry, or witnessed the debauching effects of a holiday festival. They had solemnly sat in unwarmed churches; they had been present at elections; had seen men standing in the pillory or women whipped through the streets; they had diverted themselves at weddings or the husking-bee, or by walking in the woods, or by drinking in a tavern. But no frivolous and superstitious world of Anti-Christ compassed them about to point the moral of the harsh Puritan tale. Their Puritanism was induced by precept and example rather than by the compelling impact of a corrupt society.

Yet no conventionalized Puritanism, no mere living on the dead level of habitual virtues could satisfy the leaders of the great migration. The founding of Massachusetts was preeminently a self-conscious movement, the work of able and resolute men who brought an unquenchable moral enthusiasm to the support of a clearly defined purpose. They had counted the cost and made their choice; and every instinct of proud and self-contained men disposed them to minimize the difficulties which they encountered in the New World and to exaggerate those which they had overcome in the Old. Having staked their judgment on the wisdom of the venture, they were bound to be justified in the event. To admit that life on the physical and moral frontier was less than they had imagined would be a humiliating confession of failure; and worse than a confession of failure; for God had appointed this refuge for them, and not to abide in it in all contentment would be to cavil at his purpose, to question his decree. With the instinct of true pioneers they therefore idealized the barren wilderness, pronouncing its air most healing, its soil most fertile; and with unfailing optimism proving, by the very sufferings they endured, how practicable, how spacious and attractive was the habitation which they had set themselves to fashion.

Thus it was that the very influences which relaxed the hold of the Puritan ideal upon the mass of the people served only to strengthen its hold upon their leaders. With resolution stiffened by every obstacle, magistrates and clergy pressed on to the appointed task, never doubting that they were called upon to justify the ways of God to man. Drawing their inspiration from Geneva and the ancient Hebrew code, they assumed, with a courage as sublime as it proved futile, to foster moral and spiritual excellence by decrees of state. Indifference or opposition only called them to a stricter rule; for every physical disaster, every denial of the creed or departure from the straight line of life, was thought to be God's judgment upon them for some want of faith or failure in the law. And in later years the chastisements of the Lord were many:—the desolating King Philip's War; persistent interference with their chartered Liberties; dissensions in the Boston Church and quarrels of magistrates and clergy; the rise of "an anti-ministerial spirit" and the growth of worldliness and lax living among the people. "What are the reasons that have provoked the Lord to bring his judgments upon New England?" Such was the primary question which the Synod of 1679 was called upon to answer. "Declension from the primitive foundation work, innovation in doctrine and worship"—this, according to a committee of the deputies, was the true cause. "A spirit of division, persecuting and oppressing of God's ministers and precious saints," said Mr. Flint of Dorchester, "is the sin that is unseen." And not a few maintained that all their troubles were but well-merited punishments for having dealt too leniently with the Quakers.

And yet, in the year 1679, such explanations as these were falling to the level of the conventional for many of the magistrates and even for some of the clergy. After forty years few of the original leaders were still alive. Winthrop died in 1649, Cotton in 1652, Thomas Dudley in 1653, John Wilson in 1667, Richard Mather in 1669. The days of persecution and exile influenced the thinking of the second generation, indeed, not so much as an experience, but rather as a tradition or a tale that is told. Liberal influences, which were to oust the Mathers from control of Harvard College, were already gaining ground in Cambridge, while Boston had become the center of powerful material interests which were to prove incompatible with the rigid ideals of the founders. "The merchants seem to be rich men," writes Mr. Harris in 1675, "and their houses as handsomely furnished as most in London." In 1680 more than one hundred ships traded at the Bay, carrying fish, provisions, and lumber to southern Europe, to the Madeiras, and to the English sugar colonies in the West Indies. Many men who rose to prominence in the third quarter of the century were more concerned for the temporal than for the spiritual commonwealth; and when material interests thus came into competition with the interests of religion, not a few were prepared to compromise with the world, and so a secular and moderate spirit crept in to corrupt the counsels of government.

The rise of the moderate party and the divergence between clergy and magistrate is therefore a notable feature of the last years of Massachusetts history under the charter. In 1679, after the death of Leverett, Bradstreet was elected governor. He was the leader of the party of conciliation, one of many who, renouncing the rigid and uncompromising policy of the clergy, were ready to cooeperate with Randolph in the hope of securing the essential interests of the colony by a timely submission to the English Government. And it is significant of the growing influence of the property interests that the moderates were stronger in the upper than in the lower chamber. In 1682 the governor and a majority of the assistants, "upon a serious consideration of his Majesty's intimation that his purpose is only to regulate our charter, in such a manner as shall be for his service and the good of this his colony," announced themselves willing to surrender the bulwark of the Puritan liberties. But the House of Deputies voted to "adhere to their former bills," preferring with the clergy rather to "die by the hand of others, than by their own."

The event reveals the opposition of the material and the ideal interests which was a prime cause in the defeat of the great Puritan experiment. The assistants were "men of the best estates," says Randolph, while the deputies were "mostly an inferior sort of planters." Randolph was a prejudiced observer; but it is undoubtedly true that the upper chamber spoke for the shipbuilders and traders of Boston. Forty years earlier, when Laud was preparing to annul the charter, both magistrates and clergy made ready for forcible resistance. It was no longer possible. Massachusetts had ceased to be a wilderness community cut off from contact with the outside world. Her rapidly growing trade depended upon English markets. The base of the fisheries was shifting northward, and a French company at Nova Scotia was already seizing New England ships. Without English protection trade would be ruined and the colony itself fall a prey to France. Forcible resistance was therefore not to be thought of. The material interests of Massachusetts bound her to the home Government, and practical men were apt to think that even the spiritual City of God would suffer less under Anglican than under Catholic control.

The recall of the charter but opened free passage to the latent forces that were already beginning to transform the life and thought of New England. The theocratic ideal had so far lost its hold that the event to which the clergy and a remnant of the magistrates looked forward as to a cosmic catastrophe was accepted with resignation or indifference by the mass of the people. Neither disaster nor serious disturbance accompanied the inauguration of the new regime. The extension of the suffrage to the freeholders removed more discontent than it created. A government controlled by property interests approved itself as well as one directed by religious ideas. The colony was no more distracted by the introduction of the Anglican service than by the erection of the second Boston Church; and even the passing of Harvard College, that citadel and fortress of the old theocracy, into the hands of Boston and Cambridge liberals, was far less a tragedy to Massachusetts than it was to the Mathers.

The life of Cotton Mather was, indeed, a kind of tragedy, for he was the most distinguished of those who grew to manhood under the old order only to witness its fall and live in degenerate days. Not less able than his father, but how much less influential! In early years his voice was a commanding one, but he was destined to see his popularity wane and to live most of his long life in comparative isolation and neglect in the very community where Increase Mather had been a high priest indeed. In such men as Cotton Mather the old spirit lived on, sharply accentuated by defeat; and transformed, in such men as Jonathan Edwards, by dint of morbid introspection and brooding on the sins of a perverse generation, into a kind of disease, or spiritual neurasthenia. Such men could but look back with poignant regret to the golden age that was past. Of that golden age, Cotton Mather himself, "smitten with a just fear of encroaching and ill-bodied degeneracies," sat down to write the history, recording in the Magnalia "the great things done for us by our God," in the hope that he might thereby do something "to prevent the loss of the primitive principles and the primitive practices."

But he had imagined a vain thing. For even as the century drew to its close, the old Bay colony was already drifting from its back-water moorings, out into the main current of the world's thought. None could know to what uncharted seas of political and religious radicalism they were bearing on. None could foresee the time when Calvin's Institutes would give way to the Suffolk Resolutions, when Adams would speak in place of Endicott, or the later day when Emerson would preach a new antinomianism more desolating than any known to Winthrop or Bradford.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

This period is fully treated in Channing's History of the United States, I, chaps, VIII-XIV; and in Tyler's England in America, chaps. V-VII, IX-XIX. See also Fiske's Old Virginia and Her Neighbours, I, chaps. VII-XI, XIV; and Eggleston's Beginners of a Nation and The Transit of Civilization from England to America. The constitutional aspects of the colonial settlements are exhaustively treated in Osgood's The American Colonies in the 17th Century. For the economic and social history of the colonies, see Bruce's Social Life in Virginia and The Economic History of Virginia in the 17th Century, and Weeden's Economic History of New England. Contemporary pamphlets relating to the colonies are to be found in Force's Tracts and Other Papers, 4 vols. Washington, 1838. To understand the motives and ideals of the Separatists and Puritans one must read their own accounts. Of these, the most charming is Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation. This, as well as Governor Winthrop's Journal, is printed in Jameson's Original Narratives of Early American History. Johnson's Wonder Working Providence, in the same collection, is a history from the point of view of a loyal Puritan of average education and intelligence. Morton's New English Canaan (1632) and The Simple Cobler of Aggawam (1647) are printed in Force's Tracts and Other Papers, vols. II, III. A hostile account of the Puritan experiment is in Samuel Gorton's Letter to Nathaniel Morton, in Force's Tracts, etc., vol. IV. About three quarters of a century after the founding of Massachusetts, Cotton Mather wrote his Magnalia Christi Americana, or the Ecclesiastical History of New England, 2 vols. Hartford, 1855. In Bk. I he gives an account of the founding from the point of view of one who felt that New England was then departing from the "primitive principles."



CHAPTER IV

ENGLAND AND HER COLONIES IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

Your trade is the mother and nurse of your seamen; your seamen are the life of your fleet; your fleet is the security of your trade, and both together are the wealth, strength, and glory of Britain.

LORD HAVERSHAM.

I

The decay of the old Puritanism in Massachusetts, so distressing to Cotton Mather, was but a faint reflection of the change which had come over England since the return of Charles II to Whitehall. With the fall of the Puritan regime moral earnestness and high emotional tension, regarded as contrary to nature and reason, gave way to a rationalizing habit of mind, to seriousness tempered with well-bred common sense or spiced with a pinch of cynical indifference. Religion fell to be a conventional conformity. Theologians, wanting vital faith in God, were content to balance the probabilities of his existence. Amusement became the avocation of a leisure class, and the average man was intent like Samuel Pepys to put money in his purse, in order to indulge himself "a little the more in pleasure, knowing that this is the proper age to do it." From Milton and the Earl of Clarendon to William Pitt, England was no country of lost causes and impossible enthusiasms. It was a pragmatic age, in which the scientific discoveries of Newton are the highest intellectual achievement, and the conclusion of Pope that "everything that is is best" gives the quality of poetic insight.

In this ago the direction of English affairs fell to men well suited to the national temper. The first Charles suffered martyrdom for his faith; the second, determined never again to go on his travels, set the standard of public morality by selling himself to France, and with a smile professing the belief that honor in man and virtue in woman were but devices to raise the price of capitulation. And so he often found it; for he was himself served by men who, having renounced their Puritan principles for place and power, were prepared to forswear the Stuarts in order to follow the rising star of William of Orange. William was an able statesman, indeed, but his interest was in the grand alliance; he "borrowed England on his way to Versailles," and governed it in the interest of the Dutch Coalition. Queen Anne and the first Georges reigned but did not govern; and in the early eighteenth century power fell to men of supple intelligence and complacent conviction—to Marlborough and little Sidney Godolphin, to Harley and St. John and Sunderland, and at last to Robert Walpole, the very personification of the shrewd curiosity, the easy-going morals, the material ambitions of his generation.

Little wonder if in such an age colonies were regarded as providentially designed to promote the trade's increase. The recall of the Massachusetts charter was but one of many circumstances which reveal the rise in England of renewed interest in the plantations. Faith in colonial ventures had never, indeed, quite disappeared, nor had the early Stuarts ever been wholly indifferent to their American possessions. But the fate of the Virginia Company had cooled the ardor of moneyed men, and the Civil War, focusing attention for a generation upon fundamental questions of morals and politics, absorbed the energies of government and nation. With the establishment of the Protectorate imperial interests again claimed attention. Cromwell, calling the merchants to counsel, inaugurated a vigorous policy of maritime and colonial expansion. The Dutch war and the conquest of Jamaica recalled to men's minds the triumphs of Elizabeth; and those who gathered round Charles II—bankrupt nobles, pushing merchants, and able statesmen—turned to the business of trade and colonies with an enthusiasm unknown since the days of Gilbert and Raleigh.

Yet it was an enthusiasm well tempered to practical ends, purged of resplendent visions and vague idealisms. The plantations, regarded as incidents in the life of commerce, were thought to be important when they were found to be prosperous. In 1661 the king was assured that his American possessions were "beginning to grow into Commodities of great value and Esteeme, and though some of them continue in tobacco yet upon the Returne hither it smells well, and paies more Custome to his Majestie than the East Indies four times ouer." It was a statement of which the new king was not likely to miss the significance. Determined to preserve the prerogative without offending the nation, Charles was never indifferent to the material welfare of England; the expansion of trade would increase his own revenue, while the vigilance which preserves liberty he thought likely to be relaxed among a prosperous and well-fed people. To commercial and colonial expansion the merry monarch therefore gave his best attention. If he yawned over dull reports in council, he listened to them with ready intelligence, and was prepared to encourage every reasonable project for the extension of the empire.

For new colonial ventures opportunity was not lacking. Widely separated settlements along the American coast were cut in twain by New Netherland and flanked on either side by the possessions of France and Spain. To forestall rivals in occupying all the territory claimed by England, and to exploit intelligently its commercial resources, seemed at once a public duty and a private opportunity. And no region was thought more important, either in a commercial or a military way, than the Cape Fear and Charles River valleys. So at least reasoned the Earl of Clarendon, Ashley Cooper, and Sir John Colleton; to them, associated with five others, was accordingly issued in 1663, and again in 1665, a proprietary grant to the Carolinas. The patentees, upon whom the charter conferred the usual right to establish and govern colonies, expected that the surplus population of Barbados and the Bahamas, where capital and slavery were driving out white laborers and small farmers, would readily migrate to the Charles River, and there engage in the cultivation of commodities—such as silk, currants, raisins, wax, almonds, olives, and oil—which, being raised neither in England nor in any English plantation, would serve to redress the balance of trade and doubtless net a handsome profit to those with faith to venture the first costs of settlement. With the English market assured, a thriving trade and a prosperous colony seemed the certain result.

In these expectations the patentees were disappointed. Dissenters already settled in the region of Albemarle Sound were little disposed to submit to restrictions which they had left Virginia to avoid. In 1665 and 1666 some discontented Barbadians, making an essay to settle on the coast farther south, found the country less inviting than they had been led to expect, and returned to Barbados as the lesser evil. The terms on which the proprietors granted land, liberal enough but frequently changed; restrictions laid on trade almost before there was anything to exchange; the doctrinaire Fundamental Constitutions which John Locke, fresh from the perusal of Harrington, wrote out in the quiet of his study for governing little frontier communities the like of which he had never seen,—all had little effect but to irritate those who were already on the ground and discourage others from going there. In 1667, there were no inhabitants in Carolina south of Albemarle Sound; in 1672 scarcely more than four hundred. Not silk and almonds but provisions were raised; for it was necessary "to provide in the first place for the belly" before endeavoring to redress the balance of England's commerce. As late as 1675 the proprietors complained that an expenditure of L10,000 had returned them nothing but the "charge of 5 or 600 people who expect to live on us." An exaggeration, doubtless; but in truth the Carolinas never profited the proprietors anything, never drew off much of the surplus population of Barbados, nor supplied England with olives or capers. North Carolina raised tobacco, which was carried by New England traders to Virginia or the Northern colonies. The inhabitants of the Southern province, reinforced by French Huguenots and English dissenters, exported provisions to the West Indies. Yet South Carolina, disappointing to the proprietors, was destined in the next century, when rice became its staple product, to serve in an almost ideal way the purpose for which it had been founded.

The Carolina charter had scarcely been issued before the Dutch were ousted from the valley of the Hudson. It was an old grievance that the Hollanders, under many obligations to England, should have presumed to occupy territory already granted by James I to the Plymouth Company. And now, wedged in between the New England and the Southern colonies, holding the first harbor on the continent and well situated to share with France in exploiting the fur trade, the grievance had become intolerable. But the offense of all was the complacence with which the merchants of New Amsterdam ignored the English Trade Acts. Reconciled at last to the strange perversity of Virginia in raising tobacco, the English Government had made the best of a bad bargain by laying a prohibition upon its cultivation in England; yet with this result: an English industry had been suppressed by law only that the Dutch, who still contested England's right to share in the spice and slave trade, might carry Virginia tobacco to European ports, smuggle European commodities into the English settlements, and so diminish the profits of British merchants and annually deprive the royal exchequer of L10,000 of customs revenue. When the Dutch war was imminent in 1664, an English fleet, therefore, took possession of Now Amsterdam in order to secure to England the commercial value of the tobacco colonies. Before the conquest was effected the king conferred upon his brother, the Duke of York, a proprietary feudal grant of all the territory lying between the Connecticut and Delaware Rivers.

At the time of the conquest the colony of New Netherland was occupied by Dutch farmers and traders on western Long Island and on both sides of the Hudson as far north as the Mohawk River; central Long Island was inhabited in part by New Englanders; the eastern end entirely so. To establish English authority in the province, harmonizing at once the interests of the Catholic Duke of York, the Dutch Protestants, and the New England Puritans, was a difficult task, but it was accomplished with much skill by Colonel Nicolls, who was the first English governor. Religious toleration was granted; land titles were confirmed; and a body of laws, known as the Duke's Laws, based upon Dutch custom and New England statutes, was prepared by the governor and with some murmuring accepted by the inhabitants. In 1683 Governor Dongan, yielding to popular demand, established a legislative body consisting of the governor's council and a house of eighteen deputies elected by the freeholders, and the freemen of the corporations of Albany and New York. With the accession of James as King of England, the province temporarily lost its popular assembly; in 1688 it was annexed to New England under the jurisdiction of Andros; and after the Revolution it was distracted for many years by political quarrels growing out of the Leisler Rebellion. Yet none of these events interfered with the economic development of the colony. In 1674 the population was about 7000. Natural increase, together with immigrants from England and New England, Huguenot exiles from France, and refugees which the armies of Louis XIV drove out of the Palatinate, swelled the number to about 25,000 in 1700. Dutch merchants at Albany did a thriving business in furs; and in 1695 New York City, with a population of 5000, was already the center of an active trade, mainly West Indian, by no means wholly legal, in provisions and sugar.

The conquest of New Amsterdam was scarcely completed before the Duke of York, by "lease and re-lease," and for the sum of ten shillings, conveyed to his friends, Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, the territory between the Hudson and the Delaware Rivers, afterwards known as New Jersey. Dutch settlers already occupied the west shore of New York Harbor; and there were Swedes as well as Dutch on the lower Delaware. Favorable concessions offered by the proprietors soon attracted New Englanders from Long Island and Connecticut, who located in the region of Monmouth and Middletown. The proprietors nevertheless found more vexation than profit in their venture; and in 1673 Lord Berkeley sold his rights to two Friends, John Fenwick and Edward Byllinge, who were intent upon founding a refuge for the Quakers in America. Many Quakers soon settled in West Jersey along the Delaware, and upon the death of Carteret the proprietary rights to East Jersey were purchased by William Penn and other Friends who had succeeded to the rights of Fenwick and Byllinge. A mixed population and conflicting claims made the history of the first Quaker colony a turbulent one. In 1688 both Jerseys were annexed to New York; and in 1702, the proprietors having surrendered all their rights, the two colonies became the single royal province of New Jersey.

Of those who were interested in securing a refuge for the Quakers, the most active was William Penn, who had suffered ridicule and persecution for his faith, and who now desired a clearer field than the Jerseys offered for his political and religious experiments. In 1681 he therefore procured from the king a proprietary grant of the territory lying west of the Delaware from "twelve miles north of New Castle Town unto the three and fortieth degree of Northern Latitude." The land within these vague limits was thought to be "wholly Indian," and the purposes of Penn did not run counter to the colonial policy of the Government. Optimism or ignorance disposed the Lords of Trade to believe that Pennsylvania could as readily as the Carolinas be devoted to the cultivation of "oyle, dates, figgs, almons, raisins, and currans." To the political hobbies of Penn the Government was indifferent, while the intractable Quakers were classed with jailbirds and political offenders as people who were more useful to England in the plantations than at home. The proprietor's "Account of the Province of Pennsylvania," translated into Dutch, German, and French, promising religious and political liberty, and offering land on easy terms to rich and poor alike, attracted good colonists in large numbers. Within ten years there were 10,000 people, mostly Quakers, in Pennsylvania and the Delaware counties. Political wrangling, somewhat difficult to understand and scarcely worth unraveling, distracted the colony of brotherly love for many years; but from the beginning the province prospered. The settlers were as thrifty as New England Puritans, and they had better soil and a more hospitable climate. Provisions were soon raised for export; and in 1700, according to Robert Quarry, the Quakers of Pennsylvania had "improved tillage to that degree that they have made bread, flower, and Beer a drugg in all the markets of the West Indies."

II

As early as 1656 London merchants were inquiring "whether it would not be a prudentiall thing to draw all the Islands, Colonies, and Dominions of America under one and the same management here." Enterprising capitalists who had ventured their money in Jamaica or Barbados were content to leave the honor and profit of founding new colonies to idealists like Penn and Shaftesbury; but they eagerly welcomed the restored monarch after the unsettled conditions of 1659, and were prepared, even before he landed, to tell him "how the forraigne plantations may be made most useful to the Trade and Navigation of these Kingdomes." Of all the busy promoters whose private interests were, by some strange whim of Providence, in such happy accord with the nation's welfare and the theories of economists, none was more conspicuous than Martin Noel. He was a man of varied activities: a stockholder in the East India Company; a farmer of the inland post office and of the excise; a banker who made loans, and issued bills of exchange and letters of credit. His many ships traded in the West Indies, in New England and Virginia, and in the Mediterranean. During the wars of the Protectorate he was himself a commissioner of prize goods, issued letters of marque, and judged the prizes taken by his own vessels. A center of great interest was his place at the Old Jewry; the resort of ship captains, merchants, investors, contractors, officials of the Government. The capital for financing one of the Jamaica expeditions was raised there by Noel, who was rewarded by a grant of twenty thousand acres of sugar land after the conquest of the island. He had been intimate with Cromwell, and after the return of Charles won the reputation of being, in all affairs of trade and plantations, "the mainstay of the Government." It was through Martin Noel, and men of his kind, that the old colonial system began to be shaped to serve the ends of the moneyed and mercantile interests of England.



Enterprising men like Noel were prosperous enough, but their extended vision enabled them to complain intelligently of the decay of trade. In the year 1660 exports made not more than a fourth part of the eight and a half millions of England's foreign commerce. Money was scarce, interest high, rents and prices low. No one doubted that the effective remedy for these ills lay in establishing a "favorable balance of trade." But in the path of this achievement stood the old rivals of England—Holland, Spain, and France. Imports from France overbalanced exports thither in the proportion of 2.6 to 1.6. Spain still worked the rich silver veins of the Andes, and the conquest of Jamaica had opened English eyes to the high value of her West Indian possessions. Above all, the thrifty Dutch, intrenched in the East Indies and on the west coast of Africa, supplied Europe with the major part of Oriental products and denied England's right to share with them the honor and profit of importing slaves into Spanish America. To restore the balance of the French trade, and to contest with Holland and Spain for the lucrative commerce of the East and the West Indies was the underlying economic motive of the wars and diplomacy, as well as of the colonial policy of the Restoration period; it was for this that the Royal African and Hudson Bay Companies were organized; for this the Dutch and French wars were waged; for this regulations were enacted for trade and plantations. And to contemporaries the wisdom of such measures was evident in the result: at the close of the century, although imports remained approximately the same as in 1660, exports had reached the unprecedented figure of seven millions sterling.

In achieving this result, the plantations were expected to play an important part; and no one doubted that they had done so. During the decade after the Restoration, the commerce between England and her American possessions was about one tenth of her total foreign trade; in 1700 it was about one seventh. Imports from the colonies rose from L500,000 to more than L1,000,000, and exports to the colonies from L105,910 to L750,000. But the mere increase of trade was no perfect index of the importance of the plantations; for the colonial trade built up the merchant marine far more, in proportion to its volume, than any other. The American voyages were long; plantation commodities bulked large in proportion to their value; and whereas much of the commerce between England and Europe was carried in foreign ships, colonial trade was confined to British vessels. If, therefore, the merchant marine more than doubled during the Restoration, that happy result was thought to be largely due to the colonies. "The Plantacion trade is one of the greatest nurseries of the Shipping and Seamen of this Kingdome, and one of the greatest branches of its trade," said the customs commissioners in 1678; "the Plantacions, New Castle trade, and the fisheries, make 3/4 of all the seamen in ye Nation."

The colonies which enlisted the enthusiasm of the commissioners were the plantations proper. There were men, such as Charles Davenant, who thought New England might have its uses; but the high value of Maryland and Virginia, of Barbados and Jamaica, was obvious to all. Maryland and Virginia, it is true, were not quite ideal colonies, since it was found necessary, in their interest, to prohibit the raising of tobacco in England. But the sugar islands were without reproach. England was not now, as in the time of James I, thought to be overpopulated; and Barbados and Jamaica found favor, not only because their products were neither raised nor made in England, but because they could be exploited by slave labor. It was pointed out that happily "by taking off one useless person, for such generally go abroad [to the islands], we add Twenty Blacks to the Labour and Manufactures of the Nation." Negroes procured in Africa at slight cost might, indeed, be counted as commodities of export, while the island colonies cultivated precisely those commodities which England would otherwise have imported from foreign countries. And the statistics of the custom-house confirmed the theory of the pamphleteer; in 1697, seven eighths of all colonial commerce was with the tobacco and sugar plantations, and Jamaica alone offered a greater market than all the Northern and Middle colonies combined.

It was thus the West Indies which statesmen had chiefly in mind when they set about regulating trade and navigation to the end that "we may in every part be more sellers than buyers, and thereby the Coyne and present stocke of money be preserved and increased." Three acts of Parliament, embodying the ideas of London merchants interested in the tobacco and sugar plantations, formulated the principles of England's commercial code. The famous Navigation Act of 1660 confined colonial carrying trade wholly, and the foreign carrying trade mainly, to English and colonial shipping, and provided that certain colonial products—sugar, tobacco, cotton-wool, indigo, ginger, dyeing-woods; the so-called "enumerated" commodities—could be shipped only to England or to an English colony. In 1663 the Staple Act prohibited the importation into the colonies of any commodities raised or made in Europe,—with the exception of salt, of horses and provisions from Scotland and Ireland, of wine from the Madeiras and the Azores, and of commodities not allowed to be imported into England,—unless they were first landed in England. In order not to discriminate against English in favor of colonial consumers of colonial products, a third act was passed in 1673 providing that enumerated commodities, which paid a duty when shipped directly to England, should pay a duty when shipped from one colony to another. In 1705 rice, molasses, and naval stores were added to the list of enumerated commodities, and in 1733 prohibitive duties, never enforced, were laid upon rum, molasses, and sugar imported from foreign islands into the continental colonies. The purpose of these laws, and of the supplementary acts, of which more than half a hundred were passed between 1689 and 1765, was to foster the industries of the empire at the expense of foreign countries, and to develop colonial industry along lines that did not bring it into competition with English agriculture or manufactures.

Information gathered by the Privy Council committees, which the Stuarts appointed to cooerdinate the work of managing trade and the plantations, soon demonstrated that it was easier to make laws than it was to enforce them. Until the end of the century, illicit trade, inseparably connected with piracy, became increasingly flagrant in nearly every colony. West Indian buccaneers, lineal descendants of the Elizabethan "sea dogues," nesting at Jamaica under English sanction until after the peace with Spain in 1670, resorted to Charleston, New York, Providence, or Boston, and under licenses granted by royal governors joined hands with the colonial free-trader or East Indian "interlopers" to make the acts of trade a byword and a reproach. New England and Dutch merchants, "regarding neither the acts of trade nor the law of nature," carried provisions to Canada during the French wars. Tobacco was taken to Holland and Scotland, or smuggled from Maryland through Pennsylvania into the Northern colonies. Bolted flour and provisions were exchanged by New York traders in the Spanish islands for molasses and rum. European commodities and the spices and fabrics of the Orient, secured at trifling cost from pirates or "interlopers" in exchange for rum or Spanish pieces of eight, were carried in small boats up the innumerable estuaries that indent the coast from New England to Virginia. Indolent governors were often ignorant of the law; dishonest ones, willing for money down to wink at its violation; and even those, like Bellomont, who were honest and energetic, found themselves without the necessary machinery for its effective enforcement.

If the violation of the Trade Acts called loudly for a more direct supervision of the colonies, the growing menace of Canada enforced the same lesson. Under the imbecile Charles II, Spain was no longer, as in Elizabethan times, the first danger. Colbert's attention to colonial affairs, as well as Louis XIV's European ambitions, soon obscured the commercial rivalry of England and Holland, while the accession of William of Orange to the throne of the Stuarts, by pledging England to twenty years of war against the House of Bourbon, revealed the startling fact that it was New France rather than New Spain which threatened the security of British America. English settlements had not yet passed the Alleghany foothills before French missionaries and explorers had penetrated by the chain of lakes to the heart of the continent. Jean Nicolet as early as 1640, Radisson and Grosseilliers in 1660, were canoeing down the Wisconsin River toward the Mississippi; and in 1671, the year before Count Frontenac landed at Quebec to begin the regeneration of Canada, Saint-Lusson, with impressive ceremony in the presence of fourteen native tribes at Sault Ste. Marie, took possession of the great Northwest in the name of the Grand Monarch.

It was no mere spirit of adventure, or dream of limitless empire, that dispersed the French settlements over so wide an area. As Virginia was founded on tobacco, so was Canada on furs; and unless the Indians on the northern lakes could be induced to bring their furs down the St. Lawrence, Quebec might add luster to the crown of Louis, but it could not greatly increase the commercial strength of France. A firm alliance with the northern tribes was therefore the first object. It was for this that military posts were established on the waterways of the interior. And every stockaded fort was at once a trading camp and a mission house: merchants lured the Indian with brandy and firearms; civil officials and men at arms impressed him with the authority of the great king; Jesuit priests, strangely compounding true devotion and unscrupulous intrigue, learned the native languages, and with the magic of the crucifix and the Te Deum converted the spirit-fearing savages into loyal children of the Bishop of Rome. Canada, with its center at Quebec, and its outposts at Michilimackinac and Sault Ste. Marie, was little more than "a musket, a rosary, and a pack of beaver skins": not so much a colony, indeed, as a mesh of interlacing interests cunningly designed to convert fur into gold. And so long as the tribes of the northern lakes annually brought their rich freightage of mink and beaver to Fort Frontenac or Montreal, to be exchanged there for arms and brandy, beads, hatchets, bracelets, and gay-colored fabrics, gold was not lacking—for the pockets of clever merchant and corrupt official, if not always for the royal treasury of France.

"The colonies of foreign nations so long settled on the sea board," wrote the Intendant Talon in 1671, "are trembling with fright in view of what your Majesty has accomplished here in the last seven years." In fact, the thrifty and unadventurous farmers along the Atlantic were as yet only too indifferent to the importance of Canada; still less did they foresee the New France of which La Salle was at that moment dreaming. After a dozen years of heart-breaking discouragements, that somber idealist finally reached the Gulf of Mexico by way of the Mississippi. It was on the 9th of April, 1682, at the mouth of the Father of Waters, that he proclaimed the sovereignty of Louis XIV over "this country of Louisiana, from the mouth of the river St. Louis, otherwise called the Ohio, as also along the river Colbert, or Mississippi, and the rivers that discharge thereinto, from its source as far as its mouth at the sea." To make sure the title thus announced to the silent wilderness, a pillar bearing the arms of France was erected, and a lead plate buried in the sand. The inscription would scarcely have frightened away even a stray Englishman, had he chanced to see it; but when, in December of the same year, La Salle built his wooden fort on the rock of St. Louis, there began to emerge from the world of dreams to the world of realities the vision of a greater New France, held together by a chain of forts on all the inland waterways from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi, and exploiting, through friendly alliance with the native tribes, the rich fur trade of the continent.

It was during the last decade of the Stuart regime, when the efficient committee known as the Lords of Trade had charge of colonial affairs, that the English Government first set seriously about the task of checking the growing power of France and of suppressing illicit trade. To aid the governors in enforcing the navigation laws, collectors and comptrollers of the customs had been established in nearly every colony by 1678; in 1688 William Dyre, responsible to the English customs commissioners, was appointed surveyor-general and placed at the head of the American service; and it was mainly on the ground of illegal trade that Massachusetts was made a crown colony in 1684. The doughty Colonel Dongan, who came out as Governor of New York in 1683, was one of the first to see the importance of Canada; and after 1685 he was supported by James in the attempt to divert the fur trade from Montreal to Albany by bringing the Iroquois Indians under English control. The scheme, which involved nothing less than the ruin of Canada, was by no means a visionary one. The Five Nations, lying south of the chain of lakes, could profit but little by the fur trade while it remained in French hands. But let Albany replace Montreal as the chief market, and they would become the indispensable middle carriers between the northern tribes and the English. And the northern tribes were themselves not ill-disposed to such a change. Undoubtedly the French had better manners than the English; undoubtedly French fire-water was of excellent flavor. But the traders whom Dongan sent to Michilimackinac proved beyond cavil that English goods were cheap; and so long as a beaver skin was the price of a debauch on French brandy, whereas a mink skin was sufficient to attain the same exaltation by means of English rum, the French control of the fur trade rested on a precarious basis. The chief obstacle to Dongan's scheme was the division of executive authority in the colonies, the apathy of colonial assemblies, and the lack of an adequate military force to protect the Iroquois from the enmity of the French. It was precisely to change these conditions, and to avoid the very evils which soon came to pass, that James II, who had at least the merit of an intelligent interest in the colonies, placed all New England under the single jurisdiction of Andros in 1686, and, in 1688, united New York and the Jerseys to New England.

The Revolution which drove James from the throne discredited his measures, but the twenty years of war with France which the Revolution brought in its train proved the wisdom of his policy. When Indian massacres inspired at Quebec made a desolate waste of the New England frontier, while Boston and New York merchants filled their pockets by supplying the enemy with munitions of war, the inadequacy of the colonial system for defense, as well as all the worst evils of illicit trade, stood clearly revealed. Until 1715, the Board of Trade, which William appointed in 1696, maintained the traditions, if it did not exhibit all the efficiency, of the old committee of the Lords of Trade. The Navigation Act of 1696, providing for nearly thirty officials at an annual cost of L1605, for the first time systematically extended the English customs service to the colonies. In the following year seven admiralty courts, subject to the Lords of the Admiralty, were erected in the continental colonies to try cases arising out of the violation of the Trade Acts, while special courts for dealing with piracy were established in 1700. But the customs and admiralty services, although directly responsible to the English Government, could never be fully effective unless they were vigorously supported by the colonial Governments. It was in order to make the enforcement of the commercial code more effective, as well as to secure better cooeperation among the colonial Governments for military defense, that the Board of Trade repeatedly advised the recall of all the charters as a measure necessary above all others. The advice of the Board was followed only in part. The union of New England and New York was abandoned. Massachusetts received a new charter; Connecticut and Rhode Island retained their old ones; Penn's charter, annulled in 1692, was restored in 1694. But under the charter granted to Massachusetts in 1691 the governor was appointed by the Crown; New Jersey was made a royal province in 1702; and Maryland in 1691, although it was given back to the Baltimores in 1715. When the Peace of Utrecht was signed in 1713, the system devised by the Board of Trade for controlling the colonies thus lacked little of being completely established. The English customs and admiralty services had been fully extended to America; and while control of legislation was left mainly in the hands of assemblies elected in each colony, executive authority was entrusted to Crown officials in every colony except Pennsylvania, where the governor was appointed by the proprietor, and Rhode Island and Connecticut, where he was still elected by the people.

III

It is only by courtesy that these measures for confining the trade of the empire may be called a colonial system; and it would have been well if England, profiting by the experience of the French wars, had set seriously about the task of fashioning a method of government adapted to the political as well as the commercial needs of her New World possessions. But it was not to be. With the accession of George I, enthusiasm for plantation ventures declined; interest in the colonies, undiminished, indeed, was more than ever concentrated upon their commercial possibilities; and the constructive policy of the Stuarts gave way, in the phrase of Burke, to one of "salutary neglect." The neglect was, indeed, by no means complete. Information was assiduously gathered; many new laws were passed; the number of officials greatly increased, and governors more carefully instructed; colonial statutes, more consistently inspected, were more often annulled. Yet it is true that for three decades after the Peace of Utrecht no attempt was made to transform the commercial code into a colonial system. And even the commercial code was administered in "a gentlemanlike and easy-going fashion: little was embitered and nothing solved."

Of many circumstances which contributed to this result, the effect of the Revolution on English politics was fundamental. Kings who ruled by grace of a statute, instead of by divine right, inevitably lost administrative as well as legislative authority. Colonial policy was therefore no longer determined, as in Stuart times, by the king in council, but by the ministers; by ministers who might listen to the Board of Trade, but could not take advice unless it squared with the wishes of the Parliament that made them. When, in 1715, Secretary Stanhope appointed George Vaughan, an owner of sawmills in New Hampshire, to be lieutenant-governor of that province, the Board of Trade protested; and quoted, in support of its protest, the remarks of Bellomont about Mr. Partridge. "To set a carpenter to preserve woods," said Bellomont, "is like setting a wolf to guard sheep; I say, to preserve woods, for I take it to be the chiefest part of the business of a Lt. Governor of that province to preserve the woods for the king's use." The protest was ignored; and for thirty years, while the Board of Trade fell almost to the level of a joke, the colonies were managed by a Secretary of State who was likely to be less interested in preserving the woods for the king's use than in advancing the interests of the Whig oligarchy which governed England.

It could not well have been otherwise. The Whig oligarchy, having driven the Stuarts from the throne, was bound to identify the welfare of the empire with the maintenance of the House of Hanover. Convinced that so long as there was peace and plenty in the land Jacobite exiles would wait in vain for the day when the body of James II, lying unburied in the church of St. Jacques, might be restored to English soil, ministers labored to make the nation loyal by making it comfortable. It was therefore necessary to guard with jealousy the material interests of the inarticulate Tory squire, who still harbored a sullen loyalty to the Stuarts, as well as of the merchants and moneyed men whose fortunes were bound up with the Revolution settlement. And year by year the Parliamentary influence of the latter increased. Members of the South Sea and East India Companies had seats in the House of Commons; and the West India Islands, where, it was estimated in 1775, property to the value of L14,000,000 was "owned by persons who live in England," were in very truth represented there. William Beckford, who entered Parliament in 1747, possessed of a great fortune acquired in Jamaica sugar plantations, and soon to become all-powerful in "the City," was only the most famous of those who effectively voiced the demands of colonial landlords and London merchants. "Such men used in times past to come hat in hand," said Newcastle; "now the second word is, 'you shall hear of it in another place.'" In fact, although ministers bowed to the king and spoke of His Majesty's Government, they knew well that the fortunes of the kingdom were in the hands of the big property interests that buttressed an unstable throne.

And these masters of England, never interested in the colonies apart from their commercial value, were less so than ever during this Indian summer of prosperous content. Rising prices made the era of, the first Georges a golden age of agriculture; while the effect of the French wars was to "exalt beyond measure the maritime and commercial supremacy of England." The Treaty of Meuthen facilitated the importation of cloth into Portugal and the flow of Brazilian bullion to London. Levantine trade began to open to England after the conquest of Gibraltar and Minorca. English merchants acquired special privileges at Cadiz by the Treaty of Utrecht; and the Assiento gave to the South Sea Company a monopoly of importing slaves into New Spain, and enabled it to secure, "by the ingenuity of British merchants," the greater part of the general commerce of the Spanish colonies. In 1710, the number of vessels clearing from English ports was 3550; it was 6614 in 1714; and during the same period the shipping of London increased from 806 to 1550. In 1758, imports from the continental colonies into England stood at L648,683, and from the West Indies at L1,834,036. "The colonies," said the elder Horace Walpole, "are the source of all our riches"; for it was the colonies, and above all the West Indies,—that subterranean channel by which the silks and teas from Vera Cruz, and Peruvian gold from Puerto Bello, found their way into England,—which alone "preserve the balance of trade in our favour."

If, as sometimes happened, powerful Parliamentary interests complained of conditions in the colonies, the Government was ready to comply with their demands. During the Walpole regime, the private smuggler in Spanish commerce, whether Englishman or New Englander, was suppressed in order that the South Sea Company might enjoy a monopoly of that profitable business. When Jamaica planters, unable to sell their sugar in Europe or Massachusetts in competition with the French islands, clamored for relief, the famous Molasses Act of 1733 was passed, laying prohibitive duties upon the importation of sugar, molasses, and rum into the continental colonies. And in 1750, at the behest of the woolen and iron interests, rapidly growing industries in New England and Pennsylvania were restricted in order that the English landowner and English woolen and iron manufacturers might find in America the markets which they were losing in Europe. But in general neither the landed nor the industrial interests pressed the Government to meddle with the plantations; and when no one complained, ministers of the temper of Walpole or Newcastle were not disposed to concern themselves with the reform of the colonial system, or to inquire too curiously into the honesty or the efficiency with which it was administered. According to their philosophy, it mattered little whether the Governor of Virginia was an able man, or whether he resided in London or Jamestown; what mattered was that Newcastle should succeed, by a judicious distribution of offices, in maintaining a Parliamentary majority for the party which guarded the liberties of England. It mattered little whether the admiralty courts fell under the control of the merchants and landowners who dominated colonial assemblies; what mattered was that the colonial merchant and landowner should be prosperous and maintain a safe credit balance with English merchants. And therefore let the governors be punctiliously instructed to perform their duties strictly; but let those be recalled who irritated the best people in the colonies by too officiously endeavoring to carry out their instructions. So long as the colonial planter was content and the Tory squire could not complain of high taxes or low rents, so long as merchants of standing in London or New York found business good, so long as the English manufacturer had ready markets and the trading companies distributed high dividends, it seemed folly indeed to attempt, with meticulous precision, to enforce the Trade Acts at every unregarded point, to construct ideal governments for communities that were every year richer than the last, or to provide at great expense for an adequate military defense against Canada when peace with France was the settled policy of England.

Unhappily for this policy of quieta non movere, peace with France came to an end after thirty years. And if since the Peace of Utrecht the English colonies had grown rich and populous, the French had strengthened their hold on all the strategic points of the interior from Quebec to New Orleans. The province of Louisiana, founded in 1699 by D'Iberville to forestall the English in occupying the mouth of the Mississippi, contained a population of more than ten thousand white settlers in 1745. The governor maintained friendly relations with the Choctaw Indians, and endeavored to alienate the Cherokees and the Creeks from the English alliance, and so to divert the rich peltry trade of the Southwest from Fort Moore and Charleston to New Orleans. Attached to Louisiana for administrative purposes were the small but thriving French settlements on the Mississippi, between the Illinois and the Ohio Rivers, centering about Forts Chartres, Cahokia, and Kaskaskia. Between Louisiana and Canada all the connecting waterways, save alone the upper Ohio, were guarded by military establishments and trading posts—on Green Bay, on the Wabash and Miami Rivers, at the southern end of Lake Michigan, at Detroit and Niagara. By discovery and occupation, the French claimed all the inland country; denied the right of Englishmen to settle or trade there; were prepared to defend it by force, and, in case of war, to release upon the unguarded English frontier from Maine to Virginia those savage tribes, whom legend credits with many noble virtues, but whom the colonists by bitter experience well knew to be cruel and treacherous and bestial beyond conception.

The possession of this hinterland was now, toward the middle of the century, become the vital issue; for the claims of France could not stay the populous English colonies from pushing their frontier across the mountains, or prevent skillful English traders from undermining the loyalty of her Indian allies. There were settlements in the southern up-country as far west as Fort Moore on the Savannah, as far as Camden and Charlottesburg, and beyond Hillsborough. The outpost of Virginia was at Wills Creek, within striking distance of the Ohio; the valleys of the Blue Ridge were filling with Scotch-Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch; while German and Dutch farmers of New York occupied both sides of the Mohawk nearly to its source. Oswego, long since established on Lake Ontario, was abundantly justifying the ambitious scheme inaugurated sixty years earlier by Governor Dongan; for official corruption at Montreal had not made French goods cheaper since the days of Frontenac, and the northern Indians yearly resorted to Oswego to trade with the English. And every year unlicensed traders, such as Christopher Gist and William Trent, not to mention many "more abandoned wretches," hired men on the Pennsylvania or Virginia frontier and with goods on pack-horses crossed the Alleghanies to traffic among the western Indians. In 1749, Celoron de Bienville, sent by the Governor of Canada to take possession of the Ohio Valley, found English traders at Logstown and Scioto, and in nearly every village as far west as the Miami. This was the very year that John Hanbury, a London merchant, and some Virginia gentlemen, among whom were Lawrence and Augustine Washington, petitioned the Board of Trade for a grant of five hundred thousand acres of land on the upper Ohio. And the petition was granted, in order that the country might be more rapidly settled, and "to cultivate the friendship and carry on a more extensive commerce with the native Indians, and as a step towards checking the encroachments of the French."

Those who went into the back country received little assistance from Government, either English or colonial, in extending the frontier, and but little in defending it. Tide-water rice or tobacco planters, peaceful and gain-loving Quakers at Philadelphia, New York or Boston merchants trading in the West Indies, all untouched by Indian massacre and absorbed in local politics, begrudged money spent to protect a half-alien people, often without their jurisdiction. The English Government, for its part, had long observed the comfortable maxim that if her navy policed the sea, the colonists were bound to provide their own defense in time of peace. Money for Indian presents was regularly sent; garrisons maintained in Nova Scotia and in the West Indies; assistance sometimes given for forts on the exposed New York or Carolina frontier. But the expense was slight indeed: in 1783 the total amount appropriated for defending the continental colonies, exclusive of Nova Scotia and not counting money for Indian presents, was L10,000; in 1743, it was L25,000. And the war which opened in 1743 demonstrated that a government which neglected defense in time of peace could scarcely provide it in time of war. The New England frontier was once more devastated by pillage and massacre; and Philip Schuyler, to the high disgust of his Iroquois allies, was forced to abandon and burn Fort Saratoga for lack of supplies to maintain it. Yet New England farmers made possible the capture of Louisburg, and the colonies together raised nearly eight thousand troops to cooeperate, in the conquest of Canada, with the fleet and army which the Duke of Newcastle promised but never sent. Massachusetts was, indeed, generously repaid for the heavy expense which she incurred; but two hundred and seventeen chests of Spanish dollars and one hundred barrels of copper coin, sufficient to restore her credit, were scarce full return for the restoration of Louisburg to France after the war was over.

With how much ease, during the six years that followed the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, might the English and colonial Governments have prevented the worst horrors of the French and Indian War! Deprived of her Indian allies, Canada would scarce have been a danger; and at no time were the Indians better disposed toward the English. "All I can say," Celoron de Bienville announced when he returned from the Ohio in 1750, "is that all the nations of these countries are very ill-disposed toward the French, and devoted to the English." And in the next year Pere Piquet complained that Oswego "not only spoils our trade, but puts the English into communication with a vast number of our Indians far and near. It is true that they like French brandy better than English rum; but they prefer English goods to ours, and can buy for two beaver skins at Oswego a better silver bracelet than we sell at Niagara for ten." Strongly garrisoned forts at Albany, at Oswego, and on the Ohio would have transformed this friendly disposition into a firm alliance. But there was little loyalty in the red man's heart for an unmilitary people; and cheap goods, however they might win the Indian in time of peace, made but a silken cord to hold him in time of war. "We would have taken Crown Point, but you prevented us," said Chief Hendrick at the conference hastily summoned at Albany to prepare for defense on the eve of war. "Instead you burned your own fort at Saratoga and ran away from it. You have no fortifications, no, not even in this city. The French are men; they are fortifying everywhere. But you are all like women, bare and open, without fortifications." Not one representative of seven colonies had authority to reassure him. Sir William Johnson did, indeed, negotiate a treaty of alliance with the Iroquois and the western Indians; and the Virginia assembly, yielding at last to Governor Dinwiddie's insistent demands, appropriated some money for maintaining the wooden fort, well named Fort Necessity, which Colonel Washington had built on the Ohio. But it was too late. The French built a better fort at Duquesne; and they had scarcely defeated the Virginia colonel and destroyed his fort before the English traders were driven from the Indian villages, and no English flag was to be seen west of the mountains. It was the western tribes that brought Braddock's expedition to a disastrous end. While the Quakers at Philadelphia denounced the iniquity of war, these quondam allies of England ravaged the frontiers of Pennsylvania and Virginia, and the northern tribes that had gladly come to Oswego to trade in 1754, assisted Montcalm to capture and destroy it in 1756.

Reverses in America were but part of the multiplied disasters which befell English arms at the opening of the Seven Years' War. At the close of the year 1756, with Hanover threatened and Minorca taken, with the Bourbon arms victorious in India and the Bourbon fleet unchecked upon the sea, with a million and a half of colonists seemingly helpless before eighty thousand French in America, it was clear at last that ministers who employed organized corruption to buttress the throne, who rarely read the American dispatches, and were not quite sure where Nova Scotia was, had endangered that very peace and material prosperity with which they had been so long and so exclusively occupied. In this crisis many plans were forthcoming, at Albany and in London, for colonial union and imperial defense; plans doubtless excellent in themselves, but impracticable under the circumstances. They were therefore laid aside until the war should be over. A plan of attack, not of defense, was now the prime necessity. In face of this necessity, the Whig oligarchy, abdicated its high function of "muddling through" the business of government, while "an afflicted despairing nation turned to a private gentleman of slender fortune, wanting the parade of birth and title, as the only saviour of England." "I know," said William Pitt, "that I can save England, and that nobody else can."

A most galling boast for both your houses of Pelham and Yorke, but a true one. Within three years the nation was raised from the depths of despair to the high level of its great leader's assured and arrogant confidence. It was not by colonial systems that Pitt brought victory, but by organizing efficiency in place of corruption and by inspiring many men to heroic effort. Wisdom born of sympathy and common sense soon accomplished in America what neither the bullying of Loudoun nor the New Englander's hatred of the French could effect. In 1756 no more than five thousand troops were raised in all New England and New York. Governor Pownall was haggling as usual with his assembly over a levy of two thousand men, when there arrived in Boston Pitt's order that henceforth colonial officers should take rank with regulars, according to the date of their commissions. The simple order was worth more than many plans of union. The very next morning, when the dispatch was read out, the Old Bay assembly voted the entire seven thousand men originally asked of the Northern colonies; and during the year 1758 nearly twenty-five thousand provincial troops were raised for the war. With this support, the English army and fleet, for the first time ably led and efficiently directed, soon destroyed the power of France in Canada: Louisburg was once more captured; Crown Point and Niagara were taken; Oswego was rebuilt; while the French, deserted by their savage allies as soon as the English won victories, destroyed their own fort at Duquesne; and at last the intrepid General Wolfe, fortunately aided by a strange combination of accidents, scaled the Heights of Quebec and defeated the army of Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham.

When the war was over and Canada no longer the menace it had been, men without imagination, turning again to the schemes which had been laid aside in 1756, began to devise measures for a closer supervision of the "plantations," and for raising "a revenue in Your Majesty's dominions in America for defraying the expenses of defending, protecting, and securing the same." They were not aware that since the recall of the Massachusetts charter the colonies had become something more than plantations, or that there was arising on the continent of America a people whose interests were national rather than imperial, and whose ideals of well-being transcended the dead level of material ambitions.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

For the settlement of the Southern and Middle colonies in this period, see Channing History of the United States, II, chaps. II, IV; Andrews, Colonial Self-Government, chaps. VI-VII, IX, XI. The best discussion of the reasons for a revival of interest in the colonies during the Restoration, and of the establishment and practical application of a system of colonial administration and control, is Beer's The Old Colonial System, Part I, 2 vols. See particularly, I, chaps, I-IV. For this subject, see also, Channing, II, chaps. I, VIII; Andrews, Colonial Self-Government, chaps. I-II; Andrews, British Committees, Commissions, and Councils of Trade and Plantations (Johns Hopkins Studies, 1908); and Andrews, The Colonial Period, chap. V. For the relations between England and her colonies in the first half of the eighteenth century, see Dickerson, American Colonial Government (Cleveland, 1912); Andrews, The Colonial Period, chaps. VI, VII; Greene, Provincial America, chaps. II-IV, XI; and Beer, British Colonial Policy, chap. I. The importance of the West Indies in determining the policy of Walpole is brought out by Temperley, American Historical Association Reports, 1911, vol. I, p. 231. For the rise of New France and the conflict of France and England in America, see Fiske, New France and New England, chaps, I-II, IV, VIII-X; Thwaites, France in America, chaps. I, IV, VI, VIII; Channing, II, chaps. V, XVIII-XIX. The most fascinating as well as the fullest treatment of this subject is contained in the works of Francis Parkman. His Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV; Half Century of Conflict, 2 vols., and Montcalm and Wolfe, 2 vols., make a fairly continuous history of the subject from 1672 to 1763.