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Aims... of founders of
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GENERAL LIBRARY
University of Michigan
Presented by
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William Kalby
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I.
THE AIMS AND PURPOSES OF THE FOUNDERS
OF MASSACHUSETTS.
II.
THEIR TREATMENT OF INTRUDERS AND
DISSENTIENTS.
BY GEORGE E. ELLIS.

I.
THE AIMS AND PURPOSES OF THE FOUNDERS OF
91689
MASSACHUSETTS.
II.
THEIR TREATMENT OF INTRUDERS AND
DISSENTIENTS.
TWO LECTURES
OF A
COURSE BY MEMBERS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS
HISTORICAL SOCIETY,
Delivered before the Lowell Enstitute,
ON JAN. 8 AND JAN. 12, 1869.
BY GEORGE E. ELLIS.
ď
BOSTON:
BAS
PRESS OF JOHN WILSON AND SON.
1869.

1
пориви
THE AIMS AND PURPOSES
OF THE
FOUNDERS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS COLONY.
"TANTUM RELIGIO POTUIT."
!
.......
THE AIMS AND PURPOSES
OF THE
FOUNDERS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS COLONY.
C
"TANTUM RELIGIO POTUIT.”
AM to speak of the Aims and Purposes of the Founders of
the Colony, now the State, of Massachusetts. What were
the ends and objects of their enterprise? what its motive and
its design? It ought to be easy for us to meet these questions
with a full and sufficient answer. We have many and very
distinct avowals from most of the leaders in that enterprise.
From these, digested and harmonized, we might well expect to
learn their real intent. And if it be suggested
And if it be suggested as it often has
been that these avowals of theirs were not frank disclosures
of their real motives, but were misleading or deceptive, designed
to cover their secret purposes, which it would not have been
safe or for their own ultimate success to reveal, then we have
another means of reaching the truth. On the principle that
actions speak louder than words, we have a sure interpretation
of their motives in their deeds, in the course which they pursued,
in the measures which they originated, in the records of their
legislation and administration, and in their practical manage-
ment of their affairs.
If the views which are now to be presented have the warrant
of truth, it will appear that there is no occasion for charging
them with insincerity, or with secrecy; and that their avowed
motives were put into their actions.
1 Less than half of the matter of the following Lecture, with the authorities
quoted in it, was read on its delivery. The extracts from documents on which its
statements and arguments are based, are here printed at length.
6
THE AIMS AND PURPOSES OF THE
}
!
M
It may as well be stated distinctly, at the start, that I intend
to controvert, or at least to qualify and correct, the current
opinion, the so-called popular and generally accepted idea, of the
motive of their enterprise. An error, of the sort defined as the
suppression of the truth, has worked into our history. By some
strange process, the key has been lost to modern use which alone
can make it intelligible as a whole, and reveal the consistency
of its parts. Inadvertence and misconstruction, rather than any
intentional unfairness, have confused and mystified this subject.
Dr. Palfrey, the latest, and incomparably the best, of our his-
torians, so thorough and able and trustworthy indeed, that
there is no reason why he should not always be the last of them,
after rehearsing preliminaries, and bringing the founders of
Massachusetts to these shores, gives us this sentence:
"As a corporation, the company had obtained the ownership of a large
American territory, on which it designed to place a colony which should
be a refuge for civil and religious freedom.” ¹
But on the very preceding page the historian has quoted the
words of Winthrop, the governor and master-spirit of the colony,
as found in a beautiful little treatise, called "A Model of Chris-
tian Charity," written by him on his ocean passage hither.
These are the words:
K
"It is by a mutual consent, through a special overruling Providence,
and a more than ordinary approbation of the churches of Christ the
work we have in hand, to seek out a place of cohabitation and consort-
ship, under a due form of government, both civil and ecclesiastical."
1 Hist. of New Eng., vol. i. p. 314.
2 The spirit of earnest and gentle devoutness which runs through this little essay
gives us an engaging revelation of the character of the writer. Though it is anti-
cipating a point to be more emphatically insisted upon by and by, another quotation
from the essay may be introduced here. It will prepare us for a further dealing
with more matter that is like it.
"Thus stands the cause between God and us. We are entered into Covenant
with Him for this worke. We have taken out a Commission. The Lord hath
given us leave to drawe our own articles. We have professed to enterprise these
and those accounts, upon these and those ends. We have hereupon besought Him
of favour and blessing. Now if the Lord shall please to heare us, and bring us in
peace to the place we desire, then hath hee ratified this covenant and sealed our
Commission, and will expect a strict performance of the articles contained in it; but
if wee shall neglect the observation of these articles, which are the ends wee have
propounded, and, dissembling with our God, shall fall to embrace this present world
FOUNDERS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS COLONY.
7
There is a wide discrepancy between the statement made by
the historian and that made by the Governor. The variance is
great even, as measured by words. - by words, which change
their meanings with time and use, and are charged with more
or less of meaning according to the intelligence of readers or
hearers. But far greater than the difference between the verbal
statements is the variance in the substance and the matter of the
two assertions. What Governor Winthrop so distinctly affirms.
about the intentions of his company, taken for what it signified
at the time when it was written, conveys something amazingly
different, wide apart, from the idea which those who read the sen-
tence of Dr. Palfrey would draw from it. Now, the difference in
the substance and purport of what goes respectively with those
two statements, to my mind, corresponds exactly to the erroneous
writing and reading of our early history, which has dropped out
of recognition the real aims and purposes of the founders of
Massachusetts, and substituted for them other motives and ends,
avowed or secret.
The difference between the Governor's "place of cohabitation
and consortship, under a due form of government, both civil and
ecclesiastical," and the historian's "place of refuge for civil and
religious freedom," is, one may say, immeasurable by com-
parison or contrast. The purpose which the Governor recog-
nizes, positively and completely excluded every thing that is
conveyed to us in the phrase used by Dr. Palfrey and by our-
selves. We have civil and religious freedom in this State now.
But what we have as such was not in the minds of the Fathers.
They never designed it or planned for it. On the contrary, in
view of their real intent and aim, the purpose which mastered
and put them willingly and heroically to its service, what is
civil and religious freedom to us, would have been to them a
dread and woe.
I might quote a long and suggestive series of statements from
the pens of the ablest writers in Massachusetts, who have found.
occasion to give their own views as to the purpose and aim of
and prosecute our carnal intentions, seeking greate things for ourselves and our
posterity, the Lord will surely breake out in wrathe against us, be revenged of such
a [sinful] people, and make us knowe the price of the breache of such a covenant."
- Mass. Hist. Collections, xxvii. p. 46.
8
THE AIMS AND PURPOSES OF THE
:
the original colonists. My space restricts me here within narrow
limits.
Governor Hutchinson says,
L«It was one great design of the first planters of the Massachusetts
colony to obtain for themselves and their posterity the liberty of worship-
ping God in such manner as appeared to them to be most agreeable to
the sacred Scriptures. Upon their removal, they supposed their relation
both to the civil and ecclesiastical government of England, except so far
as a special reserve was made by their charter, was at an end, and that
they had right to form such new model of both as best pleased them." 1
Judge Story says,
拳
​"The fundamental error of our ancestors, an error which began with
the very settlement of the colony, was a doctrine which has since been
happily exploded; I mean the necessity of a union between church and
state. To this they clung as to the ark of their safety."
This error is what we see. The colonists found in it their
obligation and motive.
Mr. Quincy says the colonists did not come here " to acquire
liberty for all sorts of consciences, but to vindicate and maintain
the liberty of their own consciences. [They did not cross the
Atlantic on a crusade in behalf of the rights of mankind in
general, but in support of their own rights and liberties."3 But
all depends upon the view which the colonists had of the extent,
nature, and use of "their own rights and liberties."
There are those who charge themselves with the responsibility
of defending and vindicating the Fathers of Massachusetts, alike.
against censures and assertions which are perfectly true, as well
as against aspersions and slanders which are false and malig
nant. Their defence in either case is made difficult, and always
will be unsatisfactory and insufficient, unless we start fairly with
an understanding of their real motive and design. This may
prove, on the search, to have been one of such a nature, such
an inspiration, that they shall need no vindication or apology
for having been guided by it. It may prove that, in the light
and under the sway of a supposed obligation which furnished
1 History, vol. i. pp. 368-9.
2 Commemoration of the Settlement of Salem.
Address: Second Century of Boston.
FOUNDERS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS COLONY.
9
them their enterprise, they will as little need to be relieved of
any censure for what they did to others, or to each other, in
attempting to accomplish it, as to be condoled with, pitied, or
wept over for the stern sufferings to which they subjected them-
selves in pursuit of their great aim.
The attempts which are made to vindicate the Fathers of
Massachusetts-to extenuate their errors, to reduce or apologize
for their harsh spirit and their severe and, to us, cruel dealings
do not reach to the bottom of the matter; they are not suc-
cessful; they are not consistent with truth. By some strange
oversight, many of their descendants have failed to inform them-
selves how they may wisely deal with criticisms and censures
visited upon an ancestry whom they feel bound to defend. On
no subject dealt with among us, in lectures, orations, sermons,
poems, historical addresses, and even in our choice school litera-
ture, has there been such an amount of crude, sentimental, and
wasteful rhetoric, or so much weak and vain pleading, as on
this. Those old forefathers who are thus patronized, flattered,
and stood for, if they could listen to or read what is thus offered
in their behalf, would themselves repudiate the larger part of it.
They would feel aggrieved equally, perhaps, by their champions
as by their defamers. The root of the whole error, common alike
to those who censure and those who defend those ancient
Fathers, is in the assumption that they came here mainly to seek,
establish, and enjoy liberty of conscience; that this was their
inspiration, their motive, their aim. Their assailants and their
defenders both agree, in the main, in asserting or allowing this;
and they are both wrong.
Starting from this assumption, their assailants proceed to say,
that [these Fathers very soon showed that it was only liberty of
conscience, and that a very peculiar conscience, of their own, which
they sought for,-liberty to indulge their own notions and
intolerant spirit;) that they at once became the relentless per-
secutors of every opinion and belief varying from their own, and
stopped at no severity or cruelty in repressing and punishing
every form of dissent; imprisoning, banishing, whipping, fining,
mutilating, and hanging all who questioned their ways. They
did all these harsh and cruel things. They were deadly enemies
of every form of what they called heresy; and some free-
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10
THE AIMS AND PURPOSES OF THE
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thinking, if they could have reached it, they would have regarded
as punishable as some free-speaking. They restricted the right
of citizenship, in the franchise, the right of choosing and of
being chosen to office, to those who had accepted their reli-
gious covenant and become church-members. They not only
punished strangers and interlopers coming into their jurisdiction
whose ways and opinions offended them; but they also pro-
ceeded, almost to the last penalties of their rigid code, against
a succession of men and women in their own religious fellow-
ship, who raised strife or dissent. They even fettered themselves
by disabling covenants and compacts, and bound themselves in
severe subjection to tests and obligations of the sternest sort;
willingly renouncing a large measure of that liberty which we
so naturally exercise.
These, certainly, were strange doings for men and women
professing liberty of conscience, self-exiled for the purpose of
providing a safe harborage for it. If they did all these things
by a rule of their own opinionativeness, measured by a standard
of their own devising, with no appeal, outside of themselves, to
an authority held by them as equally supreme for their own
guidance and that of all others, their course would indeed.
present the most marvellous phenomenon in history. If they
had intended to afford such an asylum, and had in writing or in
spoken word avowed it, one would have thought that the first
instance in which they violated or impaired it, would have
opened their eyes to the marked and glaring inconsistency of
their course. At any rate, how easy would it have been for the
first victim of their intolerance to have quoted their own pro-
fessions against them!-an opportunity never availed of from
first to last by any one of their victims, for the very excellent
reason, as we shall soon see, that the founders of Massachusetts
had made no such professions, but were consecrated to an enter-
prise so pledged and constrained in itself that it would not have
admitted of any laxness.
The simple truth is, that the founders of Massachusetts never
professed or promised any thing that is implied to us in the
phrase "liberty of conscience." After having read every thing
that I know of as extant in print, or manuscript, from the pens
of those exiles, I feel justified in stating positively that they did
Maou
FOUNDERS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS COLONY.
11
not come here to seek, nor even to indulge themselves in,
"liberty of conscience," in any thing like the meaning which
that phrase has to us. We mislead ourselves when we assert or
allow that they recognized any thing of the sort. Not a single
sentence can be quoted from any one of them committing them
to it. You may find the words, the phrase, in their writings,
often repeated and very emphatic; but when it is used to express
any thing of what we mean by it, that thing is sternly repudi-
ated; and when the phrase is a part of their own vernacular, it
covers something which is only a part of a much larger whole,
and which defined rather a limitation, a subjection, than an
enfranchisement, of natural liberty. We must not put our
meaning into their phrase, but their meaning.
It can hardly be necessary to avert here the suggestion of a
quibble or a cavil, to the effect that these self-exiled colonists
were still exercising that same free will and private judgment, alike
in what they renounced and in what they accepted and pledged
themselves to believe and do, which practically defines liberty
of conscience. The subject of a Jesuit novitiate may exercise
that "liberty" in putting himself under a rule which henceforth
binds him to forego it. If, as I shall attempt to show, the
Fathers of Massachusetts felt, avowed, and put themselves under
the sway of, an obligation to an external rule, which overbore
henceforward the exercise of any natural freedom for changing
or qualifying their allegiance and subjection to it, then it would
seem that we should bring them before us rather as the awed
and pledged subjects of a yoke to which they had submitted
themselves, than as free rovers not as yet persuaded to what
they should commit themselves, if to any thing or to anybody.
They certainly were not "fancy-free."
Every conception which those men had of liberty, civil or
religious, was of something subjected to the sway and restraint
of law, a qualified, dependent, conditioned, and reduced
freedom. Liberty under law was their motto, and it depended
upon the nature and the quality of the law to decide the nature
and the quality of the liberty. In any province or exercise of
liberty, they recognized, frowning or presiding over it, some
symbol or dispensation of authority.
In a great controversy rising here in the Court from a small
J
12
THE AIMS AND PURPOSES OF THE
1
occasion, in 1645, and leading to what is called "the impeach-
ment" of Winthrop, then Deputy Governor, he made an
admirable speech, in which we find him giving his idea of
liberty as follows:
"For the other point concerning liberty, I observe a great mistake in
the country about that. There is a twofold liberty, — natural (I mean as
our nature is now corrupt) and civil or federal. The first is common to
man with beasts and other creatures. By this, man, as he stands in
relation to man simply, hath liberty to do what he lists; it is a liberty to
evil as well as to good. This liberty is incompatible and inconsistent
with authority. The exercise and maintaining of this liberty makes men
grow more evil, and in time to be worse than brute beasts: omnes sumus
licentiâ deteriores. This is that great enemy of truth and peace, that
wild beast, which all the ordinances of God are bent against to restrain
and subdue it. The other kind of liberty I call civil or federal; it may
also be termed moral, in reference to the covenant between God and
man, in the moral law, and the politic covenants and constitutions amongst
men themselves. This liberty is the proper end and object of authority,
and cannot subsist without it; and it is a liberty to that only which is
good, just, and honest. This liberty you are to stand for, with the hazard
not only of your goods, but of your lives, if need be. Whatsoever
crosseth this is not authority, but a distemper thereof. This liberty is
maintained and exercised in a way of subjection to authority; it is of the
same kind wherewith Christ hath made us free." 1
De Tocqueville, in his "Democracy in America," 2 quotes the
above, and describes it as a "fine definition of liberty."
Of liberty of conscience, either as an abstraction or as an abso-
lute right, they with whom we are dealing had no conception,
as of a good thing. Certainly, they had no respect for it, no
confidence in it. They would have dreaded it beyond our
power in these days to imagine. They had begun to see around
them, in their native England, the threatenings of some of the
effects and results of just what we mean by liberty of conscience,
and they shuddered at them. Their dread of those consequences
was one of the satisfactions which they afterwards found in
their exile. [It would be much nearer to the truth,—indeed, it
is the truth itself, and it would be truer to all the facts of the
case, to the integrity of history, and to the right use of terms
1 Life and Letters, vol. ii. pp. 340, 341.
2 Bowen's ed., vol. i. p. 52.
FOUNDERS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS COLONY.
13
which get changed in their import and burden, to say, frankly
and boldly, that our Fathers came here to get away from, to get
rid of, such liberty of conscience, as to them a hateful, pernicious,
and ruinous thing, sure to result in impiety and anarchy. They
did not claim it for themselves, except under a restriction and
limitation, soon to be defined, which would render the claim
almost nugatory in our view of it. They would have shuddered
at indulging themselves in what is now known as such liberty.
To have expected them to approve of it in others, and to provide
for it, would be an absurdity. It was the one horrid, dreaded
bugbear of their fancies, the one proscribed iniquity of their
religion. A conscience free, in our loose sense of the word,
would have been to them far worse than no conscience at all.]
1
Attracted as I was, years ago, to the study of their enterprise,
as one of the most striking episodes in the world's annals, con-
sidering what great and marvellously prospered issues have
come from it, I soon learned, that the fulsome panegyrics and
the sentimental rhetoric spent upon those stern old Fathers,
were worse than wasted; that the superficial way in which their
history has been read and referred to, was introducing misrepre-
sentation and misunderstanding; and that they had become the
subjects of false praise and of unjust censure, the joint product
of which had come to be visited upon them in the form of a
facile and flippant ridicule. No one among the living genera-
tion here, native or alien, is called upon to undertake their
championship in terms which will vindicate their superstitions
or their severities, or which will cover an approbation of the
fundamental principles assumed or adopted by them. They
are, however, justly entitled to be set forth in the light of their
own age, under the guidance of their own sincere convictions,
and with an intelligent, truthful recognition of their master-
motive, which was as lofty a one as has ever engaged sages,
philanthropists, or saints in any earthly enterprise. It is painful
to any one who, inheriting their blood and sharing the blessings
of their sufferings and labors, is also versed in their history, to
hear them either falsely praised or unfairly criticised, ridiculed,
and maligned. In the mixtures of populations in our northern
cities, and in the spirit of religious partisanship which is rife
among us, those who are very glad to avail themselves of the
14
THE AIMS AND PURPOSES OF THE
freedom and thrift of our Puritan heritage, often allow them-
selves to speak contemptuously and derisively of the original
colonists. What has come of their enterprise and institutions,
is found to be desirable by all who share in it; but not only
gratitude, truth itself, is often forgotten in the enjoyment of the
inheritance. The story of the intolerance of the colonists is
curtly told in epigrams and stinging jests. Their grim and
morose manners, their superstitions, austerities, and cruel enact-
ments are enlarged upon. Some of their lineal progeny give
them over to travesties and railleries of light and bitter tongues.
Any thing that could be viewed as a defence or vindication
of them; any thing, even, which, falling short of that, would
claim for them an average measure of intelligence and common
sense, — must be given over, if it takes in the fancy that these old
Fathers had main regard for what we mean by liberty of con-
science, or by civil freedom.
Read their history searchingly, penetrate to the motives and
convictions of the men and women themselves, and the truth
will reveal itself to you, that never was there in this world a com-
pany of persons who, individually and in their joint fellowship,
held their consciences as subject to a more constraining obligation
than they did theirs. I never find any one of their pleas or
avowals alleging a claim to, or an exercise of, liberty of con-
science, which fails to qualify it by a recognition of their subjec-
tion to a Scripture rule, in indulging themselves in that liberty.
Thus, in the Humble Petition and Address of the General Court
to Charles II., in 1660-1, Endicott being governor, they say:
"Our
liberty to walk in the faith of the Gospel, with all good conscience,
according to the order of the Gospel, was the cause of our trans-
porting ourselves," &c.
A rule, or mastery, which they accepted over their consciences,
became to them, in fact, a substitute for conscience. You must
look behind, deeply below, this pretence of freedom of conscience,
in the ordinary use of the phrase, for the influence, the sway, the
conviction, the purpose, aye, the inspiration, which moved them.
They were the last men in the world to trust to a natural con-
science. They were a covenanted people. The Puritan Bible
was the Lord of their consciences; and they put themselves under
the most implicit and unlimited subjection to what they owned
FOUNDERS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS COLONY.
15
as its just authority over them. True, it may be said they fol-
lowed their individual consciences, and allowed them exercise in
approving and putting themselves under a rule, which, for them,
represented a supreme authority. But, in so doing, they under-
stood that they parted with what others, "uncovenanted," might
regard as their liberty. Their Bible training had preoccupied and
restricted their freedom. Their opinions, their motives, their
actions, their laws, their institutions, were all restrained - we
should say, hampered by their religious belief, reducing their
natural freedom within rigid limitations. We may in these days
of ours question the reasonableness of that belief of theirs; and
we may deny that the Bible has the kind and degree of authority
over the natural conscience which they assigned to it. But these
are our opinions, not theirs; and in order to see and know them,
we must get into their atmosphere. The fact is, that a con-
science in subjection to a severe rule, and not a free conscience,
guided them. So little did they think of what they might do,
if they indulged their own notions and speculations, that their
whole earnestness of purpose was concentrated in putting them-
selves under a disabling restriction of their own wills and wishes.
The free exercise of their individual consciences would have
divided them in opinion, and prevented any harmony of action.
Only as they consented to forego individualism in speculation
and belief, through a common conscientiousness subjecting them
to the rule of the Bible, could they walk and act together.
I will endeavor to state, in a plain way, the simple and
authentic truth, which will furnish the key to the motives and
intent of the colonists.
Certain proprietary rights and privileges on land and water,
in a region defined as Massachusetts Bay, had been secured by
royal charter to a trading company of adventurers in England.
Twenty patentees were named as constituting that company;
viz., a governor, a deputy governor, and eighteen assistants,
seven beside the governor and deputy governor being a quorum
for business. The company, by its charter, could make as many
more persons free of it, freemen, so called, that is, members or
partners, voters, proprietors, as they pleased, and on such
terms, conditions, and qualifications as they pleased. The com-
pany had absolute jurisdiction over its territory; and the charter
16
THE AIMS AND PURPOSES OF THE
gave it full powers of legislation and administration, subject only
to accordance with the laws of England. The charter provisions
for this power and these rights are explicit, full, and emphatic.
To the company was given "full and absolute power and autho-
rity, to correct, punish, pardon, and rule" all English subjects
that should at any time adventure to, or inhabit within, the pre-
cincts of its jurisdiction; and, "for their special defence and
safety, to encounter, expulse, repel, and resist by force of arms,
as well by sea as by land, and by all fitting ways and means
whatsoever, all such person and persons, as shall at any time
hereafter attempt or enterprise the destruction, invasion, detri-
ment, or annoyance to the said plantation or inhabitants."
Here, certainly, was a large franchise, with broad privileges.
and well-fortified rights. Yet nothing short of all this would
have secured the enlistment of able and well-disposed men
in an enterprise that stood out alone hopefully among many
similar enterprises in those days which had disastrously failed.
The company needed all that the charter pledged to it by
the royal seal: the right of self-administration; of deciding and
imposing the terms on which it would admit free associates,
who might advance or ruin its schemes; legal rights over its
jurisdiction; and power to punish, expel, and thwart the designs
of all who might threaten or practise harm or annoyance to it.
Certainly the question may be raised, and a very vigorous and
equal-handed discussion may be maintained upon it, whether the
three provisions in their charter, on which they insisted so
strenuously, and with their own self-favoring interpretation of
them, the absolute jurisdiction of the soil, the authority to
define their own terms for admitting freemen, and the right to
drive out those whose presence troubled them, - allowed of the
strained use and application to which the proprietors applied
them. It is to my purpose, however, only to accept the fact, that
the authorities did so interpret those provisions, and did, in the
open face of day, act upon such interpretations. This they did,
not only in their secret confidences with each other, but equally
in public avowals. They could not expect to make a secret of
their pretensions, not even of their bold denial of a right of appeal
from them to English courts; for there was almost a worn track
and highway on land and sea, between the Massachusetts court
FOUNDERS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS COLONY.
17
and those courts, made by complainants. Indeed, even to the
last death-struggle of the authorities to retain their charter
against commissioners and against Charles II., they stood
stoutly to their first construction of it.
now.
It was probably intended and expected, though not a word
was covenanted or intimated to that effect, that the company
and its charter should remain and be administered in England;
vessels and servants being sent hither to fish and trade. As to the
legality of its transfer by charter and local government to this
spot, it is not within the scope of my lecture to argue or pro-
nounce. Nor is any discussion of that matter needful here and
For, as we have seen what powers of local jurisdiction
the charter assured to the company, it would seem that its offi-
cers might have done, through their resident agents here, sub-
stantially what, and all that, they did when they were established
in their jurisdiction. They could make laws for all who were
living here; they could admit or reject at their pleasure, and on
their own terms, any who sought to vote in their affairs; and
they could warn off and drive out intruders. Had the charter
and administration never been transferred, the company would
still have had rule here.
G
A merely mercenary spirit, bent on pecuniary gains, had, in
the main, guided the company in its origin, as it had similar
patentees corporated by prior grants and charters. But there
were in its membership men strongly swayed and leavened by
Puritanism; and the extraordinary excitement, the religious
fervor, and the civil and political agitations of the crisis in Eng-
land, fast working towards civil war and revolution,-in-
creased and strengthened that influence. While Endicott at
Salem, with a body of associates and servants, was acting as
local governor and agent of the company, and receiving his in-
structions from the charter administration in England, we find
the following entry on the original records, of matter of busi-
ness, as the company was assembled in its General Court, at the
house of its deputy governor, Thomas Goff, in London, July 28,
1629:
M
"Mr. Governor (Cradock) read certain propositions conceived by him-
self; viz., that for the advancement of the plantation, the inducing and
encouraging persons of worth and quality to transport themselves and
2
18
THE AIMS AND PURPOSES OF THE
families thither, and for other weighty reasons therein contained, to
transfer the government of the plantation to those that shall inhabit
there, and not to continue the same in subordination to the company here,
as now it is. This business occasioned some debate: but by reason of the
many great and considerable consequences thereupon depending, it was
not now resolved upon; but those present are desired privately and
seriously to consider hereof, and to set down their particular reasons in
writing pro and contra, and to produce the same at the next General Court;
where, they being reduced to heads, and maturely considered of, the com-
pany may then proceed to a final resolution thereon; and in the mean time
they are desired to carry this business secretly, that the same be not
divulged."
tion.
For any thing we know to the contrary, this significant prop-
osition, as well as the purpose which it proposed, may have
originated in the mind of Governor Cradock. That it does not
appear to have surprised or at all displeased some of those, at
least, who heard it as "conceived by himself," would indicate
that preparation had been made for its bold utterance, and for
its entry upon the records, by previous suggestion and consulta-
At any rate, the purpose of transferring the charter and
government was not of a sort to have been born full-shaped for
the occasion of its public utterance, on the spur of a moment.
The matter was made the especial business of the Court at a
meeting a month afterwards; the point under consideration
being, "to give answer to divers gentlemen intending to go into
New England, whether or no the chief government of the plan-
tation, together with the patent, should be settled in New Eng
land or here." Committees were appointed representing both
alternatives, with liberty to get advice and opinions from others
not belonging to the company; and they were to prepare their
respective arguments, from which a report might be digested for
the General Court the next day. The deliberateness of the method,
and yet the short time allowed for the decision, is another indica-
tion of much previous conference. The decision was made on
the next day, August 29, when, after a hearing of reasons on
both sides, and a long debate, the question was called for,
whether the patent and the government be transferred, "so as it
may be done legally." By erection of hands, it appeared by
the general consent of the company, that the transfer should be
FOUNDERS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS COLONY.
19
made; "and accordingly an order to be drawn up." At the Court
held on September 29, following, the orders above agreed upon
having been read, further decisive action was deferred, on account
of the absence of some of the leading assistants, who had been
at the previous meetings. But in the mean while some prelimi-
nary measures were provided for, especially " to take advice of
learned council, whether the same may be legally done or no."
At the meeting of the General Court, October 15,—at which,
significantly, Mr. John Winthrop, and some others of like spirit,
appear for the first time, the transfer, and arrangements inci-
dental to it, were fully decided. On the 20th of the same month,
a General Court was held, for the purpose of choosing new officers
of the company, with reference to the enterprise agreed upon, as
neither the governor nor the deputy intended to go over at that
time. Mr. John Winthrop, "both for his integrity and sufficiency,"
was chosen governor, and Mr. John Humphrey deputy; but as the
latter, when the time for embarkation came, was to stay behind,
Thomas Dudley was put in his place. One other entry on the
records must be copied here. At the Court on November 25,-
(C
G
-
Upon the motion of Mr. White, to the end that this business might
be proceeded in with the first intention, which was chiefly the glory of
God; and to that purpose, that their meetings might be sanctified by the
prayers of some faithful ministers, resident here in London, whose advice
would be likewise requisite upon many occasions, the court thought fit to
admit into the freedom of this company Mr. Jo: Archer and Mr. Philip
Nye, ministers here in London, who being here present kindly accepted
thereof. Also Mr. White did recommend unto them Mr. Nathaniel
Ward, of Standon.” 1
This last extract must convey to us all that it reports, all that
it suggests, and a great deal more also. It gives us explicitly a
fragment from a history which we have the means of setting into
a more full narration. A change had evidently passed upon the
Massachusetts Company, a change in purpose, aim, and
membership. So far as its business proceedings had now come
to embrace a prayer meeting, the token is a reminder of much
beside. Some of the preparatory agencies which wrought to the
result may be indicated. When Deputy Governor Dudley had
1 Court Records, vol. i. pp. 49-63.
20
THE AIMS AND PURPOSES OF THE
¡
got a rude cottage for himself here, less than a year after his arri-
val, he addressed a letter, of singular interest and pathos, to the
Countess of Lincoln, the mother of the wife of Isaac Johnson,
his associate. In this letter he says,
66
Touching the plantation which we have here begun, it fell out thus.
About the year 1627, some friends, being together in Lincolnshire, fell into
discourse about New England, and the planting of the Gospel there; and,
after some deliberation, we imparted our reasons, by letters and messages
to some in London and the west country; where it was likewise deliber-
ately thought upon, and at length, with often negotiation, so ripened," &c.,
as to result in the procuring of the royal charter, and in the
plantation. These "Boston men," so called, reinforced the funds.
of the company. It was the coming in of the religious spirit
into the business plans, by the new membership of the company,
which alone induced the transfer of the charter and the govern-
ment. In the little treatise of Winthrop, written on the Atlantic
Ocean, already quoted, he says, "We are a company professing
ourselves fellow-members of Christ." Some links out of the
chain which connected the trading company with the religious
colony, were wanting, until the recent discovery of a large mass
of the papers of Governor Winthrop revealed to us certain night
rides, secret consultations, and deliberate negotiations, weighing
of arguments and devotional exercises, which brought him into
membership of the company, committed him to its bold and
consecrated enterprise, and led to his choice, as its all sufficient
leader.
Nearly at the same time on which the valuable mass of
"Winthrop Papers" came to light in New London, Conn., con-
taining, among others, the governor's autograph copy of that
significant document called "General Considerations for the
Plantation in New England," &c., John Forster, Esq., published
in London a biography of that noble patriot Sir John Eliot.
The Hon. R. C. Winthrop having published the above named
document in the "Life and Letters" of his ancestor, with the
reasons for assigning the authorship to him, had shortly after-
wards noticed an allusion by Mr. Forster, to a paper found among
Eliot's, alluding to New-England colonization. The Earl of St.
Germans, a descendant of Eliot, on being applied to by Mr.
Winthrop, kindly sent to our Society a transcript of the paper,
•
FOUNDERS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS COLONY.
21
which proved to be a copy, with some variations, of the "Con-
siderations." It was made by Eliot himself, in the Tower, to be
sent to his illustrious compeer, John Hampden. We have now
four copies of that important document which did such service
of a religious sort in our enterprise.'
The enterprise was eminently one which was originated, con-
trolled, and guided by a leadership. It had favorers, coadjutors,
subordinates, sympathizers, and servants; but its aim, its quick-
ening motive, and its inspiration, came from a very small
number, perhaps from only half a score of persons, its master-
spirits. These devised and purposed; they bore the sacrifices and
renewed the pledges of self-consecration under dark and discour-
aging aspects. They furnished in council the practical wisdom
adapted to the development of the scheme, and its only security
in emergencies. They were men who could confide in each
other.
M
Magn
I feel justified in adopting Winthrop as my chief authority
and guide in interpreting the motives of his associates for whom
he speaks, as well as for his own. The crisis in the affairs of the
company in England was marked by his coming into it, and his
coming in brought in a religious intensity in its purposes. He
was himself at the time under deep religious impressions. The
colony for the twenty remaining years of his life was more in-
fluenced by him than by any other person, alike in its civil and
religious administration, not excepting even Cotton. We
have more full and frank disclosures and avowals from his
pen, than from all others of his associates. These are cogent
reasons for implicit trust in him.
It was the working of the religious leaven in the company
which ensured the end of colonizing by the transfer of the gov-
ernment. Such members of the company as had no heart or
zeal for the work, dropped out of it; and new members were, for
its new consecration, drawn into it. Friends and well-wishers
in the kingdom, not belonging to it, nor intending to join it,
made generous and valuable gifts to it, because of its new
designs.
The counsellor of the company, Mr. White, who had procured
1 Historical Society Proceedings, 1864-5, pp. 413, &c.
22
THE AIMS AND PURPOSES OF THE
the drafting of its charter, and by whose calculation or foresight
it may perhaps have been contrived, that neither London nor
any other place was specified for its local administration, had
certified to the legality of its transfer. Had the intent been
known by the English authorities, we are not certain that it was
not known, the transfer would perhaps have been prevented.
Had those authorities been privileged with a prevision of what
was to come from establishing the charter here, they certainly
would have retained it in England; in fact would never have
allowed it to have passed the seals.
Coincidently with the departure of the colonists, the Rev. Mr.
White, of Dorchester, the chief prompter of the enterprise, pub-
lished his “ Planters' Plea," in explanation and justification of it.
In this, he says,-
j
Mag
"I should be very unwilling to hide any thing I think might be fit, to
discover the uttermost of the intentions of our planters in their voyage
to New England; and therefore shall make bold to manifest, not only what
I know, but what I guess, concerning their purpose. As it were absurd
to conceive they have all one mind, so were it more ridiculous to imagine
they have all one scope. Necessity may press some; novelty, draw on
others; hopes of gain in time to come may prevail with a third sort: but
that the most, and most sincere and godly part, have the advancement of
the Gospel for their main scope, I am confident. That of them some may
entertain hope and confidence of enjoying greater liberty there than here
in the use of some orders and ceremonies of our church, it seems very
probable."
The chosen leader of the enterprise was a providential man;
and from that hour till his death, twenty years after, he was its
hero and its saint. The members of that transported trading
company, represented by its officers, its freemen, and their ser-
vants, present themselves on this side of the great dreary ocean,
as a band of religious exiles. They appear in, they assume, that
character, at once. As such they prayed together under a huge
forest tree, and recognized the consecration of their enterprise.
And what was it? Now, in place of that silly fancy that they
were seeking to provide a refuge for freedom of conscience, let
us substitute their real inspiration and aim. Liberty of con-
science, in our full sense of the phrase, was preparing to assert
and exercise itself in England, at the time of their exile; and it
FOUNDERS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS COLONY.
23
was this fact, with "the prophaneness" and "disorder” there fer-
menting, which frightened our Fathers away from their dear old
home. We have a multitude of queer books and pamphlets,
the relics of those days,quaint, odd, wild, eccentric, in their
contents, gleaming here and there with grand and startling truths,
and proving fully this affirmation, that there is not a cobweb nor
a fancy, a notion nor a theory, a conceit nor an opinion in any
living brain to-day, in Boston, which was not soon after the emi-
gration held and avowed then and there. And this positive
statement, if it does not exhaust, at any rate puts to trial, the
utmost power of language. These dreams and heresies of vis-
ionaries, mystics, and bold thinkers, were, as we shall note by and
by, especially and painfully odious to those from whom we
inherit this Commonwealth. They wanted to get away from all
such hateful license, and to find protection from its risk in a
pledged and covenanted purpose. The Fathers of Massachusetts,
parting with their lands and houses at home, finally, with no
intent of return, once for all, agreed by a most solemn compact
at their own charges, and by an investment of all their worldly
goods, to avail themselves of their charter rights over the terri-
tory covered by their patent, to try here an experiment, which
seemed to them alike noble, practical, and religious.
And here I must avail myself of the privilege indulged to one
who, in a historical review, infers from results and developments
the nature of the primary causes and motives which originated
and guided them. From the frank and earnest and reiterated.
avowals of the leaders and the master-spirits of the enterprise,
and from their steadfast purpose and aim manifested in all their
subsequent measures, plans, legislation, and administration, I
infer the design which they had in view. I should have a right
to draw such an inference, if I had to do it solely as an interpre-
ter of actions, without any avowals of a direct sort to aid me.
But these avowals in words are not wanting, and they are in full
harmony with the deeds done. It is not necessary, to assure the
position which I take, that I should be held to show that, if the
question of purpose and motive had been put to each and every
party to this enterprise, including all its subordinates and ser-
vants, he would have answered as I answer for its leaders.
Even the leaders may not all have seen the full shape of their
24
THE AIMS AND PURPOSES OF THE
vision. But I have no misgiving as to what it was. The enter-
prise was no hap-hazard experiment in drifting, no waiting on the
luck of events. The serious earnestness with which it was
undertaken, corresponds to the resolute purpose with which it
was pursued by them.
Their lofty and soul-enthralling aim the condition and
reward of all their severe sufferings and arduous efforts was
the establishment and administration here of a religious and
civil commonwealth, which should bear the same relation to the
spirit and the letter of the whole Bible that the Jewish common-
wealth bore to the Law of Moses. This was the significance
and purport of the remarkable words written by Governor
Winthrop, on his passage hither, "to seek out a place of cohabi-
tation and consortship, under a due form of government, both
civil and ecclesiastical." The difference between the aim so
defined and the providing "a refuge for civil and religious free-
dom," will appear as we go along. An experiment was to
be put on trial here which, even we must say, had a right to
be tested, and which was worthy of being tested; but which
was regarded by our Fathers as holding them under a con-
secrated obligation to commit themselves to it. They organized
here a body politic, all whose laws, functions, and institutions
had rigid reference to their one supreme aim. Their own con-
sciences were held under thrall by it, and were free only in one
direction of obligation to it, that of whole-souled and life-
lasting loyalty to it. Two misgivings or fears, and only two,
were known to them: first, that they themselves, by fault or
infirmity, might fail of fidelity to it; or, second, that it should
be brought under peril from the wickedness or waywardness of
any who might creep in or start up among them. Against the
first danger, they sought security under a solemnly pledged
agreement and covenant, binding themselves to each other and
to God. Against the second risk, they believed they could pro-
tect themselves under their charter, by choosing only such
associates as they desired, and on their own terms, and by
exercising their royally sealed authority to resist, thwart, punish,
and drive out every one who might oppose or annoy them.
Mark the qualification in the statement just made, that the
projected religious commonwealth was to be founded and ad-
M
FOUNDERS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS COLONY.
25
ministered by the Bible, the whole Bible, not by the New
Testament alone. If, as Christians, they had adopted what is
generally held in these days as to the substantial substitution
of the New Scripture for the Old, their whole creed and rule
and legislation would have been different. But they revered
and used and treated the Holy Book as one whole. A single
sentence from any part of it was an oracle to them: it was as a
slice or a crumb from any part of a loaf of bread, all of the same
consistency. God, as King, had been the Lawgiver of Israel :
he should be their Lawgiver too. They had found so little.
satisfaction under the legislation of men, that they longed to put
themselves under the legislation of the Deity. Israel, as a
commonwealth, had been administered by his statutes: those
same statutes should bind their consciences, ratify their laws,
and rule their lives. They would make the support of religion
compulsory, as did the Jewish legislator. The Sabbath-breaker
and the blasphemer should stand as high criminals. The Church
should fashion the State, and be identical with it. Only experi-
enced and covenanted Christian believers, pledged by their
profession to accordance of opinion and purpose with the original
proprietors and exiles, should be admitted as freemen, or full
citizens of the commonwealth. They would restrain and limit
their own liberty of conscience, as well as their own freedom
of action, within Bible rules. In fact,-in spirit even more
than in the letter, they did adopt all of the Jewish code which
was in any way practicable for them. The leading minister of
the colony was formally appointed by the General Court to adapt
the Jewish law to their case; and it was enacted, that, till that
work was really done, "Moses, his Judicials," should be in full
force. Mr. Cotton in due time presented the results of his
labor in a code of laws illustrated by Scripture texts. This
code was not formally adopted by the Court; but the spirit of it,
soon rewrought into another body, had full sway.
It was known that Winthrop had written what he calls "a
small treatise," in 1644, at a period of some internal variance in
the colony, in which treatise he undertook to vindicate the
government from the "aspersion" of being arbitrary in its
conduct. This treatise came to light only a few years
ago, among some family papers, in the Governor's original
26
THE AIMS AND PURPOSES OF THE
autograph. In it are found the following very decisive state-
ments:
"By these it appears that the officers of this Bodye politick have a
Rule to walke by, in all their administrations, which Rule is the Worde
of God, and such conclusions and deductions as are or shalbe regularly
drawn from thence.
“The ffundamentalls which God gave to the Commonwealth of Israell
were a sufficient Rule to them, to guide all their Affaires; we havinge
the same, with all the Additions, explanations and deductions, which have
followed; it is not possible we should want a Rule in any case: if God
give wisdome to discerne it."¹
In the life of Mr. Cotton by his friend Mr. Davenport, we find
he following most explicit statement, which shows how far
these Fathers were from recognizing the plea for liberty of con-
science:
66
Considering that these Plantations had liberty to mould their civil
order into that form which they should find to be best for themselves, and
that here the churches and Commonwealth are complanted together in
holy covenant and fellowship with God in Christ Jesus, Mr. Cotton did,
at the request of the General Court in the Bay, draw an abstract of the
laws of judgement delivered from God by Moses to the Commonwealth
of Israel, so far forth as they are of moral, that is, of perpetual and uni-
versal, equity among all nations; especially such as these Plantations
are; wherein he advised that Theocrasie, i.e. God's government, might
be established as the best form of government, wherein the people that
choose rulers, are God's people in covenant with him, that is, members of
churches, and the men chosen by them to be rulers, such also, and the
laws of God, and the ministers of God, are consulted with by the Governor,
magistrates and people, in all hard cases and in matters of the Lord, that
is, of religion," &c.²
In July, 1634, the hearts of the colonists were gladdened
by the receipt of "Certain Proposals made by Lord Say, Lord
Brooke, and other persons of quality, as conditions of their
removing to England." Hutchinson has preserved these for us,
by printing them "with the answers thereto."
Besides proposing an aristocratic class for recognition in the
colony, these noblemen desired that the franchise should depend
1 Life and Letters, vol. ii. p. 445. 2 Hutchinson's Coll. of Papers, p. 161.
FOUNDERS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS COLONY.
27
upon property. The answer vindicates, wholly from Scripture
texts and examples, the law of the colony which restricted the
franchise to church-members.
Hutchinson also gives us a letter, on the same occasion, from
Mr. Cotton to Lord Say and Sele, which is in itself conclusive
as to the intent of the authorities. He writes in vindication
of their rule: —
"God hath so framed the state of church government and ordinances,
that they may be compatible to any commonwealth, though never so
much disordered in its frame. But yet, when a commonwealth hath
liberty to mould its own frame (scripturæ plenitudinem adoro), I conceive
the scripture hath given full direction for the right ordering of the same.
It is better that the Commonwealth be fashioned to the setting forth of
God's house, which is his church, than to accommodate the church frame
to the civil state. Democracy, I do not conceive, that ever God did
ordain as a fit government either for church or commonwealth. If the
people be governors, who shall be governed? As for Monarchy and
Aristocracy, they are both of them clearly approved and directed in
Scripture, yet so as referreth the sovereignty to himself, and setteth up
Theocracy in both, as the best form of Government in the Common-
wealth, as well as in the church." 1
Captain Edward Johnson, that serviceable man in so many
capacities, civil and military, came over with Winthrop's com-
pany. He understood well, and heartily sympathized with, the
purposes of the colonists, whose toils he shared, and whose for-
tunes he sought to record, though anonymously, in poetry and
verse, distressing as some of the latter is. His quaint and
grotesque but still instructive book" Wonder-working Provi-
dence of Sion's Saviour in New England" is strewn all over
with the tokens characteristic of the Biblical model of the
Commonwealth.
·
As a deputy of the Court, and himself one of the most
laborious and efficient members of the committee engaged in the
protracted work of digesting a body of laws, he may be regarded
as competent, as he certainly was frank, a witness of the intent
which underlaid all our early legislation. The following words
of his are certainly candid enough:-
"This year, 1646, the General Court appointed a Committee of divers
1 Hutchinson History, vol. i., Appendix.
28
THE AIMS AND PURPOSES OF THE
:
persons to draw up a Body of laws for the well ordering of this little
Commonwealth and to the end that they might be most agreeable with
the rule of Scripture, in every county there was appointed two Magistrates,
two Ministers, and two able persons from among the people, who having
provided such a competent number as was meet, together with the former
that were enacted newly amended, they presented them to the General
Court, where they were again perused and amended; and then another
committee chosen to bring them into form, and present them to the Court
again, who the year following passed an Act of confirmation upon them,
and so committed them to the Press; and in the year 1648, they were
printed, and now are to be seen of all men, to the end that none may plead
ignorance; and that all who intend to transport themselves hither, may
know this is no place of licentious liberty, nor will this people suffer any
to trample down this vineyard of the Lord, but with diligent execution
will cut off from the City of the Lord, the wicked doers; and if any man
can shew wherein any of them derogate from the Word of God, very
willingly will they accept thereof, and amend their imperfections (the
Lord assisting); but let not any ill-affected persons find fault with them,
because they suit not with their own humour, or because they meddle with
matters of Religion, for it is no wrong to any man, that a people who have
spent their estates, many of them, and ventured their lives for to keep
faith and a pure conscience, to use all means that the Word of God allows
for maintenance and continuance of the same, especially they have taken
up a desolate Wilderness to be their habitation, and not deluded any by
keeping their profession in huggermug, but point and proclaim to all the
way and course they intend, God willing, to walk in; if any will yet,
notwithstanding, seek to justle them out of their own right, let them not
wonder if they meet with all the opposition a people put to their greatest
straits can make," &c.¹
These extracts, and a score of others of a similar purport
might be culled from the writings of the leading exiles, tell the
whole story.
The actual code of laws adopted by the colony
-called "The Bodie of Liberties," prepared mainly by the Rev.
Nathaniel Ward of Ipswich - differs essentially from Mr.
Cotton's abstract, especially in dispensing for the most part with
scriptural citations; but in no single particular did the legislation
indicated by it, look away from or loosen its hold upon the
supreme purpose of the authorities, to establish and administer
here a strictly Biblical Commonwealth. Ward, who had had an
1 Book iii. chap. v., Poole's ed., p. 206.
FOUNDERS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS COLONY.
29
early legal training in England, stood for that aim and experi-
ment as firmly as did Cotton.
And then we are to remind ourselves that their Bible faith
was not merely a simply vague and general reverence for it, like
the sentiment which lingers now with their descendants. They
had no theory about the Bible: they never criticised it; and
they rarely suggested amendments, even of the English transla-
tion of it. They loved, honored, and revered it, and gave to it
the homage of their awed spirits. What testimony is borne to
this fact in their letters and diaries, in the implicit faith with
which they took down the texts and expositions of their minis-
ters, and quoted illustrations and parallelisms from the Bible, as
decisions for all cases! How earnestly did they strive to incor-
porate into their private and family life, not only the preceptive,
but as much as they could of even the ceremonial, matter of the
Scriptures!]
That frankly avowed and practically applied purpose of the
Fathers, of establishing here a Bible Commonwealth, "under a
due form of government, both civil and ecclesiastical," furnishes
the key to, the explanation of, all the dark things and all the
bright things in their early history. The young people educated
among us ought to read our history by that simple, plain inter-
pretation. The consciences of our Fathers were not free in our
sense of that word. They were held under rigid subjection to
what they regarded as God's Holy Word, through and through
in every sentence of it, just as the consciences of their Fathers
were held, under the sway of the Pope and the Roman Church.
The Bible was to them supreme. Their church was based on it,
modelled by it, governed by it; and they intended their State.
should be also. Two very striking and emphatic sentences from
the pen of Governor Winthrop convey the substance of vol-
umes; and who had better right than he to tell us his own
aim and that of his associates?
"Whereas the way of God hath always been to gather his churches
out of the world; now, the world, or civil state, must be raised out of
the churches." "The Magistrates are limited, both by their church
Covenant, and by their oath, and by the duty of their places to square all
their proceedings by the rule of God's Word [why did he not say by the
D
30
THE AIMS AND PURPOSES OF THE
law of England?] for the advancement of the Gospel and the weale
publick," &c.¹
This was their master aim, this was the vision of the soul
which led those exiles hither, and by the inspiration of which
alone, would they have come, or remained, or prospered. Con-
strained, compulsory, and rigidly enforced subjection to the
consecrated purpose and rule of their enterprise required of
those who imposed or recognized it, a personal suffering under
it, a painful loyalty to it, fully as severe, as tasking to the energies
of human nature, as were the disabilities and penalties which
they stood ready to inflict upon all opponents and mischief-
makers. It is worth our while to remember that the heads of
that Commonwealth, its legislators and magistrates, found their
own yoke a very hard one in the bearing. Winthrop, Dudley,
Saltonstall, and others, the highest among them, were called to
question, put under discipline, and bound to penalties. While
their scruples forbade the kissing of the Bible, in the administra-
tion of an oath, their conduct and "carriage" were tried by the
statutory authority of that Book.
We must consider this also: these Fathers were proprietors
by purchase, members of a private joint-stock company, holding
this territory under mercantile conditions. They had the rights
of corporators. After parting with their property in England to
commit themselves to their enterprise, they subjected it to risks
in the transfer and occupancy here, which, as local residents on
their own territory, it was wise in them to foresee, and prudent
to provide against. They did not put the right of franchise
among them at a money value. It was not to be purchased at
any price. They would confer it on conditions of their own,
but never sold it to any one. No one, resident or stranger,
could lay claim to it. The mass of those who came over with
1 These very significant statements are from Winthrop's "Reply," &c., to
Vane's "Briefe Answer,'" &c., to "A Defence of an Order of Court made in the
year 1637," concerning the giving the magistrates power to deny to any, by their
own rule, the right of residence here. It must be owned that Mr. Vane presses the
honored governor with very able and cogent objections to the assumption of
the magistrates. Winthrop, certainly, has recourse to special pleading. But the
specialty is based, like all the early legislation of the colony, upon the foregone con-
clusion of a Bible Commonwealth. (Hutchinson's Coll. Papers, pp. 88-98.)
FOUNDERS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS COLONY.
31
the company, were simply hired servants of the company; and
those whom they found here were interlopers and squatters.
The proprietors had a right to say on what terms other per-
sons should come here to abide, to vote, to take any part in the
administration of affairs, perilling either their property or their
enterprise, which was a consecrated experiment. Mark these
words of Governor Winthrop, when he found occasion, in the
controversy with Vane, to stand for these proprietary rights:-
"Let the Patent be perused, and there it will be found, that the incor-
poration is made to certain persons by name, and unto such as they
shall associate to themselves, and all this tract of land is granted to them
and their associates.
"None other can claim privilege with them but by free consent."
It is true the original proprietors and exiles were most glad to
welcome new-comers of spirit and purpose like their own; but
they were very keen and rigid in their scrutiny. Yankee inquisi-
tiveness, which was but old English shrewdness, sharpened on
our granite whetstones, began then its famed skill in interroga-
tions put to all strangers. They wished to know every new-
comer thoroughly, outside and inside; whence he came; what he
wanted; what he believed; if possible, what he thought; what
he intended to do; what was his substance; what was his spirit.
And these conditions were perfectly well understood in the Old
World, by those likely to come hitherwards. No man, who is
meditating an assault upon a hornet's or a wasp's nest, better
understands the nature of his enterprise, and the sort of reception
he will have, than did the Familist, Antinomian, Anabaptist, or
Quaker, know beforehand how Massachusetts would entertain
him. Courtesy, honesty, all fair principles, required that the
rights and purposes of the legal proprietors should be respected
by all others.
The conclusion is obvious. These exiled colonists, having
embarked all their worldly goods in this enterprise, would be dis-
mayed and ruined by its failure. Having solemnly covenanted
with separate churches as Englishmen at home, they had entered
into another solemn agreement with each other, outside of their
court-meeting, before they embarked.
r
This "Agreement" was made at Cambridge, England, on
Aug. 26, 1629, and was subscribed by those who pledged
32
THE AIMS AND PURPOSES OF THE
themselves to embark on the following March. In it they say
they have engaged themselves to their enterprise, after having
"weighed the greatness of the work, in regard of the consequence,
God's glory, and the churches' good." They face "the difficul-
ties and the discouragements" before them. They considered
this "withal, that this whole adventure grows upon the joint con-
fidence we have in each other's fidelity and resolution herein, so
as no man of us would have adventured it without assurance of
the rest." The agreement was conditional, on this proviso,
"that before the last of September next, the whole government,
together with the patent for the said plantation, be first, by an
order of court, legally transferred and established to remain with
us, and others which shall inhabit upon the said plantation." 1
One other paper, very important in its bearings on this point,
is to be carefully noted, because as it was prepared and circulated
on the other side of the water, as preliminary to, and designed
to induce, the emigration, it exposes to us the intent of the
leaders in the enterprise. It is entitled, "General Considerations
for the Plantation in New England, with an Answer to Several
We
Objections," to which reference has already been made.
have now four copies of the substance of this paper, with vari-
ations and comments from the different hands under which it
passed. It was a document which served a high agency in pro-
moting the enterprise, being passed from friend to friend, and
used in those cross-country rides and night consultations which
drew its master-spirits into it. One copy of it, as has been re-
lated, came from the hands of that noble patriot, Sir John Eliot,
in the Tower; and was sent by him to his friend and compeer,
John Hampden. There is a religious spirit and tone in the
whole paper. The seventh of the considerations reads thus:-
"What can be a better work, and more noble and worthy a Christian,
than to help to raise and support a particular church while it is in its
infancy, and to join our forces with such a company of faithful people,"
&c.2
-
There is a remarkable recognition in this document of a deeply
ominous foreboding, often finding utterance from the pens and
hearts of the leading colonists, that a catastrophe of utter anarchy
1 Hutch. Coll. Papers, p. 25.
2 Hutch. Coll. Papers, p. 27.
FOUNDERS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS COLONY.
33
and ruin was impending threateningly, at the time, over the realm
and the religion of England. From that awful wreck they would
save the gospel, by transplanting it, and rearing for it a church
which should guide the Commonwealth. The following solemn
sentences meant more to devout hearts in those days than they
mean to us:
"Secondly, all other churches of Europe are brought to desolation; and
it may be justly feared that the like judgement is coming upon us and
who knows but that God hath provided this place [New England] to be a
refuge for many whom he means to save out of the general destruction."
This was indeed a reason for regarding it "a service to the
church of great consequence, to carry the Gospell into those parts
of the world.”
[These Fathers of Massachusetts having thus solemnly cove-
nanted with each other, in the terms of their august experiment,
were bound to stand for it, and to try it with heart and soul and
life. Any thing or any body that perilled it, any stranger or
interloper coming among them, or a troublesome spirit rising up
of themselves, must be dealt with in a summary way. He
brought under risk every thing which they had, or hoped for, or
revered. They were themselves under the same bond and pledge
which they exacted of others. They were all in the wilderness.
They were straitened of their own natural and lawful liberty in
many ways and things. They were held to personal and mutual
covenants of the most stringent sort. They could not say what
they pleased, still less do as they pleased. They had made
themselves amenable to what they called "the Gospel rule;"
and, if they swerved or broke terms, the penalty was sure and
stern. They were no triflers, no summer-day dreamers, no fancy
theorists, such as we have in our day. They knew well what an
opinion like theirs cost; what a conviction and a belief meant;
what the enterprise which they had in hand involved to those.
who were determined to embark in it. They had looked before
them very deliberately: they had fronted the conditions of their
work, and come to meet them. They encountered no opposition
or discomfiture which they had not provided for.
At the first General Court of the company held on this soil,
May 18, 1631, one hundred and eighteen persons applied to be
3
¡
34
THE AIMS AND PURPOSES OF THE
❤
admitted as freemen, voters, new and full partners. Here was a
startling and critical predicament for the company, represented
by less than a dozen of the actual proprietors and administrators
under the charter. What was to be done?
What was to be done? Some of the appli-
cants for the franchise were "old planters," or squatters; some
had been sent here, and others had been just brought here, as
hired servants of the company; and others still were suspected or
disaffected persons, of a sort which a Quarter court had already
judged "unmeet to inhabit here." Should this miscellaneous.
multitude be at once lifted to a place and power which put the
whole enterprise effectually at their mercy? The court was
alarmed, as well it might be. It was alarmed, but it confronted
the juncture. These applicants were admitted to the franchise,
having first taken the freeman's oath. The oaths formally en-
tered upon the Records, for every officer and member of the
company, furnish in themselves very significant matter bearing
upon the intent of the colonists as already set forth, to establish
here a Biblical Commonwealth. Before the transfer of the
charter, the form of oath for the governor, deputy, and assistants,
bound them "to admit none to be free of this fellowship but
such as may claim the same by virtue of our privileges." But
after the charter had been transferred, and the government had
been set up here, these official oaths had been significantly
changed into this form: the governor and magistrates bound
themselves to administer the government "according to the laws
of God, and for the advancement of his Gospel, the laws of this
land, and the good of the people of this plantation." This
change in the form of the oath meant all that it implies.
And whoever took the first freeman's oath here, swore as fol-
lows:
"I do freely and sincerely acknowledge that I am justly and lawfully
subject to the government of the Company: and do accordingly submit
my person and estate to be protected, ordered, and governed by the laws
and constitutions thereof."
Yet before letting in this crowd of citizens, "the generalitie,"
as they were called, the Court agreed and ordered, that hence-
forward the freemen should vote for the body of assistants, who,
after being chosen, should elect a governor and deputy out of
FOUNDERS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS COLONY.
35
their own number, and should be the legislators, and also should
appoint all officers of the law. This restriction was, however,
removed the next year, and the freemen resumed their right of
voting directly for governor and deputy. Of the newly admit-
ted freemen, more than half were already church-members, and
others soon became so. A few of them proved intractable or
mischievous persons, and had afterwards to be dealt with by
summary or deliberate process. The shock of apprehension,
almost of dismay, to which the Court had been subjected, led to
the adoption of that rule and order, for prospective operation,
which has been made the reproach and jeer of the early legisla-
tion of Massachusetts. It stands on our Records in these
words:
"To the end the body of the commons may be preserved of honest and
good men, it was likewise ordered and agreed, that for time to come no
man shall be admitted to the freedom of this body politic, but such as are
members of some of the churches within the limits of the same." 1
Looked at in the light of our days, or even by the contemporary
working of the rule as experimental trial tested it, we, of course,
may denounce it, or ridicule it. But we must be fair to those who
lived by their own light, and tried a serious enterprise. In estab-
lishing that rule, the company exercised a charter-right, by their
own interpretation clearly conferred upon thern; and sought, with-
out doing wrong to any, to protect and defend themselves, their
own franchise, their own property, their own great design. What
else, what less, than this could they have done for their own
security? Even if only as the responsible administrators of a
(C
1 Court Records, vol. i. p. 87.
Mr. Cotton, in a letter to Lord Say, Lord Brook, &c., in 1636, says (Hutch.
Hist., vol. i. Appen. 435), that no church-members "are excluded from the liberty
of freemen." But the being a church-member did not, of itself, constitute a freeman.
The application for the privilege must be made to the Court, and there be sub-
mitted to the vote of the other citizens; and then, if the candidate passed, he had
to take the freeman's oath. It would seem, however, that there was soon a con-
siderable number of church-members who did not seek the privilege of citizenship;
perhaps shrinking from its annoyances and responsibilities. For, in 1643, the Court
Ordered, concerning members that refuse to take their freedom, the churches
should be writ unto, to deale with them." (Records, ii. p. 38.)
Lechford, just before this time, wrote that "Three parts of the people of the
country remain out of the church."
1
36
THE AIMS AND PURPOSES OF THE
local government, they had had an ordinary concern to avert dis-
order and anarchy, and to maintain morality and religion, they
could hardly, in those days, have stopped short of that rule, at
least in its substance, or in an equivalent alternative. In every
Christian State, religion was then established; and uniformity of
subjection to it was imposed by laws and penalties.¹
The inference, then, seemed to be that the more scriptural,
authoritative, pure, and practicable a method or type of religion
was, the better was it entitled to the legislative warrant.
<
But if the Fathers of Massachusetts were under the sway and
in the service of the aim which has been defined as theirs, they
had especial reason, as they had legal right, in requiring of all
who sought to vote about their property and their experiment,
that they should be in accord with them. They chose to put
foremost this condition, and to insist upon it: Commit your-
selves to our opinion, conviction, and purpose, then we will let
you in: join our religious fellowship, and you shall share our
civil rights, without money or price.' They thought confidently
- for them, reasonably that they should thus make sure for a
stock of citizens, if not of saints, yet of those who were out-
wardly, visibly, and constrainedly free from the more scandalous
and mischievous human failings. At any rate, they did thus
make sure of men who, before God and their fellows, had volun-
tarily pledged and covenanted themselves, by a well-defined
standard of obligation, the bond of a rigid intercommunion. No
1 In maintaining their form of administration of religion by a public tax, and
making an attendance upon its services compulsory, the colonists did but follow the
example of their native country. In the colony of Virginia, in 1610, attendance at
church twice every Sunday was enjoined "upon pain, for the first fault, to lose their
provision and allowance for the whole week following; for the second, to lose said
allowance, and also to be whipped; and for the third to suffer death." (Force's
Tracts iii. (ii.) 11.) Subsequent modifications of the law in Virginia were as follows:
"The Governor published several edicts, — That every person should go to church
Sundays and holidays: or lie Neck and Heels that night, and be a slave to the colony
the following week; for the second offence he should be a slave for a month; for the
third, a year and a day." (Stith, p. 147. 1618.)
In Virginia Assembly, Aug. 4, 1619. "All persons whatsoever upon the Sab-
bath days, shall frequent divine service and sermons, both forenoon and afternoon,
and every one that shall transgress this law, shall forfeit three shillings a time, to
the use of the church all lawful and necessary impediments excepted. But if a
servant in this case shall wilfully neglect his master's commands, he shall suffer
bodily punishment."
FOUNDERS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS COLONY.
37
man could get into a church except through profession, confes-
sion, and the taking of a vow, and the putting himself under the
discipline of a brotherhood. Those who had passed that ordeal,
and were still held to its continuous control, were to be regarded
as Christians; and Christians might be trusted as citizens. So
far were the Fathers of Massachusetts from feeling that they
wronged any one by establishing this rule, that they were assured
that they were adopting an eminently wise way in conferring a
privilege which they might have withheld. It was fully compe-
tent for them to have declined making any more freemen on any
terms. They made more because they wished for more, provided
they could have them of their own sort, which was not our sort.
Those who were not freemen or voters had rights and privi-
leges secured to them which still made them members of "ye body
politique." The twelfth of the "Bodie of Liberties" made this
provision:-
(C
Every man, whether inhabitant or foreigner, free or not free, shall
have libertie to come to any publique Court, Councel, or Towne meeting,
and either by speech or writing, to move any lawfull, seasonable, and ma-
teriall question, or to present any necessary motion, complaint, petition,
Bill or information, whereof that meeting hath proper cognizance, so it be
done in convenient time, due order, and respective manners."
To construct a commonwealth out of a church, as the hon-
ored and noble Winthrop so frankly avowed it, and to admin-
ister all civil affairs by church-members, that was the intent
of the founders of this colony.] They meant that the rulers and
those who chose the rulers should be upright, God-fearing men,
as, in a most emphatic sense, they were themselves. Enough
of such men, they believed, could be found, men renewed,
baptized in the Spirit, gifted with wisdom, in faithful covenant
with Christ, their Master. Yet they were not to depend upon,
nor to trust to, their own wisdom, nor to follow their natural
consciences. They had God's Word,-divine statutes, an in-
spired oracle. Some of our ancestors used the Bible in earlier
English versions; but our version had won its way to the hearts
of many of them. The free and authorized circulation of the
royal version wrought an effect in England which we can
scarcely make real to ourselves. It took the place of pope,
church, and minister for thousands, whom it brought under the
M
38
THE AIMS AND PURPOSES OF THE
direct teaching of God. Those who read it with that moderated
control of their own eccentric tendencies which would insure a
common influence from it, brought themselves under subjection
to it. Individual fanatics and "private interpreters " put it to
strange uses. By that Book, even without the aid of the new
covenant Scriptures, the chosen people of old-between whose
circumstances and their own our Fathers found many parallels
had been trained in a wilderness, and fashioned into a com-
monwealth. They intended to repeat the process under fairer
auspices. With a stern and heroic spirit, in awful sincerity,
earnest men and gentle women, made calmly resolute for their
own share in it, set themselves to the work, after counting its
cost so wisely that they met with nothing which they had not
anticipated. Many died of the earliest hardships, in full faith
of a blessed success to be realized by their posterity. And these
were accounted happy by their survivors, who looked on their
fresh wilderness graves as the seed-bed of a glorious harvest.
It is not strange, though it is in many respects sad, that so
many of those high-souled exiles should have had to meet the
vexations of all the stages of a gradual, but finally a complete,
disappointment in the thwarting and failure of their experiment.
They could not create a State out of a church; for a State grew
up which would not come into their church, and which they
would not have allowed to come into it. They could not
administer a civil government by Biblical statutes; for those
statutes have God, not man, for their administrator. That
liberty of conscience which they themselves, and for themselves,
had put under restraining subjection to their own covenants and
religious limitations, was irresistibly exercised by some among
them, and by a continual succession of new-comers. They
were made dreadfully uncomfortable by dissentients and in-
truders and interlopers, honest and pure persons, men and
women, but eccentric, fanciful, and strong-headed, with strange
conceits, theories, and notions of their own. For a time, the
magistrates and ministers tried to stand by their first purpose
and aim, at all cost. Their legislation was pursued into the
most minute details. It was inquisitorial, severe, fearless, and
without respect of persons. They maintained the proprietary
rights, and clung to their Theocratical experimen against all
P
FOUNDERS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS COLONY.
39
intruders and heretics. Their Court (Sept. 4, 1639), in passing a
law against "the common custom of drinking one to another,"
as an occasion of much waste and sin, held it to be a duty
to prevent such wickedness," especially in plantations of
churches and common weales, wherein the least known evils are
not to be tolerated by such as are bound by solemn covenant to
walk by the rule of God's word in all their conversation." 1
Whatever the expectations of the leading colonists may have
been, before they crossed the seas, of the relations of dependence
and oversight which would continue to exist between their
remote home and England, and however vague or definite may
have been their intentions of setting up for themselves, as a
matter of fact they did find themselves charged with the whole
responsibility of administering a government. Their necessities
and emergencies settled that point for them. England gave
them no help whatever; and all her attempted commissions
about their affairs were regarded and rejected, or resisted, as
mischievous interference. The home government could not
have wisely disposed the affairs of this colony at any time
during its charter administration. For a large part of that term
England itself was in a distracted condition, through its own
civil war; and its intermeddlings here would but have caused
confusion and increased dissension. Charged, then, with the
full responsibility of legislative, judicial, and executive offices,
the authorities developed their own scheme, and worked toward
the realizing of their Theocracy. [Their experiment proved
impracticable. Its weak points answered exactly to the kind of
assaults and the sort of weapons which were tried against it by
their own more restless spirits and by their ingenious tormenters.
In one aspect of the case, and in some moods of our minds, in
these days we cannot but smile as if we found fun in reading
some of their experiences; for there certainly is an element and
aspect of the ludicrous in some of them. It seems as if all the
ingenuities and whimsies, all the crotchets and extravagancies,
of crude and conscientious enthusiasm and fanaticism, were
conjured up at the time, and for the occasion of teasing and
worrying the poor sheep who had sought this fold. The tor-
1 Court Records, vol. i. p. 271.
t
40
THE AIMS AND PURPOSES OF THE
↓
menting troublers of the new Israel were of every style and
pattern, of every variety of sting and venom.] One who in our
dog-day season is trying to do diligent work with eye, hand, and
mind engaged, and who finds himself made the sport and prey
of flies, guats, mosquitoes, and all summer bugs, may realize
what was often the vexed and harried experience of our Fathers,
as, from over the seas, or out of the woods, or in one of their
own cottages or congregations, some "extraordinary," "exorbi-
tant," or "unsavory spirit," in man or woman, presented itself,
-to indicate a swarm in persistency and variety.
Beside the buffetings and distractions caused by strangers or
troublers among themselves, the authorities had soon to meet
with many serious perplexities arising from the practical work-
ing of their own theory. Thus, as the Court had made church-
membership the condition of eligibility to the franchise, they
found it essential for them to have a word to say about the
rightful constitution of churches whose prerogative it was to
decide the terms of admission for members. To prevent vari-
ance and undue privilege or license in this matter, the independ-
ence of the churches was brought under risk. In 1634-5, we
find the following on the Records: ¹-
1
"This Court doth intreate of the elders and brethren of every church
within this jurisdiction, that they will consult and advise of one uniform
order of discipline in the churches agreeable to the Scriptures, and then
to consider how far the magistrates are bound to interpose for the pres-
ervation of that uniformity and peace of the churches.”
In the next year, the Court subjected the mode of gathering
churches to the order and approbation of the magistrates, and
refused the franchise to members of churches otherwise gathered.2
The "New-English Canaan" was the jesting title which the
roguish Thomas Morton gave to the site of the Puritan State;
showing how well he divined the nature of the enterprise which
he tried to vex and thwart. The experiment of the Fathers of
Massachusetts to form and administer a Commonwealth, in
which all civil affairs should be disposed by members of one order
of churches, is classed by us now among the visionary fancies
1 Records, vol. i. p. 168.
2 Vol. i. pp. 142–3.
*
FOUNDERS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS COLONY.
41
which have beguiled good but weak men, and which, on the trial,
have exposed their folly and error. So we judge; and then, too
often, condemn. [Those covenanted legislators are not to be held
accountable for the logical or the practical consequences which
followed from their scheme when put on trial. They were not
bound to foresee these consequences, nor to be ready to abandon,
or even to re-adjust, their theory, as its experimental working
brought perplexities and unlooked-for resistance. They were
right, after having recognized what their faith and piety held to
be a constraining duty which would consecrate and bless them
in the doing of it, to throw their souls into its discharge, and
defy and resist all opposition. ]
The quotations which have been so abundantly made in the
preceding pages, from the authentic writings of the leading foun-
ders of Massachusetts, and from their legislative records, are
alike confidential and public testimonies of the design which
prompted them. It was not that they intended, however con-
scientiously they might have done so, to construct a theory or
form of government of their own devising, for ends of civil and
religious freedom. All motive to do this, if they had felt its in-
fluence, was overruled by a profound conviction, the result of
their religious training and belief, that the Bible offered them an
already perfected model and guide for a Commonwealth; and
that they were at liberty only, or could only safely use their liberty,
in following that model. Many pages more, from diaries, letters,
and more public documents, might be covered with confirmatory
and illustrative matter, similar to what has already been given.
But there is a record of such marked and emphatic significance
in its bearing upon the same point, that it must not be passed
over unnoticed.
Massachusetts alone, of all its sister colonies of New England,
with positive avowal, and with consistent efforts and measures
to realize it, aimed to establish a Bible Commonwealth. The
colonies of Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven, approxi-
mated to that aim, but fell short of it in actual legislation
for it.
What, then, was more natural than that Massachusetts should
have attempted to induce her sister colonies to follow her own
example, in making the church estate the condition of citizen-
42
THE AIMS AND PURPOSES OF THE
ship? This attempt she did make in all sincerity, though with
but partial success. As early as 1638, at a meeting held at Cam-
bridge, Connecticut had proposed a confederation with the
other three colonies. The proposition, failing of effect at the
time, was held in mind, till it resulted in a union of the four in
1643, by formal articles, providing for regular annual meetings
of two commissioners for each of them, appointed by their
several General Courts. The preamble of the Confederacy begins
thus:
"Whereas, we all came into these parts of America with one and the
same end and aim, namely, to advance the Kingdome of our Lord
Jesus Christ, and to enjoy the liberties of the Gospell in puritie, with
peace," &c.
The object of the Union was chiefly for purposes of mutual
aid in defence against the Indians. They entered into "a firme
and perpetuall league of friendship and amytie, for offence and
defence, mutuall advice and succour, upon all just occasions,
both for preserving and propagating the truth and liberties of
the Gospell, and for their own mutuall safety and welfare."
After the organization had become familiar, and the commis-
sioners, instructed by the General Courts which they severally
represented, and to whom they were to report the advisory meas-
ures recommended in their Congress, had experience of what
business might properly come before them, we find the following
proposition on their Records, at a meeting held in due order of
place and time, at New Haven, in September, 1646. It bears on
its face that it came from Massachusetts:
"Upon serious consideration of the spreading nature of Error, the dan-
gerous growth and effects thereof in other places, and particularly now
the purity and power both of religion and of civill order is already much
corrupted, if not wholy lost in a parte of New England, by a licentious
liberty graunted and setled; whereby many casting off the rule of the
word, professe and practise what is good in their owne eyes: And upon
information of what petitions have beene lately putt in some of the Colon-
ies against the good and straite wayes of Christ, both in the Churches,
and in the Comon Wealth, the Commissioners remembering that those
Colonies for themselves and their posteritie did enter into this firme and
perpetuall league, as for other respects so for mutuall advise that the
truth and liberties of the Gospell might be preserved and propagated,
P
FOUNDERS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS COLONY.
43
thought it their duty seriously to comend it to the care and consideration
of each Generall Corte within these United Colonies, that as they have
laid theire foundations and measured the temple of God, the worship and
worshippers by that straight Reed God hath putt into their hands, soe
they would walke on and build up (all discouragements and difficulties
notwithstandinge) with an undaunted heart and unwearied hand, accord-
ing to the same rules and patternes. That a due watch be kept and con-
tinued at the doores of God's house, that none be admitted as members of
the body of Christ, but such as hold foorth effectuall callinge and thereby
union with Christ the head, and that those whome Christ hath received,
and enter by an expresse covenant to attend and observe the lawes and
dutyes of that spirituall Corporation, that Babtisme, the seale of the Cove-
nant, be administred onely to such members and their ymediate seed, that
Anabaptisme, familisme, Antinomianisme, and generally all errors of like
nature, which oppose, undermine and slight either the scriptures, the Sab-
both, or other ordinance of God, and bring in and cry up unwarrantable
Revelations, inventions of men, or any carnall liberty, under a deceitfull
colloure of liberty of conscience, may be seasonably and duely supprest,
though they wish as much forbearance and respect may be had of tender
consciences seeking light as may stand with the purity of religion and
peace of the Churches."
The record adds:
"The Commissioners of Plymouth desire further consideration con-
cerninge this advise given to the generall Corts." 1
Massachusetts had been consistent with herself in pressing her
Bible theory of State upon her sister colonies, but she could not
legislate for them.
Now look at, examine, that aim or scheme or experiment of
the first colonists, as it stands in the line of history, and holds
a place, certainly not a mean one, among the enterprises of
men. It was one of a hundred schemes, visions, lures, or devices
of men, which have floated before their busy and quickened
faucies, and engaged their whole souls, their worldly means, their
lives and heroism in attempts to realize them. The possible
nobleness of humanity has often gone into some of the dreami-
est and most impracticable of these schemes. The Fathers of
Massachusetts had doubtless read the "Republic" of Plato, and
the "Utopia" of Sir Thomas More. But they had also read
1 From the Plymouth Copy of the Records of Commissioners.
44
THE AIMS AND PURPOSES OF THE
their Bible as they had read no other book. And if they had
seen the Book float down from the sky, and had received it by a
clutch of the hand from out of a mountain cloud, they could not
have given to it a more revering love, trust, and divine authority
than they did yield to it. It suggested to them the conception
and experiment of a Christian state, a commonwealth in which
human legislation should be patterned from the divine.
The conditions of time, opinion, opportunity, and persons, for
the practical trial of a Biblical Commonwealth, were as follows:
1. A religiously earnest period, characterized by an implicit
faith in the divine authority, and in the literal, inspired infalli-
bility of the whole Bible; and a mode of valuing it, and a sense
of subjection to its teachings conformed to that view of it.
2. A class of men and women to whom that belief should be
a bond of sympathy and fellowship.
3. Unfavorable or antagonistic circumstances forbidding the
practical trial of an ecclesiastical commonwealth where they
were then living.
4. The opening of a new field remote and sheltered in the
distance, with vested rights secured for its occupancy and juris-
diction.
I have used by preference the term a "Biblical Common-
wealth:" I might have confined myself to the use of the term
Theocracy," which has been quoted more than once, as used by
the Fathers as applicable to their form of government. And it is
applicable, if by it we mean the direct recognition of a Divine
Headship to a state. Our Fathers used it in that legitimate sense
of the term which subordinates all views of expediency, custom,
and human prerogative to a profound sense of subjection to a
Divine Ruler, and an obligation to accept and to follow what is
believed to be an intelligible revelation of His will, as the basis.
and guide of legislation.
66
That conception was sure, in its turn and season, to come to
practical trial in this world. It stood entered on the docket of
time, awaiting human agents, fit field and opportunity, with the
prime condition of faith and self-renunciation in man and
Then it would be entitled to a trial.
woman.
Glance with a single backward thought, over the long and
varied, generally interesting, but often melancholy, series of the
FOUNDERS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS COLONY.
45
visionary fancies, the social and political theories, by which men
and women with only good aims have sought to organize and
govern themselves. We have had the schemes of St. Simon, of
Fourier, and of Owen. You may have read Mr. Hepworth
Dixon's sketch of some of the experiments on trial among us,
in Shakerism and Communism. And it hardly becomes an age
and an indulgence, which, like our own, tolerate the filthy ex-
periment of Mormonism, to be very critical in judging about
any of the past theories which have failed. There have been
many experiments of a purely religious sort, tried by men and
women devoutly sincere and high-minded, which had far less of
grandeur, nobleness, and practical feasibility to offer as motives,
than had that of our Fathers. Among the fashionings of the
millennium, and the plannings for it, theirs, certainly, was not one
which will unfavorably compare with others. They took care
to guard against the extravagancies and the follies of the Fifth
Monarchy men; and they had a sober, and never a fanatic,
spirit. Their experiment, as I have said, was sure of, and was
entitled to have, its time and trial. We may criticise and even
ridicule it, if we choose, on its weak side. But there was
an august grandeur, an attractive and spell-like power in it,
a beckoning promise of some unspeakable blessing with it,
which would be certain to give it an enthralling influence over
devout and high-souled men and women. Its time for trial came
at the most earnestly religious age which has as yet been
chronicled in the history of the church.]
It is from the failure and from the success of great visions and
schemes, that men have learned all their practical and political
wisdom. We will not undertake to cast the proportions of
success or failure in the original enterprise, which is represented
now by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Puritanism, in the strictly Bible theory and embodiment of it,
as accepted by our Fathers, had a thoroughly sincere disciple-
ship, and a hearty earnestness of purpose engaged for it, only
for a little more than half a century and for two generations.
During that period, and for those full believers of it, it was
transiently consistent, because it was parallel with, and at the
level of, the degree of intelligence which had been reached in
some portions of Christendom, especially in England, for it
46
THE AIMS AND PURPOSES OF THE
never had the same sway on the continent of Europe. Under
those temporary conditions, Puritanism secured the devout con-
fidence of noble and eminent men, statesmen, jurists, and
scholars; and of such votaries as in those times there were, of
science and philosophy, as well as the profoundest reverence of
meek women, sturdy yeomen, and craftsmen in ordinary life.
But Puritanism could not outlast its own age, nor hold its un-
questioned control beyond the limitations of time and genera-
tions, except by living on its traditions among people in secluded
places not reached by increasing light and extended knowledge.
It started with an estimate of, and a way of using, the whole
Bible, which have been discredited by more intelligence, independ-
ence of thinking, critical, scholarly, and scientific culture, and the
exercise of a higher grade of what we call common sense in
common people. But the theory and faith on which our.
Fathers proceeded, though steadily impaired, modified, and
diminished, have only gradually yielded, only a little for each
generation, retaining enough of inherited or traditional in-
fluence to avert the catastrophe of a complete revolutionary
repudiation at any one time. The spirit and shadow, the tone
and savor of Puritanism, still remain and have influence in our
State. Doubtless, there are members of our present Legislature,
certainly there are constituents of some of them, who in heart
and mind are persuaded, that it would be well if we could
restore Puritan legislation in our franchise, in our churches, in
household management and discipline, in Sabbath laws, in
many social customs and indulgences, against dissipation and
gambling. But the dream is of the past.
No reader can engage his mind, candidly and seriously, upon
the original papers left to us by the Fathers of our colony,
without being impressed with the thought, that they subjected
themselves to all the sacrifices involved in their enterprise, bore
willingly all the sharp inflictions of suffering incident to it, and
cheered themselves with great religious hopes of its issues, under
the quickening impulse of a belief that they were putting under
practical trial the loftiest aim which had ever inspired high-
minded and devout men.
True, it is unspeakably to our advantage and enjoyment in
the freedom and cheerfulness of life, that we have been released
FOUNDERS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS COLONY.
47
from the severe sway of what we call, conventionally, the rigidness
and superstition of Puritan institutions and ideas.
We may,
however, question the fairness of describing as the outgrowth of
Puritanism, what a more just view of facts recognizes as a gen-
eral and comprehensive progress and enlightenment, by many
agencies of advance on the past.
Yet are we sure that the change, as all relaxing and liberaliz-
ing, is pure gain to us, and no loss? A large and liberal-minded
man might easily defend the position, that there were elements
and usages of Puritanism, which we are none the wiser, none
the better, none the freer, none the happier, for having left them.
Our domestic, civil, and religious life; our amusements, vices,
and wicked haunts, all testify that our Fathers had some
virtues and safeguards which we have not.
-
Meanwhile, not with alarming and dangerous reaction of
revolution or anarchy, but slowly and safely relaxing its sway in
our Commonwealth, eight generations born and nurtured here,
and many bands of new exiles, have realized that Puritanism has
prepared for them a most pleasant heritage. So that this noble.
and honored State has a repute of which all living in it, who
are not justly proud, will not increase its credit by staying here,
but had better avail themselves of their liberty by moving out
of it without process.
The Commonwealth in this our present age of it has these
four conspicuous honors:
1. Its money bonds are set at a higher premium than are any
American paper obligations in the marts of the world.
2. Its educational system, and the high and general culture
produced by it, give us the pre-eminent advantages and safe-
guards of intelligence.
3. Its charitable, benevolent, and reformatory institutions are
most numerous, munificent, and humane. The State is treated
by the whole Union, as a bank for gathering, and a deep free
pocket for dispensing, all manner of pecuniary gifts; and those
who are for leaving us out in the cold, strangely enough, have
to come here to get warm.
4. There are in this Commonwealth more peaceful and happy
homes, palatial in our towns and cities, and simple and frugal in
our sheltered valleys and on our hill-sides, filled with those who
48
}
AIMS AND PURPOSES OF THE MASSACHUSETTS COLONY.
are favored beyond any people on the earth in an opportunity
to make the best thing possible out of life.
I have said nothing to rebut, or even as recognizing, the
charge against our Fathers of having a worldly outlook for
trade and profit. It is enough to say that they were in the body
and found it necessary to keep themselves alive, — to be fed,
housed, and clothed, as human beings always do, wherever they
may be, and whatever experiment they have on trial. Some of
them did keep alive. After stern and varied hardships, a few of
them gathered a comfortable substance. But as to the profit of
their undertaking, nearly the whole of that has come to the
generations between them and our own, most largely to our
own. It would not have been agreeable or desirable, for such
persons as we are, to have lived with our Fathers; but it is
an inestimable privilege to us to live after them, in their own
places.
TREATMENT
он
INTRUDERS AND DISSENTIENTS
BY THE
FOUNDERS OF MASSACHUSETTS.
TREATMENT
OF
INTRUDERS AND DISSENTIENTS
BY THE
FOUNDERS OF MASSACHUSETTS.
A
CORRECT view of the aims and purposes of the Founders
of Massachusetts carries with it a certain consistent course
of treatment, which might be expected to be visited upon all
who should interfere with them, or cause them trouble. Their
project was in itself of such a nature, that it would very easily
afford a test for distinguishing between a friend and an enemy,
between measures, intentions, and even opinions, which would
tend to advance it, and those which would thwart and wreck it.
Once committed to their enterprise, and holding in their hands a
royal instrument, which they regarded as securing to them the
territorial rights and jurisdiction necessary for a practical trial
of it, they felt that it would be their own fault or folly if it
failed in that trial. To keep possession of their charter was
their first security. For this they trusted to law, to policy, to
shrewd management; and to a final reinforcement from obsti-
nacy, and something that looks like cunning, the last, how-
ever, brought into use only in opposition to cunning There
were in their view, or construction, three privileges secured to
them by that charter, which were their main reliance: -
First, An absolute jurisdiction over the soil included in their
patent;
Second, The right to define and impose terms on which alone
new members should be admitted into their company;
52
TREATMENT OF INTRUDERS AND DISSENTIENTS
Third, The right, "for their special defence and safety, to in-
counter, expulse, repel, and resist, all such person and persons, as
shall at any time attempt the destruction, invasion, or annoy-
ance to the plantation or its inhabitants."
No doubt they had some intelligent apprehensions of the nature
and sources of the hostility from parties and individuals which
they would have to deal with. They had reason to believe that
their hold upon their charter would always be under peril, from
their enemies residing in England, and from those smarting under
their discipline carrying ill reports from hence. These they
would need to circumvent in one way. Their internal troubles
they would meet in another way.
Only the actual reading of the early volumes of the original
Records of the colony, page by page, carefully and intelligently
too, can put their case before us, as they might claim that we
should look at it. And we should need to begin with them at
their own beginning. Their enterprise in colonizing had been
preceded by a series of like undertakings, which had proved costly
and disastrous failures. Unfit men, and insufficient or unblessed
purposes or aims, had brought those enterprises into painful
discomfiture, and stained them with reproach. If a new one
was to be undertaken, it was with cautions and warnings
learned from those which had been blasted. The excellent and
revered John White, of the English Dorchester, the most effect-
ive promoter of the Massachusetts colony, in his "Planters'
Plea," 1630, had well defined the sort of persons who alone
might hope to prosper in such an enterprise. He wrote:-
A
"The persons chosen out for this employment, ought to be willing, con-
stant, industrious, obedient, frugal, lovers of the common good, or, at
least, such as may be easily wrought to this temper; considering that
works of this nature try the undertakers with many difficulties, and easily
discourage minds of base and weak temper.”
With equal force and frankness, he describes the sort of persons
not wished for, as not suitable:
"Men nourished up in idleness, unconstant, and affecting novelties,
unwilling, stubborn, inclined to faction, covetous, luxurious, prodigal, aud
generally men habituated to any gross evil, are no fit members of a
colony."
BY THE FOUNDERS OF MASSACHUSETTS.
53
We have one letter by Governor Cradock, and two from the
company in England, addressed to Endicott, as their representa-
tive here before the charter was brought over. The explicit
directions which they contain indicate the measures which the
authorities themselves would pursue when established here.
Endicott is told, "that the propagating of the Gospel is the
thing we do profess, above all, to be our aim in settling this
plantation." He is instructed to press a rigid restriction upon
the sort of persons allowed to reside here; and "that none be
partakers but such as be peaceable men; and of honest life and
conversation, and desirous to live amongst us and conform
themselves to good order and government." The company had
yielded to the desire of the Rev. Ralph Smith to come over,
"before we understood his difference of judgment in some things
from our ministers." The order to Endicott is, "that, unless he
will be conformable to our government, you suffer him not to
remain within the limits of our grant." Explicit directions also
are given him for settling all single persons and servants in
families, that they may have part in morning and evening
devotions.¹
Such hints as these prepare us for what we find when the
government was established here. An agreement had been
made with their ministers in England. The first business of
the first Court, held on this soil, is entered thus: "Imprimis, it
was propounded how the ministers should be maintained. It
was ordered that houses should be built for them, with con-
venient speed, at the public charge;" and salaries paid in money
and in produce. Following on with the Records from that page,
we find the development of their purpose to establish here a
Bible Commonwealth formed out of a church, the legislators
of which, should be bound by solemn covenant, as professed
Christians pledged to one sacred design. We find in those
records, too, a series of legislative acts, and of cases of enforce-
ment of them, which are now pronounced absurd, arbitrary,
intolerant, and even of merciless cruelty. These are candidly
entered, never apologized for, but always justified by those
responsible for them. From these and other original records, we
1 Col. Rec., i. 386–397.
54
TREATMENT OF INTRUDERS AND DISSENTIENTS
have a fair and full presentment of the materials for dealing with
this subject, The Treatment visited by the authorities of the
colony of Massachusetts upon the Intruders who came into their
jurisdiction, and upon the Dissentients who, from time to time,
individually, or in company, started forth among themselves.
Readers generally, among us, know that that treatment was
severe. The occasions and reasons they do not generally know.
And even though it may be unnecessary for me to say so, yet
let me distinctly and emphatically avow, that I am not to argue
for the abstract justice or fairness of the course pursued by the
authorities of Massachusetts; nor to attempt to vindicate it as
necessary; nor to palliate its severity; nor even to assert its
wisdom or expediency under the circumstances. If a faithful
exposition of the facts shall avail in either of these directions,
those who now stand charged with folly, harshness, and cruelty,
will, so far, have the benefit in judgment. I am not undertaking
a vindication of those Fathers, in the sense of an approval or
justification either of their religio-political theory, or of their
measures for a practical trial of it. I hold myself simply to the
obligation to make a fair statement of the facts of the case;
to set what is to us an historic past, in the light, or under the
darkness, if such it were, of the times when it was living,
present experience; to expound the views, the actions, and, if
possible, also the motives of those who, in the exercise of what
they held to be rightful authority, as under covenant and oath,
did what they believed to be their duty to themselves in doing
as they did towards others.
We must first put ourselves into the light or if, as sug-
gested, it was under the darkness of those times. The basis
of fellowship, of accord, and of legislation in Massachusetts, was
different from that of either of her sister colonies of New Eng-
land. That stern and strong form of faith, founded on a rever-
ential regard for the letter of the Bible, which was held here,
was also substantially held by the leading spirits of the other
colonies. But it was more especially wrought in with the
spirit, the purposes, and the measures, which had
had sway in、
Massachusetts; and the peculiar working and shaping of that
belief here account for all the peculiarities of our early history.
As we read that history, we are at times surprised at the kind
Media Ma
BY THE FOUNDERS OF MASSACHUSETTS.
55
and degree of unanimity, of accordance in opinion and purpose,
of so many persons of strong and really independent spirits.
Why did they not fall out oftener and more threateningly
among themselves? What was it that kept enough of them of
one mind and of one will for the ends of legislation and admin-
istration? It was simply and solely their common aim, founded
upon their common faith; their idolizing, so to speak, of the
Bible; their way of thinking about it, interpreting it, and using
it. This common religious sentiment and purpose — restraining
an indulgence of what we mean by liberty of conscience - held
them firmly in sympathy and mutual confidence. To a certain
extent, and that a large extent, it repressed and checked the
tendency to diversity of judgment. That diversity of judgment,
individualism, opinionativeness, was the most marked charac-
teristic of the age that was then opening, and even of the class
of persons with whom they had many strong affinities. Their
common faith discouraged, averted, much of what would have
been utterly fatal to their enterprise. Had they allowed indi-
vidualism, or tolerated any of the crotchets of eccentric and
independent speculation, their scheme would have come to an
end before it had had a beginning. There were many occasions
and emergencies- such were furnished indeed in every case
of their dealing with opposers and dissentients in which
variance of judgment among themselves would have fatally
discomfited them. The strength of their one bond of harmony
enabled them to deal as with one mind with all who differed
with them.
This suggestion brings us directly to the point from which we
have to start. The especial dread of the Fathers of Massa-
chusetts was of all individuality and eccentricity of opinion.
They had an intense- by us an unappreciable horror and
distrust of those who professed to be favored with private inter-
pretations, revelations, and inspirations. And, strangely enough,
it so proved, that nearly every one of their troublers- Anti-
nomians, Gortonists, and Quakers-laid claim to those oracular
qualities and gifts. The epithets of description and reproach
attached to the names of such intruders and dissentients, carry
with them a key to the history. They were "exorbitant"
sons, "heady," "fantastic," "blasphemous," "malignant," "un-
" per-
!
56
TREATMENT OF INTRUDERS AND DISSENTIENTS
savory spirits," &c. The decisive blow which fell on the head
of Mrs. Hutchinson, on her trial before the court, came from the
testimony of a reverend fellow-passenger with her on her way
over the sea, that, in the ship, " she had vented her revelations"
about some calamity that was coming on the country. Gorton's
mystic creed was to the authorities the very hyperbole and
quintessence of crazy enthusiasm. The Quaker's "inward
light" and "testimony-bearing by the Spirit" was utter blas-
phemy to the pious ears that heard it. It is a very curious fact,
that not a single one of those men or women, who were treated
with the severest or most cruel penalties by the authorities of
Massachusetts, was of immoral character or of impure life; not
one of them. On the contrary, they were especially such as we
should regard as blameless, even excellent and exemplary, in
their moral character and conduct, honest, truth-speaking,
kind, and tender-hearted. But erratic individuality of opinion
or interpretation, or a claim to a "revelation" of their own,
would bring the best and purest of them under judgment. In
one point of view, this whole series of the troublers of the New
England Israel gives us a most interesting and even fascinating
study of characters. They were such as make especial favorites
for the mystic, the pietist, and the transcendentalist. They
would have made an admirable stock for "Brook Farm."
They did make a most miscellaneous and heterogeneous stock
for the early Rhode-Island and Providence plantations. With
the single exception of that sad scapegrace Captain Underhill,¹
even the Antinomians were all free of moral reproach. But
they were not wanted, and they could not be tolerated in Mas-
sachusetts. "Transcendentalism" was wasted on our Fathers.
It was a thing of which they would very soon have had too
much, if they had admitted any of it. We must get ourselves
as far away as possible from the atmosphere and liberalism of
this modern Boston, with its free invitation and its large hos-
1 Underhill, though very serviceable in his military capacity, was a man of a
shaky morality and a cloudy theology. He was "convented " on grave suspicions of
impurity, but explained his conviction that he was one of the elect, by saying, that,
"having lain under a spirit of bondage and a legal way five years, he could get no
assurance till the Spirit set home an absolute promise of free grace, as he was taking
the moderate use of the creature called tobacco."— Winthrop's Journal, vol. i. p. 270.
BY THE FOUNDERS OF MASSACHUSETTS.
57
pitality for all novelties and individualisms, — its churches,
synagogues, cathedrals, halls and theatres for preaching, - its
conventions, fraternities, and woman's club,- if we would have
before us the Boston that once was. Did it enter into the
imagination of its first occupants to conceive what a posterity
they should be responsible for?
Their dread of all persons professedly illuminated by special
revelations was by no means the result of a merely imaginary
apprehension of a possible evil that might befall them. I have
affirmed that it might with truth be alleged, and with full evi-
dence, that the Fathers of Massachusetts, instead of coming
hither to provide for liberty of conscience, left their old home
to keep themselves clear of the workings and effects of the
license, lawlessness, and mischief, which had already begun to
threaten a wild indulgence in England. Any one who is well
read in the history of England, either in its capital or in its by-
places, during the period just following the planting of this
colony, needs not to be told that that period, of all the Chris-
tian ages, was most rife in religious fancies, speculations,
eccentricities, and frenzies. Some persons, without this knowl-
edge, take for granted that sectarianism, individualism, and
free thinking, with all their developments, moderate or extrava-
gant, healthful or harmful, are the especial products of our
modern age. They are strangely and egregiously mistaken. It
is just as difficult to devise a new heresy or a new fancy or a
new oddity in religious belief or practice, as it is to discover
a new truth. There is no opinion, conceit, or notion in such
matters, recognized among us, which had not its living belief and
avowal at the period of which I am speaking.
Before me lie three quaint and time-worn old books, very
communicative witnesses as to what I am now saying. They
were written and published after the time when our General
Court began to legislate on this soil, but their contents cover
materials that were familiar and notorious. I will copy and
read their titles, which, I think, will serve the purpose, without
asking you to read their contents.
1. "Gangræna or A Catalogue and Discovery of many of the Errors,
Heresies, Blasphemies, and pernicious practices of the Sectaries of this
1
58
TREATMENT OF INTRUDERS AND DISSENTIENTS
time, vented and acted in England in these four last years, &c. By
Thomas Edwards, Minister of the Gospel."
2. "Heresiography, or a Description of the Heretics and Sectaries
sprung up in these latter times, &c. By Ephraim Pagitt, late Minister of
St. Edmonds."
3. " The Dippers Dipt. Or the Anabaptists Duck'd and Plunged over
Head and Eares, at a Disputation in Southwark, &c. By Daniel Featley,
D.D."
This was Milton's "year of sects and schisms."
A precious medley do these books, and others like them,
"adorned with cuts," present us, of the workings of individual-
ism and sectarism in England then. And there were on the
stage of life earnest and fantastic characters, answering to
each belief and opinion, each notion, scruple, and extravagance,
by garb, behavior, habit, and speech. There were then in
England men who wore long hair and women who wore short
hair; the bearded and the shaven; the dandy and the drab-
coated; those who said Thee and Thou, and those who kept on
their hats, where others took them off, before Fox became the
apostle of such.
To assume, as some carelessly do, that when Roger Williams
and others asserted the right and safety of liberty of conscience,
they announced a novelty that was alarming, because it was a
novelty, to the authorities of Massachusetts, is a great error. Our
Fathers were fully informed as to what it was, what it meant;
and they were familiar with such results as it wrought in their
day. They knew it well, and what must come of it; and they
did not like it; rather, they feared and hated it. They did not
mean to live where it was indulged; and, in the full exercise of
their intelligence and prudence, they resolved not to tolerate it
among them. They identified freedom of conscience only with
the objectionable and mischievous results which came of it. They
might have met all around them in England, in city and country,
all sorts of wild, crude, extravagant, and fanatical spirits. They
had reason to fear that many whimsical and factious persons
would come over hither, expecting to find an unsettled state of
things, in which they would have the freest range for their eccen-
tricities. They were prepared to stand on the defensive.]
BY THE FOUNDERS OF MASSACHUSETTS.
59
Now we turn back again to the Colony Records, without an
actual perusal of which, page by page, as I have said, will
the history, as it is apt to be written, not stand before us as truth.
On those pages we are impressed at once by the high-handed,
resolute, straightforward, and systematic way,- never faltering,
halting, doubting, or justifying themselves, in which the authori-
ties proceeded to put the soil and its inhabitants under their
mastery. They proceeded on the calm, full assurance, that it
was for them to begin with a clear, or a cleared, field. Exactly
as one who, having purchased a large freehold, on which he con-
templates improvements, runs his eye over it to see what nui-
sances he must remove; the stumps to be grubbed up, the holes
in the fences, and so forth. The colonial proprietors by charter
found here some chance and irregular residents; "old planters,”
and others, who, with a mysterious history behind them in
England,-rogues, adventurers, or romantic spirits loving solitude.
and the wilderness, had occupied many of the headlands and
promontories of our Bay. These had to be packed off, sent
home to England, or brought under the authority and discipline
of the colonists. Some of these, getting before the Privy Coun-
cil with the tale of their grievances, and with ill reports of what
was going on here, originated that suspicion and jealousy
towards the colony which brought its charter and authorities
under threats and peril. The only effect which such complaints
had here was, to make legislation and oversight more rigid and
watchful, and the dealing with mischief-breeders more sharp
and stern. Never in a single instance were the authorities inti-
midated or thwarted. All interlopers here, all roving characters,
seeking the delights of a proximate return to the state of
nature, were at once looked after. The roisterous and reckless
Morton, of Merry Mount, has the honor of coming first under
their discipline. At the very first Court held in the Bay, it was
"Ordered, that Morton, of Mount Woolison, should presently
be sent for by process." They had him in hand in less than a
fortnight, set him in the "bilbowes," and then sent him to Eng-
land, confiscating his goods to make satisfaction to Indians whom
he had wronged, and then burning his shanty as a scene of
wicked revelry. In a few months after, six persons have a
passage home provided for them against their will; the all-suffi-
60
TREATMENT OF INTRUDERS AND DISSENTIENTS
cient reason being given that they are
(6 persons unmeete to
inhabit here." At the same time, as one of two prisoners to be
sent to England, is that dark and mysterious character, Sir Chris-
topher Gardiner, "an undoubted Papist," professedly a Knight of
the Sepulchre, sorely charged as having temporary and contem-
porary wives, two in England, and a certain Italian woman
here. On the same date, the first quack was treated in a way
which reminds us how different the law was then from what it
is now.
"Nich. Knopp is fined five pounds for taking upon him to cure the
scurvey by a water of noe worth nor value, which he sold at a very deare
rate, to be imprisoned till he pay his fine, or give security for it, or els to
be whipped, and shall be liable to any man's action of whome he hath
received money for the said water." 1
Again,
"Thomas Gray is enjoined under the penalty of ten pounds to attend
on the Court in person this day three weeks, to answer to divers things
objected against him, and to remove himself out of the limits of this
patent," before six months. (p. 77.)
Another unaccounted-for old planter, who seems to have had
dangerous relations with the Indians, was Thomas Walford, of
Charlestown.
He was, May, 1631, "fined forty shillings, and is enjoined, hee and
his wife, to depart out of the limits of this pattent, before the 20th day of
October nexte, under pain of confiscation of his goods, for his contempt
of authority, and confronting officers," &c.
"Capt. John Stone for his outrage comitted in confronting authority,
abuseing Mr. Ludlowe, both in words and behavour, assalting him and
calling him a just ass &c. is fined 100 pds, and prohibited coming within
this pattent without leave from the Government under the penalty of
death." (p. 108.)
Again,
"Mr. Thomas Makepeace, because of his novile disposition, was in-
formed we were weary of him unlesse hee reforme." (p. 252.)
Mr. Blaxton, an old planter on the peninsula of Boston, a
mysterious man, shrewdly foreseeing what sort of a sway was
1 Records, vol. i. p. 83.
BY THE FOUNDERS OF MASSACHUSETTS.
61
about to be established here, quietly took himself off, selling out
to the settlers his own squatter rights and improvements.
While the soil was thus cleared of intruders, and the proprie-
tors asserted their rights of jurisdiction over strangers, they were
none the less resolute in putting their own magistrates and ser-
vants under rigid discipline. Sir Richard Saltonstall, and others
of the highest among them, were fined for absence or tardiness at
the Court-meetings, or for irregularities of conduct. It is hard to
read the Records without feeling the motions for many a smile,
or even for more marked demonstrations. So rigid was the
inquisition, so petty were many of the offences punished, and so
severe were the penalties, that we find our smiles repressed. But
those stern and grim legislators understood themselves. They
knew what were their aims, and the caution, severity, and reso-
luteness requisite to realize them, or, at least, to guard the trial
of them. Before we hear of their making stocks or whipping-
posts, such conveniences seem to have been all handy for use as
subjects were sentenced to them.]
It would seem from the following order of the Court, that the
use of the Boston stocks was very fittingly inaugurated:-
"Edward Palmer, for his extortion, takeing 1 13 7 for the plank
and wood-work of Boston stocks, is fined five pounds, and censured to bee
set an hour in the stocks. This fine was remitted to 10” 1
"Robert Shorthose, for swearing by the blude of God, was sentenced
to have his tongue put into a cleft stick, and to stand so by the space of
halfe an houre."
Elizabeth, the wife of Thomas Apelgate, was censured to stand with
her tongue in a cleft stick, for swearing, raileing, and revileing."
"Edward Woodley, for attempting a rape, swearing, and breaking into
a house, was censured to be severely whipt 30 stripes, a yeares imprison-
ment, and kept to hard labour with course dyot, and to weare a coller of
yron.'
"12
66
Capt. Lovell was admonished to take heede of light carriage.
A specimen of the severity of their discipline on a grievous
offender, a servant on Governor Cradock's farm, is as follows:
At the Court, June 14, 1631.
"It is ordered that Philip Ratliffe shall be whipped, have his eares cut
off, fined 40 pounds, and banished out of the limitts of this jurisdiction,
2 Id. p. 177.
3 Id. p. 193.
1 Records, vol. i. p. 260.
* 8
62
TREATMENT OF INTRUDERS AND DISSENTIENTS
for uttering malicious and scandalous speeches against the government,"
&c.
Again, at the Court, in March, 1638,
"Mr. Ambros Marten, for calling the Church covenant a stinking
carrion and a human invention, and saying he wondered at God's pa-
tience, feared it would end in the sharpe, and said the ministers did
dethrone Christ, and set up themselves; he was fined 10 pds. and coun-
selled to go to Mr. Mather to be instructed by him."
These last two extracts are very significant to us of a fact, evi-
dence of which is strewn all over the Records, that the authorities
were especially stern, unflinching, and unrelenting, in dealing
with those whose offence was a contumacious trifling with the
dignity of the government, or an irreverent reproaching of their
church covenant. Security and harmony, respect and submis-
sion, as to both those vitally fundamental matters, held at stake
the prosperity or the absolute ruin of the enterprise.
Yet it would be doing harsh injustice to the early legislators
of Massachusetts, to recognize in their records only a stern
spirit. Gentleness and mercy show many pleasing and impres-
sive manifestations even there. The reader is constantly re-
minded of the same characteristic in the Jewish code, in which
severity is set in contrast with mildness. The tender regard for
the widowed and the fatherless; the privileges secured to the
gleaners, as illustrated in the beautiful pastoral in the Book of
Ruth; consideration for the impoverished and the honest debtor;
the distinction between disciplinary punishment and inhuman
vengeance, are admirably paralleled between the Old-Testa-
ment code and that of Massachusetts. Our legislators stood for
absolute equity between man and man.7 They protected the
unfortunate and the wronged. They provided for the fair settle-
ment of estates, and the adjustment of private controversies.
Their legislation was rigidly impersonal and sternly impartial.
They remitted fines on confession and submission. As has
been already said, the ever-upright Winthrop and the other
associates in the chief magistracies, stood in turn at the same.
bar where offenders and culprits were held to judgment. Here,
certainly, is an act of even-handed justice, done by the Court, in
September, 1631:-
ļ
BY THE FOUNDERS OF MASSACHUSETTS.
63
"It is ordered that Josias Plastowe shall (for stealeing four basketts of
corne from the Indians) returne them eight basketts againe, be fined five
pounds, and hereafter, to be called by the name of Josias, and not Mr., as
formerly hee used to be.”1
Some distinction of difference is certainly to be recognized by
us, for it was recognized by the authorities, in their mode of
treating, respectively, intruders or strangers who caused them
annoyance, and the dissentients from their opinions, measures,
or policy, members of their own company and churches. The
harshness which in either case is rightly charged upon the
authorities, and the injustice and cruelty which, with less ground
of reason, are also ascribed to them, can be fairly judged of by
us only when we keep in mind the distinction between the two
classes of troublers. As regards those who were not proprietors,
members of the company, or freemeu, but chance residents,
strangers, interlopers, adventurers, or visitors, the authorities felt
that their rights of self-protection and privacy, with security
from molestation, were as plain and sufficient as are those of
any householder among us on his own premises, or those of any
joint-stock company in managing its corporate affairs.
They
did not feel themselves bound in any case, beyond their own
inclinations, to give a reason for keeping out, warning off, or,
expelling, such as came under the description just named. It
was enough if any such person was thought "unmeete to inhabit
here." If he was not wanted, he must stay away, or he might
be sent away. If he did any thing wrong while here, he might
be fined, whipped, or otherwise punished first, and then be
ordered and helped to take himself off. So the authorities
insisted their charter gave them a right to judge and act in
every case for themselves; and so they knew it was wise and
necessary for them to proceed, if they meant that their pro-
foundly sincere and exacting religious enterprise should have a
fair trial. The issue stood thus between the two parties, — the
housekeepers and the visitants, the proprietors and the outsiders.
Here were the owners of certain property, and proprietary rights
of local government and jurisdiction. They understood each
other, and were solemnly covenanted with each other, in a pur-
{
1 Records, vol. i. p. 92.
A
64
TREATMENT OF INTRUDERS AND DISSENTIENTS
pose which had brought them hither, at their own charges,
furnished with the means of self-protection. They must stay
here, identifying themselves and their fortunes with their experi-
ment. They had parted with their homes and possessions in
the old world; and, if they could not make and keep such here,
they would be vagabonds on the earth.1
The other party to the issue were those who came unasked,
for curiosity, adventure, or caprice. They did not intend to stay
except for private ends of their own. They had no property
here. They did not love the air of the place, nor its society.
Very many of them were possessed of the whimsies and
crotchets which the colonists intended to be clear of, as one
reason for coming hither. Others of those intruders had the
"prophetical spirit," which classed them as nuisances of the
most offensive character. It certainly was easier and more
reasonable for the visitors to leave, than for the householders to
break up their establishment, or to live in a constant ferment and
dissension. And it is to be frankly and distinctly admitted, that
not a single such intruder, however summarily he was dealt
with here, would have escaped legal process and punishment
under like circumstances in England. Any one who will
search curiously into the vagrant laws of the mother country,
and mark what a careful watch was kept, and what discipline
was visited upon the unthrifty and those who had no visible
means of a livelihood, will find abundant evidence that our
Fathers followed precedents; though, it must be owned, they did
not care for such support.]
The case was somewhat different when dissent and variance
sprang up within their own fellowship in state or church. The
grievance was a deep and a sore one, in each instance of it,
when those who had the rights of freemen, and the sanctity of
>>
1 In a tr
Declaration" issued by the Court, in 1659, in the course of the proceed-
ings against the Quakers, this ground is assumed: "There is no man that is pos-
sessed of house or land, wherein he hath just title and property as his own, but he
would count it unreasonably injurious that another who had no authority thereto
should intrude and enter into his house, without the owner's consent.
The argu-
ment proceeds, that, if the intruder in such a case should be killed by the house-
holder, the latter will be guiltless; and if an individual may thus defend his private
rights, how much more the authorities of a government. - Miscellaneous MSS. in
the State House.
BY THE FOUNDERS OF MASSACHUSETTS.
65
the covenant of church-membership raised diversities of judg-
ment or variances of purpose, and so caused distraction. It
was evident in all such cases, that the umpireship, the appeal,
would be found in referring to the common pledge of aim and
enterprise which had bound the proprietors together, and to the
seal which they had set upon their pledge in their church vows
and in their civil oath. It was perfectly fair, as they were held
themselves, that they should hold each other to the most strin-
gent terms of their joint and common obligations. It was to be
taken for granted, that each and every one of them was con-
cerned to avert the failure of their enterprise; and if that was
risked by any variance of opinion in civil or religious matters,
such variance was to be held in check before it resulted in
sedition or dangerous heresy.
Roger Williams was the first conspicuous subject of what is
called the intolerance, the severity, aye, the cruelty, of the
authorities of Massachusetts. Fact and fiction, or great mis-
apprehension and misrepresentation, are about equally mingled
in the popular reading of his story. An enterprise to which he
fortuitously committed himself, helped alike by the sort of dis-
comfitures and compulsory straits which it encountered, as well
as by any deliberate and intentional purpose of his own thrown
into it, was crowned with the same success as was reached by
Massachusetts through another process. His purity of char-
acter, his integrity, perseverance, and magnanimity, and his
lengthened life, give a personal and historic interest to his
career. But none the less was he the occasion of much trouble
here. The quarrel which he had on this soil was of his own
originating. If he had had his way a grievous wrong would
have been visited on the colonists. He found occasion, indeed,
to reconsider, with maturer wisdom, the course he had pursued
here, when the adoption or imitation of it by some of his own
associates in Rhode Island led him to ask sympathy and aid
from Massachusetts.
Sir William Martin, a warm friend of the colony and of Gov-
ernor Winthrop, in a letter to the latter from England (in March,
1636), after Williams had come under censure, wrote as follows:
"I am sorry to hear of Mr. Williams' separation from you. His
former good affections to you and the plantations were well known to me,
5
66
TREATMENT OF INTRUDERS AND DISSENTIENTS
and make me wonder now at his proceedings. I have wrote to him
effectually to submit to better judgements, and especially to those whom
formerly he reverenced and admired; at least, to keep the bond of peace
inviolable. This hath been always my advice; and nothing conduceth
more to the good of plantations. I pray show him what lawful favor you
can, which may stand with the common good. He is passionate and pre-
cipitate, which may transport him into error; but I hope his integrity
and good intentions will bring him at last into the way of truth, and con-
firm him therein. In the mean time, I pray God to give him a right use
of this affliction."1
-
This kindly and impartial estimate of Williams was made by
one who evidently knew him well. It corresponds at every
point with the view which a fair-minded reader would take of
his case as history.
Williams came here in 1631 as a young, ardent, and strongly
self-willed man, at his own prompting. He was not a proprie-
tor in the company, and never became a freeman of it. He was
a rigid separatist from the English Church, in which he had
been a minister; while the authorities of Massachusetts were not
so rigid, certainly not in avowal, as Williams wished them to
be. He was invited, on his arrival, as he long after affirmed,
though there is no other testimony to the fact, to become the
teacher of the Boston Church; which he says he refused to do,
because its members would not humble themselves for their
former communion with the English Church, and renounce it.
He served a short time in the ministry at Salem, though the
Court remonstrated at his being put into that office, both be-
cause of that severe judgment of his already mentioned, as
also because of an opinion for which he stood stoutly, that the
power of the magistrates and of government should be limited
to civil affairs, taking no cognizance of an infraction of the first
four commandments. This opinion and avowal of Williams, of
course struck a fatal blow at the very life of the "Theocrasie,"
which the Fathers of Massachusetts were establishing. He
made warm friends in Salem, notwithstanding the restlessness
of his spirit. Yet, for reasons not known to us, he left there
within a year, and shared a more congenial ministry with the
separatist pastor, Mr. Smith, at Plymouth. The excellent and
1 Hutch. Coll. Papers, p. 106.
BY THE FOUNDERS OF MASSACHUSETTS.
67
gentle Elder Brewster, and the judicious and even-tempered
Governor Bradford, both had occasion to mark his hastiness of
spirit and his "unsettled judgment," though they loved him.
They were glad to have him go away; and on his return to
Salem, in 1633, they addressed a word of caution on his account
to his old friends. While he was at Plymouth, he had shown to
the authorities there a written paper, in which he struck another
blow against the very fundamentals of any local government to
be administered on this soil, by denying the validity of any rights
conferred by the patents held by the colonists. This treatise
coming to the knowledge of the authorities of Massachusetts on
his return to Salem, he was summoned to answer for it. In the
only single instance known to us in his life, of his yielding in
judgment or pertinacity, — and even this instance, as it proved,
was not to be permanently an exception, -he penitently confessed
that he was in error, submitted to the judgment of the Court, and
consented that his treatise should be burned. The magistrates in
vain tried to prevent the Salem Church from putting him into
office in 1634, and withheld a grant of land from that town on
account of this contumacy. He was again summoned before
the Court in 1635, for having broken his promise by renewing
his assault upon the patent, for calling the English churches, re-
proachfully, anti-Christian, and for denying the right to put an
unregenerate person under oath in a civil court. Altercation
and acrimony mingled in this dispute. The result which might
reasonably and shall we not say, fairly? be expected, came
in the form of this judgment, by the Court, Sept. 3, 1635:
"Whereas, Mr. Roger Williams, one of the elders of the Church of
Salem, hath broached and divulged divers new and dangerous opinions
against the authority of magistrates, as also writ letters of defamation
both of the magistrates and churches here, and that before any conviction,
and yet maintaineth the same without retraction, it is therefore ordered,”
that he depart from the jurisdiction within six weeks, failing of
which he was to be sent away, never to return without leave.
On account of the season, his time was extended to the next
spring. As he was planning for a settlement on Narragansett
Bay, and continued to keep Salem in a ferment, the magistrates
concluded to ship him for England. This coming to his knowl-
68
TREATMENT OF INTRUDERS AND DISSENTIENTS
edge, he anticipated the measure by starting off, as his last bio-
grapher, Mr. R. A. Guild, thinks, in a shallop, and "coasting
probably from place to place during the 'fourteen weeks' that he
'was sorely tossed,' and holding intercourse with the native tribes,
whose language he had acquired." 1
Less than a dozen close friends accompanied Williams; and
the supporters which he left behind him were reduced to about
the same number, when the nature and tendency of his self-
willed course were fully realized. Much romantic and sympa-
thizing interest has been connected with his supposed wilderness.
experience. But all the settlers were in a wilderness then, and
it would have been a wilder one than it was, on the edge of our
Bay, if the disorganizing notions of Williams had had sway.
There was no intentional inhumanity in the treatment of him.
He might have gone to friends in Plymouth. He had no right
of residence here, and his course was not such as to give him a
claim on courtesy or hospitality. We must not transfer our
sense of security, our tolerance, and our familiarity with what
are to us harmless extravagances, to our Fathers, and then won-
der why they allowed this well-meaning but troublesome man
to visit upon them such fears. It was a matter of life or death
with them.
Cotton Mather's oft-quoted saying about Williams, "that he
had a windmill in his head," is not exactly true. A windmill
admits of being adjusted to breezes and currents, however fickle;
and its use depends upon its turning these breezes to account in
ministering to the homely necessities of the body's life. Williams
had in him neither mechanical nor moral appliances or impulses
for seeking any selfish ends. He was sound to the core in integ-
rity, frank, disingenuous, and large-hearted.
Jobu Quincy Adams best characterized him on the less agree-
able side of his nature, when young, by calling him "a consci-
entious contentious man."
In the old age of a long life, Williams, mellowed by time, and
taught patience by having to deal in his own colony with such
opponents and troublers as he himself had been to Massachu-
setts, became, even more benignantly and lovingly, what he had
1 Publications of the Narragansett Club, vol. i. p. 32.
BY THE FOUNDERS OF MASSACHUSETTS.
69
always been in the real temper of his heart. His noble magna-
nimity disposed him to be of the highest service to Massachu-
setts, in averting from her peril, and establishing for her friendly
relations with the Indians in threatening times. He appreciated,
too, the personal kindness which he had received from individuals,
who, in the exercise of their authority, had had to deal with
him as a dangerous and mischievous offender. There is great
tenderness in the tones and words in which, in his old age, he
speaks of "that ever-honored Governor, Mr. Winthrop," who, he
says, "advised him, for many high and heavenly and public
ends,” to steer his course to the Narragansett Bay; and also of
the bounty of "that great and pious soul, Mr. Winslow;" and
of others.
Mr. Williams may be classed either among the intruders or
the dissentients against whom, as individuals or as classes, Mas-
sachusetts exercised its charter authority or its ecclesiastical dis-
cipline. As one who came hither unbidden, not as a member of
the company, and never made a freeman under it, he might be
said to have been here only on sufferance, liable to be warned
off at the pleasure of the proprietors whenever his presence
should prove undesirable. But as having exercised a ministry
in one of the regular church assemblies of the jurisdiction, it
might be claimed that he had been adopted as a full citizen.
Yet that his having come into full standing in the colony would
have made little, if any, difference in the course pursued towards
him, may fairly be inferred from the facts now to be recognized
in the dealing with a large company of dissentients springing
up here, alike in full civil and church relations. These are
known to us as Antinomians, and as the followers and sympa-
thizers with Mrs. Hutchinson.
The agitation and strife connected with the Antinomian con-
troversy, opened by Mrs. Ann Hutchinson, came dangerously
near to bringing the fortunes of the young Massachusetts colony
to a most disastrous ruin. Discord and division, of the most
imbittered sort, among brethren, proposing a recourse to open
violence with blows and arms, reached an advanced stage of
sedition, and threatened complete anarchy. The peril overhung
at a time when the proprietary colonists had the most reasonable
and fearful forebodings of the loss of their charter by the inter-
70
TREATMENT OF INTRUDERS AND DISSENTIENTS
ference of a Privy Council Commission, and also were waging
war against the Pequot Indians. Those were dark and wretched
days here, for the colonists, whose all was at stake. Ominously
enough, too, Mrs. Hutchinson arrived here, Sept. 18, 1634, in
the vessel which brought the copy of that commission. Win-
throp describes her as a woman of a "ready wit and bold spirit.”
Strongly gifted herself, she had a gentle and weak husband, who
was guided by her. She had at home enjoyed no ministrations
so much as those of Cotton, and her brother-in-law, Mr. Wheel-
wright. She came here to put herself again under the preach-
ing of the former. On her passage, she had raised the fears of
Symmes, the minister of Charlestown, by "venting some private
revelations," and by uttering some strange opinions.
By his
interference and warning, the admission which she sought to
membership of the Boston Church was delayed, though after-
wards granted. She had been here for two years, known as a
ready, kindly, and most serviceable woman, especially to her own
sex in their straits and sicknesses. But she anticipated the in-
troduction of "the woman question" among the colonists in a
more troublesome form than it has yet assumed for us. Joined
by her brother-in-law, who was also admitted to the church,
after those two quiet years she soon made her influence felt for
trouble, as he did likewise. There were no newspapers in those
days, no clubs, no daily mails, no gatherings for friendly inter-
course, no food for the mind other than religious discoursing to
vary the strain upon one class of thoughts, or to occupy the list-
less or social hours.
Besides the regular substantial repast of listening to many
sermons, the dessert consisted of talking them over. As a general
rule, men are apt to leave out something, and women are apt
to put in something, in their respective reports and criticisms of
sermons. The male members of the Boston Church had a
weekly meeting, in which they discussed the ministrations of
Cotton and Wilson. Mrs. Hutchinson organized and presided
over one, held soon twice in a week, for her own sex, attended
by nearly a hundred of the principal women on the peninsula
and in the neighborhood. It was easy to foresee what would
come of it, through one so able and earnest as herself, even if
she had no novel or disjointed or disproportioned doctrine to
BY THE FOUNDERS OF MASSACHUSETTS.
71
inculcate; which, however, it proved that she had. Antinomian
means a denying, or, at least, a weakening, of the obligation to
observe the moral law, and to comply with the external duties;
to do the works associated with the idea of internal, spiritual
righteousness. It was a false or disproportioned construction of
St. Paul's great doctrine of justification by faith, without the
works of the law, a doctrine which is safe only exactly as St.
Paul defines and limits it, easily misrepresented and exposed
to dangerous application. Its truth is restricted to its Divine
relations, and fails as it is applied between man and man. God
takes the right and sincerely earnest heart-purpose for the deed,
and pities and forgives shortcomings. Man sometimes will do
the same, but not always: nor can man always be expected to
do it, for he cannot be sure of a heart-purpose, even if it would
satisfy him.
A debtor burdened with obligations, with a sincere
desire to pay, asks that that desire be accepted as payment.
This is satisfactory to all except to the creditors. Mrs. Hutchin-
son was understood to teach, that one who was graciously justi-
fied by a spiritual assurance, need not be greatly concerned for
outward sanctification by works. She judged and approved, or
censured and discredited, the preachers whom she heard, accord-
ing as they favored or repudiated that view. Her admirers
accepted her opinions. Winthrop¹ ascribes to her "two danger-
ous errors, from which grew many branches:" "first, that the
person of the Holy Ghost dwells in a justified person; second,
that no sanctification can help to evidence to us our justification."
Word soon went forth that Mrs. Hutchinson had pronounced in
her meetings, that Mr. Cotton and her brother-in-law Wheel-
wright, alone of all the ministers in the colony, were under "a
covenant of grace," the rest being "legalists," or under "a cov-
enant of works." These reports, which soon became more than
opinions, were blazing brands that it would be impossible to
keep from reaching inflammable material. The matter of dissen-
sion was just of the sort to cause contention of the most alarm-
ing character, because concerned with matters already exagger-
ated in their interest, and entertained in the community with a
morbidness of zeal. As the contention extended it involved all
1 Journal, vol. i. p. 200.
-
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TREATMENT OF INTRUDERS AND DISSENTIENTS
the principal persons of the colony. Cotton and all but five
members of the Boston Church though one of these five was
Winthrop, and another was Wilson-proved to be sympa-
thizers with Mrs. Hutchinson; while the ministers and leading
people outside in the other hamlets were strongly opposed to her.
She had a partisan, moreover, of transcending influence in the
young Governor Sir Henry Vane. The son of a Privy Coun-
cillor, and one of the Secretaries of State, he had (not with the
sympathy of his father) given himself to zeal for the Puritan
form of religion; and, by suggestion of the King, had a three
years' leave of residence in New England. He had come here
the year before the Antinomian controversy opened; and was
but twenty-three years old. Though pure and devout, and
ardent in his zeal, he had not then the practical wisdom for
which Milton afterwards praised him in his noble sonnet:
Vane, young in years, but in sage counsels old.”
So gushing was the admiration quickened in the colony
toward their noble visitor, that the people at once chose him for
their governor, electing Winthrop as deputy. Vane, sincere
and right intentioned as he was, erred in judgment; and the
results of his administration of a single year were so unsatis-
factory to himself, as well as prejudicial to the colony, that he
soon returned to England, disappointed and under a cloud.¹
With his strong support, and that of two other prominent magis-
trates and of so overwhelming a majority of the Boston Church,
Mrs. Hutchinson naturally felt emboldened. The other ministers
of the Bay coming to Boston to the Court, took up, and in con-
ference, heightened the strife. The Boston Church was for intro-
ducing Wheelwright to office over them; and this design was
with difficulty frustrated. He then was invited to a church gath-
ered at Mount Wollaston. The cloud grew very dark over the
colony, as the terrible war with the Pequots was coincident with
1 Richard Baxter gives us an account of the trouble which he had, when chaplain
to the garrison in Coventry, with one or two persons who came among us from
New England, of Sir Henry Vanes party, and one Anabaptist tailor." (Life, Part I.)
Baxter unfairly attributes to the Anabaptist party, as largely composed "of abun-
dance of young, transported zealots, and a medley of opinionists," the responsibility
of bringing forth "the horrid sects of Ranters, Seekers, and Quakers, in the land."
(Life, Part II.)
66
BY THE FOUNDERS OF MASSACHUSETTS.
73
the threatenings of sedition. Meetings of ministers and of
magistrates, separately and jointly, were held; at one of which
the plain-spoken Hugh Peter opened his mind, without compli-
ment of matter or manner, to the young governor.
Mrs. Hutchinson and some of her followers rose and went out
of meeting when Wilson officiated. Bitterness and rancor
came between former friends. A General Fast Day was ap-
pointed for pacification. But Wheelwright preached a sermon
of an exciting character, quoting passages from the Old Testa-
ment intimating a recourse to arms and violence. He was at
once proceeded with for sedition. Members of the Boston
Church presented a petition in his behalf, for which they were
disarmed and otherwise censured. He himself made an appeal
to the King, which only aggravated his offence; and as Win-
throp writes, "refusing to leave either the place or his public
exercisings, he was disfranchised and banished." Seven years
afterwards, having lived away, he reviewed his course with
regret and manfully apologized for it in a letter, to the Governor
for the Court, in which he said that, after long and mature
consideration, he had found that the main point of difference in
the controversy about justification and the evidence of it—
"is not of that nature and consequence as was then presented to me in
the false glass of Satan's temptations and mine own distempered passions,
which makes me unfeignedly sorry that I had such a hand in those sharp
and vehement contentions raised thereabouts, to the great disturbance of
the churches of Christ."
He also regrets the censoriousness of his sermon, and the
countenance which he gave in it to persons of corrupt judg-
ment;
"and that, in the Synod, I used such unsafe and obscure expressions,
falling from 'me as a man dazzled with the buffetings of Satan, and that I
did appeal [to the King] from misapprehension of things."
He "confessed that herein he had done very sinfully, and he
humbly craved pardon." This letter was dated at Wells, Sept.
10, 1643, probably after he had learned of the tragic death of his
sister. His sentence of banishment was revoked.¹
1 Winthrop's Journal, vol. i. p. 162.
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TREATMENT OF INTRUDERS AND DISSENTIENTS
This penitence was an after work. He stood stoutly for his
sister through her convention before the Court.
The civil sentence passed against her, Nov. 2, 1637, was as
follows:-
"Mrs. Hutchinson (the wife of Mr. Wm Hutchinson) being convented
for traducing the ministers and their ministry in this country, she de-
clared volentarily her revelations for her ground, and that shee should be
delivred, and the Court ruined, with their posterity; and thereupon was
banished, and the meane while comited to Mr. Joseph Weld untill the
Court shall dispose of her."¹
After she had been sentenced to civil banishment, she was
dealt with by the Church, and excommunicated. She lost her
temper, and seemed once to part with veracity, on her trial.
Her "revelations" were especially offensive. At one time" she
made a retraction of near all" the errors attributed to her, and
"declared that it was just with God to leave her to herself, as
he had done, for her slighting his ordinances, both magistracy
and ministry." A question involving her veracity arose, when
she affirmed that she had never advanced some of the opinions
charged upon her; and for this, Winthrop says, "the church
with one consent cast her out," for "having impudently persisted
in untruth." Many of her sympathizers at once fell away.
As
the summing up of the strife, seventy-six persons were dis-
armed; 2 two were disfranchised and fined; two more were
fined; eight more were disfranchised; three were banished;
and eleven who had asked permission to remove, had leave, in
the form of a limitation of time within which they must do it.
The more estimable and considerable of them apologized, and
were received back. Those who did not, proved troublesome per-
sons where they went. After various removes with her husband,
and a vexed and troubled life, Mrs. Hutchinson, a widow, with
many children and grandchildren, living on the shore opposite
1 Records, vol. i. p. 207.
2 There was thought to be need of especial caution in this measure of disarming.
The military power of the colony had recently been organized into three regiments,
carefully officered, and for the time admirably well equipped. The sound of war
was in the land; and Wheelwright, in his sermon, had carried the rhetoric of battle
and violence, from the Old Testament, as far as it was safe to use it for Bible
champious. The authorities reasonably apprehended a direct recourse to arms.
BY THE FOUNDERS OF MASSACHUSETTS.
75
}
Long Island, was murdered in the summer of 1643, on an
inroad of the Indians. A daughter of eight years of age, the
only survivor, was carried into captivity. Four years after-
wards, she was recovered by the General Court, and brought
back to Massachusetts. Edward Hutchinson, a son of this
excellent though perhaps ill-balanced woman, had been among
those who were disfranchised and fined. His fine of forty
pounds was remitted, though I do not find any record of his
restoration to full citizenship, which probably he obtained. He
remained in Boston, on the removal of the family, and was a
brave captain, doing good service in Philip's war, and receiving a
mortal wound in Quaboag [Brookfield] fight. He was the great-
grandfather of Thomas Hutchinson, our provincial governor and
historian, who, in his latter capacity, seeking to subordinate filial
sentiment to impartiality, has hardly done justice to his ances-
tress in his narration of her troubles.
Thomas Savage, another of the disarmed, had married a
daughter of Mrs. Hutchinson, and afterwards he became son-
in-law of her strongest enemy, Rev. Zachariah Symmes. The
Hon. James Savage, his descendant, as editor and commen-
tator of Winthrop, gives us another example of impartiality in
his faithful annotations concerning the Antinomian controversy.
A period of twenty years elapsed between the struggle against
Antinomianism and the special legislation against the Quakers.
But the interval was divided by another contentious issue,
which threatened to put the ecclesiastical basis of the govern-
ment to a severer strain than it could safely bear, though still it
triumphed. Again the issue was one which engaged both
intruders and dissentients against the Government, though the
disaffection was mainly that of transient residents and non-
freemen. Mr. William Vassall, one of the original assistants,
had come over with Winthrop; but, from some disaffection, had
very soon returned to England. After residing there five years,
he came hither again, but, by preference, to Plymouth colony. He
was intensely opposed both to the civil and ecclesiastical rule
set up by his old associates. Being, as Winthrop says, "a man
of a busy and factious spirit," and "never at rest but when in
the fire of contention, he had practised with such as were not
1 Jour., vol. i. pp. 26 and 321.
1
76
TREATMENT OF INTRUDERS AND DISSENTIENTS
members of our churches" to initiate a new strife. Robert
Child and six others, accordingly, in May, 1646, addressed a
Remonstrance and Petition to the General Court, complaining
that the residents here were not governed by the laws of Eng-
land; that they were kept out of civil privileges as not being
church-members, while church-membership was to be secured
only by a covenant which was not fairly framed; that their
children were denied Christian baptism, and they themselves
compelled by fine to support and attend religious ministrations:
for all which grievances they asked redress. The Court, having
made arrangements for a synod of churches, issued, on Nov. 4,
1646, a stiff "Declaration" in answer. They insist that "ye
Government is framed according to our charter and ye funda-
mental and common laws of England, and carried on according
to the same;" adding, however, these important clauses, which
we know now how to fill in with all the meaning they then
implied, taking the words of eternal truth and righteousness
along with them, as that rule by which all kingdoms and juris-
dictions must render account of every act and admistration in
the last day." What was so "taken along" with the laws of
England, was the Bible, not by any means as of secondary
authority. The "Declaration" is followed by a series of par-
allelisms between Magna Charta and the Colony Laws, a liberal
allowance being made for statutes "alterable for occasions." 1
66
The petitioners carried their appeal to Parliament, but without
avail, there being then a good understanding between that Court
and ours. The complaints which were zealously urged in Eng-
land against the rigid and persecuting course of the authorities
of Massachusetts, drew from their old associate, the noble Sir
Richard Saltonstall, a letter of sharp rebuke, addressed to Cotton
and Wilson, somewhere between 1645 and 1653. A leading
and highly honored assistant, he had arrived here with Winthrop,
June 12, 1630; but, after some trifling alienating experiences, he
went back to England at the close of the following March, leav-
ing here some of his family, but never returning himself. He
continued, however, to exert his powerful influence to befriend
the colony, and to circumvent its enemies at the English courts.
The difficulty of his task in that capacity, rather than any doubt
1 Hutchinson's Coll., pp. 188-218.
BY THE FOUNDERS OF MASSACHUSETTS.
77
that he had not shared, or had lost his interest in, the religious
designs of his former associates, may have prompted some of the
stinging rebukes of that letter. He writes, -
"Reverend and deare friends whom I unfaynedly love and respect:
It doth not a little grieve my spirit to hear what sadd things are reported
dayly of your tyranny and persecutions in New England, as that you fyne,
whip and imprison men for their consciences. First, you compel such to
come into your assemblies, as you know will not join with you in your
worship, and when they show their dislike thereof or witniss against it,
then you styrre up your magistrates to punish them for such (as you con-
ceyve) their public affronts. Truly, friends, this your practice of compelling
any in matters of worship to doe that whereof they are not fully persuaded,
is to make them sin, for so the Apostle (Rom. 14 and 23) tells us, and
many are made hypocrites thereby, conforming in their outward man for
fear of punishment."
He prays for them and hopes they will-
"not practice those courses in a wilderness which you went so farre to
prevent. These rigid wayes have layed you very lowe in the hearts
of the saynts. I doe assure you I have heard them pray in the publique
assemblies, that the Lord would give you meeke and humble spirits, not
to stryve so much for uniformity, as to keep the unity of the spirit, in the
bond of peace.
I hope you do not assume to yourselves infallibilitie of
judgement, when the most learned of the Apostles confesseth he knew but
in part, and saw but darkely as thro a glass. Oh that all those who are
brethren, tho yet they cannot thinke and speake the same things, might be
of one accord in the Lord.” 1
Cotton, for himself and for his brother Wilson, replied to this
letter of frank and friendly rebuke, in a spirit of loving respect
for the writer, but disclaiming all blame, and standing stoutly for
their Bible model in their proceedings. Saltonstall had been at
least fourteen years withdrawn from any present share of adminis-
tering "the church in the wilderness." Away from the tentative
processes and the actual difficulties of the scheme on trial here,
he had the equally tasking responsibility of meeting the perplexi-
ties which it involved on the other side of the water.
The saddest and darkest stain upon the early annals of
Massachusetts attaches to the treatment of the people called
Quakers. And yet the fair and full rehearsal of the facts which
1 Hutchinson Papers, pp. 401-407.
78
TREATMENT OF INTRUDERS AND DISSENTIENTS
I
compose a faithful narrative of what, beginning in comedy ended
in tragedy, will certainly avail to relieve the burden of wanton
and ruthless cruelty cast upon our legislators. Two leading
positions must be taken at the start.
First, it is to be frankly admitted, that those legislators, though
beyond measure provoked and goaded to the course which they
pursued, and though they acted with slow deliberation, and were
always ready to interpose mercy for judgment, did nevertheless,
as seen in the light of our day, act very unwisely; allowed their
timid fears to master their reason, and committed themselves to
a dilemma, either horn of which humiliated and tortured them.
Second, it is to be as frankly and positively affirmed, that their
Quaker tormentors were the aggressive party; that they wan-
tonly initiated the strife, and with a dogged pertinacity persisted
in outrages which drove the authorities almost to frenzy; while
with a stiff temper of audacity, as the authorities saw it, but of
fidelity to holy duty as they felt, they courted the extreme penal-
ties which they might at any moment have escaped, except
through constraint of their " inspirations."
This episode in our history, mingled of the ludicrous and the
dismal, dates from more than a quarter of a century after the
planting of the colony. Many of the wiser and gentler spirits
which at first had sway here, and whose judgment would doubt-
less have stopped short of the tragic inflictions visited on four
so-called Quakers, had gone to their rest. Winthrop, Cotton,
Wilson, and others like them, as they passed away, left the ad-
ministration of affairs in State and Church to men more stern
and less wise than themselves. In the mean while, foreign and
domestic troubles and perplexities had contributed to endanger
the colony, to threaten its liberties, and to make the manage-
ment of its affairs even more difficult. The emergencies of the
time made it of the most critical necessity to keep out all dis-
turbers, to secure internal harmony, and to cling to the well-
proved safeguards of the first enterprise.
The root of the prevalent superficial opinion, founded upon
an unintelligent, cursory, and hap-hazard way of writing and
reading our history, and which heaps an unrelieved burden of
censure upon our colonial court for its proceedings against the
Quakers, presents itself at once to an impartial inquirer. Mis-
BY THE FOUNDERS OF MASSACHUSETTS.
79
apprehension and error, leading to positive injustice to our legis-
lators, come in the popular mind, from identifying modern
Quakers with the sort of persons whom our Fathers knew and
dealt with under that name. When one or a group of those
excellent people known as Friends is seen quietly passing our
streets, if any descendant of our colonists, or any foreign-born
citizen, trusting to ignorance in the lack of knowledge, should say
to himself, "Those are the sort of people who, two hundred years
ago, were imprisoned, whipped, and mutilated here, and four of
whom were hung on Boston Common," he would need to be
sent back to the record.
The intrusive, pestering, indecent, and railing disturbers of
early Massachusetts, lawless and ignorant as most of them were,
have scarcely a single point of affinity with the dignified and
highly esteemed Friends of our day. These last are, and for
several generations have been, especially noted for quietude of
spirit, for a grave solemnity of demeanor, and a modest unob-
trusiveness. Indeed, it would be hard to define stronger points
of contrast in speech, conduct, and even in some important mat-
ters of opinion and religious belief, than those which really dis-
tinguished between the first and the modern Quakers. Those
whoin our Fathers knew were of the type of Fox and Burroughs
and Naylor.¹
1 In vol. i. pp. 10 to 158, of Burton's Parliamentary Diary, may be read the curi-
ous and wearisome debate upon the case of Naylor, extending over eleven days.
That the wise and grave men of the English Parliament of 1656 should have found
material in that case for so long a discussion, when so much important business had
to be postponed by it, is in itself a suggestive fact. The perusal of that tedious
story will nevertheless reward a reader, if he will take it as a chapter of the struggle
and development of opinion concerning full liberty of conscience. Naylor, however,
was indicted and condemned for blasphemy. He had rode into Bristol in a guise,
and with observances, imitating the entry of Jesus Christ into Jerusalem. The in-
dictment against him was: That he assumed the gesture, words, names, and attri-
butes of our Saviour, Christ." Narrowly escaping capital punishment, he was
sentenced to be pilloried and whipped in two places in London, to have his tongue
bored with a hot iron, to be branded on the forehead with the letter B, to be sent to
Bristol, there to ride "on a horse bare-ridged, with his face back," to be whipped again,
and then brought back to prison in London, debarred the use of pen, ink, and paper,
and of all food but what he should labor for. Cruelly treated as he had been, the
victim for a time of an insane enthusiasm, and of the fanatical folly of some admirers,
he was for a time disowned by the Quakers. Coming to his senses after two years'
imprisonment, he grieved over his delusions, and became an approved and effective
preacher. His utterances just before his death have a deep tenderness, sweetness,
and beauty.
80
TREATMENT OF INTRUDERS AND DISSENTIENTS
6
In "An addition to the book entitled, The Spirit of the Mar-
tyrs revived," published just one hundred years after the first
coming of the Quakers to Massachusetts, Joseph Bolles, one of
the earnest Friends, draws a censorious contrast, " concerning the
difference between the former Quakers, that suffered Persecutions
and these in this day," as follows:
“If we may know them by their Fruits, they were two manner of Peo-
ple; the first often going to Meeting Houses, and bearing a godly testi-
mony, after the speaker had done [not always waiting for that, however],
also Teaching and Exhorting at other public places, for which they suffered
much Persecution, which they took joy fully, being upheld by the Power
of God. And these, only holding Meetings of their own in a formal way,
as other Professors do, having a form of Godliness, and not the Power
and Life thereof, as the suffering Quakers had; minding earthly things,
being adulterated and living in the friendship of the World, which is enmity
with God. So these, not having the spirit as the first Quakers had, are
no more to be compared with them, than a dead Tree may be compared
to a living Tree."
The writer was certainly unjust in thus making the difference
wrought by a century to consist only in this, that the first Quak-
ers kept themselves alive by disturbing other people, while his
contemporaries stagnated among themselves. The Friends did.
not settle into quietude, till they had secured a general recogni-
tion of the vitalities of their system of truth. They have ever
since met the unpopularity of standing for advanced and unwel-
come truths, and for reforms.
Those whom we know are of the type of Penn, Barclay, and
Whittier. The conduct, at least, of those who first bore the name,
would find its severest rebukers in such as now bear it. As to
religious opinions, or theology, distinctly characteristic of the in-
truders here, it is curious to note how little those had to do with
the strife. Penn and Barclay wrought out for the Friends, a re-
ligious system for belief and practice which would do honor to
any fellowship of Christians at the present time. But that was
the product of a later age of Quakerism, calmly, intelligently,
and even philosophically elaborated by nobly endowed men.
The crude and indigested notions which the early Quakers uttered
"in a prophetical way," sounded like the wildest rant, to be re-
lieved of the reproach of blasphemy only by being referred to a
BY THE FOUNDERS OF MASSACHUSETTS.
81
besotted stupidity or a shade of distraction. Our Fathers cared
little, if at all, for the Quaker theology. They did not get so
far as that in dealing with them. Not being inclined to accept
the account which the Quakers gave of themselves as being
under the peculiar guidance of the Holy Spirit, our Fathers dealt
with them on the score of their manners, their lawlessness, and
their offensive speech and behavior. Yet it is also true that the
peculiar set of Quakers who came and testified, and defiantly
insisted upon returning and staying here, would not have been in
all respects exactly what they were, nor have done all that they
did, and as they did, if they had not had just such persons to
deal with them as they confronted here.
We, indeed, in the calm retrospect by which we study past
developments of new opinions, and in the intelligent analysis
which we make of the working elements, that go to the produc
tion of a fresh truth, can apprehend the high and pure motive
which not only led, but really inspired, those unwelcome mission-
aries to our Bay. They were the advanced pleaders for a liberty
which is now our life, for a form of faith and piety which alone
has power for a free soul. The most illiterate and incoherent of
them had the Divine gift. They put their sincerity beyond all
question, by their often meek, but always unflinching, endurance
of contumely and violence. And, without doubt, much of their
terrible abusiveness of language was wholly free from malice and
any ill-intention, but was prompted wholly from an honest and
severely righteous sense of the errors and superstitions which
they assailed. But all this, we must again remind ourselves, is
from our own point of view, not from that of our Fathers. The
colonists had themselves suffered for opinion's sake. They, too,
had their visions, not "of private interpretation," and they
thought they had a skill in "trying spirits," and must look for
the devil always under a disguise.
George Fox, the reputed founder of the system of belief and
1
practice known as Quakerism, has come to stand in many
sketchy and æsthetic essays, as a profoundly original genius, a
man of nature's own large endowing, a seer and an organizer.
He was nothing of the sort. A cursory perusal of those old
books describing the heresies and sectaries then abounding in
England, to which I have referred, will convince a reader that,
6
1
82
TREATMENT OF INTRUDERS AND DISSENTIENTS
before Fox came upon the stage, all the fancies, scruples, and
oddities of opinion and behavior by which he and his compan-
ions first won their notoriety, were all ready for their adoption.
Fox was an eclectic. He picked up in the various places where
he wandered, and from the mixed and multiform company
with which he associated, every one of his peculiar ideas and
crotchets.
Though he had a native vigor of understanding, and a soul
of sincerity and purity, he was an illiterate and ill-balanced man.
Shoemaker and shepherd as he was by turns, he was given to
hypochondriac meditations; and when, with his seeking and
inquisitive mind, he commenced his rovings, he found stimulant
and food for his morbidly eccentric nature in any shred of truth
which he gathered on the way. The fellowship which he drew
around him was of those like himself, waiting-as the phrase
went for some one who would "speak to their condition," and
then ready by public or private harangues, " testimonies," or “
66 pro-
phetical burdens," to make that condition of theirs a standard for
trying other peoples' spirits. Some of the sect did get hold of,
and urge with earnest, simple eloquence, living truths which lay
latent in the Christian Scriptures, unrecognized and unapplied,
according to their due value and authority, by the Church of
their day. But the Quakers threw these fresh truths out of their
proportions and relations in dealing with them.
If Fox, as he once purposed, had gone into physic, instead of
into divinity, he would not have led so harmless a life. But, as
a preacher, he was known as a disturber of the peace, a reviler
of other ministers of religion, and of magistrates. His tongue
was a sharp one, though he referred its sharpness to the Spirit.
He railed and testified in all public places and assemblies, and
of course was buffeted, mobbed, and put into jail. He was one
of those harmless enthusiasts, who are best reduced to soberness
by being to a degree listened to, and then let alone. But neither
he nor his fellows would have been satisfied with being slighted:
nor were those whom they abused and reviled, inclined to give
them the benefit of indifference. Some of his associates far
exceeded him in their offensiveness of speech and behavior.
The English jails soon became filled with Quakers, who, curi-
ously enough, were by many regarded as disguised Popish emis-
ding.
BY THE FOUNDERS OF MASSACHUSETTS.
83
saries of the Franciscan order in the service of Rome. Baxter
rashly asserts that many such friars had been found speaking in
the Quaker assemblies.
The home-field of England, Ireland, and Scotland, inviting
and rewarding as it was, soon proved too limited for the mission-
ary zeal of the new enthusiasts. Men and women of the sect
soon found "the burden and call of their spirit" to carry their
testimony over the earth. The continent of Europe, with its
princes and peasants, offered them promising opportunities, and
the Pope and the Grand Turk received visits from them.
Our Fathers were on the watch for an inroad of these de-
spised but dreaded intruders some considerable time before they
found their way hither. Through letters from friends at home,
and the abounding pamphlets of religious controversy of those.
days, the people of Massachusetts were well informed as to the
spirit and actings of the Quakers. Dangerous books had already
been found circulating in the colony, and had been proscribed by
law in 1654; especially some of those of John Reeves and Ludo-
vick Muggleton, "the two last Witnesses," which contained
similar notions to those advanced by Fox. The authorities were
on the alert. Indeed, but a few weeks before the first two
Quakers arrived here, a solemn Fast-day had been kept in the
colony, the first object of which was stated to be, "to seek
the face of God in behalf of our native country, in reference
to the abounding of errors, especially those of Ranters and
Quakers."
1
It was not till July, 1656, ten years after the first preaching
of Fox, that the unwelcome news was circulated in Boston, that
a ship in the harbor, from Barbadoes, had on board two women
Quakers. One of these, Mary Fisher, had visited the Grand Turk,
at Adrianople. By order of the magistrates, they were searched
and committed to jail, and their books were burned; the master
of the vessel being put under bonds to take them away again.
Hardly were they got rid of, than a vessel arrived from England,
having on board four Quaker men, and as many women, together
with a ninth passenger, a man, who, having come on board at
Long Island, had been converted by his companions. They
were committed to jail, examined, and found by their abusive
1 Rec., iv. (1) 276.
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TREATMENT OF INTRUDERS AND DISSENTIENTS
speech to belong to a class of persons for whom there was no
room or welcome here. Gorton, from Rhode Island, found
means to communicate with them in jail, proposing to get them
out of the vessel somewhere along the coast, as the master of
it, in conformity with his heavy bonds, was carrying them out
of this jurisdiction. But the magistrates thwarted Gorton's
purpose.
Then began a series of deliberative and legislative measures
on the part of our authorities, founded, as they believed, on
their full right to secure themselves from the seditious and ran-
corous visitors; either by warning them off from coming, or by
at once banishing them on their arrival, with some form of
punishing for a return those who, having come more than once,
were to be shipped off again. There was a gradation and an
adaptation of the penalties enacted, designed to be fitly and
righteously adjusted to the measure of provocation, insolence,
and defiance exhibited by the intruders themselves. In every
previous instance in which any offender had been banished from
the jurisdiction, the sentence had been effective. No one who
had suffered it had ever defied it by returning hither again.
The magistrates had reason to suppose that that measure would
be sufficient for their protection in the case of the Quakers.
When it is considered, too, that any shipmaster who should
bring such as passengers, was liable to a heavy fine, and to other
enforced charges; and also, that any resident who should harbor
or encourage a Quaker, would be severely dealt with for the
offence, it might appear as if good manners, and generosity
and magnanimity of spirit, would have kept the Quakers away.
Certainly, by every rule of right and reason, they ought to have
kept away. They had no rights or business here, and a simple
prohibition ought to have been sufficient even to release their
consciences from all obligation to meddle with other people's
consciences. Most clearly, they courted persecution, suffering,
and death; and, as the magistrates affirmed, "they rushed upon
the sword." Those magistrates never intended them harm, nor
would have done them harm, except as they believed that all their
successive measures and sharper penalties were positively neces-
sary to secure their jurisdiction from the wildest lawlessness and
an absolute anarchy.
..
B
BY THE FOUNDERS OF MASSACHUSETTS.
85
But they erred in their calculation, reasonable as it was.
They little knew how stiff and indomitable was the will of a
Quaker, what a new energy and persistency of purpose came of
a conscience reinforced and guided by a supposed inspiration
from above. An hour's meditation, in some favorable mood of
mind or feeling, would lead a Quaker to the persuasion, that a
certain utterance from his lips, or a certain course of conduct,
was as clearly indicated to him by God, as if a commission had
floated down to him from the visible heavens.
These "revelations" came in a very simple form, as prompt-\
ings or directions, which the subjects of them seem to have been
persuaded that they could distinguish, by some test of quality
or intensity, from the mere impulses or inclinations which it
would be unwise to yield to. Thus, two of the victims on
whom fell the last penalty of Massachusetts law, as we shall
soon have to read, gave this account of their reasons for pro-
voking that penalty. William Robinson, being in Rhode Island,
felt that "the Lord had commanded him to go to Boston, and to
lay down his life there." Marmaduke Stevenson, at Barbadoes,
1
"heard that New England had made a law to put the servants of the
living God to death, if they returned after they were sentenced away.
Immediately came the Word of the Lord unto me, saying, 'Thou knowest
not but that thou mayest go thither.' So after that, a vessel was made
ready for Rhode Island, which I passed in; and the Word of the Lord
came unto me, saying,,' Go to Boston with thy brother William Robin-
'" &c.¹
son,
It was in vain that ministers and magistrates pressed any
Quaker who returned here, after being banished the second,
third, and fourth time, and complained of persecution, with
the argument, that the Master, in whose name he professed to
preach, had expressly instructed his disciples, that, "when per-
secuted in one place, they should flee to another." The Quaker
had a revelation which nullified that command.
With the purpose and aim of impartiality held in the mind
of one who is historically dealing with this episode, it seems as
if the only way to secure it, is to divide between the parties
either censure or palliation. The facts cannot be written with-
1 Miscellaneous Papers in the State House.
86
TREATMENT OF INTRUDERS AND DISSENTIENTS
out the use of the stronger and the harsher adjectives on both
sides. There was no down, or rosewater, or language of com-
pliment, in use among them. Stern, sinewy, Saxon speech, and
a calling of things by their right names, and a setting before us
of pitched combatants in the attitude of striking and striking
back, alone befit the facts. We like to feel that the fight was
fair on both sides. One party represented a renovated Israel
on the ocean border of a wilderness, seeking, with wrong or
malice for none outside of them, to obey the call of God in
planting a religious Commonwealth. They required peace and
harmony. The other party had new light; and they felt upon
them the obligation of making the darkness comprehend it The
Quakers had hold in common of an advanced truth, quick with
the energy of the Spirit. There was accord enough among
them to assure them that their oracles were not private delusions.
Their oracles were, indeed, better than the utterance of them.
There was much that was irritating and aggravating in the
sharpest degree, and intended to be such in the language and
conduct of the Quakers. Their persistency, their seeming wil-
fulness, and aimless spirit of annoyance, indicated a set purpose
of defying all remonstrance, and of inviting a violent handling.
—
1
I do not know that an essay has ever been written upon the
satisfactions of being persecuted, as the word is, especially when
that persecution is incurred by persecuting other people. But
there is matter for such an essay, and for its copious and rich
illustration. The men and women who regarded themselves as
led by the Spirit to give " testimony," which, as things then were,
would subvert all civil and religious order in this colony, and
overwhelm it with confusion and anarchy, - while travelling
through the wilderness, or coursing inland waters, or pinched in
the stocks, or screaming out through barred windows,-doubtless
took an appreciable comfort in their own "sufferings." They
felt that they entered thereby into the fellowship of prophets and
martyrs. An hour of brooding and elated thought lifted them
1 Worcester defines persecute thus: "To pursue with malignity or enmity; to
harass with penalties; to afflict; to distress; to oppress; generally on account of
opinions." Webster's definition is, "To pursue in a manner to injure, vex, or
afflict; to cause to suffer pain from hatred or malignity; to harass; to beset in an
annoying way." The reader may make his own selection and application.
/
BY THE FOUNDERS OF MASSACHUSETTS.
87
to heights of intense enthusiasm. A spell wrought upon their
spirits; and they yielded themselves, as they thought, to a guid-
ance from above. Their full sincerity was proved by their
shrinking from no burden, mortification, sacrifice, or pain, which
lay in their way of obligation. Modest and pure women, under
this spell, would rush into the public highways, or into a crowded
place of worship, and, independent of all the art or materials of
dressmakers, would make a distressing spectacle of themselves.
One such, coming into a meeting-house in this condition, had
smeared herself with black paint, as a sign, she said, of the
black-pox, which she prophesied God would send on this cruel
jurisdiction.
I have before me a copy, which I made from a miscellaneous
mass of manuscripts in our archives in the State House, of
official papers connected with the legislation and the proceedings
against the Quakers. Among these are many original letters,
on scraps of paper, written, in the jail, by imprisoned Quakers
to their friends or to the magistrates. Most of these, even those
whose grammar, diction, and chirography indicate the least of
culture, express, often with great sweetness and gentleness of
spirit, a heroism of heart and a self-centred calm of conviction
fully befitting witnesses for the truth of God. In general, these
papers fail of bearing out the charge of our own authorities, that
the Quakers were beyond measure abusive in their speech. And
it is probable that the sternness of face which was set against
them, the rough handling which they received, and the offensive
epithets applied to them, occasionally irritated them into coarse-
ness and violence of language not habitual with them.
Some livelier specimens of their rhetoric than any which I
have found in our own records, passed under my eyes among
the rich stores of the British Museum.
Among these is a tract¹ bearing this title: -
"N. England's Ensigne, It being the Account of Cruelty, the Pro-
fessors' Pride, and the Articles of their Faith; signified in characters
written in blood, wickedly begun, barbarously continued and inhumanly
finished (so far as they have gone) by the present power of darkness
possest in the Priests and Rulers in N. England, with the Dutch also
1 Numbered in Catalogue, 493. h
6
88
TREATMENT OF INTRUDERS AND DISSENTIENTS
inhabiting the same land. In a bloody and cruel birth which the Hus-
band to the Whore of Babylon hath brought forth by ravishing and
torturing the seed of the Virgin of Israel," &c. "Written at sea, by us
whom the wicked in scorn call Quakers."
Of this, Humphrey Norton was the writer. The Massa-
chusetts people are described as "Cruel English Jewes." New
England is "the most vainest and beastliest place of all Bruits
[brutes], the most publicly prophane, and the most covertly
corrupt." One of his company, he says, went to the meeting-
house in Martha's Vineyard; "and after the Priest Thomas
Maho [Mayhew] had done his speech, unspake a few words."
Being thrust out for this, he repeated his visit in the afternoon.
Here is a graphic piece of etching:-
“A man that hath a covetous and deceitful rotten heart; lying lips
which abound among them, and a smooth, fawning, flattering tongue, and
short hair, and a deadly enmity against those that are called Quakers and
others that oppose their wayes, such a hypocrite is a fit man to be a
member of any N. England church.
“J. Rous and H. Norton were moved to go to the great meeting house
at Boston upon one of their Lector days, where we found John Norton
their teacher set up, who like a babling Pharisee run over a vain
repetition near an hour long (like an impudent smooth fac'd harlot, who
was telling her Paramoors a long fair story of her husband's kindness,
while nothing but wantonness and wickedness is in her heart.) When
his glass was out he begun his sermon, wherein, amongst many lifeless
expressions, he spake much of the danger of these who are called Quakers.
Some of his hearers gaped on him as if they expected honey should have
dropped from his lips. And amongst other of his vain conceits he
uttered this, (whereby he plainly discovered the blindness and rottenness
of his heart,) that the Justice of God is the Armor of the Devil: the
which, if true, then is the Devil sometimes covered with Justice: which
is more than ever I heard any of his servants say on his behalf before,"
&c.
"13th of 2ª Month, 1658 Sarah Gibbins and Dorothy Waugh
spoke at Lector. Death fed Death through the painted sepulchre
John Norton." And, "as a sign of his emptiness," the women
broke two empty bottles over him.
The same lively journal contains an impudent letter to
Governor "Indicot." If there was an epithet beyond all others
BY THE FOUNDERS OF MASSACHUSETTS.
J
89
offensive to a New-England minister, it was that of "Priest "
which the Quakers so freely used. "Baal's priests," "the seed
of the Serpent," "the brood of Ishmael," were other titles. We
can hardly conceive of the indignation caused by these wanton
disturbances of the exercises of the " Thursday Lecture."
It is possible, that, when a Puritan congregation was startled
and shocked by such an apparition among them as that of an
unclothed woman, or by a less indecent method of Quaker
testifying, the minister may at the moment have been reading
from the Bible, how one of the old prophets had, without his
garments, delivered himself in a similar prophetical way of his
burden. Our Fathers listened to the holy record of such doings
with the profoundest reverence; but the living imitation infuri-
ated them. They could not, or they would not, on the bare
word of the Quakers themselves, believe that they were inspired
directly from the Holy God. They had another way of account
ing for the phenomena. Yet who can doubt but that some
high-wrought fervors, or some sweet inward satisfactions, com-
pensated the reproachings, buffetings, and whippings which
the victims drew upon themselves. Indeed, they often contrived.
to make rather a good thing of it. They rallied and comforted
and reinforced each other. They would not work in the prisons,
nor pay jail fees. They excited the sympathy of some of the
tender and less rigid members of the colony, who would intro-
duce food into the windows of the prison, and who very soon
began to protest against the cruelty used towards them, and to
listen favorably to their utterances. This sympathy for the
Quakers, so likely to be, and so soon actually, followed by dis-
cipleship among our own people, was what the magistrates
greatly dreaded. Many of their harsher measures they regarded
as simply cautions and safeguards against the spread of Quaker
notions with the weaker and more sympathetic among them-
selves. If a Quaker in prison could get pen, paper, and ink-
horn, or, failing the last, blood from a pricked finger would
serve, he would address a missive to magistrates and ministers,
not always conciliatory. There are many of these preserved in
our State House. As the parties to this terrible struggle came
better to understand each other, the terms of either party were
as follows:
90
TREATMENT OF INTRUDERS AND DISSENTIENTS
The magistrates, regarding the opinions and conduct of the
Quakers as seditious and blasphemous, resolved, in the exercise
of their charter-rights, to keep them out, or to drive them out,
of their jurisdiction; steadily increasing the penalties against
such as, having been again and again banished, returned.
The Quakers, on their part, assured that persecution among
Christians was wicked, that the Puritan church-way was
oppressive and wrong, and that its intolerance could be worn
down and worn out only by the most resolute defiance and
endurance of penalties, - professed their purpose, in the name
and under the power of God, to persecute the persecutors till they
ceased to persecute. It was a struggle between two indomitable
wills; the one fortified by a parchment charter and a church
covenant, the other borne up by an intense conviction of direct
spiritual guidance. Our sympathies must go for go they
will with those who thus held to a still inspiring and revealing
God, beyond the contents of a Book taken by its letter.
There is something more yet to be said, in order that we may
set the constituted authorities of Massachusetts in the light in
which they themselves stood and acted. Their horror of fanati-
cism in religion had been learned and intensified from the
terrible extravagancies and the bloody tragedies connected with
the wild doings of the Anabaptists of Munster under King John,
the tailor of Leyden, in the century preceding. Visions of a
repetition of these frenzies came up before the horrified minds
of our magistrates and ministers; and they felt the responsi-
bility of averting what they so often in their records call up in
reference to these mad Anabaptists. Again, mutilation of the
body had been made familiar to them in England, as a penalty
for malignity, sedition, and heresy. They may have seen Leigh-
ton, Burton, Prynne, and Bastwick, as thus mutilated by the
1
kāpj
1 Dr. Leighton, for his book against Prelacy, had been sentenced "to suffer the
loss of both ears, to have his nostrils slit, his forehead branded, to be publicly
whipped, fined ten thousand pounds, and perpetually imprisoned." The sentence
was executed to the letter, save that he was set at liberty by the Long Parliament,
after twelve years' confinement, when he could neither see, hear, nor walk.
Henry Burton, Dr. Bastwick, and William Prynne were mutilated in a similar
manner. The last of these having been sentenced a second time to a part of the
punishment, the stumps of his ears were sawed out. These acts were done under
Episcopal and Royal sanction. It is melancholy to think that they should have to
BY THE FOUNDERS OF MASSACHUSETTS.
91
highest English law. And, once more, our Fathers regarded
Quakers as representing for them, of danger and evil, exactly
what plotting Jesuits represented to the realm of England. The
penalty of death, on Quakers coming here a fourth time after
banishment, was copied by them from the English statute
against Jesuits. The mutilation law was never but partially
enforced here.
The miscellaneous manuscripts of scraps of paper, to which
I have referred as now among the old files in the State House,
enable us to trace the course of proceedings in this harassing
experience, and contain much curious matter. By an order of
Court, June 10, 1658, the Rev. John Norton was appointed to
write and publish a treatise against the Quakers. This he did,
under the title of "The Heart of New England rent by the
Blasphemies of the present Generation," &c.; and he received a
grant of land for his remuneration. The Court had been moved
to ask this service of him; and to other measures, by the zeal of
the sterner portion of their constituents. In October, 1658, a
petition was addressed to the Court from leading citizens of
Boston, in which they asked for severer laws against the Quakers.
The dangers and ruin threatening from their behavior and testi-
monies, and the darkly drawn apprehensions of the same horrors
as followed from Anabaptism at Munster, are alleged as justify-
ing a law inflicting death upon such as should return from
banishment. Singularly enough, the names of several of the
signers of this petition indicate them as some of those who had
been censured and disarmed, for having signed the petition in
behalf of Mr. Wheelwright. Some persons here had evidently
changed sides, from that of sufferers to that of advocates of the
sternest discipline.¹
As I have said, there was a steadily progressive legislation of
enactments and penalties undertaken by Massachusetts, designed
to meet and punish the successive acts of boldness and con-
a degree been imitated by the Puritan against the Quaker. It is remarkable, how-
ever, that, even after his second barbarous punishment, Mr. Prynne should have
written a book to prove "that Christian Kings and magistrates have authority,
under the Gospel, to punish idolatry, apostasy, heresy, blasphemy, and obstinate
schism, with pecuniary, corporal, and, in some cases, with capital punishments."
(Wood's Athen Ox., ii. pp. 311–327.)
1 Vol. of Miscel. Papers in the State House, p. 246, &c.
92
TREATMENT OF INTRUDERS AND DISSENTIENTS
tumacy, on the part of the Quakers, prison, fines, whippings,
mutilation of ears and tongue, branding, and the gallows. Sad,
sad indeed, was the climax to which our Fathers were led on,
from an error at the start. They sought, with only partial suc-
cess, to induce the other New-England colonies to keep pace
with them in legislation against the Quakers. Rhode Island, as
furnishing a harborage for all sorts of consciences, made our
Fathers uncomfortable, because from it the Quakers had such a
ready access to our jurisdiction. Would that Massachusetts, in
her own course with them, had anticipated the method suggested
in the sly wisdom of the reply which she received from Benedict
Arnold, the President of Rhode Island, in answer to a request.
that that colony would imitate the legislation of the Bay
colony against the Quakers. Arnold, speaking for his associates,
says:
"We find that in those places where this people aforesaid, in this
Colony, are most of all suffered to declare themselves freely, and are
only opposed by arguments in discourse, there they least of all desire to
come. And we are informed that they begin to loathe this place, for
that they are not opposed by the civil authority; but with all patience
and meekness are suffered to say over their pretended revelations and
admonitions. Nor are they like or able to gain many here to their way.
Surely, we find that they like to be persecuted by civil powers; and,
when they are so, they are like to gain more adherents by the conceit of
their patient sufferings, than by consent to their pernicious sayings."
(R. I. Records, i. 377.) ¹
1
But even the all-including tolerance of Roger Williams suf-
1 Our historian, Hutchinson, tries to divide equally his censure upon our magis-
trates and the Quakers, when he speaks (Hist. i. 380) of "the strange delusion the
Quakers were under, in courting persecution; and the imprudence of the authorities
in gratifying this humour, as far as their utmost wishes could carry them."
The famous Richard Baxter, of Kidderminster, who had been greatly exercised
and annoyed by the personal abuse visited on him by Quakers, came at last to
learn the same wise way of humoring them. He writes in his Life:
"The Quakers would fain have got entertainment, and set up a meeting in the
town, and frequently railed at me in the congregation; but when I had once given
them leave to meet in the church for a dispute, and, before the people, had opened
their deceits and shame, none would entertain them more, nor did they get one
proselyte among us."
One of his most pertinent questions to them concerning their doctrine of the
"inner light," which they said all men had, was this: "If all have it, why may not
I have it?"
BY THE FOUNDERS OF MASSACHUSETTS.
93
fered a strain too much from the Quakers. Rowing in a skiff
over the Narragansett Bay, quickened by his ever-ardent love of
disputation, to match himself against some of them, the keen-
spirited old man had a sore trial of his patience. He after-
wards wrote of Quakers,-
"They are insufferably proud and contemptuous. I have, therefore, pub-
licly declared myself, that a due and moderate restraint and punishment of
these incivilities, though pretending conscience, is so far from persecution
properly so called, that it is a duty and command of God unto all man-
kinde, first in Families, and thence into all mankinde Societies."
The summing up of the severities in our own colony is as
follows: twenty-two Quakers were banished on pain of death;
four were hung, one a woman; three lost the right ear; one was
branded in the hand with the letter H; between thirty and forty
were whipped.
The death penalty was legalized by only a majority of two in
the General Court; and was so strongly resisted, as soon to be
left in abeyance.
The Court, from time to time, urged to the most stringent
measures by some of the more austere spirits, and discouraged
Make
1 " George Fox digged out of his Burrowes," &c., p. 200. This curious book, of
which, though it was published in Boston, in 1676, there are only four copies known
to be extant, one being in the Boston Athenæum, is promised in a reprint by
the Narragansett Club. It is to be hoped, that a few of those who had known of
Roger Williams's youthful experiences in Massachusetts survived to enjoy its pe-
rusal. The old fire of disputation had not gone out in its writer. Its severity of
bitterness and invective, its unsparing contemptuousness, streaked with real good-
nature and the old "conscientious contentiousness," make it one of the curiosities
of literature. Williams had evidently been beyond measure provoked and horrified
by the Quakers. He had tried his skill upon them in a meeting at Newport, in 1671;
but he says, that, while he was speaking, one cut him off by "falling to prayer,"
and then another by singing. George Fox being then in the country, Williams
challenged him and his followers to a public discussion on fourteen propositions, the
thirteenth of which is that, "Their many Books and writings are extreamly poor,
lame, naked, and swelled up with high titles and words of boasting vapour."
Williams, says Fox, was afraid to meet him. "This old Fox thought it best to run
for it; and leave the work to his journeymen and chaplains." The disputation was
held at Newport, and rare sport it must have afforded to uncircumcised listeners.
"God graciously assisted me in rowing all day with my old bones, so that I got to
Newport towards the midnight of the day before the meeting" (p. 24.) It was in
August, 1672.
A
There is a double joke in the title of the book, as it includes a sly hit at Burroughs,
one of Fox's chosen companions.
}
94
TREATMENT OF INTRUDERS AND DISSENTIENTS
by a steadily increasing number of opponents, moved either by
pity or by a sense of the utter futility of the legislation, were
evidently, as shown by scraps of paper still extant, most sorely
perplexed. Under a sense of their responsibility, and moved by
their convictions, that Quakers were to the colony they were
guarding from ruin and anarchy, precisely what Jesuits were to
the realm of England, they felt justified in enacting and inflicting
the death penalty against the most obstinate and insidious
offenders. They issued several formal vindications and argu-
ments in support of their successive measures. The pleas which
they set up were all minutely and elaborately illustrated by
Scripture texts and examples, like that of Solomon's putting to
death of Shimei.¹
The stern issue was to be fully tried. Four Quakers were
banished, Sept. 12, 1659, on pain of death if they returned.
Two of these, Mary Dyer being one, "found freedom to depart."
But she returned again in a month, with the other two, who
were attended by a woman from Salem, bringing with her some
linen, which she showed to the Governor, as intended for the
winding-sheets of the victims.
The rest is best narrated by the Court Record:
"SECOND SESSION, GENERAL COURT, OCTOBER 18, 1659.
"It is ordered that William Robbinson, Marmaduke Stephenson, and
Mary Dyer, Quakers, now in prison for theire rebellion, sedition, and pre-
sumptious obtruding themselves upon us, notwithstanding their being sen-
tenced to banishment on paine of death, as underminers of this govern-
ment, &c., shall be brought before this Court for theire trialls, to suffer
the poenalty of the lawe (the just reward of their transgression) on the
morrow morning, being the nineteenth of this instant."
Being "brought to the barre, they acknowledged themselves to be the
persons banished. After a full hearing of what the prisoners could say
for themselves, it was put to the question, whether the prisoners, who
have been convicted for Quakers, and banished this jurisdiction on paine
of death, should be putt to death according as the lawe provides in that
case. The Court resolved this question on the affirmative; and the
Governor, (Endecott) in open Court, declared the sentence to W. Rob-
binson, that was brought to the barr: W. R. yow shall goe from hence to
the place from whence yow came, and from thence to the place of exe-
1 1 Kings, chap. ii.
MARKA
BY THE FOUNDERS OF MASSACHUSETTS.
95
cution, and there hang till yow be dead. The like sentence the Gov¹., in
open Court, pronounced against Marmaduke Steephenson and Mary Dyer,
being brought to the barre one after another, in the same words:
"Whereas" the above named "are sentenced by this Court to death
for theire rebellion, &c., it is ordered that the Secretary issue out his war-
rant to Edward Michelson, marshall generall, for repairing to the prison
on the 27th of this instant October, and take the said persons into his cus-
tody, and then forthwith, by the aid of Capt. James Oliver, with one hun-
dred souldiers, taken out by his order proportionably out of each company
in Boston, compleatly armed with pike and musketteers, with powder and
bullett, to lead them to the place of execution, and there see them hang
till they be dead, and in theire going, being there, and retourne, to see all
things be carried peaceably and orderly. Warrants issued.
"It is ordered that the Reverend Mr. Zackery Simes and Mr. John
Norton, repaire to the prison, and tender theire endeavors to make the
prisoners sencible of theire approaching dainger by the sentence of this
Court, and prepare them for theire approaching ends.
"Whereas Mary Dyer is condemned by the Generall Court to be exe-
cuted for hir offences, on the petition of William Dier, hir soune, it is
ordered that the said Mary Dyer shall have liberty for forty eight howers
after this day to depart out of this jurisdiction, after which time, being
found therein, she is forthwith to be executed, and in the meane time that
she be kept close prisoner till hir sonne or some other be ready to carry
hir away within the aforesaid time; and it is further ordered, that she
shall be carried to the place of execution, and there to stand upon the
gallowes, with a rope about her necke, till the rest be executed.
"Itt is ordered, that thirty-six of the souldiers be ordered by Capt.
Oliver to remain in and about the towne as centinells, to preserve the peace
of the place, whiles the rest goe to the execution.
It is ordered that the selectmen of Boston shall, and heereby are re-
quired and impowred to presse tenn or twelve able and faithfull persons
every night during the sitting of this Court to watch with great care the
toune, especially the prison," &c.¹
This last order is an evidence, among others which the Records
show, that the magistrates, charged as they felt with the gravest
responsibility in vindicating the authority of the law against all
trifling and defiance, were still well aware that a protesting and
indignant spirit, widely working among the citizens, was ready
to manifest itself in a threatening way.
On the 27th of October, 1659, a gallows stood on Boston
1 Vol. iv. pt. 1, pp. 383-4.
96
TREATMENT OF INTRUDERS AND DISSENTIENTS
Common, for the execution of three condemned Quakers, who,
after repeated banishments, refused to accept their lives on the
condition that they would go away and keep away,- W. Robin-
son, Marmaduke Stevenson, and Mary Dyer. The train-band
accompanied them, and drums were beat to drown their testi-
mony. The town, also, was put under guard, by thirty-six sol-
diers, against apprehended tumult. The two men were hung,
and buried beneath the gallows. Mary Dyer, who for more than
twenty years had been a trouble to Massachusetts, after having
the noose put round her neck, was pardoned, and sent back to
Rhode Island, though with difficulty prevailed on by her son to
go. She must have been past middle age, if not in the decline
of life. In the Antinomian troubles, she had been prominent as
a fast friend of Mrs. Hutchinson, and had suffered from the poor
superstition of the times, because of an unhappy incident in her
maternity. She walked to the gallows between her two con-
demned companions, holding each of them by a hand. The
marshal asked her, "If she was not ashamed to walk, hand in
hand, between two young men?" She replied, "It is an hour
of the greatest joy I can enjoy in this world. No eye can see,
no ear can hear, no tongue can speak, no heart can understand,
the sweet incomes and refreshings of the Spirit of the Lord which
now I enjoy."
When she understood, on being returned to the prison, upon
what account she was reprieved, she wrote to the authorities re-
pudiating the ground of it, and tendered the sacrifice of her life
against the law. It was only by compulsion that she was got
out of the jurisdiction on horseback. She came back again the
next spring. On the gallows the second time, June 1, 1660, she
was offered her life, if she would promise to keep out of Massa-
chusetts. Her reply was: "In obedience to the will of the Lord
I came; and in his will I abide faithful to the death.” She
did so.
I have before me, as I write, the autograph, on sadly stained
paper, of a poor and sorrowful letter, dated at Portsmouth, R.I.,
May 3, 1660, and addressed to Governor Endicott, by his "most
humble suppliant, W. Dyer." The letter draws tears now, if it
did not from the eyes that first read it. The husband pleads to
save his wife from death on the gallows:
M
BY THE FOUNDERS OF MASSACHUSETTS.
97
"HONORED SIR, It is no little grief of mind and sadness of hart, that
I am necessitated to be so bould as to supplicate your honored self, with the
Hon Assembly of your Generall Court, to extend your mercy and favor
once agen to me and my children. Little did I dream that I should ever
have had occasion to petition you in a matter of this nature, but so it is
that throw the divine providence and your benignity, my sonn obtained so
much pity and mercy att your hands, as to enjoy the life of his mother.
"Now my supplication to your Honors is to begg affectionately the life
of my deare wife. Tis true I have not seene her above this halfe yeare;
and therefore cannot tell how in the frame of her spirit she was moved
thus again to run so great a hazard to herself and perplexity to me and
mine, and all her friends and well-wishers: so it is, from Shelter Island
about by Pequid, Narragansett and to the town of Providence, she secretly
and speedily journied, and as secretly from thence came to your juris-
diction. Unhappy journey may I say, and woe to that generation saye I
that gives occasion thus of grief and trouble to those that desires to be
quiet, by helping one another (as I may say) to hazard their lives for I
know not what end, or to what purpose. If her zeale be so greate as thus
to adventure, oh, let your favour and pitye surmounte itt, and save her
life. Let not your forewonted compassion be conquered by her incon-
siderate madness, and how greately will your renowne be spread, if by so
conquering you become victorious. What shall I say more? I know you
are all sensible of my condition, and let the reflect be, and you will see
what the petition is and'what will give me and mine peace. Oh let mer-
cies wings once more soar above justice ballance, and then whilst I live
shall I exalt your goodness. But otherwise twill be a languishing sor-
rowe, yea, soe great that I should gladly suffer the blow att once muche
rather. I shall forbear to trouble your Honors with words, neither am I
in a capacitye to expatiate myselfe at present. I only say this, yourselves
have been and arc, or may be, husbands to wife or wives, and so am I,
yea, to one most dearlye beloved. Oh, do not you deprive me of her, but
I pray give her me out again, and I shall bee soe much obliged forever,
that I shall endeavor continually to utter my thanks, and render your
Love and Honor most renowned. Pitye me. I beg it with tears.”
J
Those tears are in the paper still. If he could have answered
for his wife, she would have lived. She answered for herself.
The next year, one more banished Quaker, William Leddra,
who had been a weary nuisance in many places, refused to ac-
cept his life, and was executed on the Common, March, 1661.
Another condemned and sentenced man was in the prison,
but he wrote to the magistrates, -
7
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TREATMENT OF INTRUDERS AND DISSENTIENTS
"I, the condemned man, do give forth under my hand, that if I may
have my liberty, I have freedom to depart this jurisdiction, and I know
not that ever I shall come into it any more. W. CHRISTOPHERSON.”
The Quaker will had overcome the Puritan will. The magis-
trates relaxed. The people withstood the death penalty. It has
been often affirmed, and has been generally supposed, that the
authorities were arrested in their course by a mandate procured
by a Quaker, who had been whipped in Salem, from Charles II.,
which forbade any further capital proceedings against Quakers,
and required that the condemned be sent to England. Such a
royal letter was written by the King, Sept. 9, 1661, and received
by our Court in November. But before it was even procured
from the monarch, the Court had evidently been convinced of the
utter folly of its measures. It had wavered in suspense, vacil-
lated, and failed to enforce its capital law against victims in its
power, while it shrunk from using its appliances to secure others
whom it might easily have reached.
It may be that the king's command was a welcome salvo to
the chagrin or mortification of the authorities. Certain it is, that
the Quakers revelled over the discomfiture of the magistrates,
and played some of their most offensive antics of railing and de-
fiance. But they were by no means left to their liberty. The
whip and the cart-tail, the prison and the pillory, were still kept
in service against them, even by allowance of the King, and the
course pursued in England. The General, the Quarterly, and
the Magistrates' and Local Courts found subjects in them for
penalties, more or less severe, till perfect tolerance was found to
be the lesson of wisdom, and the condition of peace.
The Puritan Commonwealth, after a resolute struggle against
the successive shocks, personal and practical, which its essential
elements invited, as well as were sure to encounter, yielded even
then only gradually, though I can hardly add gracefully, to a
steady modification of its original theory. Yet there was more
of success than of failure in the experiment. All of profound
sincerity, and of God-fearing self-consecration, and of stern re-
solve, which put that august experiment on trial, planted for it
foundations, giving to it its early security, and constituting the
1 Miscel. Papers.
BY THE FOUNDERS OF MASSACHUSETTS.
99
stability and glory of the Commonwealth which succeeded
to it.
Sometimes, as I walk in our city streets, or ride through our
clustering towns and villages, I imagine myself as having by my
side one of the old first comers to this wilderness; some grave
man, in church or magistracy, who, after his coming, may have
lived and wrought here more than half a century, in laying the
hard and deep foundations of things. I raise him up-in a
shadow — for my companionship. He goes along with me, looks
round him, puts questions, and turns to me to relieve his sur-
prise, to refix landmarks, to relate and account for the changes
and developments of things on our way. He is stern and sharp:
but I am not afraid of him; for I know that what I have of
hin is only dust, and that something more substantial represents;
him elsewhere. Shadow as he is, we can hardly keep our foot-
ing in the crowded streets. He is inclined, at a glance, favorably
to regard our humanity in providing bird-roosts in the wires
which run over our roofs in the air, unless he surmise them to be
snares for catching birds. But these rows of shops and stores,
with all their gilded gew-gaws and displays of trifles and lux-
uries, are about to prompt his utterance, just as he is choked by a
whiff from some "tobacco-taker" passing by. The theatres, and
palaces of vice for gambling or intemperance, make him sad and
sour. But the great school-houses offer a temporary relief. He
wishes to rest awhile in the burial-grounds, and study their
stones, asking where is his own. The hardest part of the
explanatory work which falls to me, is as we pass many churches,
-Jewish Synagogues, the Roman College and Cathedral, at
the sight and name of which those shadowy lips seem to utter
something that sounds like a very bad word. The lists of voters,
with the un-English names upon them, and the prevalence of
Hibernian patronymics, are evidently too much for him. The
explanation of the national flag plainly engages his sympathies.
He remembers that he and his old contemporaries were rather
tame in their loyalty, and that he died thinking, – perhaps hop-
ing, — that things would one day come about so, that we should
have a flag of our own. On the whole, though the facts which
he would have to hear and face, and to take for just what they
are and mean, would fearfully exercise him, and lead him to ask
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100
TREATMENT OF INTRUDERS AND DISSENTIENTS.
how all this freedom and license had worked in among us, and
whether Church and State had not been wrecked over and over
again in the process; on the whole, I think, he would rather re-
main alive with us, and take his chance, and take things as they
are, than go back into the ground again. One thing, I know,
would reconcile him to taking things as they are; viz., the
clear conviction, that if he and all his generation could come
again into their old places, they could not introduce a force
which would turn back the current. They would have to take
things as they are, and submit to the dispensation of human
freedom, as safer than Puritan sway.
Freedom, sad and fearful and wicked things are done in
that name, by that plea, for that good; but we must accept it,
with all its risks, which sometimes frighten or dismay us. Any
thing but the most perfect and unfettered freedom of thinking,
speaking, and acting among us, would peril the experiment we
Pet are trying here, grander than that of our Fathers, of making
one nation out of fragments of all the populations of the globe.
There is no form of force, no method of restraint, no devices of
imperial, ecclesiastical, military, or even constitutional sway,
which could possibly control the processes of risk involved in the
contact and citizenship of all the races, colors, temperaments, and
classes, which we hold in solution here. No: the wit of man,
piety, wisdom, statesmanship, would in vain attempt, by any
repressive or coercive measures, any interference, however gentle
or however stern, to introduce any agency of external authority
in the mighty process which is working here. Nothing but per-
fect freedom, absolute soul-liberty for the individual, can make
the process safe on the trial. We can dam rivers. We can
imprison thousands of pounds of steam. We can use a flash
of lightning for a common carrier. But we cannot overmaster
the workings of human nature.

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