The same causes which had spread the English settlements over so wide a territory now led, as an indirect result, to their partial union into a confederacy. The immediate consequence of the westward movement had been an Indian war. Several savage tribes were now interspersed between the settlements, so that it became desirable that the military force should be brought, as far as possible, under one management. The colony of New Netherlands, moreover, had begun to assume importance, and the settlements west of the Connecticut river had already occasioned hard words between Dutch and English, which might at any moment be followed by blows. In the French colonies at the north, with their extensive Indian alliances under Jesuit guidance, the Puritans saw a rival power which was likely in course of time to prove troublesome. With a view to more efficient self-defence, therefore, in 1643 the four colonies of Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven formed themselves into a league, under the style of "The United Colonies of New England." These four little states now contained thirty-nine towns, with an aggregate population of 24,000. To the northeast of Massachusetts, which now extended to the Piscataqua, a small colony had at length been constituted under a proprietary charter somewhat similar to that held by the Calverts in Maryland. Of this new province or palatinate of Maine the aged Sir Ferdinando Gorges was Lord Proprietary, and he had undertaken not only to establish the Church of England there, but also to introduce usages of feudal jurisdiction like those remaining in the old country. Such a community was not likely to join the Confederacy; apart from other reasons, its proprietary constitution and the feud between the Puritans and Gorges would have been sufficient obstacles.

As for Rhode Island, on the other hand, it was regarded with strong dislike by the other colonies. It was a curious and noteworthy consequence of the circumstances under which this little state was founded that for a long time it became the refuge of all the fanatical and turbulent people who could not submit to the strict and orderly governments of Connecticut or Massachusetts. All extremes met on Narragansett bay. There were not only sensible advocates of religious liberty, but theocrats as well who saw flaws in the theocracy of other Puritans. The English world was then in a state of theological fermentation. People who fancied themselves favoured with direct revelations from Heaven; people who thought it right to keep the seventh day of the week as a Sabbath instead of the first day; people who cherished a special predilection for the Apocalypse and the Book of Daniel; people with queer views about property and government; people who advocated either too little marriage or too much marriage; all such eccentric characters as are apt to come to the surface in periods of religious excitement found in Rhode Island a favoured spot where they could prophesy without let or hindrance. But the immediate practical result of so much discordance in opinion was the impossibility of founding a strong and well-ordered government. The early history of Rhode Island was marked by enough of turbulence to suggest the question whether, after all, at the bottom of the Puritan's refusal to recognize the doctrine of private inspiration, or to tolerate indiscriminately all sorts of opinions, there may not have been a grain of shrewd political sense not ill adapted to the social condition of the seventeenth century. In 1644 and again in 1648 the Narragansett settlers asked leave to join the Confederacy; but the request was refused on the ground that they had no stable government of their own. They were offered the alternative of voluntary annexation either to Massachusetts or to Plymouth, or of staying out in the cold; and they chose the latter course. Early in 1643 they had sent Roger Williams over to England to obtain a charter for Rhode Island. In that year Parliament created a Board of Commissioners, with the Earl of Warwick at its head, for the superintendence of colonial affairs; and nothing could better illustrate the loose and reckless manner in which American questions were treated in England than the first proceedings of this board. It gave an early instance of British carelessness in matters of American geography. In December, 1643, it granted to Massachusetts all the territory on the mainland of Narragansett bay; and in the following March it incorporated the townships of Newport and Portsmouth, which stood on the island, together with Providence, which stood on the mainland, into an independent colony empowered to frame a government and make laws for itself. With this second document Williams returned to Providence in the autumn of 1644. Just how far it was intended to cancel the first one, nobody could tell, but it plainly afforded an occasion for a conflict of claims. [Sidenote: Turbulence of dissent in Rhode Island] [Sidenote: The Earl of Warwick and his Board of Commissioners]

The league of the four colonies is interesting as the first American experiment in federation. By the articles it was agreed that each colony should retain full independence so far as concerned the management of its internal affairs, but that the confederate government should have entire control over all dealings with the Indians or with foreign powers. The administration of the league was put into the hands of a board of eight Federal Commissioners, two from each colony. The commissioners were required to be church-members in good standing. They could choose for themselves a president or chairman out of their own number, but such a president was to have no more power than the other members of the Board. If any measure were to come up concerning which the commissioners could not agree, it was to be referred for consideration to the legislatures or general courts of the four colonies. Expenses for war were to be charged to each colony in proportion to the number of males in each between sixteen years of age and sixty. A meeting of the Board might be summoned by any two magistrates whenever the public safety might seem to require it; but a regular meeting was to be held once every year.

In this scheme of confederacy all power of taxation was expressly left to the several colonies. The scheme provided for a mere league, not for a federal union. The government of the Commissioners acted only upon the local governments, not upon individuals. The Board had thus but little executive power, and was hardly more than a consulting body. Another source of weakness in the confederacy was the overwhelming preponderance of Massachusetts. Of the 24,000 people in the confederation, 15,000 belonged to Massachusetts, while the other three colonies had only about 3,000 each. Massachusetts accordingly had to carry the heaviest burden, both in the furnishing of soldiers and in the payment of war expenses, while in the direction of affairs she had no more authority than one of the small colonies. As a natural consequence, Massachusetts tried to exert more authority than she was entitled to by the articles of confederation; and such conduct was not unnaturally resented by the small colonies, as betokening an unfair and domineering spirit. In spite of these drawbacks, however, the league was of great value to New England. On many occasions it worked well as a high court of jurisdiction, and it made the military strength of the colonies more available than it would otherwise have been. But for the interference of the British government, which brought it to an untimely end, the Confederacy might have been gradually amended so as to become enduring. After its downfall it was pleasantly remembered by the people of New England; in times of trouble their thoughts reverted to it; and the historian must in fairness assign it some share in preparing men's minds for the greater work of federation which was achieved before the end of the following century. [Sidenote: It was only a league, not a federal union]

The formation of such a confederacy certainly involved something very like a tacit assumption of sovereignty on the part of the four colonies. It is worthy of note that they did not take the trouble to ask the permission of the home government in advance. They did as they pleased, and then defended their action afterward. In England the act of confederation was regarded with jealousy and distrust. But Edward Winslow, who was sent over to London to defend the colonies, pithily said: "If we in America should forbear to unite for offence and defence against a common enemy till we have leave from England, our throats might be all cut before the messenger would be half seas through." Whether such considerations would have had weight with Charles I. or not was now of little consequence. His power of making mischief soon came to an end, and from the liberal and sagacious policy of Cromwell the Confederacy had not much to fear. Nevertheless the fall of Charles I. brought up for the first time that question which a century later was to acquire surpassing interest,—the question as to the supremacy of Parliament over the colonies.

Down to this time the supreme control over colonial affairs had been in the hands of the king and his privy council, and the Parliament had not disputed it. In 1624 they had grumbled at James I.'s high-handed suppression of the Virginia Company, but they had not gone so far as to call in question the king's supreme authority over the colonies. In 1628, in a petition to Charles I. relating to the Bermudas, they had fully admitted this royal authority. But the fall of Charles I. for the moment changed all this. Among the royal powers devolved upon Parliament was the prerogative of superintending the affairs of the colonies. Such, at least, was the theory held in England, and it is not easy to see how any other theory could logically have been held; but the Americans never formally admitted it, and in practice they continued to behave toward Parliament very much as they had behaved toward the crown, yielding just as little obedience as possible. When the Earl of Warwick's commissioners in 1644 seized upon a royalist vessel in Boston harbour, the legislature of Massachusetts debated the question whether it was compatible with the dignity of the colony to permit such an act of sovereignty on the part of Parliament. It was decided to wink at the proceeding, on account of the strong sympathy between Massachusetts and the Parliament which was overthrowing the king. At the same time the legislature sent over to London a skilfully worded protest against any like exercise of power in future. In 1651 Parliament ordered Massachusetts to surrender the charter obtained from Charles I. and take out a new one from Parliament, in which the relations of the colony to the home government should be made the subject of fresh and more precise definition. To this request the colony for more than a year vouchsafed no answer; and finally, when it became necessary to do something, instead of sending back the charter, the legislature sent back a memorial, setting forth that the people of Massachusetts were quite contented with their form of government, and hoped that no change would be made in it. War between England and Holland, and the difficult political problems which beset the brief rule of Cromwell, prevented the question from coming to an issue, and Massachusetts was enabled to preserve her independent and somewhat haughty attitude. [Sidenote: Fall of Charles I. brings up the question as to supremacy of Parliament over the colonies]

During the whole period of the Confederacy, however, disputes kept coming up which through endless crooked ramifications were apt to end in an appeal to the home government, and thus raise again and again the question as to the extent of its imperial supremacy. For our present purpose, it is enough to mention three of these cases: 1, the adventures of Samuel Gorton; 2, the Presbyterian cabal; 3, the persecution of the Quakers. Other cases in point are those of John Clarke and the Baptists, and the relations of Massachusetts to the northeastern settlements; but as it is not my purpose here to make a complete outline of New England history, the three cases enumerated will suffice.

The first case shows, in a curious and instructive way, how religious dissensions were apt to be complicated with threats of an Indian war on the one hand and peril from Great Britain on the other; and as we come to realize the triple danger, we can perhaps make some allowances for the high-handed measures with which the Puritan governments sometimes sought to avert it. [Genesis of the persecuting spirit]

As I have elsewhere tried to show, the genesis of the persecuting spirit is to be found in the conditions of primitive society, where "above all things the prime social and political necessity is social cohesion within the tribal limits, for unless such social cohesion be maintained, the very existence of the tribe is likely to be extinguished in bloodshed." The persecuting spirit "began to pass away after men had become organized into great nations, covering a vast extent of territory, and secured by their concentrated military strength against the gravest dangers of barbaric attack." [13]

Now as regards these considerations, the Puritan communities in the New England wilderness were to some slight extent influenced by such conditions as used to prevail in primitive society; and this will help us to understand the treatment of the Antinomians and such cases as that with which we have now to deal.

Among the supporters of Mrs. Hutchinson, after her arrival at Aquedneck, was a sincere and courageous, but incoherent and crotchetty man named Samuel Gorton. [Sidenote: Samuel Gorton]

In the denunciatory language of that day he was called a "proud and pestilent seducer," or, as the modern newspaper would say, a "crank." It is well to make due allowances for the prejudice so conspicuous in the accounts given by his enemies, who felt obliged to justify their harsh treatment of him. But we have also his own writings from which to form an opinion as to his character and views. Lucidity, indeed, was not one of his strong points as a writer, and the drift of his argument is not always easy to decipher; but he seems to have had some points of contact with the Familists, a sect established in the sixteenth century in Holland. The Familists held that the essence of religion consists not in adherence to any particular creed or ritual, but in cherishing the spirit of divine love. The general adoption of this point of view was to inaugurate a third dispensation, superior to those of Moses and Christ, the dispensation of the Holy Ghost. The value of the Bible lay not so much in the literal truth of its texts as in their spiritual import; and by the union of believers with Christ they came to share in the ineffable perfection of the Godhead. There is much that is modern and enlightened in such views, which Gorton seems to some extent to have shared. He certainly set little store by ritual observances and maintained the equal right of laymen with clergymen to preach the gospel. Himself a London clothier, and thanking God that he had not been brought up in "the schools of human learning," he set up as a preacher without ordination, and styled himself "professor of the mysteries of Christ." He seems to have cherished that doctrine of private inspiration which the Puritans especially abhorred. It is not likely that he had any distinct comprehension of his own views, for distinctness was just what they lacked. [14] But they were such as in the seventeenth century could not fail to arouse fierce antagonism, and if it was true that wherever there was a government Gorton was against it, perhaps that only shows that wherever there was a government it was sure to be against him.

In the case of such men as Gorton, however,—and the type is by no means an uncommon one,—their temperament usually has much more to do with getting them into trouble than their opinions. Gorton's temperament was such as to keep him always in an atmosphere of strife. Other heresiarchs suffered persecution in Massachusetts, but Gorton was in hot water everywhere. His arrival in any community was the signal for an immediate disturbance of the peace. His troubles began in Plymouth, where the wife of the pastor preferred his teachings to those of her husband. In 1638 he fled to Aquedneck, where his first achievement was a schism among Mrs. Hutchinson's followers, which ended in some staying to found the town of Portsmouth while others went away to found Newport. Presently Portsmouth found him intolerable, flogged and banished him, and after his departure was able to make up its quarrel with Newport. He next made his way with a few followers to Pawtuxet, within the jurisdiction of Providence, and now it is the broad-minded and gentle Roger Williams who complains of his "bewitching and madding poor Providence." The question is here suggested what could it have been in Gorton's teaching that enabled him thus to "bewitch" these little communities? We may be sure that it could not have been the element of modern liberalism suggested in the Familistic doctrines above cited. That was the feature then least likely to appeal to the minds of common people, and most likely to appeal to Williams. More probably such success as Gorton had in winning followers was due to some of the mystical rubbish which abounds in his pages and finds in a modern mind no doorway through which to enter. [Sidenote: He flees to Aquedneck and is banished thence]

Williams disapproved of Gorton, but was true to his principles of toleration and would not take part in any attempt to silence him. But in 1641 we find thirteen leading citizens of Providence, headed by William Arnold, [15] sending a memorial to Boston, asking for assistance and counsel in regard to this disturber of the peace. How was Massachusetts to treat such an appeal? She could not presume to meddle with the affair unless she could have permanent jurisdiction over Pawtuxet; otherwise she was a mere intruder. How strong a side-light does this little incident throw upon the history of the Roman republic, and of all relatively strong communities when confronted with the problem of preserving order in neighbouring states that are too weak to preserve it for themselves! Arnold's argument, in his appeal to Massachusetts, was precisely the same as that by which the latter colony excused herself for banishing the Antinomians. He simply says that Gorton and his company "are not fit persons to be received, and made members of a body in so weak a state as our town is in at present;" and he adds, "There is no state but in the first place will seek to preserve its own safety and peace." Whatever might be the abstract merits of Gorton's opinions, his conduct was politically dangerous; and accordingly the jurisdiction over Pawtuxet was formally conceded to Massachusetts. Thereupon that colony, assuming jurisdiction, summoned Gorton and his men to Boston, to prove their title to the lands they occupied. They of course regarded the summons as a flagrant usurpation of authority, and instead of obeying it they withdrew to Shawomet, on the western shore of Narragansett bay, where they bought a tract of land from the principal sachem of the Narragansetts, Miantonomo. The immediate rule over this land belonged to two inferior chiefs, who ratified the sale at the time, but six months afterward disavowed the ratification, on the ground that it had been given under duress from their overlord Miantonomo. Here was a state of things which might easily bring on an Indian war. The two chiefs appealed to Massachusetts for protection, and were accordingly summoned, along with Miantonomo, to a hearing at Boston. Here we see how a kind of English protectorate over the native tribes had begun to grow up so soon after the destruction of the Pequots. Such a result was inevitable. After hearing the arguments, the legislature decided to defend the two chiefs, provided they would put themselves under the jurisdiction of Massachusetts. This was done, while further complaints against Gorton came from the citizens of Providence. Gorton and his men were now peremptorily summoned to Boston to show cause why they should not surrender their land at Shawomet and to answer the charges against them. On receiving from Gorton a defiant reply, couched in terms which some thought blasphemous, the government of Massachusetts prepared to use force. [Sidenote: Providence protests against him] [Sidenote: He flees to Shawomet, where he buys land of the Indians]

Meanwhile the unfortunate Miantonomo had rushed upon his doom. The annihilation of the Pequots had left the Mohegans and Narragansetts contending for the foremost place among the native tribes. Between the rival sachems, Uncas and Miantonomo, the hatred was deep and deadly. As soon as the Mohegan perceived that trouble was brewing between Miantonomo and the government at Boston, he improved the occasion by gathering a few Narragansett scalps. Miantonomo now took the war-path and was totally defeated by Uncas in a battle on the Great Plain in the present township of Norwich. Encumbered with a coat of mail which his friend Gorton had given him, Miantonomo was overtaken and captured. By ordinary Indian usage he would have been put to death with fiendish torments, as soon as due preparations could be made and a fit company assembled to gloat over his agony; but Gorton sent a messenger to Uncas, threatening dire vengeance if harm were done to his ally. This message puzzled the Mohegan chief. The appearance of a schism in the English counsels was more than he could quite fathom. When the affair had somewhat more fully developed itself, some of the Indians spoke of the white men as divided into two rival tribes, the Gortonoges and Wattaconoges. [16] Roger Williams tells us that the latter term, applied to the men of Boston, meant coat-wearers. Whether it is to be inferred that the Gortonoges went about in what in modern parlance would be called their "shirt-sleeves," the reader must decide. [Sidenote: Miantonomo and Uncas]

In his perplexity Uncas took his prisoner to Hartford, and afterward, upon the advice of the governor and council, sent him to Boston, that his fate might be determined by the Federal Commissioners who were there holding their first regular meeting. It was now the turn of the commissioners to be perplexed. According to English law there was no good reason for putting Miantonomo to death. The question was whether they should interfere with the Indian custom by which his life was already forfeit to his captor. The magistrates already suspected the Narragansetts of cherishing hostile designs. To set their sachem at liberty, especially while the Gorton affair remained unsettled, might be dangerous; and it would be likely to alienate Uncas from the English. In their embarrassment the commissioners sought spiritual guidance. A synod of forty or fifty clergymen, from all parts of New England, was in session at Boston, and the question was referred to a committee of five of their number. The decision was prompt that Miantonomo must die. He was sent back to Hartford to be slain by Uncas, but two messengers accompanied him, to see that no tortures were inflicted. A select band of Mohegan warriors journeyed through the forest with the prisoner and the two Englishmen, until they came to the plain where the battle had been fought. Then at a signal from Uncas, the warrior walking behind Miantonomo silently lifted his tomahawk and sank it into the brain of the victim who fell dead without a groan. Uncas cut a warm slice from the shoulder and greedily devoured it, declaring that the flesh of his enemy was the sweetest of meat and gave strength to his heart. Miantonomo was buried there on the scene of his defeat, which has ever since been known as the Sachem's Plain. This was in September, 1643, and for years afterward, in that month, parties of Narragansetts used to visit the spot and with frantic gestures and hideous yells lament their fallen leader. A heap of stones was raised over the grave, and no Narragansett came near it without adding to the pile. After many a summer had passed and the red men had disappeared from the land, a Yankee farmer, with whom thrift prevailed over sentiment, cleared away the mound and used the stones for the foundation of his new barn. [17] [Sidenote: Death of Miantonomo]

One cannot regard this affair as altogether creditable to the Federal Commissioners and their clerical advisers. One of the clearest-headed and most impartial students of our history observes that "if the English were to meddle in the matter at all, it was their clear duty to enforce as far as might be the principles recognized by civilized men. When they accepted the appeal made by Uncas they shifted the responsibility from the Mohegan chief to themselves." [18] The decision was doubtless based purely upon grounds of policy. Miantonomo was put out of the way because he was believed to be dangerous. In the thirst for revenge that was aroused among the Narragansetts there was an alternative source of danger, to which I shall hereafter refer. [19] It is difficult now to decide, as a mere question of safe policy, what the English ought to have done. The chance of being dragged into an Indian war, through the feud between Narragansetts and Mohegans, was always imminent. The policy which condemned Miantonomo was one of timidity, and fear is merciless.

The Federal Commissioners heartily approved the conduct of Massachusetts toward Gorton, and adopted it in the name of the United Colonies. After a formal warning, which passed unheeded, a company of forty men, under Edward Johnson of Woburn and two other officers, was sent to Shawomet. Some worthy citizens of Providence essayed to play the part of mediators, and after some parley the Gortonites offered to submit to arbitration. The proposal was conveyed to Boston, and the clergy were again consulted. They declared it beneath the dignity of Massachusetts to negotiate "with a few fugitives living without law or government," and they would no more compound with Gorton's "blasphemous revilings" than they would bargain with the Evil One. The community must be "purged" of such wickedness, either by repentance or by punishment. The ministers felt that God would hold the community responsible for Gorton and visit calamities upon them unless he were silenced. [20] The arbitration was refused, Gorton's blockhouse was besieged and captured, and the agitator was carried with nine of his followers to Boston, where they were speedily convicted of heresy and sedition. Before passing judgment the General Court as usual consulted with the clergy who recommended a sentence of death. Their advice was adopted by the assistants, but the deputies were more merciful, and the heretics were sentenced to imprisonment at the pleasure of the court. In this difference between the assistants and the deputies, we observe an early symptom of that popular revolt against the ascendancy of the clergy which was by and by to become so much more conspicuous and effective in the affair of the Quakers. Another symptom might be seen in the circumstance that so much sympathy was expressed for the Gortonites, especially by women, that after some months of imprisonment and abuse the heretics were banished under penalty of death. [Sidenote: Trial and sentence of the heretics]

Gorton now went to England and laid his tale of woe before the parliamentary Board of Commissioners. The Earl of Warwick behaved with moderation. He declined to commit himself to an opinion as to the merits of the quarrel, but Gorton's title to Shawomet was confirmed. He returned to Boston with an order to the government to allow him to pass unmolested through Massachusetts, and hereafter to protect him in the possession of Shawomet. If this little commonwealth of 15,000 inhabitants had been a nation as powerful as France, she could not have treated the message more haughtily. By a majority of one vote it was decided not to refuse so trifling a favour as a passage through the country for just this once; but as for protecting the new town of Warwick which the Gortonites proceeded to found at Shawomet, although it was several times threatened by the Indians, and the settlers appealed to the parliamentary order, that order Massachusetts flatly and doggedly refused to obey. [21] [Sidenote: Gorton appeals to Parliament]

In the discussions of which these years were so full, "King Winthrop," as his enemy Morton called him, used some very significant language. By a curious legal fiction of the Massachusetts charter the colonists were supposed to hold their land as in the manor of East Greenwich near London, and it was argued that they were represented in Parliament by the members of the county or borough which contained that manor, and were accordingly subject to the jurisdiction of Parliament. It was further argued that since the king had no absolute sovereignty independent of Parliament he could not by charter impart any such independent sovereignty to others. Winthrop did not dispute these points, but observed that the safety of the commonwealth was the supreme law, and if in the interests of that safety it should be found necessary to renounce the authority of Parliament, the colonists would be justified in doing so. [Sidenote: Winthrop's prophetic opinion] [22] This was essentially the same doctrine as was set forth ninety-nine years later by young Samuel Adams in his Commencement Oration at Harvard.

The case of the Presbyterian cabal admits of briefer treatment than that of Gorton. There had now come to be many persons in Massachusetts who disapproved of the provision which restricted the suffrage to members of the Independent or Congregational churches of New England, and in 1646 the views of these people were presented in a petition to the General Court. The petitioners asked "that their civil disabilities might be removed, and that all members of the churches of England and Scotland might be admitted to communion with the New England churches. If this could not be granted they prayed to be released from all civil burdens. Should the court refuse to entertain their complaint, they would be obliged to bring their case before Parliament." [23] The leading signers of this menacing petition were William Vassall, Samuel Maverick, and The Presbyterian cabal. Dr. Robert Child. Maverick we have already met. From the day when the ships of the first Puritan settlers had sailed past his log fortress on Noddle's Island, he had been their enemy; "a man of loving and curteous behaviour," says Johnson, "very ready to entertaine strangers, yet an enemy to the reformation in hand, being strong for the lordly prelatical power." Vassall was not a denizen of Massachusetts, but lived in Scituate, in the colony of Plymouth, where there were no such restrictions upon the suffrage. Child was a learned physician who after a good deal of roaming about the world had lately taken it into his head to come and see what sort of a place Massachusetts was. Although these names were therefore not such as to lend weight to such a petition, their request would seem at first sight reasonable enough. At a superficial glance it seems conceived in a modern spirit of liberalism. In reality it was nothing of the sort. In England it was just the critical moment of the struggle between Presbyterians and Independents which had come in to complicate the issues of the great civil war. Vassall, Child, and Maverick seem to have been the leading spirits in a cabal for the establishment of Presbyterianism in New England, and in their petition they simply took advantage of the discontent of the disfranchised citizens in Massachusetts in order to put in an entering wedge. This was thoroughly understood by the legislature of Massachusetts, and accordingly the petition was dismissed and the petitioners were roundly fined. Just as Child was about to start for England with his grievances, the magistrates overhauled his papers and discovered a petition to the parliamentary Board of Commissioners, suggesting that Presbyterianism should be established in New England, and that a viceroy or governor-general should be appointed to rule there. To the men of Massachusetts this last suggestion was a crowning horror. It seemed scarcely less than treason. The signers of this petition were the same who had signed the petition to the General Court. They were now fined still more heavily and imprisoned for six months. By and by they found their way, one after another, to London, while the colonists sent Edward Winslow, of Plymouth, as an advocate to thwart their schemes. Winslow was assailed by Child's brother in a spicy pamphlet entitled "New England's Jonas cast up at London," and replied after the same sort, entitling his pamphlet "New England's Salamander discovered." The cabal accomplished nothing because of the decisive defeat of Presbyterianism in England. "Pride's Purge" settled all that. The petition of Vassall and his friends was the occasion for the meeting of a synod of churches at Cambridge, in order to complete the organization of Congregationalism. In 1648 the work of the synod was embodied in the famous Cambridge Platform, which adopted the Westminster Confession as its creed, carefully defined the powers of the clergy, and declared it to be the duty of magistrates to suppress heresy. In 1649 the General Court laid this platform before the congregations; in 1651 it was adopted; and this event may be regarded as completing the theocratic organization of the Puritan commonwealth in Massachusetts. [Sidenote: The Cambridge Platform; deaths of Winthrop and Cotton]

It was immediately preceded and followed by the deaths of the two foremost men in that commonwealth. John Winthrop died in 1649 and John Cotton in 1652. Both were men of extraordinary power. Of Winthrop it is enough to say that under his skilful guidance Massachusetts had been able to pursue the daring policy which had characterized the first twenty years of her history, and which in weaker hands would almost surely have ended in disaster. Of Cotton it may be said that he was the most eminent among a group of clergymen who for learning and dialectical skill have seldom been surpassed. Neither Winthrop nor Cotton approved of toleration upon principle. Cotton, in his elaborate controversy with Roger Williams, frankly asserted that persecution is not wrong in itself; it is wicked for falsehood to persecute truth, but it is the sacred duty of truth to persecute falsehood. This was the theologian's view. Winthrop's was that of a man of affairs. They had come to New England, he said, in order to make a society after their own model; all who agreed with them might come and join that society; those who disagreed with them might go elsewhere; there was room enough on the American continent. But while neither Winthrop nor Cotton understood the principle of religious liberty, at the same time neither of them had the temperament which persecutes. Both were men of genial disposition, sound common-sense, and exquisite tact. Under their guidance no such tragedy would have been possible as that which was about to leave its ineffaceable stain upon the annals of Massachusetts.

It was most unfortunate that at this moment the places of these two men should have been taken by two as arrant fanatics as ever drew breath. For thirteen out of the fifteen years following Winthrop's death, the governor of Massachusetts was John Endicott, a sturdy pioneer, whose services to the colony had been great. He was honest and conscientious, but passionate, domineering, and very deficient in tact. At the same time Cotton's successor in position and influence was John Norton, a man of pungent wit, unyielding temper, and melancholy mood. He was possessed by a morbid fear of Satan, whose hirelings he thought were walking up and down over the earth in the visible semblance of heretics and schismatics. Under such leaders the bigotry latent in the Puritan commonwealth might easily break out in acts of deadly persecution. [Sidenote: Endicott and Norton take the lead] [Sidenote: The Quakers and their views]

The occasion was not long in coming. Already the preaching of George Fox had borne fruit, and the noble sect of Quakers was an object of scorn and loathing to all such as had not gone so far as they toward learning the true lesson of Protestantism. Of all Protestant sects the Quakers went furthest in stripping off from Christianity its non-essential features of doctrine and ceremonial. Their ideal was not a theocracy but a separation between church and state. They would abolish all distinction between clergy and laity, and could not be coaxed or bullied into paying tithes. They also refused to render military service, or to take the oath of allegiance. In these ways they came at once into antagonism both with church and with state. In doctrine their chief peculiarity was the assertion of an "Inward Light" by which every individual is to be guided in his conduct of life. They did not believe that men ceased to be divinely inspired when the apostolic ages came to an end, but held that at all times and places the human soul may be enlightened by direct communion with its Heavenly Father. Such views involved the most absolute assertion of the right of private judgment; and when it is added that in the exercise of this right many Quakers were found to reject the dogmas of original sin and the resurrection of the body, to doubt the efficacy of baptism, and to call in question the propriety of Christians turning the Lord's Day into a Jewish Sabbath, we see that they had in some respects gone far on the road toward modern rationalism. It was not to be expected that such opinions should be treated by the Puritans in any other spirit than one of extreme abhorrence and dread. The doctrine of the "Inward Light," or of private inspiration, was something especially hateful to the Puritan. To the modern rationalist, looking at things in the dry light of history, it may seem that this doctrine was only the Puritan's own appeal to individual judgment, stated in different form; but the Puritan could not so regard it. To such a fanatic as Norton this inward light was but a reflection from the glare of the bottomless pit, this private inspiration was the beguiling voice of the Devil. As it led the Quakers to strange and novel conclusions, this inward light seemed to array itself in hostility to that final court of appeal for all good Protestants, the sacred text of the Bible. The Quakers were accordingly regarded as infidels who sought to deprive Protestantism of its only firm support. They were wrongly accused of blasphemy in their treatment of the Scriptures. Cotton Mather says that the Quakers were in the habit of alluding to the Bible as the Word of the Devil. Such charges, from passionate and uncritical enemies, are worthless except as they serve to explain the bitter prejudice with which the Quakers were regarded. They remind one of the silly accusation brought against Wyclif two centuries earlier, that he taught his disciples that God ought to obey the Devil; [24] and they are not altogether unlike the assumptions of some modern theologians who take it for granted that any writer who accepts the Darwinian theory must be a materialist. [Sidenote: Endicott and Norton take the lead] [Sidenote: The Quakers and their views]

But worthless as Mather's statements are, in describing the views of the Quakers, they are valuable as indicating the temper in which these disturbers of the Puritan theocracy were regarded. In accusing them of rejecting the Bible and making a law unto themselves, Mather simply put on record a general belief which he shared. Nor can it be doubted that the demeanour of the Quaker enthusiasts was sometimes such as to seem to warrant the belief that their anarchical doctrines entailed, as a natural consequence, disorderly and disreputable conduct. In those days all manifestations of dissent were apt to be violent, and the persecution which they encountered was likely to call forth strange and unseemly vagaries. When we remember how the Quakers, in their scorn of earthly magistrates and princes, would hoot at the governor as he walked up the street; how they used to rush into church on Sundays and interrupt the sermon with untimely remarks; how Thomas Newhouse once came into the Old South Meeting-House with a glass bottle in each hand, and, holding them up before the astonished congregation, knocked them together and smashed them, with the remark, "Thus will the Lord break you all in pieces"; how Lydia Wardwell and Deborah Wilson ran about the streets in the primitive costume of Eve before the fall, and called their conduct "testifying before the Lord"; we can hardly wonder that people should have been reminded of the wretched scenes enacted at Munster by the Anabaptists of the preceding century. [Sidenote: Violent manifestations of dissent]

Such incidents, however, do not afford the slightest excuse for the cruel treatment which the Quakers received in Boston, nor do they go far toward explaining it. Persecution began immediately, before the new-comers had a chance to behave themselves well or ill. Their mere coming to Boston was taken as an act of invasion. It was indeed an attack upon the Puritan theocratic idea. Of all the sectaries of that age of sects, the Quakers were the most aggressive. There were at one time more than four thousand of them in English jails; yet when any of them left England, it was less to escape persecution than to preach their doctrines far and wide over the earth. Their missionaries found their way to Paris, to Vienna; even to Rome, where they testified under the very roof of the Vatican. In this dauntless spirit they came to New England to convert its inhabitants, or at any rate to establish the principle that in whatever community it might please them to stay, there they would stay in spite of judge or hangman. At first they came to Barbadoes, whence two of their number, Anne Austin and Mary Fisher, sailed for Boston. When they landed, on a May morning in 1656, Endicott happened to be away from Boston, but the deputy-governor, Richard Bellingham, was equal to the occasion. He arrested the two women and locked them up in jail, where, for fear they might proclaim their heresies to the crowd gathered outside, the windows were boarded up. There was no law as yet enacted against Quakers, but a council summoned for the occasion pronounced their doctrines blasphemous and devilish. The books which the poor women had with them were seized and publicly burned, and the women themselves were kept in prison half-starved for five weeks until the ship they had come in was ready to return to Barbadoes. Soon after their departure Endicott came home. He found fault with Bellingham's conduct as too gentle; if he had been there he would have had the hussies flogged. [Sidenote: Anne Austin and Mary Fisher]

Five years afterward Mary Fisher went to Adrianople and tried to convert the Grand Turk, who treated her with grave courtesy and allowed her to prophesy unmolested. This is one of the numerous incidents that, on a superficial view of history, might be cited in support of the opinion that there has been on the whole more tolerance in the Mussulman than in the Christian world. Rightly interpreted, however, the fact has no such implication. In Massachusetts the preaching of Quaker doctrines might (and did) lead to a revolution; in Turkey it was as harmless as the barking of dogs. Governor Endicott was afraid of Mary Fisher; Mahomet III. was not.

No sooner had the two women been shipped from Boston than eight other Quakers arrived from London. They were at once arrested. While they were lying in jail the Federal Commissioners, then in session at Plymouth, recommended that laws be forthwith enacted to keep these dreaded heretics out of the land. Next year they stooped so far as to seek the aid of Rhode Island, the colony which they had refused to admit into their confederacy. "They sent a letter to the authorities of that colony, signing themselves their loving friends and neighbours, and beseeching them to preserve the whole body of colonies against 'such a pest' by banishing and excluding all Quakers, a measure to which 'the rule of charity did oblige them.'" Roger Williams was then president of Rhode Island, and in full accord with his noble spirit was the reply of the assembly. "We have no law amongst us whereby to punish any for only declaring by words their minds and understandings concerning the things and ways of God as to salvation and our eternal condition." As for these Quakers we find that where they are "most of all suffered to declare themselves freely and only opposed by arguments in discourse, there they least of all desire to come." Any breach of the civil law shall be punished, but the "freedom of different consciences shall be respected." This reply enraged the confederated colonies, and Massachusetts, as the strongest and most overbearing, threatened to cut off the trade of Rhode Island, which forthwith appealed to Cromwell for protection. The language of the appeal is as touching as its broad Christian spirit is grand. It recognizes that by stopping trade the men of Massachusetts will injure themselves, yet, it goes on to say, "for the safeguard of their religion they may seem to neglect themselves in that respect; for what will not men do for their God?" But whatever fortune may befall, "let us not be compelled to exercise any civil power over men's consciences." [25] [Sidenote: Noble conduct of Rhode Island]

There could never, of course, be a doubt as to who drew up this state paper. During his last visit to England, three years before, Roger Williams had spent several weeks at Sir Harry Vane's country house in Lincolnshire, and he had also been intimately associated with Cromwell and Milton. The views of these great men were the most advanced of that age. They were coming to understand the true principle upon which toleration should be based. (See my Excursions of an Evolutionist, pp. 247, 289-293.) Vane had said in Parliament, "Why should the labours of any be suppressed, if sober, though never so different? We now profess to seek God, we desire to see light!" [Sidenote: Roger Williams appeals to Cromwell]

This Williams called a "heavenly speech." The sentiment it expressed was in accordance with the practical policy of Cromwell, and in the appeal of the president of Rhode Island to the Lord Protector one hears the tone with which friend speaks to friend.

In thus protecting the Quakers, Williams never for a moment concealed his antipathy to their doctrines. The author of "George Fox digged out of his Burrowes," the sturdy controversialist who in his seventy-third year rowed himself in a boat the whole length of Narragansett bay to engage in a theological tournament against three Quaker champions, was animated by nothing less than the broadest liberalism in his bold reply to the Federal Commissioners in 1657. The event showed that under his guidance the policy of Rhode Island was not only honourable but wise. The four confederated colonies all proceeded to pass laws banishing Quakers and making it a penal offence for shipmasters to bring them to New England. These laws differed in severity. Those of Connecticut, in which we may trace the influence of the younger John Winthrop, were the mildest; those of Massachusetts were the most severe, and as Quakers kept coming all the more in spite of them, they grew harsher and harsher. At first the Quaker who persisted in returning was to be flogged and imprisoned at hard labour, next his ears were to be cut off, and for a third offence his tongue was to be bored with a hot iron. At length in 1658, the Federal Commissioners, sitting at Boston with Endicott as chairman, recommended capital punishment. It must be borne in mind that the general reluctance toward prescribing or inflicting the death penalty was much weaker then than now. On the statute-books there were not less than fifteen capital crimes, including such offences as idolatry, witchcraft, blasphemy, marriage within the Levitical degrees, "presumptuous sabbath-breaking," and cursing or smiting one's parents. [26] The infliction of the penalty, however, lay practically very much within the discretion of the court, and was generally avoided except in cases of murder or other heinous felony. In some of these ecclesiastical offences the statute seems to have served the purpose of a threat, and was therefore perhaps the more easily enacted. Yet none of the colonies except Massachusetts now adopted the suggestion of the Federal Commissioners and threatened the Quakers with death. [Sidenote: Laws passed against the Quakers]

In Massachusetts the opposition was very strong indeed, and its character shows how wide the divergence in sentiment had already become between the upper stratum of society and the people in general. This divergence was one result of the excessive weight given to the clergy by the restriction of the suffrage to church members. One might almost say that it was not the people of Massachusetts, after all, that shed the blood of the Quakers; it was Endicott and the clergy. The bill establishing death as the penalty for returning after banishment was passed in the upper house without serious difficulty; but in the lower house it was at first defeated. Of the twenty-six deputies fifteen were opposed to it, but one of these fell sick and two were intimidated, so that finally the infamous measure was passed by a vote of thirteen against twelve. Probably it would not have passed but for a hopeful feeling that an occasion for putting it into execution would not be likely to arise. It was hoped that the mere threat would prove effective. Endicott begged the Quakers to keep away, saying earnestly that he did not desire their death; but the more resolute spirits were not deterred by fear of the gallows. In September, 1659, William Robinson, Marmaduke Stevenson, and Mary Dyer, who had come to Boston expressly to defy the cruel law, were banished. Mrs. Dyer was a lady of good family, wife of the secretary of Rhode Island. She had been an intimate friend of Mrs. Hutchinson. While she went home to her husband, Stevenson and Robinson went only to Salem and then faced about and came back to Boston. Mrs. Dyer also returned. All three felt themselves under divine command to resist and defy the persecutors. On the 27th of October they were led to the gallows on Boston Common, under escort of a hundred soldiers. Many people had begun to cry shame on such proceedings, and it was thought necessary to take precautions against a tumult. The victims tried to address the crowd, but their voices were drowned by the beating of drums. While the Rev. John Wilson railed and scoffed at them from the foot of the gallows the two brave men were hanged. The halter had been placed upon Mrs. Dyer when her son, who had come in all haste from Rhode Island, obtained her reprieve on his promise to take her away. The bodies of the two men were denied Christian burial and thrown uncovered into a pit. All the efforts of husband and son were unable to keep Mrs. Dyer at home. In the following spring she returned to Boston and on the first day of June was again taken to the gallows. At the last moment she was offered freedom if she would only promise to go away and stay, but she refused. "In obedience to the will of the Lord I came," said she, "and in his will I abide faithful unto death." And so she died. [Sidenote: Executions on Boston Common] [Sidenote: Wenlock Christison's defiance and victory]

Public sentiment in Boston was now turning so strongly against the magistrates that they began to weaken in their purpose. But there was one more victim. In November, 1660, William Leddra returned from banishment. The case was clear enough, but he was kept in prison four months and every effort was made to induce him to promise to leave the colony, but in vain. In the following March he too was put to death. A few days before the execution, as Leddra was being questioned in court, a memorable scene occurred. Wenlock Christison was one of those who had been banished under penalty of death. On his return he made straight for the town-house, strode into the court-room, and with uplifted finger addressed the judges in words of authority. "I am come here to warn you," said he, "that ye shed no more innocent blood." He was instantly seized and dragged off to jail. After three months he was brought to trial before the Court of Assistants. The magistrates debated for more than a fortnight as to what should be done. The air was thick with mutterings of insurrection, and they had lost all heart for their dreadful work. Not so the savage old man who presided, frowning gloomily under his black skull cap. Losing his patience at last, Endicott smote the table with fury, upbraided the judges for their weakness, and declared himself so disgusted that he was ready to go back to England. [27] "You that will not consent, record it," he shouted, as the question was again put to vote, "I thank God I am not afraid to give judgment." Christison was condemned to death, but the sentence was never executed. In the interval the legislature assembled, and the law was modified. The martyrs had not died in vain. Their cause was victorious. A revolution had been effected. The Puritan ideal of a commonwealth composed of a united body of believers was broken down, never again to be restored. The principle had been admitted that the heretic might come to Massachusetts and stay there.

It was not in a moment, however, that these results were fully realized. For some years longer Quakers were fined, imprisoned, and now and then tied to the cart's tail and whipped from one town to another. But these acts of persecution came to be more and more discountenanced by public opinion until at length they ceased.

It was on the 25th of May, 1660, just one week before the martyrdom of Mary Dyer, that Charles II. returned to England to occupy his father's throne. One of the first papers laid before him was a memorial in behalf of the oppressed Quakers in New England. In the course of the following year he sent a letter to Endicott and the other New England governors, ordering them to suspend proceedings against the Quakers, and if any were then in prison, to send them to England for trial. Christison's victory had already been won, but the "King's Missive" was now partially obeyed by the release of all prisoners. As for sending anybody to England for trial, that was something that no New England government could ever be made to allow.

Charles's defence of the Quakers was due, neither to liberality of disposition nor to any sympathy with them, but rather to his inclinations toward Romanism. Unlike in other respects, Quakers and Catholics were alike in this, that they were the only sects which the Protestant world in general agreed in excluding from toleration. Charles wished to secure toleration for Catholics, and he could not prudently take steps toward this end without pursuing a policy broad enough to diminish persecution in other directions, and from these circumstances the Quakers profited. At times there was something almost like a political alliance between Quaker and Catholic, as instanced in the relations between William Penn and Charles's brother, the Duke of York. [Sidenote: The "King's Missive"] [Sidenote: Why Charles II. interfered to protect the Quakers]

Besides all this, Charles had good reason to feel that the governments of New England were assuming too many airs of sovereignty. There were plenty of people at hand to work upon his mind. The friends of Gorton and Child and Vassall were loud with their complaints. Samuel Maverick swore that the people of New England were all rebels, and he could prove it. The king was assured that the Confederacy was "a war combination, made by the four colonies when they had a design to throw off their dependence on England, and for that purpose." The enemies of the New England people, while dilating upon the rebellious disposition of Massachusetts, could also remind the king that for several years that colony had been coining and circulating shillings and sixpences with the name "Massachusetts" and a tree on one side, and the name "New England" with the date on the other. There was no recognition of England upon this coinage, which was begun in 1652 and kept up for more than thirty years. Such pieces of money used to be called "pine-tree shillings"; but, so far as looks go, the tree might be anything, and an adroit friend of New England once gravely assured the king that it was meant for the royal oak in which his majesty hid himself after the battle of Worcester!

Against the colony of New Haven the king had a special grudge. Two of the regicide judges, who had sat in the tribunal which condemned his father, escaped to New England in 1660 and were well received there. They were gentlemen of high position. Edward Whalley was a cousin of Cromwell and Hampden. He had distinguished himself at Naseby and Dunbar, and had risen to the rank of lieutenant-general. He had commanded at the capture of Worcester, where it is interesting to observe that the royalist commander who surrendered to him was Sir Henry Washington, own cousin to the grandfather of George Washington. The other regicide, William Goffe, as a major-general in Cromwell's army, had won such distinction that there were some who pointed to him as the proper person to succeed the Lord Protector on the death of the latter. He had married Whalley's daughter. Soon after the arrival of these gentlemen, a royal order for their arrest was sent to Boston. If they had been arrested and sent back to England, their severed heads would soon have been placed over Temple Bar. The king's detectives hotly pursued them through the woodland paths of New England, and they would soon have been taken but for the aid they got from the people. Many are the stories of their hairbreadth escapes. Sometimes they took refuge in a cave on a mountain near New Haven, sometimes they hid in friendly cellars; and once, being hard put to it, they skulked under a wooden bridge, while their pursuers on horseback galloped by overhead. After lurking about New Haven and Milford for two or three years, on hearing of the expected arrival of Colonel Nichols and his commission, they sought a more secluded hiding-place near Hadley, a village lately settled far up the Connecticut river, within the jurisdiction of Massachusetts. Here the avengers lost the trail, the pursuit was abandoned, and the weary regicides were presently forgotten. The people of New Haven had been especially zealous in shielding the fugitives. Mr. Davenport had not only harboured them in his own house, but on the Sabbath before their expected arrival he had preached a very bold sermon, openly advising his people to aid and comfort them as far as possible. [28] The colony, moreover, did not officially recognize the restoration of Charles II. to the throne until that event had been commonly known in New England for more than a year. For these reasons the wrath of the king was specially roused against New Haven, when circumstances combined to enable him at once to punish this disloyal colony and deal a blow at the Confederacy. We have seen that in restricting the suffrage to church members New Haven had followed the example of Massachusetts, but Connecticut had not; and at this time there was warm controversy between the two younger colonies as to the wisdom Of such a policy. As yet none of the colonies save Massachusetts had obtained a charter, and Connecticut was naturally anxious to obtain one. Whether through a complaisant spirit connected with this desire, or through mere accident, Connecticut had been prompt in acknowledging the restoration of Charles II.; and in August, 1661, she dispatched the younger Winthrop to England to apply for a charter. Winthrop was a man of winning address and of wide culture. His scientific tastes were a passport to the favour of the king at a time when the Royal Society was being founded, of which Winthrop himself was soon chosen a fellow. In every way the occasion was an auspicious one. The king looked upon the rise of the New England Confederacy with unfriendly eyes. Massachusetts was as yet the only member of the league that was really troublesome; and there seemed to be no easier way to weaken her than to raise up a rival power by her side, and extend to it such privileges as might awaken her jealousy. All the more would such a policy be likely to succeed if accompanied by measures of which Massachusetts must necessarily disapprove, and the suppression of New Haven would be such a measure. [Sidenote: New Haven annexed to Connecticut]

In accordance with these views, a charter of great liberality was at once granted to Connecticut, and by the same instrument the colony of New Haven was deprived of its separate existence and annexed to its stronger neighbour. As if to emphasize the motives which had led to this display of royal favour toward Connecticut, an equally liberal charter was granted to Rhode Island. In the summer of 1664 Charles II. sent a couple of ships-of-war to Boston harbour, with 400 troops under command of Colonel Richard Nichols, who had been appointed, along with Samuel Maverick and two others as royal commissioners, to look after the affairs of the New World. Colonel Nichols took his ships to New Amsterdam, and captured that important town. After his return the commissioners held meetings at Boston, and for a time the Massachusetts charter seemed in danger. But the Puritan magistrates were shrewd, and months were frittered away to no purpose. Presently the Dutch made war upon England, and the king felt it to be unwise to irritate the people of Massachusetts beyond endurance. The turbulent state of English politics which followed still further absorbed his attention, and New England had another respite of several years. [Sidenote: Founding of Newark]

In New Haven a party had grown up which was dissatisfied with its extreme theocratic policy and approved of the union with Connecticut. Davenport and his followers, the founders of the colony, were beyond measure disgusted. They spurned "the Christless rule" of the sister colony. Many of them took advantage of the recent conquest of New Netherland, and a strong party, led by the Rev. Abraham Pierson, of Branford, migrated to the banks of the Passaic in June, 1667, and laid the foundations of Newark. For some years to come the theocratic idea that had given birth to New Haven continued to live on in New Jersey. As for Mr. Davenport, he went to Boston and ended his days there. Cotton Mather, writing at a later date, when the theocratic scheme of the early settlers had been manifestly outgrown and superseded, says of Davenport: "Yet, after all, the Lord gave him to see that in this world a Church-State was impossible, whereinto there enters nothing which defiles."

The theocratic policy, alike in New Haven and in Massachusetts, broke down largely through its inherent weakness. It divided the community, and created among the people a party adverse to its arrogance and exclusiveness. This state of things facilitated the suppression of New Haven by royal edict, and it made possible the victory of Wenlock Christison in Massachusetts. We can now see the fundamental explanation of the deadly hostility with which Endicott and his party regarded the Quakers. The latter aimed a fatal blow at the very root of the idea which had brought the Puritans to New England. Once admit these heretics as citizens, or even as tolerated sojourners, and there was an end of the theocratic state consisting of a united body of believers. It was a life-and-death struggle, in which no quarter was given; and the Quakers, aided by popular discontent with the theocracy, even more than by the intervention of the crown, won a decisive victory.

As the work of planting New England took place chiefly in the eleven years 1629-1640, during which Charles I. contrived to reign without a parliament, so the prosperous period of the New England Confederacy, 1643-1664, covers the time of the Civil War and the Commonwealth, and just laps on to the reign of Charles II. By the summary extinction of the separate existence of one of its members for the benefit of another, its vigour was sadly impaired. But its constitution was revised so as to make it a league of three states instead of four; and the Federal Commissioners kept on holding their meetings, though less frequently, until the revocation of the Massachusetts charter in 1684. During this period a great Indian war occurred, in the course of which this concentration of the military strength of New England, imperfect as it was, proved itself very useful. In the history of New England, from the restoration of the Stuarts until their final expulsion, the two most important facts are the military struggle of the newly founded states with the Indians, and their constitutional struggle against the British government. The troubles and dangers of 1636 were renewed on a much more formidable scale, but the strength of the people had waxed greatly in the mean time, and the new perils were boldly overcome or skilfully warded off; not, however, until the constitution of Massachusetts had been violently wrenched out of shape in the struggle, and seeds of conflict sown which in the following century were to bear fruit in the American Revolution. [Sidenote: Breaking down of the theocratic policy] [Sidenote: Weakening of the Confederacy]



CHAPTER V.

KING PHILIP'S WAR.

For eight-and-thirty years after the destruction of the Pequots, the intercourse between the English and the Indians was to all outward appearance friendly. The policy pursued by the settlers was in the main well considered. While they had shown that they could strike with terrible force when blows were needed, their treatment of the natives in time of peace seems to have been generally just and kind. Except in the single case of the conquered Pequot territory, they scrupulously paid for every rood of ground on which they settled, and so far as possible they extended to the Indians the protection of the law. On these points we have the explicit testimony of Josiah Winslow, governor of Plymouth, in his report to the Federal Commissioners in May, 1676; and what he says about Plymouth seems to have been equally true of the other colonies. Says Winslow, "I think I can clearly say that before these present troubles broke out, the English did not possess one foot of land in this colony but what was fairly obtained by honest purchase of the Indian proprietors. Nay, because some of our people are of a covetous disposition, and the Indians are in their straits easily prevailed with to part with their lands, we first made a law that none should purchase or receive of gift any land of the Indians without the knowledge and allowance of our Court .... And if at any time they have brought complaints before us, they have had justice impartial and speedy, so that our own people have frequently complained that we erred on the other hand in showing them overmuch favour." The general laws of Massachusetts and Connecticut as well as of Plymouth bear out what Winslow says, and show us that as a matter of policy the colonial governments were fully sensible of the importance of avoiding all occasions for quarrel with their savage neighbours. [Sidenote: Puritans and Indians]

There can, moreover, be little doubt that the material comfort of the Indians was for a time considerably improved by their dealings with the white men. Hitherto their want of foresight and thrift had been wont to involve them during the long winters in a dreadful struggle with famine. Now the settlers were ready to pay liberally for the skin of every fur-covered animal the red men could catch; and where the trade thus arising did not suffice to keep off famine, instances of generous charity were frequent. The Algonquin tribes of New England lived chiefly by hunting, but partly by agriculture. They raised beans and corn, and succotash was a dish which they contributed to the white man's table. They could now raise or buy English vegetables, while from dogs and horses, pigs and poultry, oxen and sheep, little as they could avail themselves of such useful animals, they nevertheless derived some benefit. [29] Better blankets and better knives were brought within their reach; and in spite of all the colonial governments could do to prevent it, they were to some extent enabled to supply themselves with muskets and rum. [Sidenote: Trade with the Indians]

Besides all this trade, which, except in the article of liquor, tended to improve the condition of the native tribes, there was on the part of the earlier settlers an earnest and diligent effort to convert them to Christianity and give them the rudiments of a civilized education. Missionary work was begun in 1643 by Thomas Mayhew on the islands of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. The savages at first declared they were not so silly as to barter thirty-seven tutelar deities for one, but after much preaching and many pow-wows Mayhew succeeded in persuading them that the Deity of the white man was mightier than all their manitous. Whether they ever got much farther than this toward a comprehension of the white man's religion may be doubted; but they were prevailed upon to let their children learn to read and write, and even to set up little courts, in which justice was administered according to some of the simplest rules of English law, and from which there lay an appeal to the court of Plymouth. In 1646 Massachusetts enacted that the elders of the churches should choose two persons each year to go and spread the gospel among the Indians. In 1649 Parliament established the Society for propagating the Gospel in New England, and presently from voluntary contributions the society was able to dispose of an annual income of L2000. Schools were set up in which agriculture was taught as well as religion. It was even intended that Indians should go to Harvard College, and a building was erected for their accommodation, but as none came to occupy it, the college printing-press was presently set to work there. One solitary Indian student afterward succeeded in climbing to the bachelor's degree,—Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck of the class of 1665. It was this one success that was marvellous, not the failure of the scheme, which vividly shows how difficult it was for the white man of that day to understand the limitations of the red man. [Sidenote: Missionary work: Thomas Mayhew]

The greatest measure of success in converting the Indians was attained by that famous linguist and preacher, the apostle John Eliot. This remarkable man was a graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge. He had come to Massachusetts in 1631, and in the following year had been settled as teacher in the church at Roxbury of which Thomas Welde was pastor. He had been distinguished at the university for philological scholarship and for linguistic talent—two things not always found in connection—and now during fourteen years he devoted such time as he could to acquiring a complete mastery of the Algonquin dialect spoken by the Indians of Massachusetts bay. To the modern comparative philologist his work is of great value. He published not only an excellent Indian grammar, but a complete translation of the Bible into the Massachusetts language,—a monument of prodigious labour. It is one of the most instructive documents in existence for the student of Algonquin speech, though the Massachusetts tribe and its language have long been extinct, and there are very few scholars living who can read the book. It has become one of the curiosities of literature and at auction sales of private libraries commands an extremely high price. Yet out of this rare book the American public has somehow or other within the last five or six years contrived to pick up a word which we shall very likely continue to hear for some time to come. In Eliot's Bible, the word which means a great chief—such as Joshua, or Gideon, or Joab—is "mugwump."

It was in 1646 that Eliot began his missionary preaching at a small Indian village near Watertown. President Dunster, of Harvard College, and Mr. Shepard, the minister at Cambridge, felt a warm interest in the undertaking. These worthy men seriously believed that the aborigines of America were the degenerate descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel, and from this strange backsliding it was hoped that they might now be reclaimed. With rare eloquence and skill did Eliot devote himself to the difficult work of reaching the Indian's scanty intelligence and still scantier moral sense. His ministrations reached from the sands of Cape Cod to the rocky hillsides of Brookfield. But he soon found that single-handed he could achieve but little over so wide an area, and accordingly he adopted the policy of colonizing his converts in village communities near the English towns, where they might be sequestered from their heathen brethren and subjected to none but Christian influences. In these communities he hoped to train up native missionaries who might thence go and labour among the wild tribes until the whole lump of barbarism should be leavened. In pursuance of this scheme a stockaded village was built at Natick in 1651 Under the direction of an English carpenter the Indians built log-houses for themselves, and most of them adopted the English dress. Their simple government was administered by tithing-men, or "rulers of tens," chosen after methods prescribed in the book of Exodus. Other such communities were formed in the neighbourhoods of Concord and Grafton. By 1674 the number of these "praying Indians," as they were called, was estimated at 4000, of whom about 1500 were in Eliot's villages, as many more in Martha's Vineyard, 300 in Nantucket, and 700 in the Plymouth colony. There seems to be no doubt that these Indians were really benefited both materially and morally by the change in their life. In theology it is not likely that they reached any higher view than that expressed by the Connecticut sachem Wequash who "seeing and beholding the mighty power of God in the English forces, how they fell upon the Pequots, ... from that time was convinced and persuaded that our God was a most dreadful God;" accordingly, says the author of "New England's First Fruits," "he became thoroughly reformed according to his light." Matters of outward observance, too, the Indians could understand; for we read of one of them rebuking an Englishman "for profaning the Lord's Day by felling of a tree." The Indian's notions of religion were probably confined within this narrow compass; the notions of some people that call themselves civilized perhaps do not extend much further. [Sidenote: Villages of Christian Indians]

From such facts as those above cited we may infer that the early relations of the Puritan settlers to the Algonquin tribes of New England were by no means like the relations between white men and red men in recent times on our western plains. During Philip's War, as we shall see, the Puritan theory of the situation was entirely changed and our forefathers began to act in accordance with the frontiersman's doctrine that the good Indians are dead Indians. But down to that time it is clear that his intention was to deal honourably and gently with his tawny neighbour. We sometimes hear the justice and kindness of the Quakers in Pennsylvania alleged as an adequate reason for the success with which they kept clear of an Indian war. This explanation, however, does not seem to be adequate; it does not appear that, on the whole, the Puritans were less just and kind than the Quakers in their treatment of the red men. The true explanation is rather to be found in the relations between the Indian tribes toward the close of the seventeenth century. Early in that century the Pennsylvania region had been in the hands of the ferocious and powerful Susquehannocks, but in 1672, after a frightful struggle of twenty years, this great tribe was swept from the face of the earth by the resistless league of the Five Nations. When the Quakers came to Pennsylvania in 1682, the only Indians in that neighbourhood were the Delawares, who had just been terribly beaten by the Five Nations and forced into a treaty by which they submitted to be called "women," and to surrender their tomahawks. Penn's famous treaty was made with the Delawares as occupants of the land and also with the Iroquois league as overlords. [30] Now the great central fact of early American history, so far as the relations between white men and red men are concerned, is the unshaken friendship of the Iroquois for the English. This was the natural consequence of the deadly hostility between the Iroquois and the French which began with Champlain's defeat of the Mohawks in 1609. During the seventy-three years which intervened between the founding of Pennsylvania and the defeat of Braddock there was never a moment when the Delawares could have attacked the Quakers without incurring the wrath and vengeance of their overlords the Five Nations. This was the reason why Pennsylvania was left so long in quiet. No better proof could be desired than the fact that in Pontiac's war, after the overthrow of the French and when Indian politics had changed, no state suffered so much as Pennsylvania from the horrors of Indian warfare. [Sidenote: Why Pennsylvania was so long unmolested by the Indians]

In New England at the time of Philip's War, the situation was very different from what it was between the Hudson and the Susquehanna. The settlers were thrown into immediate relations with several tribes whose mutual hostility and rivalry was such that it was simply impossible to keep on good terms with all at once. Such complicated questions as that which involved the English in responsibility for the fate of Miantonomo did not arise in Pennsylvania. Since the destruction of the Pequots we have observed the Narragansetts and Mohegans contending for the foremost place among New England tribes. Of the two rivals the Mohegans were the weaker, and therefore courted the friendship of the formidable palefaces. The English had no desire to take part in these barbarous feuds, but they could not treat the Mohegans well without incurring the hostility of the Narragansetts. For thirty years the feeling of the latter tribe toward the English had been very unfriendly and would doubtless have vented itself in murder but for their recollection of the fate of the Pequots. After the loss of their chief Miantonomo their attitude became so sullen and defiant that the Federal Commissioners, in order to be in readiness for an outbreak, collected a force of 300 men. At the first news of these preparations the Narragansetts, overcome with terror, sent a liberal tribute of wampum to Boston, and were fain to conclude a treaty in which they promised to behave themselves well in the future.

It was impossible that this sort of English protectorate over the native tribes, which was an inevitable result of the situation, should be other than irksome and irritating to the Indians. They could not but see that the white man stood there as master, and even in the utter absence of provocation, this fact alone must have made them hate him. It is difficult, moreover, for the civilized man and the savage to understand each other. As a rule the one does not know what the other is thinking about. When Mr. Hamilton Gushing a few years ago took some of his Zuni friends into a hotel in Chicago, they marvelled at his entering such a mighty palace with so little ceremony, and their wonder was heightened at the promptness with which "slaves" came running at his beck and call; but all at once, on seeing an American eagle over one of the doorways, they felt that the mystery was solved. Evidently this palace was the communal dwelling of the Eagle Clan of palefaces, and evidently Mr. Gushing was a great sachem of this clan, and as such entitled to lordly sway there! The Zunis are not savages, but representatives of a remote and primitive phase of what Mr. Morgan calls the middle status of barbarism. The gulf between their thinking and that of white men is wide because there is a wide gulf between the experience of the two. [Sidenote: Difficulty of the situation in New England] [Sidenote: It is hard for the savage and the civilized man to understand one another]

This illustration may help us to understand an instance in which the Indians of New England must inevitably have misinterpreted the actions of the white settlers and read them in the light of their uneasy fears and prejudices. I refer to the work of the apostle Eliot. His design in founding his villages of Christian Indians was in the highest degree benevolent and noble; but the heathen Indians could hardly be expected to see anything in it but a cunning scheme for destroying them.

Eliot's converts were for the most part from the Massachusetts tribe, the smallest and weakest of all. The Plymouth converts came chiefly from the tribe next in weakness, the Pokanokets or Wampanoags. The more powerful tribes—Narragansetts, Nipmucks, and Mohegans—furnished very few converts. When they saw the white intruders gathering members of the weakest tribes into villages of English type, and teaching them strange gods while clothing them in strange garments, they probably supposed that the pale-faces were simply adopting these Indians into their white tribe as a means of increasing their military strength. At any rate, such a proceeding would be perfectly intelligible to the savage mind, whereas the nature of Eliot's design lay quite beyond its ken. As the Indians recovered from their supernatural dread of the English, and began to regard them as using human means to accomplish their ends, they must of course interpret their conduct in such light as savage experience could afford. It is one of the commonest things in the world for a savage tribe to absorb weak neighbours by adoption, and thus increase its force preparatory to a deadly assault upon other neighbours. When Eliot in 1657 preached to the little tribe of Podunks near Hartford, and asked them if they were willing to accept of Jesus Christ as their saviour, their old men scornfully answered No! they had parted with most of their land, but they were not going to become the white man's servants. A rebuke administered to Eliot by Uncas in 1674 has a similar implication. When the apostle was preaching one evening in a village over which that sachem claimed jurisdiction, an Indian arose and announced himself as a deputy of Uncas. Then he said, "Uncas is not well pleased that the English should pass over Mohegan river to call his Indians to pray to God." [31]

Thus, no matter how benevolent the white man's intentions, he could not fail to be dreaded by the Indians as a powerful and ever encroaching enemy.

Even in his efforts to keep the peace and prevent tribes from taking the warpath without his permission, he was interfering with the red man's cherished pastime of murder and pillage. The appeals to the court at Plymouth, the frequent summoning of sachems to Boston, to explain their affairs and justify themselves against accusers, must have been maddening in their effects upon the Indian; for there is one sound instinct which the savage has in common with the most progressive races, and that is the love of self-government that resents all outside interference. All things considered, it is remarkable that peace should have been maintained in New England from 1637 to 1675; and probably nothing short of the consuming vengeance wrought upon the Pequots could have done it. But with the lapse of time the wholesome feeling of dread began to fade away, and as the Indians came to use musket instead of bow and arrow, their fear of the English grew less, until at length their ferocious temper broke forth in an epidemic of fire and slaughter that laid waste the land. [Sidenote: It is remarkable that peace should have been so long preserved]

Massasoit, chief sachem of the Wampanoags and steadfast ally of the Plymouth colonists, died in 1660, leaving two sons, Wamsutta and Metacom, or as the English nicknamed them, Alexander and Philip. Alexander succeeded to his father's position of savage dignity and influence, but his reign was brief. Rumours came to Plymouth that he was plotting mischief, and he was accordingly summoned to appear before the General Court of that colony and explain himself. He seems to have gone reluctantly, but he succeeded in satisfying the magistrates of his innocence of any evil designs. Whether he caught cold at Plymouth or drank rum as only Indians can, we do not know. At any rate, on starting homeward, before he had got clear of English territory, he was seized by a violent fever and died. The savage mind knows nothing of pneumonia or delirium tremens. It knows nothing of what we call natural death. To the savage all death means murder, for like other men he judges of the unknown by the known. In the Indian's experience normal death was by tomahawk or firebrand; abnormal death (such as we call natural) must come either from poison or from witchcraft. So when the honest chronicler Hubbard tells us that Philip suspected the Plymouth people of poisoning his brother, we can easily believe him. It was long, however, before he was ready to taste the sweets of revenge. He schemed and plotted in the dark. In one respect the Indian diplomatist is unlike his white brethren; he does not leave state-papers behind him to reward the diligence and gratify the curiosity of later generations; and accordingly it is hard to tell how far Philip was personally responsible for the storm which was presently to burst upon New England. [Sidenote: Deaths of Massasoit and Alexander] [Sidenote: Philip's designs]