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 THE APPRENTICESHIP 
 
 OP 
 
 WASHINGTON 
 
 AND 
 
 OTHER SKETCHES OF SIGNIFI- 
 CANT COLONIAL PERSONAGES
 
 THE APPRENTICESHIP 
 
 OF 
 
 WASHINGTON 
 
 AND OTHER SKETCHES OF SIG- 
 NIFICANT COLONIAL PERSONAGES 
 
 BY 
 GEORGE HODGES 
 
 NEW YORK 
 MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 
 
 1909
 
 Copyright, 1909, by 
 
 MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 All Eights Reserved 
 Published, February, 1909
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. THE APPRENTICESHIP OF WASHINGTON . 7 
 II. THE HANGING OF MARY DYER .... 41 
 
 III. THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MYLES 
 
 STANDISH 91 
 
 IV. THE EDUCATION OF JOHN HARVARD . . 149 
 V. THE FOREFATHERS OF JAMESTOWN . . .187
 
 THE APPRENTICESHIP OF 
 WASHINGTON
 
 THE APPRENTICESHIP OF 
 WASHINGTON 
 
 THE Continental Congress which sat 
 in Philadelphia in the late spring and 
 early summer of 1775 had among its able 
 members one who was distinguished from 
 the others by the infrequency of his 
 speeches and by the color of his coat. He 
 sat for the most part in attentive silence, 
 well satisfied with the arguments of his 
 neighbors, content to forward the purposes 
 of the convention by serving diligently on 
 the committee which was charged with the 
 arrangements for the raising of an army. 
 But he wore his uniform. He appeared 
 not in the attire of a legislator or of a man 
 of peace, but in the garments of war, in 
 the colonel's coat which he had worn in 
 military service. This dress was of itself
 
 8 THE APPRENTICESHIP 
 
 a speech. Buff is defined in the * ' Century 
 Dictionary " as "a yellow color deficient 
 in luminosity." The buff of that partic- 
 ular uniform, however, was by no means 
 deficient in luminosity. It shone with 
 meaning, as the blue sky shines in the 
 sun. Everybody who saw it knew that its 
 wearer was convinced that war was in- 
 evitable. When John Adams made his 
 notable speech in which he put that convic- 
 tion into words, and declared that the time 
 had come to choose a commander over the 
 colonial forces, he pointed to the man in 
 buff and blue. There, he said, is the gen- 
 eral for us. 
 
 At that moment a career began with 
 which we are all measurably familiar. 
 Washington the general, we know; Wash- 
 ington the president, we know ; with Wash- 
 ington the colonel, however, we are not 
 so well acquainted. I propose, accord- 
 ingly, to recount some of the exploits of 
 Colonel Washington. This I do partly be- 
 cause this period of his life is not so well
 
 OF WASHINGTON 9 
 
 established in the memory of most of us; 
 and partly because of the interest and 
 value which naturally inhere in the begin- 
 nings of things, and specially in the begin- 
 nings of noble lives. For biography ap- 
 peals to our ambition. We read the life of 
 a great man not only for the pleasure 
 which we get from his society but for the 
 sake of learning, if possible, how to be- 
 come great. What was there in him and 
 about him which thus exalted him above 
 his fellows? How did he go to work to 
 attain the high purposes of his life? 
 Through what sort of training did he pass 
 into his might and his fame? While we 
 are still at such an age that the major 
 part of our life seems to be before us rather 
 than behind us, we secretly hope that we 
 may somehow share in the spirit of the 
 great. We may not venture to solicit the 
 mantle of Elijah, but we think it quite 
 within the possibilities that at least the 
 shadow of Peter passing by may helpfully 
 overshadow us.
 
 10 THE APPRENTICESHIP 
 
 My subject, accordingly, is the " Ap- 
 prenticeship of Washington, " and my pur- 
 pose is to consider some of the experiences 
 which served to fit him to respond to the 
 call of the Continental Congress, to lead 
 our armies, and finally to establish us as a 
 people upon enduring foundations. 
 
 It is plain that young Washington lived 
 a large part of his life under the open sky. 
 He was born and brought up in the coun- 
 try. There is nothing impossible in the 
 tradition of the cherry tree or in the tradi- 
 tion of the breaking of the colt. The im- 
 probable element in these stories is the 
 extraordinary conversation which accom- 
 panies them. The talk which goes on be- 
 tween the lad and the father is as far re- 
 moved from reality as the conferences be- 
 tween Adam and Eve which are reported 
 by John Milton. Adam, as M. Taine ob- 
 serves, is a graduate of the University of 
 Oxford, and has a seat in the Long Parlia- 
 ment. And Mr. Lodge makes a similar re- 
 mark concerning the Washington of Par-
 
 OF WASHINGTON n 
 
 son Weems's stories. This young person, 
 he says, is a near relative of Sanford and 
 Merton and of Harry and Lucy. He is one 
 of Miss Maria Edgeworth's and Miss 
 Hannah More's good boys. The truth is 
 that Parson Weems, knowing nothing 
 about Washington's boyhood, but knowing 
 well that the purchasers of his book would 
 wish to be informed regarding that period 
 of his career, told these pleasant tales to 
 show that the great man began to exhibit 
 remarkable qualities at a tender age. Un- 
 fortunately, at the moment of writing, the 
 ideal of a perfect child was that which was 
 set forth by the maiden ladies to whom I 
 have referred. The proper child of that 
 day was a good deal of a prig. Washing- 
 ton, so far as the historians can discover, 
 had nothing of the prig about him. I do 
 not applaud him for lying or for swearing; 
 but there is a certain wholesome satisfac- 
 tion to be derived from the fact that he did 
 occasionally tell a lie, when it seemed to 
 serve his purpose; especially in his early
 
 12 THE APPRENTICESHIP 
 
 years, when he dealt with Indians. I sup- 
 pose it was considered necessary to lie to 
 Indians. He also was able, when the situa- 
 tion appeared to demand unusual empha- 
 sis, to use quite vigorous language. He 
 was a very human person, with a hot and 
 hasty temper. 
 
 It is to be noticed, however, even in these 
 apocryphal stories, that the scene is laid 
 out of doors, and that the prig, their hero, 
 has either a hatchet or a halter in his hand; 
 never a book. It does not anywhere ap- 
 pear that the young Washington took kind- 
 ly to books, or that he was ever at any 
 period of his life given to reading. It is 
 true that in 1748 he noted in his diary that 
 he " read to the reign of King John " and 
 " in the Spectator read to 143,'* but these 
 are isolated items. It is doubtful if he 
 ever got in the Spectator to 144, or in the 
 history to the reign of the third Henry. 
 He was certainly well acquainted with the 
 reign of the third George, which is more 
 to the purpose. No, the items which he
 
 OF WASHINGTON 13 
 
 records with far more frequency and with 
 much more interest are such as these: 
 " Went a hunting with Jack Custis and 
 catched a fox after three hours' chase; 
 found it in the creek." " February 12th, 
 catched two foxes." " February 13th, 
 catched two more foxes." 
 
 Books entered of necessity into the day's 
 work of the boy. Hobby, the sexton of the 
 parish church, taught him his letters, and 
 guided the first uncertain motions of the 
 handwriting which was afterwards so 
 strong and dignified. Williams, the school- 
 master of Bridge's Creek, gave the re- 
 mainder of his formal education. That 
 was all that the schools did for him. The 
 most that he got, beyond the essential rudi- 
 ments, was some sort of idea of the world 
 in which he lived, and a good knowledge of 
 applied mathematics. The fact that he 
 spelled well shows that he attended to his 
 lessons. His mother was a particularly 
 bad speller, even in a day when private 
 judgment and academic authority were
 
 14 THE APPRENTICESHIP 
 
 still contending at the point of everybody's 
 pen. 
 
 Whatever culture he had in his early 
 years came from the high-minded and 
 courteous society of the neighborhood. 
 Thackeray said that colonial Virginia was 
 the most aristocratic country in the world. 
 The remark was made in a novel but it had 
 a good foundation in fact. The land was 
 sparsely settled, being for the most part 
 divided into great estates. Each of these 
 estates had its manor house, with many 
 large rooms, built for generous hospitality, 
 flanked by the slaves' quarters, and stand- 
 ing in the midst of gardens and fertile 
 fields. One still catches a glimpse of such 
 noble mansions in a journey down the 
 James Eiver. Washington's own house at 
 Mount Vernon is the most familiar exam- 
 ple. These places were inhabited by men 
 and women of excellent English stock, who 
 maintained the pleasant and honest Eng- 
 lish traditions. They managed their house- 
 holds and their herds, entertained continu-
 
 OF WASHINGTON 15 
 
 ally, were forever riding back and forth on 
 horses along the wood roads making visits, 
 going to dancing parties, and to church on 
 Sundays. The young men were fond of 
 hunting and competed one with another in 
 rough sports. They were also fond of the 
 young women, following the good fashion 
 of the race. It is recorded of Washington 
 that although he was for the most part a 
 pretty steady boy, he once * ' surprised his 
 schoolmates by romping with one of the 
 largest girls." Indeed, it is remembered 
 of him that he had a habit of falling in love, 
 and he is known to have entertained tender 
 thoughts of several large girls before he 
 met the widow Custis. This too contrib- 
 uted much to his education. 
 
 On the whole, however, the distinctive 
 feature of all this life, as I said at the be- 
 ginning, was that it was lived under the 
 open sky. The society of the neighborhood 
 was indeed aristocratic, but it was an aris- 
 tocracy mitigated by manual labor. Most 
 of the great people were land poor. All of
 
 16 THE APPRENTICESHIP 
 
 them worked with their hands, the women 
 in the kitchen and the men in the barn. A 
 lad who grew to manhood under these con- 
 ditions knew how to do things. He was a 
 competent person, who could ride a horse, 
 and milk a cow, and break a colt, and mend 
 a roof, and make a bridge. Washington 
 lived out of doors all his life. He was on 
 horseback nearly every day. The eques- 
 trian statues represent him characteris- 
 tically. He was engaged in overseeing 
 things, first his estates, then his soldiers, 
 then the nation. He had the clearness of 
 sight which comes from dealing in a large 
 way with nature. His nerves were sea- 
 soned in the sun. He had an executive 
 habit. 
 
 The lad's first ambition was to go to sea. 
 He knew nothing about the sea, and it had 
 therefore a strong attraction for him. He 
 wanted to get on board a tobacco ship, and 
 go out in search of his fortune. Happily, 
 his young energies were set to work in the 
 business of surveying. This direction he
 
 OF WASHINGTON 17 
 
 owed in great part to a valuable friend 
 and kinsman, Thomas, Lord Fairfax. Lord 
 Fairfax was then sixty years of age, an 
 Oxford scholar and man of the world, who 
 had turned his back upon a society which 
 had disappointed him, and had come over 
 here to look after his great possessions. It 
 was probably Fairfax who had set young 
 Washington to reading the Spectator, to 
 which he himself is said to have contrib- 
 uted a number. The old man took the boy 
 into his heart. They used to ride and hunt 
 and talk together. Now he suggested that 
 he should go out into the forest, and sur- 
 vey the Fairfax lands, beyond the Blue 
 Eidge. 
 
 Washington was by this time of the age 
 of sixteen years. I copy Mr. Lodge's ac- 
 count of his appearance. " He was tall 
 and muscular, approaching the stature of 
 more than six feet which he afterwards at- 
 tained. He was not yet filled out to manly 
 proportions, but was rather spare, after 
 the fashion of youth. He had a well-
 
 18 THE APPRENTICESHIP 
 
 shaped, active figure, symmetrical, except 
 for the unusual length of his arms, indicat- 
 ing uncommon strength. His light brown 
 hair was drawn back from his broad fore- 
 head, and grayish-blue eyes looked hap- 
 pily, and perhaps soberly, on the pleasant 
 Virginia world about him. The face was 
 open and manly, with a square, massive 
 jaw, and a general expression of calmness 
 and strength. Fair and florid, big and 
 strong, he was, taking him for all in all, as 
 fine a specimen of his race as could be 
 found in the English colonies." 
 
 Thus he set out upon the first day's task 
 of his young manhood. It was in the month 
 of. March, and there was much rain, swell- 
 ing the streams, over which there were no 
 bridges. The boy and his companion slept 
 in settlers' huts, or under the trees. Some- 
 times they went hungry ; sometimes, as the 
 surveyor says in his journal, they had a 
 good dinner, " wine and rum punch in 
 plenty, and a good feather bed with clean 
 sheets." Once they met thirty Indians
 
 OF WASHINGTON 19 
 
 coming from war. " We had some liquor 
 with us, ' ' he says, * ' of which we gave them 
 part. It elevated their spirits, put them in 
 the humor of dancing, of whom we had a 
 war dance, ' ' which he describes. The jour- 
 nal shows that he looked about him atten- 
 tively. A man who lives in the woods must 
 keep his eyes open. But Washington saw 
 other sights than trees and animals, and 
 knew how to set down what he saw briefly 
 and clearly. This appears more noticeably 
 in the journal which he kept when he went 
 shortly after this to the Barbadoes with his 
 brother Lawrence. He has an eye for the 
 pursuits and pleasures of the people, for 
 the crops and the condition of the.markets, 
 for the administration of the government. 
 One characteristic of his account of his sur- 
 veying is the small importance which he 
 attaches to the hardships of the journey. 
 This is the proper result of the sturdy 
 training of a lad bred in a new country, 
 1 ' expecting accidents, ' ' like Sancho Panza. 
 On his visit to the Barbadoes he caught the
 
 20 THE APPRENTICESHIP 
 
 smallpox, an experience to which he gives 
 some two lines of his journal. 
 
 Washington spent but a month in this 
 particular survey, but he was busy for 
 three years as public surveyor, surveying 
 lines which stand true to this day. Mean- 
 while, this frontier life was making him 
 ready for his next notable undertaking. 
 News kept coming from the settlements be- 
 yond the mountains that the French were 
 trespassing on English land. This, indeed, 
 was a part of a concerted plan. The Eng- 
 lish had built their colonies along the coast, 
 the French had made theirs on the banks 
 of the rivers. It would seem at first as if 
 there was enough room in the great unset- 
 tled continent for both these companies of 
 colonists. This, however, was a view at 
 variance with the theories upon which land 
 titles at that time proceeded. The English 
 theory was that the possession of land 
 along the sea entitled the owner to all the 
 country which lay westward back of his 
 farm to the Pacific Ocean. The French, on
 
 OF WASHINGTON 21 
 
 the other hand, maintained that the discov- 
 ery of a river entitled the discoverer to all 
 the regions drained by that river and by 
 its remotest tributaries. Under this the- 
 ory, the French held the St. Lawrence and 
 the Mississippi, and they claimed every- 
 thing which lay between the Alleghenies in 
 the east and the Eockies in the west. The 
 point where these claims, English and 
 French, came first into actual conflict was 
 at the headwaters of the Ohio. 
 
 News came that the French were settling 
 in those parts, and were asserting their 
 rightful possession of them. It was neces- 
 sary to send out somebody to learn what 
 the situation was. The Governor of Vir- 
 ginia chose Washington. The mission in- 
 volved a journey of five or six hundred 
 miles through wild woods, in peril of hos- 
 tile Frenchmen and possibly hostile sav- 
 ages for the delivery of a message which 
 might lead very speedily to a declaration 
 of war. Washington was now of the age of 
 twenty-one years. Out he set, then, upon
 
 22 THE APPRENTICESHIP 
 
 this expedition, having with him his old 
 fencing-master to act as interpreter in his 
 dealings with the French, and an experi- 
 enced and daring trader, Christopher Gist, 
 to be their guide. They found the Indians 
 wavering between friendship with the 
 French and friendship with the English, 
 but rather inclined at that moment to side 
 with the English. The French, they sus- 
 pected, were intending to take away their 
 lands. Washington went to the remotest 
 limits of diplomatic circumlocution to pre- 
 vent the Indians from entertaining a like 
 suspicion of the English, and on the whole, 
 with some assistance from the contents of 
 various persuasive black bottles, he was 
 successful. 
 
 With the French the same arrangements 
 availed at least to disclose the thoughts of 
 their hearts. " The wine, as they dosed 
 themselves pretty plentiful with it, soon 
 banished the restraint which at first ap- 
 peared in their conversation. . . . They 
 told me that it was their absolute design to
 
 OF WASHINGTON 23 
 
 take possession of the Ohio. ' ' During this 
 exercise of diplomacy by intoxication, 
 Washington sat by, very sober and very 
 attentive. He looked about him with the 
 eye of a frontiersman and with the instinct 
 of a soldier. He noted the point of land 
 where the Allegheny and the Monongahela 
 meet, now the site of Pittsburgh, and re- 
 marked its strategic importance. While 
 the French commandant was writing his 
 polite statement of the claims of his nation, 
 Washington was making a sketch of the 
 fort, and learning how many men and guns 
 were there. 
 
 It was in December when the ambassa- 
 dorial party came back through the long 
 forests, and a hard time they had of it in 
 the rain and snow. They found the rivers 
 full of floating ice, and fell into the middle 
 of one of them, spending the night on an 
 island in their frozen clothes. But they 
 made their way at last to Williamsburg, the 
 capital of Virginia. Here Washington de- 
 livered his message. Here he printed both
 
 24 THE APPRENTICESHIP 
 
 the reply of the French commander and 
 his own journal of the expedition. This 
 document presently arrived in England, 
 where it was much read and commented 
 upon. 
 
 It was evident to discerning minds in 
 England as well as in the colonies that the 
 time was approaching when another cam- 
 paign must be undertaken in that long war 
 which under various names had been 
 fought since first the barbarians assailed 
 the walls of Eome. The Teuton and the 
 Latin, even in those early days, repre- 
 sented radically different ideas. The Latin 
 stood for the centralization of power, the 
 Teuton for its distribution. The Latin po- 
 litical idea was that one man constituted 
 the state: the king was the rightful pos- 
 sessor of all land and the rightful master 
 of all people. The Teuton political idea 
 was that in the state every man counted 
 one : power was delegated by the people to 
 rulers who were their representatives. 
 These ideas pervaded and determined all
 
 OF WASHINGTON 25 
 
 life. They made the north of Europe dif- 
 ferent from the south of Europe not only 
 politically but ecclesiastically and socially. 
 The Teutonic principle is essentially demo- 
 cratic. It implies private judgment rather 
 than authority. It works out naturally into 
 a republican form of government and into 
 Protestantism. It is significant that the 
 Protestant reformation succeeded in the 
 Teutonic nations and failed in the Latin 
 nations. The wars which accompanied the 
 ecclesiastical revolution were but another 
 campaign in the long race struggle. The 
 same is true, in a way, of the civil strife 
 in England which resulted in the Com- 
 monwealth of Oliver Cromwell; the de- 
 bate was as to the possession of power, 
 whether it belonged to the king or to the 
 people. 
 
 The fight between the French and the 
 English for the possession of this continent 
 was therefore a contest charged with the 
 most serious and profound consequences. 
 The political, the religious, and the social
 
 26 THE APPRENTICESHIP 
 
 life of our people depended upon the result. 
 The French and Indian war was incompa- 
 rably the most important contention which 
 has taken place in the whole course of our 
 history. 
 
 The war lasted about seventy-five years, 
 beginning in 1689. This is the date which 
 Mr. Fiske sets as the end of the primitive 
 period and the beginning of the mediaeval 
 period of American history. The mediaeval 
 period ended and the modern period began 
 exactly a century later, with the adoption 
 of the Constitution in 1789. The French 
 and Indian war fell into four campaigns. 
 The first campaign was called King Wil- 
 liam's war; it was made notable by the 
 valor and ability of the French commander 
 Frontenac, and the French had the best of 
 it. The second campaign was called Queen 
 Anne's warj and the French had tne worst 
 of it. The third campaign was King 
 George's war, during which the men of 
 New England captured Louisburg. The 
 fourth campaign was the Seven Years'
 
 OF WASHINGTON 27 
 
 war; it involved most of the nations of 
 Europe: England and Prussia fought 
 against France, Austria, Russia, and 
 Spain. At the end of this last campaign, 
 the English had taken from the French 
 every acre of their American possessions. 
 The first shot in this decisive war was fired 
 by Colonel Washington. 
 
 The declaration of French claims which 
 Washington brought back from the Ohio 
 called for an immediate answer, and the 
 Governor of Virginia raised troops to 
 carry it. He made Washington a colonel. 
 He sent Captain Trent to fortify the stra- 
 tegic junction of the rivers to whose impor- 
 tance the young diplomat had called atten- 
 tion. In April, 1754, leaving a superior 
 officer to follow with the main body of 
 troops, Washington pushed forward with 
 two companies to find presently that the 
 French had fallen upon Trent's fort, 
 turned out the garrison with hard words 
 rather than with hard blows, and taken 
 possession. Washington determined at
 
 28 THE APPEENTICESHIP 
 
 once to march his hundred and fifty men 
 against them. Thus they arrived at Great 
 Meadows, where natural banks of earth 
 made the beginnings of an entrenchment 
 which they named Fort Necessity. The 
 clearing away of the bushes made it, as 
 Washington remarked, * ' a charming place 
 for encounter." Then word came that a 
 company of Frenchmen had left the fort 
 at the point now called Fort Duquesne, 
 and were coming in their direction. Wash- 
 ington, with his soldiers and some friendly 
 Indians, marched to meet them, found them 
 encamped in the early morning after a 
 black night of rain, and promptly fired 
 upon them with tragic effect. That 
 was the shot which set all Europe blaz- 
 ing, and began a war which lasted seven 
 years. 
 
 Washington, as I have remarked, was 
 not given to talking much about himself, 
 but upon this occasion he said some things 
 which he afterwards repented. " I flatter 
 myself, ' ' he writes to his governor, * ' [that
 
 OF WASHINGTON 29 
 
 I have] resolution enough to face what any 
 man durst, as shall be proved when it comes 
 to the test, which I believe we are on the 
 borders of. ' ' To which he added, * * I heard 
 the bullets whistle and, believe me, there is 
 something charming in the sound." George 
 the Second, to whom this sentence was re- 
 peated, said " very sensibly," that the 
 young man " would not say so if he had 
 been used to hear many." But he had not 
 at that time been used to hear many, and 
 he did say so. He thought it and said it. 
 That is, this colonel of twenty-two had 
 fighting blood in his veins. The old instinct 
 asserted itself in him which has ever, in all 
 races, sent men out with weapons in search 
 of their neighbors. Strange as it may seem 
 to us peaceful persons, to most of whom the 
 nearest approach to war has been in the 
 columns of the newspapers, some of whom 
 cannot even fire a gun at a tree without 
 shutting their eyes, this young man loved 
 to fight. He delighted in the peril of his 
 life. At this time he had no prudence, and
 
 30 THE APPRENTICESHIP 
 
 made no calculation of the difference in 
 numbers between himself and the enemy. 
 The thing seems not to have entered into 
 his mind. He was eager to get into action 
 and kill somebody. 
 
 News of this encounter came to Fort 
 Duquesne, and Fort Necessity was pres- 
 ently besieged by a force greatly superior. 
 Washington was for fighting them in the 
 open, in the convenient clearing, but they 
 preferred the local custom and fired from 
 the shelter of the trees. And it rained very 
 hard, till in the fort the men were ankle- 
 deep in mud. Finally, Washington had to 
 surrender, and marched back along the 
 trail through the woods defeated. He left 
 his hostages, one of them his old fencing- 
 master, and the other a Scotchman named 
 Stobo, who was taken to Quebec, and, one 
 day, making his escape, showed General 
 Wolfe a path which led up to the Plains of 
 Abraham. 
 
 During this expedition Washington had 
 complained bitterly about his pay. He
 
 OF WASHINGTON 31 
 
 would prefer, lie said, the glory of serving 
 for nothing rather than the ignominy of 
 serving for next to nothing. He did not 
 complain of danger or of hardship, but 
 seriously objected to whatever seemed to 
 him to be unjust. Thus though he greatly 
 desired a part in the impending war, he re- 
 fused to take a position where as a colonial 
 officer he would be outranked by any petty 
 captain who belonged to the regular army. 
 It was one of the common grievances. The 
 matter was got over by an invitation from 
 General Braddock to join his staff. 
 
 Braddock was the new Commander-in- 
 Chief who had come from England to pun- 
 ish the insolence of the French. He was 
 a good soldier, who had seen some service, 
 but he was absolutely ignorant in all mat- 
 ters which pertained to the woods. His 
 acquaintance with trees was wholly con- 
 fined to tame trees. Braddock was, more- 
 over, a very conservative person. He had 
 learned how to fight under competent mas- 
 ters, and had read books upon the subject.
 
 32 THE APPRENTICESHIP 
 
 He knew by heart all the rubrics and can- 
 ons of conventional and respectable war. 
 He had pronounced convictions on the sub- 
 ject of uniforms, and on the true order of 
 a martial procession. He was a military 
 ritualist. This precise person now issued 
 forth to fight Indians. Washington, on the 
 natural ground of acquaintance with the 
 country, offered him advice, but he declined 
 it. He did not propose at his age to take 
 instruction from a youth in buckskin re- 
 garding the art of war. That was the heart 
 of the whole matter. 
 
 So they made their way along the hard 
 roads and across the rivers, a good little 
 army. They forded the Monongahela near 
 the present site of the Carnegie steel 
 works, purposing to march thence to the 
 French fort. Everybody knows what hap- 
 pened. The French and Indians fought 
 from behind the trees. Braddock had 
 never in his life fought from behind a tree. 
 He compelled his men to fight in platoons, 
 as men were accustomed to fight in Europe.
 
 OF WASHINGTON 33 
 
 The result was that seven hundred men and 
 sixty-two out of their eighty-six officers 
 were killed or wounded. Braddock himself 
 fell, aware at last of his tragic blunder, 
 saying, too late, * ' I will do better another 
 time." Washington, who had two horses 
 shot under him and four bullets through 
 his coat, rallied the fugitives, read the 
 prayer-book service over the dead general, 
 and conducted the retreat. 
 
 Thereafter, the war was waged in other 
 places, ending at Quebec. Washington had 
 little to do with it. He had learned his 
 lesson. He had observed that frontiers- 
 men were able to meet regular soldiers and 
 overcome them. He had served his ap- 
 prenticeship. For a dozen peaceful years 
 he managed his estates, looked after his 
 slaves, administered local affairs as a mem- 
 ber of the vestry, and colonial affairs as a 
 member of the Virginia assembly. He rode 
 up across the country to New York, and 
 thence to Boston, where he attended a ses- 
 sion of the Great and General Court, was
 
 34 THE APPRENTICESHIP 
 
 asked to dinner at all the great houses, and 
 went to a dancing party every evening. It 
 is not likely that it occurred to him that he 
 might presently interrupt these gay fes- 
 tivities. Everybody was glad to meet the 
 gallant and handsome young colonel. His 
 cloak of white and scarlet brightened all 
 the countryside as he rode along with his 
 aides and his servants. It is pleasantly 
 remembered of him that he was particular 
 about his dress. In his orders to the haber- 
 dashers and other tradesfolk of London he 
 showed an interest in being in the mode. 
 He had a keen sense of the fitness of 
 things, which afterwards made him the 
 most dignified of our Presidents. No other 
 of our chief magistrates has carried him- 
 self so like a king. 
 
 This did not prevent him from falling 
 temporarily in love with Mary Philipse, as 
 he passed through New York ; nor did it in- 
 terfere with his falling permanently in love 
 with Martha Custis. He met her one day 
 at dinner which was then a midday meal
 
 OF WASHINGTON 35 
 
 spent the afternoon in her cheerful so- 
 ciety, and stayed to tea. The next day in 
 the morning he made his dinner-call, and 
 before noon the young colonel and the 
 young widow were happily engaged to be 
 married. They do not look it in the sedate 
 pictures, but that is how it happened. At 
 the wedding ' ' the bride was attired in silk 
 and satin, laces and brocade, with pearls on 
 her neck and in her ears, while the bride- 
 groom appeared in blue and silver trimmed 
 with scarlet, and with gold buckles at his 
 knees and on his shoes." So they rode 
 away after the ceremony, the bride in a 
 coach and six, her husband riding beside 
 her, mounted on a splendid horse and fol- 
 lowed by all the gentlemen of the party. 
 Here we take leave of him, on the porch of 
 Mount Vernon. His next residence was 
 Craigie House, in Cambridge. 
 
 Looking back now, over this period of 
 apprenticeship, we perceive that Washing- 
 ton learned his most notable lessons under 
 the tuition of defeat. Defeat imparts an
 
 36 THE APPRENTICESHIP 
 
 instruction and even an inspiration of its 
 own, and is sometimes more significant and 
 more effective than victory. Leonidas and 
 Ms Spartans were defeated at Thermopy- 
 lae; Warren was defeated at Bunker Hill; 
 that tall shaft marks a battleground from 
 which our men were driven. The news of 
 that encounter reached Washington on his 
 way to Boston. " Did the militia fight? " 
 he said. And when he learned that they 
 stood their ground and fought well, 
 " Then," he exclaimed, " the liberties of 
 the country are safe." He had learned by 
 his own experience that there is a differ- 
 ence between defeat and defeat. 
 
 Washington learned at Great Meadows 
 that courage is not enough for the winning 
 of a battle: the soldier must be properly 
 equipped. He learned at Braddock's Field 
 that even courage and equipment together 
 are not enough; the soldier must under- 
 stand the situation and adapt himself to it. 
 Strong in the strength of these lessons, 
 with the advantage of a sound body, a con-
 
 OF WASHINGTON 37 
 
 fident spirit, and a clear conscience, he en- 
 tered upon that stage of his career wherein 
 he was revealed to all people for all time a 
 great soldier, and a great citizen, and a 
 great man.
 
 THE HANGING OF MARY 
 DYER
 
 n 
 
 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 1 
 
 /COTTON MATHER, in the " Magna- 
 v^ Ha," makes no mention of the name 
 of Mistress Anne Hutchinson. He gives an 
 account of her opinions, but omits her 
 name out of regard for her relatives, 
 among whom, he says, there are so many 
 worthy and useful persons. He calls her 
 an Erroneous Gentlewoman. He says that 
 she had a haughty carriage, a busy spirit, 
 and a voluble tongue; but he cannot deny 
 that she had also a competent wit. This 
 wit she exercised in the organization and 
 maintenance of a Woman's Club. 
 
 Mrs. Hutchinson was the first person in 
 the country to perceive the importance of 
 assembling the women of the neighborhood 
 for mutual cultivation of mind and for the 
 direction of public opinion. Mather says 
 
 1 This Paper was the Founder's Lecture at Bryn Mawr 
 College, 1908.
 
 42 THE HANGING OF MARY DYEE 
 
 that these meetings used to be called " Gos- 
 sipings," but the gossiping was of a very 
 serious and improving sort. The sixty or 
 eighty women who met every week at Mrs. 
 Hutchinson's house in School Street came 
 to listen to her exposition of the sermon 
 which Mr. John Cotton had preached on 
 the previous Sunday. She would repeat 
 the sermon, point by point, by way of re- 
 freshing the memory of her hearers ; and 
 " after the Bepetition," says Mather, 
 ' ' she would make her Explicatory and Ap- 
 plicatory Declamations." These Explica- 
 tory and Applicatory Declamations soon 
 brought Mrs. Hutchinson and her club 
 under the censure of the church. For the 
 interpreter allowed herself a large liberty 
 of difference. Sometimes she agreed with 
 the preacher, but sometimes she found him 
 in error. Of Mr. Cotton she approved ; but 
 when Mr. Wilson, his colleague, preached, 
 she did not hesitate to show the women of 
 the congregation the weak places in his ser- 
 mon, nor to subject his theology to her
 
 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 48 
 
 lively criticism. She divided both the 
 clergy and the laity of the colony into 
 two classes conventional Christians, who 
 were living under a Covenant of Works, to 
 the peril of their souls, and genuine Chris- 
 tians, who were living under a Covenant of 
 Grace. And she finally told the club that of 
 all the ministers of the neighborhood only 
 two Mr. Cotton and Mr. Wheelwright, her 
 brother-in-law were under the Covenant 
 of Grace. 
 
 Mrs. Hutchinson's " Scandalous, Dan- 
 gerous, and Enchanting Extravagancies," 
 to quote again from the "Magnalia," went 
 straight in the face of the Puritan theory 
 of government. The men of Massachusetts 
 Bay had in mind the constitution of the 
 Jewish people after their return from ex- 
 ile, when they were ruled not by princes 
 but by priests. They had established, ac- 
 cordingly, an administration of God, in the 
 form of a state wherein the franchise was 
 restricted to the members of the church 
 and among whose officers the ministers had
 
 44 THE HANGING OF MAEY DYER 
 
 high places. They endeavored, in consist- 
 ence with this ideal, to surround the per- 
 son of the minister with all respect and 
 reverence. He was to be heard with pro- 
 found attention ; his voice was to be obedi- 
 ently heeded, as a voice from heaven. The 
 stability of both church and state was felt 
 to rest upon the devout submission of the 
 people to the mind of the clergy. That, at 
 least, was the opinion of the clergy. And 
 here, of a sudden, was Mrs. Hutchinson, 
 with her competent wit and her enchant- 
 ing extravagancies, differing from the 
 preacher, and saying so with all freedom 
 and force of language to more than sixty 
 women every week. It was not only an 
 heretical and schismatical position, but was 
 fairly revolutionary. It undermined the 
 universal foundations. Indeed, it came out 
 clearly as a very practical peril when the 
 Pequot war arose, and the men of Boston 
 were called to aid in fighting the Indians, 
 and many of them were perplexed in con- 
 science, and doubtful whether to go or stay,
 
 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 45 
 
 because Mrs. Hutchinson said that their 
 chaplain, the Eev. Mr. Wilson, was under 
 a Covenant of Works. 
 
 Finally, a council was held at Cambridge 
 to decide what to do with Mrs. Hutchinson, 
 and she was formally condemned and ex- 
 communicated, and the first woman's club 
 in this country was ignominiously dis- 
 solved and forbidden to meet again. Mrs. 
 Hutchinson and her friends were found to 
 be guilty of " eighty-five erroneous opin- 
 ions and nine unwholesome expressions." 
 The statistics show the thoroughness with 
 which the examination of Mrs. Hutchin- 
 son 's theology was conducted. Pope Pius 
 X, looking over the whole field of modern 
 thought, notices only sixty-five erroneous 
 opinions ! 
 
 The Cambridge meeting-house was 
 crowded on that March day in 1638. All 
 the authorities, civil and ecclesiastical, had 
 each his separate word of malediction. 
 Anne Hutchinson sat silent. Dudley, the 
 Deputy Governor, remarked that though
 
 46 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 
 
 she had repented in writing, there was no 
 repentance in her face; probably not. 
 Finally, John Wilson pronounced the sen- 
 tence: " Therefore, in the name of the 
 Lord Jesus Christ and in the name of the 
 church, I do not only pronounce you worthy 
 to be cast out, but I do cast you out ; and in 
 the name of Christ, I do deliver you up to 
 Satan, that you may learn no more to blas- 
 pheme, to seduce and to lie; and I do ac- 
 count you from this time forth to be a 
 Heathen and Publican, and so to be held of 
 all the Brethren and Sisters of this congre- 
 gation and of others ; therefore I command 
 you in the name of Jesus Christ and of this 
 church as a Leper to withdraw yourself out 
 of this congregation." The formula was 
 not so long nor so anatomically explicit as 
 the major excommunication, but it was 
 quite as effective. 
 
 As Anne Hutchinson, in obedience to the 
 terms of this imprecation, made her soli- 
 tary way out of the meeting-house, one 
 woman rose up and took her hand and
 
 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 47 
 
 walked out with her. This woman was 
 Mary Dyer. 
 
 It is probable that Mary Dyer would 
 have done as much as that for any perse- 
 cuted woman, out of the kindness of her 
 heart and because of her instinctive sympa- 
 thy with the unpopular and the oppressed. 
 But she was Mrs. Hutchinson's particular 
 friend and disciple. Her distress on Mrs. 
 Hutchinson's account had already brought 
 upon her a domestic grief which, in that 
 coarse age, had subjected her to the jeers 
 of her neighbors. The two had suffered 
 together, and together they had found 
 strength, and solace in sorrow, in the doc- 
 trine of the Inward Light. 
 
 The doctrine of the Inward Light has 
 been believed among Christians since the 
 day when the apostles said, " It seemed 
 good to the Holy Ghost and to us." That 
 bold sentence is the classic expression of it. 
 The apostles and brethren thereby affirmed 
 a direct communication between God and 
 themselves, and a sense of duty derived
 
 48 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 
 
 from that divine disclosure. They de- 
 clared, therefore, that though they knew 
 very well what the Church said and what 
 the Bible said, they proposed to do other- 
 wise. The question under debate was the 
 obligation of the law of Moses. There was 
 no doubt about the law ; there it was, plain 
 as the blue sky. But they decided not to 
 enforce it. They resolved unanimously 
 that a man might be a good Christian with- 
 out the ceremonies or the sacraments which 
 were enjoined in the Bible and universal in 
 the Church. It was the most radical action 
 ever taken by any body of reasonable 
 Christians. The Lutheran omission of the 
 bishops, and the Quaker omission of the 
 sacraments, were conservative in compari- 
 son with it. This action, thus contradicting 
 all authority, was taken in obedience to the 
 Inward Light. 
 
 The assurance of the Inward Light has 
 always been the reinforcement of the indi- 
 vidual against the dominance of the institu- 
 tion. The institution looms up high as the
 
 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 49 
 
 hills and wide as the horizon, demanding 
 the submission and abasement of the indi- 
 vidual ; you must do as we say, and believe 
 as we teach. But the individual rises in 
 protest and revolt. In the days of the 
 Early Church he is a Montanist, saying, 
 " We lay folk are priests as well as you." 
 In the Middle Ages he is a mystic, going 
 straight to God without the mediation of 
 rites or persons. In later times, he is a 
 Quaker, keeping devout silence that he may 
 hear God speaking in his soul. 
 
 The followers of the Inward Light have 
 always been obnoxious to the established 
 order. Men in authority have plainly per- 
 ceived that these are of a non-conforming 
 spirit, holding the law of their own souls 
 above all laws made by courts ecclesiastical 
 or civil, and defying the oppression of uni- 
 formity. The Franciscan friar, who both 
 in public and in private abused the very 
 name of St. Catherine, and scorned her 
 " with so orgulous a mind/' and the other 
 Franciscan who, while his brethren were in
 
 50 THE HANGING OF MAEY DYER 
 the choir of San Domenico after dinner, 
 catching sight of St. Catherine in the 
 church in an ecstasy, being in a trance as 
 she prayed, " came down and pricked her 
 in many places with a needle," thus re- 
 vealed by word and deed the instinctive 
 irritation and enmity of the conservative 
 mind against the person who claims to talk 
 with God. Wilson and Dudley and Win- 
 throp and Shepard felt the same way. 
 When Mrs. Hutchinson affirmed that ' ' her 
 Faith was not produced and scarce ever 
 strengthened by the public Ministry of the 
 Word, but by her own private Meditations 
 and Revelations," every public Minister of 
 the Word felt himself personally affronted. 
 And when she compared herself to Daniel, 
 and likened the magistrates to the presi- 
 dents and princes who cast Daniel into the 
 den of lions, the magistrates were of the 
 same mind with the ministers. And both 
 agreed with him who said, as touching Mrs. 
 Hutchinson, that ' * one would hardly have 
 guessed her to be an Antitype of Daniel,
 
 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 51 
 
 but rather of the lions, after they were let 
 loose." 
 
 But to Mrs. Hutchinson and Mrs. Dyer 
 the religion of the magistrates and min- 
 isters was cold and hard and formal. They 
 found God by a way more direct and imme- 
 diate, entering into the consciousness of 
 His presence in the sanctuary of their own 
 souls. And what they heard from Him in 
 such blessed intimacy, that they spoke and 
 followed. 
 
 Mary Dyer came to this country with her 
 husband in 1635. They had lived in Lon- 
 don, where William Dyer had been a mil- 
 liner in the New Exchange. Mrs. Dyer 
 is described by a Dutch writer, Gerald 
 Croese, as " a person of no mean extract 
 and parentage, of an estate pretty plenti- 
 ful, of a comely stature and countenance, 
 of a piercing knowledge in many things, 
 of a wonderful sweet and pleasant dis- 
 course, so fit for great affairs that she 
 wanted nothing that was manly, except 
 only the name and the sex." George
 
 52 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 
 
 Bishop, whose book, " New England 
 Judged," was written the next year after 
 her death, depicts her as " a comely grave 
 Woman, and of a goodly Personage, and 
 one of good Report, having a Husband of 
 an Estate, fearing the Lord, and a Mother 
 of Children." Even Governor Winthrop 
 admits that she was " a very proper and 
 fair woman," though he adds that she was 
 " notoriously infected with Mrs. Hutchin- 
 son's errors, and very censorious and 
 troublesome, she being of a very proud 
 spirit, and much addicted to revelations." 
 The fact, which appears in such writing of 
 hers as remains, that she was better edu- 
 cated than was then the custom of women, 
 may have increased the suspicion and dis- 
 like with which she was regarded by the 
 Governor. For it was Winthrop who said 
 of poor Ann Hopkins, " a godly young 
 woman, and of special parts, ' ' who was re- 
 ported to have lost her wits ' ' by occasion 
 of her giving herself wholly to reading and 
 writing," that " if she had attended her
 
 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 53 
 
 household affairs, and not gone out of her 
 way and calling to meddle in such things as 
 are proper for men, whose minds are 
 stronger, etc., she had kept her wits, and 
 might have improved them usefully and 
 honorably in the place God had set her." 
 
 William and Mary were at once admitted 
 to membership in the Boston church, of 
 which John Wilson was the pastor and 
 John Cotton the teacher. The next year 
 Mrs. Hutchinson began her meetings, hav- 
 ing the Dyers among her intimate friends 
 and followers. When Mr. Wheelwright was 
 condemned, preparatory to the excommuni- 
 cation of Mrs. Hutchinson, William Dyer 
 was one of the signers of a protest which 
 maintained that by his condemnation the 
 church in Boston had condemned the truth 
 of Christ. He was therefore disfranchised 
 and disarmed. Presently, when the Hutch- 
 insons went into exile, the Dyers went with 
 them. They were among the eighteen 
 founders of Portsmouth, Ehode Island, in 
 1638, and among the eight founders of
 
 54 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 
 
 Newport in 1639. William Dyer was 
 shortly made secretary of Portsmouth and 
 Newport, and thereafter held various re- 
 sponsible and honorable offices, becoming 
 attorney general of the colony in 1649. 
 Two years after he went to England on 
 public business. Thither his wife had pre- 
 ceded him. He returned, but she remained 
 for five years. During that time she be- 
 came a Quaker. 
 
 The Quakers were related to the Puri- 
 tans as the Abolitionists were related to 
 the friends of freedom before the Civil 
 War. They were extreme persons who 
 were determined to carry the principles 
 of Protestantism to their logical conclu- 
 sions. The Puritans complained that the 
 Church of England had stopped halfway 
 in the work of reformation ; but the Quak- 
 ers made the same complaint of the Puri- 
 tans. Thereupon the Puritans answered 
 the Quakers in the same terms in which 
 they themselves had been answered by the 
 Churchmen, in terms of expulsion and
 
 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 55 
 
 prohibition, enforced by fine and imprison- 
 ment. The fact is of interest as interpret- 
 ing the contention in which Charles and 
 Laud had played a part so reprobated by 
 the Puritan historians. When we find the 
 same part played again upon a smaller 
 stage by Endicott and Wilson, we perceive 
 that it was no particular fault of either 
 Churchman or Puritan, but belonged to 
 the tune and represented the common mind 
 of men. It was the habit of that age to 
 think of religion under conditions of uni- 
 formity, as we think of the world to-day 
 under conditions of gravitation or evolu- 
 tion. The notion that the Puritans came 
 over here to establish freedom to worship 
 God, in the sense in which that phrase is 
 understood by us at present, is without 
 foundation in fact. They came to escape a 
 uniformity which they disliked, in order to 
 set up another uniformity of their own 
 construction. They had no intention of es- 
 tablishing in Massachusetts a free church 
 in a free state, which should carry with it
 
 56 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 
 
 a hospitable recognition of dissent. They 
 detested dissent. They dealt with Roger 
 Williams as the Church of England had 
 dealt with John Cotton. When Governor 
 Winthrop said to Mrs. Hutchinson, " We 
 must restrain you from taking this course. 
 We are your judges and not you ours. We 
 must compel you to it," every exiled min- 
 ister in the company heard an echo of his 
 own trial. This consensus of ecclesiastical 
 opinion is to be taken into account in our 
 judgments of both the Puritans and the 
 Churchmen of that time. It is to be re- 
 membered in our estimates of James and 
 Charles on one side of the sea, and of Win- 
 throp and Endicott on the other side. 
 They were alike convinced of the essential 
 importance of uniformity. 
 
 Against this uniformity, the Quakers op- 
 posed themselves. And against the dis- 
 senting and disturbing Quaker, the Puri- 
 tans in England and New England lifted 
 the hard hand of authority. It was while 
 Mary Dyer was in the midst of her visit
 
 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 57 
 
 to England that George Fox reckoned that 
 there seldom were fewer than a thousand 
 Quakers in the English jails. She knew 
 that, when she became a Quaker. It was 
 probably one of the arguments which at- 
 tracted and convinced her. 
 
 The Quakers differed from other Puri- 
 tans in their emphasis on simplicity and 
 immediacy. 
 
 They proposed to return to the primi- 
 tive simplicity of Christian behavior. 
 They found themselves in a society which, 
 from their point of view, was deplorably 
 formalized and secularized. They deter- 
 mined to be absolutely honest with them- 
 selves and with their neighbors; and as a 
 symbol of that honesty, they refused to ad- 
 dress a single person with a plural pro- 
 noun. They disused the conventions of 
 formal courtesy; they wore their hats in 
 the presence of princes and magistrates. 
 They disdained the passing modes of 
 dress ; when George Fox made him a stout 
 suit of leather, he intended to wear it in
 
 58 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 
 
 defiance of all fashions to the end of his 
 days. They disliked even such stated ar- 
 rangements of services as the Puritans had 
 retained, disused the sacraments, dis- 
 missed the ministers, and prayed not only 
 in such words but at such times as the 
 Spirit gave them utterance. All this was 
 for the sake of simplicity, and it attracted 
 people with the unfailing attraction of the 
 simple life. 
 
 To this they added the doctrine of imme- 
 diacy. Cotton Mather, in the * ' Magnalia, ' ' 
 is, of course, a prejudiced witness as to 
 the teaching of the New England Quakers. 
 He wrote in a day of sharp and discourte- 
 ous controversy. " Reader," he says, " I 
 can foretell what usage I shall find among 
 the Quakers for this chapter of our Church 
 History : for a Worthy Man that writes of 
 them has observed, ' For Pride and Hypoc- 
 rosie and Hellish Eevilings against the 
 painful Ministers of Christ I know no peo- 
 ple that can match them. ' " And he 
 quotes from contemporary Quaker pam-
 
 THE HANGING OF MARY DYEE 59 
 
 phlets a considerable list of the epithets 
 which he may expect: such as, " Thou 
 Fiery Fighter and Green-headed Trump- 
 eter/' " thou Mountebank priest," " thou 
 Mole, thou Tinker, thou Lizzard, thou Bell 
 of no Metal but the tone of a Kettle, thou 
 Whirlpool, thou Whirligig, thou Wheelbar- 
 row." These are not the conditions of 
 weather in which to look for clear skies, 
 and to see truth in the serene light of day. 
 But when we find Mather, in reprobation, 
 saying of the Quakers that " they made 
 themselves to be Christ's as truly as ever 
 was Jesus the Son of Mary," that " the 
 whole History of the Gospel they beheld as 
 Acted over again every day as Literally as 
 it ever was in Palestine," and that " every 
 Day is the Lord's Day," we perceive in his 
 opponents the true spirit of the mystic. 
 To them religion was a present reality. 
 God was in all life, and their communica- 
 tion with Him was constant and intimate. 
 They believed in Mrs. Hutchinson's dis- 
 tinction; they were a Covenant of Grace,
 
 60 THE HANGING OF MAEY DYER 
 
 and outside lay the world in a Covenant of 
 Works. 
 
 Out of this fatal formalism and remote- 
 ness from God they purposed to awaken 
 the society about them. That was their 
 mission. They were possessed, or ob- 
 sessed, with the necessity of bearing their 
 witness. They were essentially aggres- 
 sive. They could not be silent. Herein 
 they differed from some of their prede- 
 cessors, the mystics, who were content to 
 withdraw themselves from the world. 
 They were Protestants of the Protestants, 
 and protested daily. And this they did in 
 ways which were very inconvenient to the 
 community. 
 
 The eccentricities of the Quakers have 
 been unduly multiplied and magnified by a 
 natural process of exaggeration. A few 
 of them behaved themselves in so dramatic 
 a manner that the things which they did 
 got into the general memory, and have 
 never been forgotten. And these acts came 
 to be regarded as characteristic of the
 
 THE HANGING OF MAEY DYER 61 
 
 Quakers, the impression being that they 
 happened every day. It was only one 
 Quaker, however, on a single occasion, who 
 walked about the streets having on his head 
 a pan of fire and brimstone. Only one 
 dressed herself in sackcloth and blackened 
 her face and in that prophetic guise pre- 
 sented herself in the congregation at serv- 
 ice time. Lydia Wardwell and Deborah 
 Wilson behaved themselves in a manner 
 even more disconcerting, but they had no 
 imitators. Sarah Gibbons and Dorothy 
 Waugh rose up in meeting and bore their 
 emphatic witness to the emptiness of the 
 sermon ; they broke some empty bottles by 
 banging them together ; one would imagine 
 from some writers that it was a part of the 
 regular business of the sexton to sweep up 
 broken glass from the floor of the meeting- 
 house every Sunday morning ; but this was 
 a rare occurrence. The Quakers did in- 
 terrupt a good many Puritan sermons 
 with frank and unsympathetic comments; 
 they did rise up a good many times, after
 
 62 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 
 
 the sermon was over, and proceed to ex- 
 pound the text in their own way ; they did 
 gather crowds about them and preach to 
 them in the streets ; being altogether unin- 
 structed in theology, they did say things 
 which were as erroneous as they were of- 
 fensive; they gave criticism the long end 
 of the handle. But these were exceptions 
 to a general rule of modest and grave de- 
 meanor. The unpardonable sin of the 
 Quakers was that they refused to agree 
 with the Puritans, and they greatly aggra- 
 vated the offence by trying to convert the 
 Puritans to their own opinion. They were 
 mightily in earnest about it, and the Puri- 
 tans on their side were mightily in earnest 
 also. That is the heart of the situation. 
 
 The first Quakers who came to Massa- 
 chusetts arrived in July, 1656. That was 
 the year in which George Fox said that 
 a thousand Quakers lay in English jails. 
 It was a month after a public day of hu- 
 miliation appointed by the General Court 
 of Massachusetts " to seek the face of God
 
 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 63 
 
 in behalf of our native country in refer- 
 ence to the abounding of errors, especially 
 those of the Eanters and Quakers." Un- 
 der these strained conditions came Ann 
 Austin and Mary Fisher, for the purpose 
 of teaching Quaker doctrine, bringing with 
 them a hundred Quaker books. To the 
 Puritan mind at that time, this was an im- 
 portation of the plague, and the authori- 
 ties dealt with it accordingly. Governor 
 Endicott was absent, in Salem, but Deputy 
 Governor Bellingham encountered the in- 
 vaders. He had the missionaries seized 
 while yet they were on board the ship, 
 searched their bags and boxes, and took 
 possession of their books and of their per- 
 sons. The books he caused to be burned by 
 the common hangman in the market-place 
 of Boston ; the Quakers he shut up in jail. 
 They were kept in close confinement, not 
 suffered to speak nor to be spoken to, pen 
 and ink and candle taken from them to 
 prevent them from writing, and a board 
 nailed across the window to keep anybody
 
 64 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 
 
 from as much as seeing them. After being 
 examined for witch marks, they were put 
 on board the next ship and sent to the Bar- 
 badoes. Endicott, when he came back, said 
 that had he been there he would have had 
 them whipped, but the authorities after- 
 ward took some credit to themselves for 
 self-restraint and gentleness. 
 
 Hardly had Ann Austin and Mary Fish- 
 er got out of sight of land when there came 
 eight missionaries more, four men and 
 four women. They were immediately im- 
 prisoned, and after eleven weeks were sent 
 to England in the same ship which had 
 brought them. 
 
 It became plain to the authorities of 
 church and state that they were to be beset 
 with Quakers, and they proceeded to en- 
 act laws by which to defend the colony 
 against this peril. " Whereas," they said, 
 " there is a cursed sect of heretics lately 
 risen up in the world, which are commonly 
 called Quakers, who take upon themselves 
 to be immediately sent of God infallibly
 
 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 65 
 
 assisted by the Spirit to speak and write 
 blasphemous opinions, despising govern- 
 ment and the order of God in church and 
 commonwealth, speaking evil of dignities, 
 reproaching and reviling magistrates and 
 ministers, seeking to turn the people from 
 the faith and gain proselytes to their per- 
 nicious ways, this court doth hereby or- 
 der," thus and so: namely, that the cap- 
 tain of any vessel bringing Quakers shall 
 be fined a hundred pounds; that every 
 Quaker coming into this jurisdiction shall 
 be forthwith committed to the house of 
 correction, soundly whipped at entrance, 
 and thereafter kept at hard labor during 
 the term of his imprisonment, and with 
 lesser penalties for possessing Quaker 
 books and defending Quaker opinions. 
 
 The first Quakers to arrive after the pas- 
 sage of this law were Ann Burden and 
 Mary Dyer. They seem, however, to have 
 escaped its severer provisions, for they 
 came on business of their own, and not as 
 missionaries : Ann Burden to collect some
 
 66 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 
 
 debts remaining from her former resi- 
 dence, and Mary Dyer to rejoin her hus- 
 band in Ehode Island. 
 
 The next arrivals felt the whip. Mary 
 Clark had twenty stripes with a scourge 
 of three cords. Christopher Holder, being 
 moved of the Lord to go to Salem, and 
 speaking a few words in meeting, after the 
 sermon, was " haled back by the hair of 
 the head, and his mouth violently stopped 
 with a glove and a handkerchief thrust 
 thereinto with much fury," by one of the 
 church members. He and his companion, 
 John Copeland, were brought to Boston 
 and given thirty stripes apiece. They were 
 afterwards kept nine weeks in prison in 
 the cold winter without a fire, and then 
 banished. Samuel Shattuck, who pulled 
 away the hand of the church member 
 who was choking Christopher Holder, was 
 brought to Boston and laid under bonds to 
 have no communication with Quakers, and 
 presently was whipped and banished. This 
 was the Samuel Shattuck who afterwards,
 
 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 67 
 
 in 1661, had the satisfaction of bringing 
 from England the royal decree which for 
 the moment opened all jail doors and 
 stopped the persecution of the Quakers ; as 
 may be read in Whittier's verse, in " The 
 King's Missive." Lawrence Southwick 
 and Cassandra his wife, who had lodged 
 the Quakers in Salem, aged persons and 
 church members, were admonished and 
 fined, and ceasing thereafter to attend the 
 meetings of the congregation were whipped 
 as a warning to others. Continuing obsti- 
 nate in their refusal to go to church under 
 these conditions, they were repeatedly 
 fined till their property was gone; and 
 then, for non-payment of church fines, 
 their two children, a son and a daughter, 
 were seized to be sold as slaves in Virginia 
 or the Barbadoes; but happily no ship- 
 master could be found to take them. 
 
 A year after the passage of the first law 
 against the Quakers, the General Court en- 
 acted a second, ' * as an addition to the late 
 order in reference to the coming or bring-
 
 68 THE HANGING OF MARY DYEE 
 
 ing in any of the cursed sect of Quakers 
 into this jurisdiction." It was now pro- 
 vided that anybody who should lodge a 
 .Quaker should be fined for such offence at 
 the rate of forty shillings for every hour 
 of such entertainment or concealment; 
 also, that every Quaker man who after be- 
 ing once punished and banished should pre- 
 sume to return should have one of his ears 
 cut off for the first offence, and for a sec- 
 ond offence his other ear, and for a third 
 offence should have his tongue bored 
 through with a hot iron. Quaker women 
 were to be punished with whipping instead 
 of the loss of ears, but for a third offence 
 they must suffer like the men. 
 
 In May, 1658, a third law ordained that 
 every person " professing any of their 
 pernicious ways, by speaking, writing, or 
 by meetings on the Lord's Day, or at any 
 other time, to strengthen themselves, or to 
 seduce others to their diabolical doc- 
 trines " shall for every such transgression 
 be fined ten shillings.
 
 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 69 
 
 A fourth law, dated October, 1658, affixed 
 to the sentence of banishment the provi- 
 sion that a return after such expulsion 
 should be punished with the pain of death. 
 It was according to this law that Mary 
 Dyer was hanged. 
 
 These four laws, issued within a space of 
 two years, indicate the anxiety of the au- 
 thorities. To them the Quakers were sheer 
 anarchists, subversive of both government 
 and religion. In deporting such persons 
 when they appeared in the colony, in ban- 
 ishing such as adopted their opinions, and 
 in fining and imprisoning such as shel- 
 tered them, the Puritans were clearly 
 within their rights. This belonged to their 
 province as magistrates. That some dif- 
 ficulties arose in their own, consciences and 
 in the minds of their constituents appears 
 in the fact that the General Court thought 
 it wise to issue a formal vindication of 
 themselves. In this document they dealt 
 particularly with the matter of banishment 
 upon pain of death. They declared that
 
 70 THE HANGING OF MARY BYER 
 
 the doctrine of the Quakers was destruc- 
 tive to the fundamental truths of religion. 
 They showed that the behavior of the 
 Quakers was in contradiction to that re- 
 spect to magistrates which is commanded 
 in the Bible. They cited the example of 
 wise Solomon, who, having confined Shimei 
 to the city of Jerusalem upon pain of 
 death, promptly beheaded him when he 
 came out of bounds. This colony, they said, 
 is our house; anybody who breaks into it 
 may properly be slain in self-defence. If 
 in such violent and bold attempt the Quak- 
 ers lose their lives, they may thank them- 
 selves as the blamable cause and authors 
 of their own death. This colony, they 
 added, is our family. " Who can make 
 question but that a man that hath children 
 and family ought to preserve them from 
 the dangerous company of persons in- 
 fected with contagious, noisome and mor- 
 tal diseases? and if such persons shall 
 offer to intrude into the man's house 
 amongst his children and servants, can
 
 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 71 
 
 any doubt but that in such a case the 
 father of the family, if otherwise he can- 
 not keep them out, may kill them? " Thus 
 they stated their case, calling for approval 
 both from common prudence and from 
 Holy Scripture. Indeed, they were but 
 exercising one of the prerogatives of 
 nations. They were keeping the Quak- 
 ers out of the colony, as we endeavor 
 to exclude undesirable citizens at our 
 ports. 
 
 On the other hand, the Quakers in com- 
 ing were following the clear guidance of 
 the Inward Light. They were within their 
 proper province as missionaries. They 
 honestly believed that the Puritans were 
 in the darkness of ignorance and sin, and 
 they came to illuminate them. They felt, 
 as the apostles had felt before them, that 
 they must obey God rather than man. 
 They entered Boston as Paul and Silas en- 
 tered Philippi, and if their mission in- 
 volved an imprisonment in the inner jail 
 and a fastening of their feet in the stocks,
 
 72 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 
 
 they accepted this, after the pattern of the 
 apostles, as a part of the day's work. If 
 in the delivery of the message which God 
 had given them they must face death, that 
 also they did gladly, even eagerly, for His 
 sake in whose name they spoke. They de- 
 serve the commendation of the faithful 
 missionary and the praise of the martyr. 
 In the noble army of martyrs they stand 
 to all time, William Eobinson with St. Po- 
 thinus, Mary Dyer with St. Perpetua ; and 
 in their company the three whose right 
 ears were cut off, the forty or fifty who 
 were whipped with knotted cords, and the 
 unnumbered others who suffered the spoil- 
 ing of their goods. " Margaret Brew- 
 ster," says the clerk of the court, " you 
 are to have your clothes stripped off to the 
 middle, and to be tied to a cart's tail at the 
 South Meeting-house, and to be drawn 
 through the town and to receive twenty 
 stripes upon your naked body." " The 
 will of the Lord be done," says Margaret 
 Brewster, * ' I am contented. ' ' And in that
 
 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 73 
 
 grave, serene, and Christian manner, so 
 spoke they all. 
 
 Thus an irresistible force encountered 
 an immovable body. Thus two sacred and 
 imperative rights came into collision. 
 
 Of course, the verdict of subsequent his- 
 tory has condemned the Puritans. It has 
 found them guilty of two serious misun- 
 derstandings. They misunderstood hu- 
 man nature, and they misunderstood the 
 Quakers. 
 
 They were in error as to human nature 
 in thinking that the argument of violence 
 is of avail against the convictions of con- 
 science. For every man who tries to stop 
 his neighbor's mouth with a glove and a 
 handkerchief, there will be another man to 
 pull away his arm; and whippings at carts' 
 tails, and even hangings are great, appeal- 
 ing arguments. We are so made that the 
 nobler spirits among us rise up instinct- 
 ively at the sight of such suffering and 
 ally themselves with the sufferers. Thus 
 it has been since the day when Stephen
 
 74 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 
 
 was stoned and Saul became a Christian. 
 The blood of the martyr is the seed of the 
 church. The Quakers proved it. The 
 effect of the Puritan method was to in- 
 crease the Quakers, as the effect of the 
 same method at the hands of Queen Mary 
 was to increase the Protestants, and the 
 effect of the same method at the hands of 
 Archbishop Laud was to increase the 
 Puritans. This we see clearly, with the 
 wisdom which follows the event. 
 
 Also the Puritans were in error as to 
 the Quakers and their conception of re- 
 ligion and of government. It seemed as 
 if a storm of heresy and schism, with hail- 
 stones and coals of fire, were beating upon 
 Protestant Christendom from all points of 
 the compass at the same time. Every ship 
 which sailed into Boston Bay brought the 
 news of the birth of a new ism. The blessed 
 liberty for which the reformers had con- 
 tended had fallen into license. The most 
 essential doctrines of religion, the most 
 sacred institutions of society, were set at
 
 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 75 
 
 naught. The colonists were not only anx- 
 ious but nervous. And then the Quaker 
 missionaries came. That the Puritans 
 should have failed to understand them was 
 inevitable. To-day the immediate asso- 
 ciation of the name of " Quaker " is with 
 peace, and quietness, and serenity of soul. 
 Nothing could have been further from the 
 minds of the neighbors of Mary Fisher or 
 of Mary Dyer. 
 
 Mary Dyer had now been living in Rhode 
 Island for ten years. Under the large tol- 
 erance established by Eoger Williams, that 
 was a comfortable colony for Quakers. 
 But the Quakers were not contented to be 
 comfortable. In June, 1659, William Rob- 
 inson and Marmaduke Stevenson were 
 moved of the Lord to pay a visit to Boston, 
 and Nicholas Davis and Patience Scott 
 went with them. Patience was eleven 
 years of age. She came of good, stout, 
 non-conforming stock, her mother hav- 
 ing been a sister of Anne Hutchinson. 
 Mrs. Scott had already experienced the
 
 76 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 
 
 rigors of the law. "A Mother of many 
 Children, one that had lived with her Hus- 
 band, of an nnblameable Conversation, and 
 a Grave, Sober and Ancient Woman, and 
 of good Breeding," she had come up to 
 Boston upon the occasion of the cutting off 
 of three right ears, and speaking her mind 
 with some righteous freedom concerning 
 that matter had been thrown into prison, 
 and given ten stripes with a three-fold 
 knotted whip, and promised that if she 
 came again she should be hanged. This 
 did not deter her from sending her little 
 daughter on the perilous errand of bear- 
 ing witness against a persecuting spirit. 
 Davis came on business, seeking opportu- 
 nity to barter corn with the heathen. Eob- 
 inson had been a merchant in London; 
 Stevenson had been a ploughman in York- 
 shire. " I was at the plough," says Ste- 
 venson, " in the East-parts of Yorkshire, 
 in Old-England, and as I walked after the 
 plough I was filled with the Love and Pres- 
 ence of the Living God, which did Eavish
 
 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 77 
 
 my Heart when I felt it; and as I stood 
 a little still, with my Heart and Mind 
 stayed on the Lord, the Word of the Lord 
 came unto me in a still, small Voice, which 
 I did hear perfectly, saying to me in the 
 Secret of my Heart and Conscience, 'I 
 have ordained thee a Prophet unto the 
 Nations.' " 
 
 These four being immediately put in 
 prison, Mary Dyer was moved of the Lord 
 to visit them, and was seized and impris- 
 oned with them. There they lay for three 
 months until the 12th of September. On 
 that day they were brought before the 
 court. The child was dismissed ; the others 
 were given two days to get out of the com- 
 monwealth. Should they be found within 
 the jurisdiction of the court after the lapse 
 of forty-eight hours, they were to be put 
 to death. Thereupon, Nicholas Davis and 
 Mary Dyer departed, one to Plymouth and 
 the other to Rhode Island; but Robinson 
 and Stevenson were "constrained in the 
 love and power of the Lord" not to depart
 
 78 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 
 
 but to try the bloody laws unto the 
 death. 
 
 Then, from the four winds, zealous Quak- 
 ers started for Boston. First came Chris- 
 topher Holder, and was at once thrust into 
 prison. On the 8th of October, came Mary 
 Dyer to visit him, and was imprisoned also. 
 After them came Hope Clifton, and Mary 
 Scott, and Robert Harper, and Daniel 
 Gold, and Henry King, and Hannah 
 Phelps, and Mary Trask, and Margaret 
 Smith, and Provided Southwick. On the 
 13th, William Robinson and Marmaduke 
 Stevenson returned, and with Mrs. Alice 
 Cowland, " who came to bring linen 
 wherein to wrap the dead Bodies of those 
 who were to Suffer." The roll of linen in 
 the arms of Alice Cowland evidenced the 
 grim spirit in which the principals in this 
 tragedy entered upon their parts. ' ' These 
 all came together," says the Quaker chron- 
 icle, ' ' in the Moving and Power of the 
 Lord, as one, to look your Bloody Laws in 
 the Face, and to accompany those who
 
 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 79 
 
 should suffer by them." They were bent 
 upon a perfectly definite purpose, to break 
 the law into a thousand pieces by endur- 
 ing its hideous penalty. They desired to 
 show to all good people what manner of 
 law it was, whereby the enormities of the 
 reign of Bloody Mary were enacted by 
 Puritan ministers and magistrates in 
 Massachusetts. 
 
 This desire was promptly gratified. On 
 the 19th of October, Eobinson and Ste- 
 venson and Mary Dyer were had before the 
 court and demanded why they came again, 
 being banished upon pain of death. They 
 replied that the ground and cause of this 
 coming was of the Lord and in obedience 
 to Him. The governor, manifestly reluc- 
 tant to proceed, sent them back to prison. 
 But the next day was a prayer day, with 
 a sermon by John Wilson. He was the 
 pastor whom Anne Hutchinson had in- 
 stinctively detested ; when she saw that he 
 was to be the preacher of a Sunday morn- 
 ing, she had on several occasions risen up
 
 80 THE HANGING OF MAKY DYER 
 
 at the announcement of the text and 
 marched out of the meeting-house. He had 
 assaulted Obadiah Holmes, the Baptist, in 
 the court-room, striking him in the face, 
 and cursing him in the name of Jesus. He 
 had flung Quaker books into the hangman's 
 fire, saying, "From the devil they came, 
 to the devil they go." He had declared 
 that the best way to convert the Quakers 
 was to kill them, drawing his hand across 
 his throat. It was the misfortune of the 
 commonwealth that this man, coarse and 
 hard and malignantly orthodox, was in a 
 position of influence and authority. He 
 preached an appropriate sermon. After 
 the sermon and the service were ended, 
 the governor sat again upon the judgment 
 seat, and in a faint voice, as a man sick 
 either in body or at heart, spoke to this 
 effect: "We have made many laws, and 
 endeavored by several ways to keep you 
 from us, and neither whipping nor impris- 
 onment, nor banishment upon pain of death 
 will keep you from among us. I desire not
 
 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 81 
 
 your death. ' ' Nevertheless, he pronounced 
 their sentence: "You shall be had back 
 to the place from whence you came, and 
 from thence to the place of execution, to 
 be hanged on the gallows till you are 
 dead." Robinson asked leave to read a 
 statement, but was refused. Stevenson 
 was permitted to make a brief speech. 
 Mary Dyer said: " The will of the Lord 
 be done." " Take her away, marshal," 
 ordered the governor. " Yea," she an- 
 swered, " joyfully shall I go." 
 
 During the week which intervened be- 
 tween the sentence and the execution so 
 much excitement appeared among the peo- 
 ple, and so many crowded about the prison 
 windows, that a military guard was set 
 against a possible rescue and release. On 
 the day appointed, after prayers, with beat 
 of drums and escort of soldiers, the three 
 condemned persons were taken to the Com- 
 mon. So great was the crowd that, after 
 the execution was over, the bridge which 
 then connected Boston with the mainland
 
 82 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 
 
 at the North End, broke with their weight. 
 The Quakers would have addressed them, 
 but as often as they tried to speak, the 
 drums were beaten. Mr. Wilson derided 
 them, shaking his fist in their faces, say- 
 ing "Shall such folks as you come before 
 authority with your hats on? " But the 
 three were already uplifted in spirit above 
 the contentions of the world. As they came 
 on, hand in hand, Mary Dyer between the 
 two men, she said, "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." The gal- 
 lows was a stout elm, traditionally the 
 " Great Tree," which, till 1876, stood be- 
 side the Frog Pond. The prisoner, having 
 the noose about his neck, climbed by a lad- 
 der to a branch, and the ladder was pulled 
 away. Thus died William Eobinson, say- 
 ing, "I suffer for Christ, in whom I lived 
 and for whom I die." Thus died Marma-
 
 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 83 
 
 duke Stevenson, saying, " Be it known to 
 all this day that we suffer not as evil-doers, 
 but for conscience sake." 
 
 Mary Dyer sat at the foot of the tree, 
 beholding the martyrdom of her friends. 
 Then her arms were bound, her skirts were 
 tied about her feet, her face was covered 
 with Mr. Wilson's handkerchief, and she 
 was lifted to the ladder. And there stand- 
 ing, having suffered already the severest 
 pangs of death, having died to the world, 
 she was suddenly informed that she was re- 
 prieved. Her son in Ehode Island had 
 petitioned for her release, and the petition 
 had been granted. She was to be sent 
 home. This fruitless agony of expectation 
 had been privately ordered by the court 
 for the sake of its impression on her mind. 
 
 For a moment Mary Dyer knew not what 
 to say or do. "Waiting on the Lord to 
 know His pleasure is so sudden a change, 
 having given herself up to die." But she 
 had no choice. She was taken back to 
 prison, whence she wrote a letter refusing
 
 84 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 
 
 to accept her life. The next day, she was 
 put on horseback and conveyed out of the 
 commonwealth. She spent the winter on 
 Shelter Island, 
 
 "Where, ocean-walled and wiser than his age, 
 The lord of Shelter scorned the bigots' rage." 
 
 There her name, with those of others who 
 found like shelter on that island, is in- 
 scribed on a memorial stone erected by 
 Professor Horsford. She avoided her fam- 
 ily, not for lack of love, but that she might 
 not be prevented by them from her firm de- 
 termination. When the spring was green, 
 she made her way secretly to Providence. 
 In the middle of May, she presented her- 
 self with all boldness in Boston. 
 
 The law of banishment on pain of death 
 was still in force. The martyrdom of Rob- 
 inson and Stevenson had not availed for its 
 repeal. The authorities had justified their 
 course in a public statement, and the peo- 
 ple had accepted the situation. The great 
 work was still to be done. The hideousness
 
 THE HANGING OF MARY DYEE 85 
 
 of the law was still to be demonstrated. 
 Mary Dyer went to demonstrate it. She 
 was under no illusion. She knew by awful 
 experience that the court would keep its 
 word. She had died once, and in the name 
 of God and of the cause and truth for which 
 she stood, she went to die again. 
 
 ''Are you the same Mary Dyer," asked 
 the governor, " that was here before?" 
 " I am the same Mary Dyer that was 
 here at the last General Court." " You 
 will own yourself a Quaker, will you 
 not I ' ' * ' I own myself to be reproachfully 
 so called." " Sentence was passed upon 
 you," said the governor, "at the last Gen- 
 eral Court, and now likewise. You must 
 return to the prison, and there remain till 
 to-morrow at nine o 'clock ; then thence you 
 must go to the gallows, and there be hanged 
 till you are dead." "This is no more," 
 said Mary Dyer, "than what thou saidst 
 before." "But now," said the governor, 
 "it is to be executed. Therefore, prepare 
 yourself to-morrow at nine o'clock." "I
 
 86 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 
 
 came," said she, "in obedience to the will 
 of God at the last General Court, desiring 
 you to repeal your unrighteous laws of 
 banishment on pain of death; and that 
 same is my work now, and earnest desire, 
 although I told you that if you refuse to 
 repeal them, the Lord would send others 
 of His servants to witness against them." 
 "Away with her!" cried the governor. 
 "Away with her!" 
 
 Thus she had her will and offered her- 
 self, our New England Iphigeneia, a 
 sacrifice for the common good. Even as 
 she stood upon the ladder, they told her 
 that she should be set free if she would go 
 home and stay there. But she would ac- 
 cept no deliverance. "Nay," she said, "I 
 cannot ; for in obedience to the will of the 
 Lord God I came, and in His will I abide 
 faithful unto death." In the Friends' 
 Records of Portsmouth, Ehode Island, they 
 made this entry: "Mary Dyer, the wife 
 of William Dyer of Newport in Ehode Isl- 
 and: She was put to death at the Town
 
 THE HANGING OF MARY D'f ER 87 
 
 of Boston with ye like cruel hand as the 
 martyrs were in Queen Mary's time, and 
 then buried upon ye 31 day of ye 3' mo. 
 1660." 
 
 The persecution of the Quakers in Mas- 
 sachusetts extended over a term of twenty- 
 one years, beginning with the deportation 
 of Ann Austin and Mary Fisher in 1656, 
 and ending with the flogging of Margaret 
 Brewster and others in 1677. In addition 
 to the penalties of fine and imprisonment, 
 it presented to the Christian community 
 the spectacle of some fifty public whip- 
 pings, many of the sufferers being women, 
 in some instances the victims being 
 dragged through the streets of towns at 
 the tails of carts, the hangman beating 
 them as they went. Three Quakers had 
 their right ears cut off, four were hanged. 
 The result was the abolition of the Puri- 
 tan theocracy. Established in the enthusi- 
 asm of high ideals, maintained by men of 
 conscience in the fear of God, excluding 
 from the franchise of the commonwealth
 
 88 THE HANGING OF MARY DYER 
 
 all who are not members of the church, 
 it set its face toward a realization of the 
 kingdom of heaven. But it broke the su- 
 preme divine law of brotherly love, and 
 fell thereby into the iniquities of persecu- 
 tion. And it came to an end in consequence. 
 The death of Mary Dyer, with other con- 
 temporary cruelties, was brought to the 
 attention of the King. While he was read- 
 ing the report, the news arrived of the 
 hanging of William Leddra. In came Ed- 
 ward Burrough, the Quaker, and said to the 
 King, " There is a vein of innocent blood 
 opened in thy dominions which if it be not 
 stopped, will over-run all." The King 
 said, * * I will stop that vein. ' ' And he did. 
 There were floggings after that, but no 
 more hangings. Liberty of conscience and 
 freedom of honest speech were no longer 
 punishable in Massachusetts with banish- 
 ment on pain of death. That was the su- 
 preme achievement of the martyrdom of 
 Mary Dyer.
 
 THE ADVENTURES OF 
 CAPTAIN MYLES STANDISH
 
 Ill 
 
 THE ADVENTURES OF 
 CAPTAIN MYLES STANDISH 
 
 THE baptismal register of Chorley 
 Church, in Lancashire, contains a 
 leaf which nobody can read. The entries 
 which precede and which follow are plain 
 enough : ink was good in the sixteenth cen- 
 tury. But this blurred leaf presents so worn 
 and dim an aspect that they have reason on 
 their side who claim that fingers more 
 hasty and tangible than those of the hand 
 of time have touched it. It looks as if the 
 records of 1584 and 1585 had been inten- 
 tionally rubbed out. It is a common guess 
 that one of the names thus unhappily 
 erased was that of Myles Standish. 
 
 At all events the name is gone, and with 
 it has disappeared the necessary proof to 
 establish the claims of the Standishes of 
 America to the pleasant possessions of the 
 
 91
 
 92 THE ADVENTURES OF 
 
 Standishes of Standish. That such a claim 
 has reasonable foundation appears in 
 Myles Standish 's will, in which "I give," 
 he says, "unto my son and heir apparent, 
 Alexander Standish, all my lands as heir 
 apparent by lawful descent in Ormistick 
 Bousconge, Wrightington, Maudsley, New- 
 burrow, Cranston and in the Isle of Man, 
 and given to mee as right heire by lawful 
 descent, but surreptitiously detained from 
 mee, my grandfather being a second or 
 younger brother from the house of Stan- 
 dish of Standish." 
 
 The house of Standish was of good an- 
 tiquity, and had possessed its Lancashire 
 estates for centuries. The origin of the 
 name is involved in the obscurity which 
 is unfortunately common to origins. There 
 is a rumor that in the uneffaced pages of 
 the Chorley register is the ancient name 
 of Milo Standanaught ; Milo being plainly 
 from the Latin for "soldier," and Stand- 
 anaught meaning " Stand-at-no thing. " 
 And there are those who guess that from
 
 CAPTAIN MYLES STANDISH 93 
 
 these sturdy syllables came the name of 
 the Puritan captain. On the other hand, 
 the armorial bearings of the family are 
 1 ' an azure shield with three standishes ar- 
 gent"; and the word " standish," thus 
 used, is simply stand-dish. In the diction- 
 aries this dish is used for pens and ink: 
 Dean Swift speaks of his silver standish. 
 But in the London Times report of Queen 
 Victoria's coronation mention is made of 
 standishes upon the altar, meaning silver 
 plates or patens. Thus they appear upon 
 the family shield. 
 
 Standish, however derived, was the 
 name. Thurston de Standish, who was liv- 
 ing in 1222, is the eldest recognizable an- 
 cestor; his son was Ealph, and Ealph's 
 sons, living in 1306, were Hugh and Jordan. 
 These two divided the estates between 
 them, and their families became respec- 
 tively the Standishes of Duxbury and the 
 Standishes of Standish. The family houses 
 of Standish and Duxbury are pictured 
 in Johnson's " Exploits of Myles Stan-
 
 94 THE ADVENTURES OF 
 
 dish." They are dignified, large, square 
 buildings, surrounded by trees and exten- 
 sive grounds. Standish Hall is reproduced 
 from a photograph and may show the place 
 as it is at present. The house is connected 
 by a timbered corridor with a chapel which 
 has a cross at the gable. Duxbury Hall 
 is copied from a painting, without date; 
 deer are grazing on the lawn, and a group 
 of gentlemen on horseback are standing by 
 the porch. 
 
 The two branches of the family chose 
 different sides in the religious contention 
 which presently disturbed the land. The 
 Standishes of Duxbury accepted the Prot- 
 estant Beformation; the Standishes of 
 Standish continued in the unreformed 
 religion. 
 
 The Catholic Standishes took a lively 
 part in the disturbances of the time. Henry 
 Standish, a Franciscan friar and bishop 
 of St. Asaph, sided with Queen Katherine 
 in the matter of the divorce. And when 
 the contention between the reformed and
 
 CAPTAIN MYLES STANDISH 95 
 
 the unreformed religions was renewed late 
 in the seventeenth century, in the time of 
 James the Second, the Standishes of Stan- 
 dish were enthusiastic Jacobites. It was 
 at Standish Hall that the " Lancashire 
 Plot " was made for the King's restoration. 
 This connection of the family with the 
 Roman religion has since given rise to an 
 interesting theory that Myles Standish was 
 a Koman Catholic. It would be pleasant 
 to have this theory confirmed. That 
 Standish was not a member of the Plym- 
 outh church is commonly asserted. Dr. 
 Jeremy Belknap, in his "American Biogra- 
 phy, ' ' says in so many words, though with- 
 out reference to authority, that he was 
 " not a member of their church "; and he 
 presently quotes from the manuscript of 
 the Eev. William Hubbard's " History of 
 New England," " He had been bred a sol- 
 dier in the Low Countries, and had never 
 entered into the school of Christ, or of John 
 the Baptist." This, indeed, may mean no 
 more than that the writer did not approve
 
 96 THE ADVENTURES OF 
 
 of the captain's martial activity; for he 
 adds, ' ' or, if ever he was there, he had for- 
 got his first lessons, to offer violence 
 to no man." Still, it is more likely 
 that he intended to make apology for 
 Standish on the ground that he was 
 not a church member. That was twenty 
 years after Standish 's death. Hubbard 
 was, therefore, a contemporary; and, 
 though he lived at Ipswich, he would not 
 be likely to be mistaken in regard to an 
 ecclesiastical position so exceptional, at 
 that time, as Standish 's. 
 
 Accordingly, there appear two facts: 
 first, that Standish 's family was of the 
 Roman Catholic faith; and, secondly, that 
 Standish himself did not belong to 
 the Puritan Church. Was he a Roman 
 Catholic? 
 
 It is certain that Myles Standish fought 
 in the Netherlands on the Protestant side 
 in a war which was essentially a war of 
 religion. 
 
 It is certain that he cast in his lot with
 
 CAPTAIN MYLES STANDISH 97 
 
 the Puritan emigrants, and was ever 
 trusted and esteemed by them. They hated 
 Papists. Bradford, in his " History of 
 Plymouth Plantation, ' ' shows how they felt 
 even about the Church of England, how 
 they detested " ye ceremonies, and serv- 
 ise books, and other popish and unchristian 
 stuff e." 
 
 It is certain that Myles Standish's li- 
 brary, as appears in the inventory made at 
 his death, was as Protestant as a lot of 
 books can be. It was like the collection of 
 an orthodox country parson, Calvin's In- 
 stitutes, Preston's Sermons, Burrough's 
 11 Earthly-Mindedness and Christian Con- 
 tentment," Dod on the Lord's Supper, a 
 reply to Dr. Cotton on Baptisms, * ' Sparkes 
 Against Heresie," Ball on " Faith," " Na- 
 ture and Grace in Conflict," together with 
 "3 old Bibles," not one of them in the 
 Douay version. It is true that some of these 
 excellent books may have been presented to 
 him in Leyden by Pastor Eobinson, or in 
 Plymouth by Elder Brewster, for the im-
 
 98 THE ADVENTURES OF 
 
 proving of his mind and the saving of his 
 soul; but it is more likely that he bought 
 them himself. That was what he liked to 
 read. There is evidence on those shelves of 
 a serious disposition and a religious spirit, 
 but there is no smallest trace of any di- 
 vergence from the opinions common in 
 Plymouth. Not one of these books could 
 have stood consistently upon a Eoman 
 Catholic shelf. 
 
 We may reasonably infer from such 
 facts as these that Myles Standish, who was 
 by family a Eoman Catholic, by baptism, 
 in Chorley Church, an Episcopalian, and 
 by association a Puritan, was a person of 
 independent mind who did not further com- 
 mit himself. That he was a Eoman Cath- 
 olic, either in practice or opinion, during 
 his life in Plymouth, there is not the least 
 ground for belief. 
 
 The life of Standish is divided into two 
 almost exactly equal portions by the sail- 
 ing of the Mayflower. Born, so near as we 
 can tell, in 1584, he died in 1656. The year
 
 CAPTAIN MYLES STANDISH 99 
 
 1620 is midway between these dates pre- 
 cisely. Of the first part of his career 
 scarce anything is known. Morton, in his 
 " New England's Memorial," tells us all 
 that he knows about it in half a sentence. 
 11 In his younger time," he says, " he went 
 over into the Low Countries, and was a 
 soldier there, and came acquainted with 
 the church at Leyden." 
 
 The lad became a soldier, naturally. The 
 surreptitious detaining of his inheritance 
 indicates family dissensions, and it may 
 have been the discomfort or compulsion of 
 them which drove him from home. He was 
 probably glad to go. It was a day of ad- 
 venture. Men who had no cause for which 
 to fight at home went abroad seeking occu- 
 pation for their swords. It was Sir Philip 
 Sidney who said, ' ' Whenever you hear of 
 a good war, go to it "; and he had himself 
 followed his own advice, going into the 
 Netherlands for the joy of the fray. Young 
 Standish's mind would respond to this 
 gallant counsel: to the wars he went.
 
 100 THE ADVENTURES OF 
 
 Spain and Holland were still fighting. 
 In 1584, the year of Myles's birth, William 
 the Silent was assassinated. In 1604, Eliz- 
 abeth having died, and James having suc- 
 ceeded her upon the throne of England, 
 the English forces which had been helping 
 Holland were withdrawn. As Standish 
 was at that time but twenty years of age, it 
 is plain that he had not seen any extended 
 service. The most notable military event of 
 that time was the siege of Ostend, 
 which came to an end in that year. It is 
 a fair guess that the young soldier had a 
 part in that foolish tragedy. Of his " three 
 muskets, four carbines, two small guns, 
 one fowling piece, a sword, a cutlass and 
 three belts," some, it is likely, were used 
 in this campaign, and were tried against 
 the Spaniards before they were directed 
 against the Indians. It was probably 
 at this time, also, that he purchased 
 his copies of " Cesar's Commentarys" 
 and " Bariff's Artillery," which he could 
 hardly have desired for counsel in his
 
 CAPTAIN MYLES STANDISH 101 
 
 dealings with the Massachusetts or the 
 Narragansetts. 
 
 Two swords are still shown, one in Bos- 
 ton and the other in Plymouth, which are 
 said to have belonged to him. The Plym- 
 outh sword, in Pilgrim Hall, has an 
 Arabic inscription on its blade, which car- 
 ries its history out of the bounds of knowl- 
 edge into the camps of that Moslem enemy 
 who, even in Standish 's time, was men- 
 acing and molesting Europe. It may easily 
 have belonged to some pirate Turk, taken 
 in his ship in the English Channel, and 
 have been sold by its captor. Myles prob- 
 ably bought it at second-hand. Unlike his 
 predecessor, Captain John Smith, he had 
 no personal encounters with men whose 
 speech was Arabic. 
 
 The Boston sword, which is in the pos- 
 session of the Massachusetts Historical 
 Society, is supposed by Mr. Winsor to be 
 the one which Alexander Standish inher- 
 ited, and was handed down to Alexander's 
 grandson, John Standish, of Plymouth,
 
 102 THE ADVENTURES OF 
 
 from whom it was borrowed on a training- 
 day by a careless neighbor who never car- 
 ried it back. In 1849, Mr. Winsor was in- 
 formed by Mr. Moses Standish, of Boston, 
 that he had seen in the house of this Cap- 
 tain John Standish a coat of mail which 
 had belonged to his great-grandfather. 
 " It was a cloth garment, being thickly in- 
 terwoven with a metallic wire,so as to make 
 it extremely durable, and scarcely penetra- 
 ble. The suit was complete, including a 
 helmet and breastplate." 
 
 In 1604, when England and Spain pro- 
 fessed to be friends, it seemed as if there 
 would be no further use for these weapons, 
 offensive or defensive. In 1609, however, 
 two events took place which determined 
 where young Standish 's taste for war 
 should find gratification. One was the es- 
 tablishment of a general peace. In the 
 West of Europe, though contending ar- 
 mies, Catholic and Protestant, made a truce 
 of twelve years, in the East of Europe, 
 other contending armies, Christian and
 
 CAPTAIN MYLES STANDISH 103 
 
 Moslem, agreed to fight no more for almost 
 twice that length of time. Thus Standish's 
 profession offered him no future in Eu- 
 rope ; no princes would buy his sword. The 
 other event was the removal from Amster- 
 dam to Leyden of a little group of English 
 Puritan refugees. Thus, in this year or 
 later, Standish came into acquaintance 
 with Eobinson and Brewster, and with 
 Carver and Bradford and Winslow. When 
 the Puritans began presently to look across 
 the sea, he naturally bethought himself of 
 Walter Ealeigh and Lyon Gardner and 
 John Smith and Ferdinando Gorges, com- 
 panions in arms with him, who, being in 
 his condition, without employment, had 
 found occupation and adventure in the 
 new world. He cast in his lot with the 
 emigrating congregation. 
 
 The Puritans had, indeed, found Leyden 
 ' ' a fair and bewtif ul citie, and of a sweete 
 situation," and had especially appreciated 
 the advantages of living in the neighbor- 
 hood of its university. They knew the per-
 
 104 THE ADVENTURES OF 
 
 ils of an untried climate. ' ' For that they 
 should be liable," they said, " to famine, 
 and nakedness, and ye want, in a manner, 
 of all things. The change of aire, diate, 
 and drinking of water would infecte their 
 bodies with sore sickness and greevous dis- 
 eases. And also those which should escape 
 or overcome these difficulties, should yett be 
 in continuall danger of ye salvage people, 
 who are cruel, barberous and most trech- 
 erous, being most furious in their rage and 
 merciles where they overcome: nor being 
 content only to kill and take away life, but 
 delight to tormente men in ye most bloodie 
 manner that may be; fleeing some alive 
 with ye shells of fishes, cutting of ye mem- 
 bers and joyntes of others peesmeale, and, 
 broiling on ye coles, eate ye collops of their 
 flesh in their sight whilst they live: with 
 other cruelties horrible to be related." 
 
 This was not a cheerful prospect. But 
 the truce between Holland and Spain was 
 nearly over, the twelve years ending in 
 1621, and the Indians, they may well have
 
 CAPTAIN MYLES STANDISH 105 
 
 thought, could not be much worse than the 
 Spaniards. Other reasons, also, impelled 
 them. They desired to have a country of 
 their own, where they might bring up their 
 children to be religious English folk. They 
 determined to seek an abiding place in the 
 wild lands across the sea. 
 
 In the meantime, Myles Standish had 
 been getting married. Somewhere, tradi- 
 tion says, in the Isle of Man, he had found 
 a young person named Rose, who was will- 
 ing, under the safe covert of his protec- 
 tion, to brave the possible horrors of New 
 England. Standish was now thirty-six 
 years old, being arrived at the middle year 
 of his life. Longfellow tells how he 
 looked 
 
 " Short of stature he was, but strongly built and 
 
 athletic, 
 Broad in the shoulders, deep-chested, with muscles 
 
 and sinews of iron ; 
 Brown as a nut was his face, but his russet beard 
 
 was already 
 Flaked with patches of snow, as hedges sometimes 
 
 in November."
 
 106 THE ADVENTUEES OF 
 
 That is as near as we can come to it. He 
 was certainly short of stature. Master 
 Morton, of Merrymount, in his * ' New Eng- 
 land Canaan," wrote satirical descriptions 
 of the colonists, and called Captain Stan- 
 dish, " Captaine Shrimpe." " Had we been 
 at home in our full number," he says, re- 
 counting how Standish invaded and ar- 
 rested the mischievous household, we 
 " would have given Captaine Shrimpe (a 
 quondam Drummer) such a welcome as 
 would have made him wish for a Drumme 
 as bigg as Diogenes' tubb, that he might 
 have crept into it out of sight." So, too, 
 the Indian Pecksuot told him, " Though 
 he were a great Captain, yet he was but a 
 little Man." William Hubbard, also, al- 
 ready quoted, said, " A little chimney is 
 soon fired : so was the Plymouth captain, a 
 man of very little stature, yet of a very hot 
 and hasty temper." 
 
 There is no authentic portrait of Stan- 
 dish, though the picture in the ' ' Standishes 
 of America ' ' suits the part well. It shows
 
 CAPTAIN MYLES STANDISH 107 
 
 a sturdy person, in the stiff ruff of the pe- 
 riod, with full black beard, and a look of 
 stout determination in his eyes. But the 
 compiler tells us that nothing is definitely 
 known about this portrait prior to the year 
 1812. It is true that Standish was in Eng- 
 land in the year 1625, when the picture is 
 dated. But the times were not such as to 
 suggest the painting of portraits : money 
 was uncommonly scarce, and London had 
 the plague. The Pilgrims did not sit for 
 their pictures. The walls of their houses 
 did not present suitable backgrounds for 
 the hanging of paintings in oil. 
 
 ' ' Wednesday, the sixth of September, 
 the wind coming East North East, a fine 
 small gale, we loosed from Plymouth [the 
 English Plymouth], having been kindly 
 entertained and courteously used by divers 
 friends there dwelling : and after many dif- 
 ficulties in boisterous storms, at length, by 
 God's Providence, upon the 9th of Novem- 
 ber following, by break of day, we espied 
 land ; which we deemed to be Cape Cod, and
 
 108 THE ADVENTURES OP 
 
 so afterward it proved. " The year was 
 1620, and the dates, being " old style," 
 need to be increased by ten to bring 
 them into proper position in our present 
 calendar. 
 
 Two days later, after perilous en- 
 counters with " dangerous shoals and 
 roaring breakers " in a vain attempt to 
 make what is now the harbor of New York, 
 they dropped anchor near the end of Long 
 Point and not far from the present village 
 of Provincetown. They found themselves 
 in a circling bay ' ' compassed about to the 
 very sea with oaks, pines, juniper, sassa- 
 fras, and other sweet wood," and so capa- 
 cious that therein " a thousand sail of 
 ships may safely ride." The water, how- 
 ever, was so shallow that they could not 
 come near the shore by " three-quarters 
 of an English mile." They had to wade 
 " a bow-shot or two " in " going aland "; 
 thus getting such coughs and colds as 
 made them ill-prepared for the rigors 
 which awaited them.
 
 CAPTAIN MYLES STANDISH 109 
 
 In the cabin of the May-flower, lying thus 
 at Provincetown, they drew up a notable 
 compact in which they agreed to combine 
 themselves together into a civil body poli- 
 tic ; and by virtue thereof to make laws to 
 which they promised all due submission 
 and obedience. The sixth name signed to 
 this document was that of Captain Myles 
 Standish. 
 
 Thus the new life began, under Novem- 
 ber skies. " Being thus passed ye vast 
 ocean," writes Bradford, in his history, 
 " they had now no friends to wellcome 
 them, nor inns to entertaine or refresh 
 their weatherbeaten bodies, no houses or 
 much less townes, to repaire too, to 
 seek for succore. . . . And for the season, 
 it was winter, and they that know ye win- 
 ters of that countrie know them to be sharp 
 and violent, and subject to cruell and 
 feirce storms, dangerous to travill to 
 known places, much more to such an 
 unknown coast." 
 
 The first task was exploration, and the
 
 110 THE ADVENTURES OP 
 
 first mention of Standish is as the leader 
 of an expedition. i l And so with cautions, 
 directions and instructions, sixteen men 
 were sent out, with every man his musket, 
 sword and corselet, under the conduct of 
 Captain Myles Standish/' They ordered 
 themselves in "a Single File " and 
 marched for a mile by the sea, without 
 meeting with an adventure, when, at last, 
 they saw five or six persons with a dog 
 coming towards them, who, when they es- 
 pied this army of invasion, ran into the 
 woods, whistling the dog after them. Stan- 
 dish and his men followed these citizens, 
 but were not able to overtake them, for 
 they " ran away with might and main." 
 Thus they went for ten miles, following 
 their footprints. Then it grew dark, and 
 they built a camp-fire, and setting a guard, 
 bestowed themselves for the night. The 
 next day they went on through the woods 
 making their way through boughs and 
 bushes which, as they reported, tore their 
 very armor in pieces. About ten in the
 
 CAPTAIN MYLES STANDISH 111 
 
 morning, being then in what is now Truro, 
 they found a spring, " of which," they 
 said, " we were heartily glad, and sot us 
 down and drank our first New England 
 water with as much delight as ever we 
 drank drink in all our lives." That day 
 they found some planks laid together, 
 where a house had been, and a ship's ket- 
 tle, " brought out of Europe," and nearby 
 in sand-heaps a store of corn, " some yel- 
 low, and some red, and some mixed with 
 blue; which was a very goodly sight." Of 
 this they helped themselves, filling the ket- 
 tle and their pockets. So they made their 
 way back to the ship, with some difficulty, 
 getting lost in the woods, and seemed to 
 their companions as fairly laden as the 
 men from Eshcol. Eight months after, 
 they met the owners of this corn and paid 
 them for it. This find of corn they called 
 the First Discovery. 
 
 On Wednesday, the 6th (16th) of De- 
 cember, another exploring expedition, con- 
 sisting of ten men and led, as before, by
 
 112 THE ADVENTURES OP 
 
 Captain Standish, started in search of a 
 proper place for the settlement. The 
 weather was very cold, the water freezing 
 on their clothes and making them " like 
 coats of iron." They went by water, in 
 the shallop, landing now and then and 
 making expeditions into the country. In 
 the middle of the second night, as they lay 
 on the shore by their fire, they heard " a 
 great and hideous cry," and shot off a 
 couple of muskets, at which the noise 
 ceased, and they judged it had been made 
 by wolves or foxes. But about five o 'clock 
 the next morning, having had prayers and 
 preparing breakfast, the cry sounded 
 again, and one of the company came run- 
 ning in, shouting, " They are men! In- 
 dians! Indians!" And the sentinel was 
 followed by a flight of arrows. The arms 
 had already been carried to the boat, but 
 Standish had a snap-lance ready a gun 
 with a flint lock and he made a shot, and 
 presently the others were ready; the In- 
 dians meanwhile keeping up their dreadful
 
 CAPTAIN MYLES STANDISH 113 
 
 cry, "Woach!" they screamed, " Woach! 
 Ha ! Ha ! Hach ! Woach ! ' ' sounding not 
 unlike a college yell. Finally their leader 
 * * gave an extraordinary cry and away they 
 went all." None of the Englishmen had 
 been hit by the discharge of arrows, nor 
 do they record having wounded any Indian. 
 They followed the retreating savages a 
 little space, and then shouted ' ' all together, 
 two several times ; and shot off a couple of 
 muskets; and so returned. This we did 
 that they might see that we were not afraid 
 of them nor discouraged." Thus ended 
 the First Encounter. 
 
 Then, giving God thanks, they set sail 
 again, looking for a harbor to which the 
 ship's pilot had directed them; he had been 
 there once, he said, and the savages had 
 stolen his harpoon; he called it Thievish 
 Harbor. Now it began to snow and rain 
 and blow, and the sea was very rough. The 
 rudder broke; the mast was split in three 
 pieces. At last, after a day of peril, they 
 " fell upon a place of sandy ground " on
 
 114 THE ADVENTURES OF 
 
 the shore of a small island. There they 
 stayed till morning, and the next day, be- 
 ing Sunday, they said their prayers and 
 sang their hymns, on Clark's Island, as we 
 call it. " On Monday they sounded ye 
 harbor, and f ounde it fitt for shipping ; and 
 marched into ye land & found diverse corn- 
 fields & little running brooks, a place (as 
 they supposed) fitt for situation; at least 
 it was ye best they could find; and ye 
 season and their present necessities, made 
 them glad to accepte of it. So they returned 
 to their shipp again with this news to 
 ye rest of their people, which did much 
 comforte their harts." 
 
 Thus is the Landing recorded, without 
 adjective or exclamation. The date was 
 December 11, or, by our reckoning, the 
 21st, piously kept as " Forefathers' Day." 
 No rock is mentioned, but as there is no 
 other rock in the immediate neighborhood 
 of their getting ashore, there is no reason 
 to doubt that they set their feet on the 
 boulder of tradition. It has been debated
 
 CAPTAIN MYLES STANDISH 115 
 
 whether John Alden or Mary Chilton was 
 the first to land ; but that event was later, 
 when the Mayflower followed the shallop's 
 course into Plymouth Bay. Let us hazard 
 the conjecture that Myles Standish, being 
 the leader of this expedition, was himself 
 the first to stand on " the threshold of 
 the United States." 
 
 The First Encounter had made the pil- 
 grims thankful that they had a military 
 man among them. They were now expectant 
 of an Indian attack. Among their domes- 
 tic and religious preparations for the win- 
 ter they did not neglect those important 
 and, as they thought, necessary precau- 
 tions for which Standish was responsible. 
 After two months of anxiety, during which 
 they sometimes saw great smokes of Indian 
 fires, but never an Indian, it happened at 
 the end of February, that ' ' Captain Myles 
 Standish and Francis Cooke, being at work 
 in the woods, coming home left their tools 
 behind them, but before they returned 
 they were taken away by the savages."
 
 116 THE ADVENTURES OF 
 
 The next day, " in the morning," says the 
 record in Mourt's " Relation," "we called 
 a meeting for the establishment of military 
 orders among ourselves; and we chose 
 Myles Standish our captain, and gave him 
 authority of command in affairs. And as 
 we were in consultation hereabouts, two 
 savages presented themselves upon the top 
 of a hill, over against our plantation, about 
 a quarter of a mile and less, and made 
 signs unto us to come unto them : we like- 
 wise made signs unto them to come unto 
 us. Whereupon we armed ourselves 
 and made ready, and sent two over the 
 brook towards them, to-wit, Captain Stan- 
 dish and Stevens Hopkins, who went to- 
 wards them. Only one of them had a mus- 
 ket, which they laid down on the ground in 
 their sight, in sign of peace and to parley 
 with them. But the savages would not 
 tarry their coming. A noise of a great 
 many more was heard behind the hill ; but 
 no more came in sight. This led us to
 
 CAPTAIN MYLES STANDISH 117 
 
 plant our great ordnance in places most 
 convenient." 
 
 Meanwhile, in January and February, of 
 the company of settlers half had died. 
 ' ' In ye depth of winter, and wanting houses 
 and other comforts, being infected with ye 
 scurvie and other diseases, which their long 
 voyage and their inacomodate condition 
 had brought upon them," they died, 
 " sometimes 2 or 3 of a day." On the 5th 
 of February, Eose Standish died. * ' Scarce 
 fifty remained," says Bradford, " and of 
 these in ye time of most distress ther was 
 but 6. or 7. sound persons, who, to their 
 great comendations be it spoken, spared no 
 pains, night nor day, but with abundance 
 of toyle and hazard of their own health, 
 fetched the wood, made them fires, dressed 
 them meat, made their beds, washed their 
 lothsome cloths and all this willingly and 
 cheerfully, without any grudging in the 
 least, shewing herein their true love unto 
 their friends and brethren." " Two of
 
 118 THE ADVENTURES OF 
 
 these 7. were Mr. William Brewster, their 
 reverend Elder, and Myles Standish, ther 
 Captain and Military Commander.'' 
 
 In this forlorn condition was the settle- 
 ment, many dead and most of the others 
 sick, the sea before them, and the menacing 
 forest behind, when, on the Friday morning 
 of a " fair, warm day " in March, there 
 came in boldly " all alone and along the 
 houses," a naked savage, crying, " Wel- 
 come ! ' ' Samoset was himself but a visitor 
 in these parts, being from Maine, where 
 he had learned some English from the fish- 
 ermen ; he was able, however, to give much 
 information. He explained the hostility 
 shown to Standish in the First Encounter 
 by the fact that Captain Hunt, an English 
 shipmaster, had stolen twenty- seven men 
 from those shores and carried them to 
 Spain to sell as slaves. He said that one of 
 these captives, named Squanto, had got 
 to England, where he had lived in London 
 for some years with a merchant in Corn- 
 hill, and had himself made his way home.
 
 CAPTAIN MYLES STANDISH 119 
 
 And he told the story of the Great Plague. 
 Standish learned that they who had been 
 feared as enemies, against whom he had 
 established on the hill his Minion and his 
 Saker, and his Bases stout cannon all 
 were themselves vanquished, broken, and 
 almost exterminated by pestilence. Pres- 
 ently Samoset brought Squanto, and Samo- 
 set and Squanto procured a conference be- 
 tween the pilgrims and Massasoit, their 
 nearest neighbor. 
 
 Massasoit had prudently prepared him- 
 self for this interview by getting ' ' all the 
 Powachs of ye cuntrie, for 3. days to- 
 gether, in a horid and divellish maner to 
 curse and execrate them with their cun- 
 jurations, which assambly and service they 
 held in a dark and dismall swampe." He 
 now came forward, Captain Standish and 
 Master Allerton meeting him at the brook 
 with half-a-dozen musketeers. He was con- 
 ducted to a barn then in building, where 
 were placed a green rug and three or 
 four cushions. The Indian king and the
 
 120 THE ADVENTURES OF 
 
 Puritan governor kissed each other's 
 hands. Then " the governor called for 
 some strong water and drunk to him, and 
 he drunk a great draught, that made him 
 sweat all the tune after." So they made a 
 treaty of peace, assuring Massasoit that so 
 long as he kept it ' ' King James would es- 
 teem of him as his friend and ally. ' ' The 
 next day Standish and Allerton ' ' ventur- 
 ously " returned the Indians' visit, and 
 were regaled with groundnuts and tobacco. 
 In spite of this polite beginning, the Pil- 
 grims never got on well with the Indians. 
 The contrast, in this particular, between 
 the two colonies founded by religious per- 
 sons and for religious purposes, Plym- 
 outh and Pennsylvania, is very marked. 
 William Penn lands upon the site of Phila- 
 delphia and finds a company of Indians. 
 They receive him cheerfully, give him food, 
 and entertain him with games, skipping 
 and jumping. Penn skips and jumps with 
 them, and they are all fraternally merry 
 together. Myles Standish lands on Cape
 
 CAPTAIN MYLES STANDISH 121 
 
 Cod, forms his men in single file, all in 
 armor and carrying guns, and presently 
 the Indians raise a great cry and come 
 upon them with arrows. Penn had no gun. 
 The only man harmed by the Indians of 
 Pennsylvania during a long course of years 
 was one who owned a gun. The Pilgrims 
 came out with a full equipment, not only 
 of muskets, but of cannon. This was prob- 
 ably due to Standish's counsel; he looked 
 after the munitions of war. It is pos- 
 sible that if Standish had not been of 
 the company, and the settlers had come 
 as peaceable and friendly folk, they might 
 have established the same relations with 
 their savage neighbors as prevailed in 
 Pennsylvania. 
 
 On the other hand, it appears that a hos- 
 tile feeling had preceded the settlement 
 of Plymouth. The Indians of those parts 
 had chiefly learned to esteem white men as 
 enemies. They had a tradition that the 
 great plague came from a Frenchman's 
 curse. They remembered Hunt, the kid-
 
 122 THE ADVENTURES OF 
 
 napper. It is likely that had it not been 
 for Captain Standish, the Pilgrims, land- 
 ing under such conditions, among Indians 
 of a more savage temper than those of 
 Pennsylvania, and justly enraged, would 
 have been summarily cut off. As it was, 
 they had several narrow escapes. So that 
 it may fairly be said that Standish saved 
 the colony. Without him, it might have 
 met the fate of other, worse defended 
 settlements. 
 
 The Plymouth people had now three val- 
 uable Indian friends: Massasoit, the 
 sachem; Squanto, the interpreter; and 
 Hobamack, one of Massasoit 's warriors, a 
 man of might. They cast in their lot with 
 the white men. They were very jealous 
 the one of another; and Squanto, by a 
 childish trick, which was meant to show 
 that he was the best friend of the white 
 man, came near to getting the settlers into 
 serious trouble with Massasoit. But they 
 were faithful friends, both of them, and 
 even their jealousy was turned to account
 
 CAPTAIN MYLES STANDISH 123 
 
 by taking Squanto into Governor Brad- 
 ford's house, and Hobamack into Captain 
 Standish 's, at which convenient distance 
 they competed which should do the colony 
 most good. Squanto taught the settlers 
 how to fish and plant, and served as guide 
 and adviser. He materially assisted Stan- 
 dish's defensive measures by informing 
 the Indians that the English had the plague 
 buried in a pot under the ground, whence 
 they were likely to bring it out on the least 
 provocation. 
 
 In August, 1621, Corbitant, one of the 
 neighbors of Massasoit, having refused to 
 sign the treaty of peace, seized Squanto, 
 saying that now the English had lost their 
 tongue. Standish felt that hesitation, or 
 even forbearance, would now be fatal. 
 Straight he marched with fourteen men 
 into Corbitant 's town, beset the chief's 
 house, and without serious bloodshed 
 brought back the interpreter in safety. 
 
 In September, with nine men of Plym- 
 outh, and Squanto for pilot, Standish
 
 124 THE ADVENTURES OF 
 
 sailed up into Boston Bay. They spent a 
 night in the open boat in the lee of Thomp- 
 son's Island, and in the morning landed on 
 the peninsula, whose name of Squantuin 
 preserves the memory of their friend. The 
 event is commemorated by a monument 
 bearing the inscription, 
 
 Captain Myles Standish 
 
 with his men, guided by the 
 
 Indian Squanto, landed here 
 
 September 30, 1621. 
 
 Here they found a pile of lobsters, freshly 
 caught, on which they made their breakfast, 
 paying for them, according to their honest 
 custom, when they met the owners. Pres- 
 ently they found the " governor," named 
 Obbatinewat, who lived, as they expressed 
 it, " in the bottom of the Massachusetts 
 Bay. ' ' Obbatinewat, who was much afraid 
 of his visitors, told them how he lived in 
 terror, not only of the Tarratines, a sav- 
 age people dwelling to the north, but of 
 the squaw sachem, a lady of the immediate 
 neighborhood, who was continually attack-
 
 CAPTAIN MYLES STANDISH 125 
 
 ing him. The Pilgrims looked about the 
 country, crossing over to what is now 
 Charlestown, and marching inland to what 
 is now Medford and "Winchester. Every 
 camp was abandoned upon their approach. 
 All the warriors hid themselves in the 
 woods. The great plague had not only 
 broken their strength, but had destroyed 
 their nerve : they had no spirit left. The 
 visitors found many squaws, but missed the 
 Massachusetts Queen. They came away 
 with two impressions of Boston: first, 
 that it was inhabited mainly by women; 
 and, secondly, that it was the most beauti- 
 ful place they had found in all their 
 travels. So they returned to Plymouth, 
 with a fair wind and a light moon. 
 
 In December, the Narragansetts, of 
 Rhode Island, the most formidable of their- 
 neighbors, sent a messenger with a bundle 
 of arrows wrapped in a rattlesnake's skin. 
 Standish detained the messenger until they 
 should learn what these symbols meant. 
 When it was found that they threatened
 
 126 THE ADVENTURES OF 
 
 war, the men of Plymouth stuffed the skin 
 with powder and shot, and returned polite 
 regrets to the Narragansetts that the Eng- 
 lish had no suitable boats in which to make 
 them a visit, adding that if the Narragan- 
 setts cared to come and make the first call, 
 themselves they might be sure of a warm 
 reception. The Narragansetts sent back 
 the powder and shot, and did not come. 
 But the Pilgrims, knowing how much 
 stouter their defiance was than their de- 
 fence, set a strong line of palings about the 
 settlement, with gates to lock at night; 
 and Captain Standish divided the men into 
 four companies, and summoned a * ' general 
 muster.' 1 
 
 The most serious peril came, however, 
 from another direction. In the summer of 
 1622, Master Weston, a money-making cit- 
 izen of London, who had been concerned in 
 the sailing of the Mayflower, established a 
 colony at Wessagusset, near the present 
 Weymouth. It was a trading venture, and 
 the colonists were most of them " rude
 
 CAPTAIN MYLES STANDISH 127 
 
 fellows," as Western, himself called them; 
 " stout knaves," was the name which 
 Master Morton called them, being an 
 associate with them. 
 
 Food was very scarce both at Wessagus- 
 set and at Plymouth ; and this scarcity the 
 new colonists increased by foolishly paying 
 the Indians as much for a quart of corn as 
 the Plymouth people were wont to pay for 
 a skin of beaver. The two settlements 
 sent out a joint expedition that autumn in 
 search of food; Standish being in com- 
 mand, and Squanto acting as interpreter. 
 The weather was very bad, and the boat 
 was several times forced back into port. 
 Standish fell sick of a fever, and gave up 
 the command to Bradford. Presently, at 
 Chatham, on the back side of Cape Cod, 
 Squanto was suddenly taken sick and died. 
 At last, having secured some corn, Brad- 
 ford and his party left the Wessagusset 
 people to bring the food to port, and walked 
 home fifty miles, preferring that to the 
 company of their neighbors. Even thus,
 
 128 THE ADVENTURES OF 
 
 the supply was not sufficient, and there was 
 hunger in both colonies. 
 
 Under these hard circumstances, the men 
 of the new colony so conducted themselves 
 as to cause the Indians to lose both fear 
 and respect of them. In their straits, they 
 sold the Indians their clothes and bed-cov- 
 erings. " Others (so base were they) be- 
 came servants to the Indeans; and would 
 cutt their woode & fetch them water for a 
 cap full of corne ; others fell to plaine steal- 
 ing, both night and day, from ye Indeans, 
 of which they greevously complained. " 
 Thus the Indians began not only to hate 
 but to despise them. They daily insulted 
 the planters. " Yea, in ye end," says 
 Bradford, " they were faine to hang one 
 of their men, whom they could not reclaime 
 from stealing, to give ye Indeans con- 
 tente. ' ' Master Morton, in his ' ' New Eng- 
 lish Canaan, " says that they put the stout 
 thief's clothes upon another of their com- 
 pany who was sick and not likely to live, 
 and hanged the sick man in the well man's
 
 CAPTAIN MYLES STANDISH 129 
 
 place. It is the story which Butler tells in 
 "Hudibras": 
 
 " Our Brethren of New England use 
 Choice Malefactors to excuse, 
 And hang the Guiltless in their stead, 
 Of whom the Churches have less need ; 
 As lately happened : In a town 
 There lived a Cobbler, and but one 
 That out of Doctrine could cut Use, 
 And mend men's lives as well as shoes. 
 This precious Brother having slain, 
 In times of peace, an Indian, 
 (Not out of malice, but mere zeal, 
 Because he was an Infidel,) 
 The mighty Tottipottymoy 
 Sent to our Elders an envoy, 
 Complaining sorely of the breach 
 Of league held forth by Brother Patch, 
 Against the articles in force 
 Between both churches, his and ours, 
 For which he craved the Saints to render 
 Into his hands, or hang th' Offender; 
 But they maturely having weighed 
 They had no more than him o' th' trade, 
 (A man that served them in a double 
 Capacity, to teach and cobble,) 
 Resolv'd to spare him ; yet to do 
 The Indian Hoghan Moghan too 
 Impartial justice, in his stead did 
 Hang an old Weaver that was bed-rid." 
 
 The right man was hanged, but even this 
 did not give " ye Indeans contente." They
 
 130 THE ADVENTURES OF 
 
 made a plot to exterminate the white men. 
 Few in numbers themselves, they sent mes- 
 sengers to the Narragansetts, to the Cape 
 Cod tribes, and, in short, to all their neigh- 
 bors in the forest, and arranged for a gen- 
 eral massacre. Winslow went to see Mas- 
 sasoit, who was sick, and either by applica- 
 tion of simple remedies or by turning out 
 the native doctors with their tom-toms, re- 
 covered him to health; and Massasoit 
 disclosed the plot. 
 
 Standish, at the same time, went on an- 
 other expedition to Cape Cod for corn, and 
 met with a cold reception from Indians 
 who had before been friendly. He found 
 Wituwamat there, a Massachusetts Indian, 
 who flourished a knife, and made a wild 
 speech, insulting the captain. That night 
 one of the savages insisted on sleeping in 
 Standish 's lodging, making great protesta- 
 tions of friendship. The night was bit- 
 terly cold, and partly by reason of the 
 weather, partly from anxiety and sus- 
 picion, the captain took no rest, " but
 
 CAPTAIN MYLES STANDISH 131 
 
 either walked, or turned himself to and fro 
 at the fire." The Indian asked him why 
 he did not sleep, and he answered that ' ' he 
 knew not well, but he had no desire at all 
 to rest." So the perilous night passed. 
 
 No sooner had Win slow and Standish 
 returned with these ill tidings, than Phin- 
 ehas Pratt suddenly appeared from Wes- 
 sagusset, covered with snow, fainting with 
 fear, hunger, and weariness, and pursued 
 by Indians. He brought information that 
 the plot was on the eve of execution. 
 
 Standish took eight men with him and 
 proceeded straight to the heart of the peril. 
 Nobody in the colony knew the Indians as 
 he did. Winslow says that he could un- 
 derstand their language better than any of 
 the others. He knew that, under the cir- 
 cumstances, conciliation would be impos- 
 sible. It was a hard case. The Indians 
 had a good deal of right on their side. A 
 company of vagabonds gathered from the 
 corners of London streets made most un- 
 pleasant neighbors, whom even the Pil-
 
 132 THE ADVENTUBES OF 
 
 grims could not endure. It was natural 
 enough that the Indians should resolve to 
 get rid of them, and natural enough, also, 
 that they should fail to make a fine dis- 
 crimination and should include all the peo- 
 ple of pale face under the ban. On the 
 other hand, the lives of the Plymouth set- 
 tlers were at stake, and the great cause for 
 which they stood was in peril. Standish 
 saw clearly that there was but one way out. 
 And he took that way. 
 
 Being arrived at the stockade at Wes- 
 sagusset, the captain found the colonists 
 weak and frightened, and the Indians bold 
 and insulting. Wituwamat showed a sharp 
 knife having a woman's face pictured on 
 the handle. " I have another at home," 
 he said, " wherewith I have killed both 
 French and English, and that hath a man's 
 face on it; and by-and-by these two must 
 marry." Pecksuot, also, a man of great 
 size, taunted Standish on his short stature. 
 The next day, being the 6th of April, 
 1623, they came again, these braves and
 
 CAPTAIN MYLES STANDISH 133 
 
 a few others, the leaders and inspirers of 
 the plot. They were allowed to enter the 
 blockhouse. Suddenly Standish gave a 
 signal, and upon the instant leaped on 
 Pecksuot, seized the knife which hung at 
 his neck, and stabbed him with it. Each of 
 his four or five companions attacked an- 
 other savage. The door was fastened, and 
 for a few tragic moments, without groan 
 or cry, the struggle went on. When the 
 door was opened, the men who were the 
 heart and hands of the conspiracy were all 
 dead. On the day after there was a brief 
 skirmish in which Hobamack put the 
 remaining warriors to flight. 
 
 When Pastor Robinson, in Leyden, heard 
 of this encounter he was much grieved 
 thereat, and besought the church to con- 
 sider the disposition of their captain, who 
 was of a warm temper, adding also, in 
 words applicable to other campaigns of 
 nearer date, " how happy a thing had 
 it been that you had converted some be- 
 fore you killed any." There is no doubt,
 
 134 THE ADVENTURES OF 
 
 however, but that Standish, by thus taking 
 the lives of a few, saved the lives of many, 
 both Englishmen and Indians. It was the 
 only blood which the captain shed. There- 
 after, his name alone was as terrible as an 
 army with banners. 
 
 One of the original settlers at Wessa- 
 gusset was Thomas Morton. Morton was 
 a London lawyer, an ardent sportsman and 
 lover of nature. Massachusetts delighted 
 him. Its " many goodly groves of trees, 
 dainty, fine, round, rising hillocks, delicate, 
 fair, large plains, sweet, crystal fountains, 
 and clear running streams," with fruit 
 and flowers and " lilies of the Daphnean 
 tree," made the land seem to him like 
 Paradise. He returned to England before 
 winter came to change his mind, and be- 
 fore the Wessagusset people entered into 
 their misfortunes. Presently Captain 
 Wollaston fitting out an expedition, Mor- 
 ton came back with it; and after some 
 months, Wollaston and most of his party 
 having moved to Virginia, Morton put him-
 
 CAPTAIN MYLES STANDISH 135 
 
 self at the head of the half-dozen who 
 remained. 
 
 The settlers established themselves at 
 Passonagessit, within the limits of. the 
 present city of Quincy. There they built 
 their house on the summit of one of those 
 gentle hills which Morton liked so much, 
 looking out over Boston Bay. They had 
 two purposes : one was to trade with the 
 Indians for skins; the other was to have 
 as good a time as was possible under the 
 circumstances. Their pursuit of these 
 purposes made them excessively obnoxious 
 to all their prudent and serious English 
 neighbors. Morton, indeed, with his 
 boisterous ideas of pleasure and his frank 
 dislike of Puritans, represented everything 
 that was objectionable in politics, in 
 religion, and in manners. Bradford says 
 that he ' ' became lord of misrule and main- 
 tained (as it were) a school of Atheisme." 
 Mr. Fiske, in his " Beginnings of New 
 England," suggests that the accusation of 
 atheism was " based upon the fact that he
 
 136 THE ADVENTURES OP 
 
 used the Book of Common Prayer. " That 
 Morton used the Prayer Book he, himself, 
 asserts. " Mine host," he says, meaning 
 himself, " was a man that indeavoured to 
 advance the dignity of the Church of Eng- 
 land, which they (on the contrary part) 
 would labour to vilifie with uncivile terms ; 
 enveying against the sacred book of com- 
 mon prayer and mine host that used it in 
 a laudable manner amongst his family, as 
 a practice of piety." Mr. Charles Francis 
 Adams, in his " Three Episodes of Massa- 
 chusetts History," thinks it likely that 
 Morton somewhat exaggerated his cham- 
 pionship in order to get the favor of Laud 
 in the troubles which he presently had with 
 the Puritans. The combination of fervent 
 piety with Morton's marked devotion to 
 " barrells of beere " and " lassies in 
 beaver coats " is, to say the least, improb- 
 able. And the spectacle of Master Morton 
 reading the Morning Prayer with his com- 
 panions at Merrymount passes imagina- 
 tion. There is, at least, no doubt but that
 
 CAPTAIN MYLES STANDISH 137 
 
 in his trading with the Indians, he sold 
 them guns and ammunition. That, of it- 
 self, made him a mischievous citizen. 
 Every colonist's life was endangered. 
 
 On the May-day of 1627 the men of Mer- 
 rymount set up a May-pole. We ' l brewed 
 a barrell of excellente beere," says the 
 chief offender, telling his own story, ' ' and 
 provided for a case of bottles, to be spent, 
 with other good cheare, for all comers of 
 that day. ' ' And he ' ' brought the Maypole 
 to the place appointed with drummes, 
 gunnes, pistols and other fitting instru- 
 ments for that purpose ; and there erected 
 it with the help of savages, that came 
 thether of purpose to see the manner of 
 our Bevels." So they danced about it, the 
 white men and the braves and the lassies in 
 beaver coats, and were as merry as the day 
 was long. 
 
 This, the " precise separatists that lived 
 at New Plymouth " found a " lamentable 
 Spectacle." Twice they wrote to Morton, 
 but he answered with high words. The
 
 138 THE ADVENTURES OF 
 
 situation became so serious that all the 
 settlers up and down the neighboring 
 coasts were concerned. If the Merry- 
 mount proceedings continued, the resi- 
 dence of decent people in those parts would 
 become impossible. Finally, Myles Stan- 
 dish was sent out to arrest the offending 
 household. He took eight men with him, 
 a number which he seems to have pre- 
 ferred in the face of danger or difficulty, 
 and laid hold on Morton as he was on a 
 visit to Wessagusset. But in the night 
 Morton got away. They had him sleep- 
 ing between guards, but the guards slept 
 sounder than he did. Suddenly a door 
 slammed and they awoke to find him gone. 
 " The word," he says, " which was given 
 with an alarme, was, ' O, he's gon he's 
 gon! What shell wee doe, he's gon!' the 
 rest (halfe a sleepe) start up in a maze, 
 and, like rames, ran their heads one at an- 
 other full batt in the darke. Their guard 
 leader, Captaine Shrimpe, tooke on most 
 furiously, and tore his clothes for anger to
 
 CAPTAIN MYLES STANDISH 139 
 
 see the empty nest and their bird gone. 
 The rest were eager to have torne theire 
 haire from theire heads; but it was 
 so short, that it would give them no 
 hold." 
 
 Standish and his men started in pursuit, 
 and found Morton and two companions en- 
 trenched at Merrymount, well armed with 
 guns, but too drunk to use them. Thus 
 they were captured, and brought down to 
 Plymouth, whence Morton was presently 
 shipped to England, where he wrote his 
 " New English Canaan," and, in various 
 ways, at the court of Charles I, did what 
 he could to make trouble for the colony. 
 
 Meanwhile the captain had comforted 
 himself in his hardships and responsibili- 
 ties by a second marriage. 
 
 The earliest account which I can find of 
 the romantic tradition which is associated 
 with Standish 's memory is in the Rev. 
 Timothy Alden's " Collection of American 
 Epitaphs." Mr. Alden says that he had the 
 story from those to whom it had been care-
 
 140 THE ADVENTURES OP 
 
 fully handed down. ' ' In a very short time 
 after the decease of Mrs. Standish, the 
 captain was led to think that if he could 
 obtain Miss Priscilla Mullins, a daughter 
 of Mr. William Mullins, the breach in his 
 family would be happily repaired. He, 
 therefore, according to the custom of those 
 times, sent to ask Mr. Mullins 's permission 
 to visit his daughter. John Alden, the 
 messenger, went and faithfully communi- 
 cated the wishes of the captain. The old 
 gentleman did not object, as he might have 
 done, on account of the recency of Captain 
 Standish 's bereavement. He said it was 
 perfectly agreeable to him, but the young 
 lady must also be consulted. The damsel 
 was then called into the room, and John 
 Alden, who is said to have been a man of 
 most excellent form, with a fair and ruddy 
 complexion, arose, and, in a very courteous 
 and prepossessing manner, delivered his 
 errand. Miss Mullins listened with re- 
 spectful attention, and, at last, after a con- 
 siderable pause, fixing her eyes upon him,
 
 CAPTAIN MYLES STANDISH 141 
 
 said, * Prithee, John, why do you not speak 
 for yourself?' " 
 
 The captain's second wife was Barbara, 
 whose other name is unknown, a passenger 
 by the Ann. Presently he settled on his 
 land at Duxbury, having the Captain's 
 Hill in the middle of his farm, now crowned 
 by his tall monument. Here he built him 
 a house, wherein he lived to the end of his 
 days. Here he gathered his children about 
 him : his six boys, Alexander, Charles, John, 
 Myles, Josiah, and a second Charles, and 
 his daughter, Lora. The little daughter's 
 sampler is in Pilgrim Hall in Plymouth, 
 
 " Lora Standish is my name. 
 
 Lord, guide my heart that I may do thy will; 
 Also fill my hands with such convenient skill 
 
 As will conduce to virtue void of shame, 
 And I will give the glory to thy name." 
 
 Alexander Standish married Sarah Alden, 
 daughter of John and Priscilla. 
 
 The captain continued all his life in the 
 military command of the colony. Once he 
 went to fight the French, who had inter- 
 fered with the Plymouth trade on the Pen-
 
 142 THE ADVENTURES OF 
 
 obscot river, but it was a fruitless expedi- 
 tion. Again he prepared to fight the 
 Dutch, when there was war between Eng- 
 land and Holland in 1652, but peace was 
 declared before colonial hostilities began. 
 The Narragansetts raised a force to attack 
 the settlements, and the captain led the 
 Plymouth company which marched with 
 the men of Massachusetts, Connecticut, 
 and New Haven to meet them, but the 
 Indians did not fight. 
 
 Standish took part also in the civil af- 
 fairs of the colony. For twenty years he 
 was one of the governor's assistants. Once 
 he went, as agent of the plantation, to Eng- 
 land, where he began the negotiations by 
 which, later, he and seven others bought 
 out all the interests of the Merchant Ad- 
 venturers in the Plymouth Colony for 
 1,800. The year, however, was a bad one. 
 Even within sight of England, the com- 
 panion to Standish 's ship was captured by 
 the Turks, and passengers and crew sold 
 into slavery. Affairs of state were in
 
 CAPTAIN MYLES STANDISH 143 
 
 disorder, and the plague was in possession 
 of London. It was no time to do business, 
 and Standish returned, having borrowed 
 150 at 50 per cent, interest. 
 
 Lowell, in his " Interview with Miles 
 Standish," sits before the fire at twilight, 
 looking reflectively upon a chair beside 
 him, which had been conveyed to these 
 shores in the good ship Mayfloiver. 
 
 " It came out in that famous bark 
 
 That brought our sires intrepid, 
 Capacious as another ark 
 For furniture decrepit." 
 
 And as the logs burn low, and the poet's 
 thoughts go back into those old days which 
 he had been considering, behold the chair 
 is occupied ; he sees 
 
 "... its trembling arms enclose 
 
 A figure grim and rusty, 
 Whose doublet plain and plainer hose 
 Were somewhat worn and dusty." 
 
 And, as he wonders who his guest may be, 
 
 "Just then the ghost drew up his chair 
 And said, 'My name is Standish.' "
 
 144 THE ADVENTURES OF 
 
 Whereupon ensues a sturdy conversation, 
 in which the captain speaks his mind on 
 the subject of compromise with slavery. 
 
 Thus he sat in his declining days, look- 
 ing out over the green country which his 
 strong arm had helped to win, reading his 
 Homer's " Hiad " with an appreciation 
 which, in these gentler days, we miss, con- 
 sulting now his " Country Farmer," and 
 now his " Phisition's Practice," accord- 
 ing to the emergency, bucolic or domestic; 
 studying his " History of the World," in 
 whose continuing chapters he himself 
 should have a place; and on Sundays re- 
 freshing his soul with Borroughs' "Gos- 
 pell Conversation," and the martial psalms 
 of David. 
 
 There is a touch of tenderness in the 
 words of the old man's will, which seems, 
 for a moment, to be foreign to the grim 
 spirit of him who stabbed Pecksuot, and 
 nailed the head of Wituwamat to the wall 
 of the meeting-house. But the captain had 
 a warm heart ever. He loved his friends
 
 CAPTAIN MYLES STANDISH 145 
 
 with an enduring and solicitous affection. 
 We may not forget his faithful nursing in 
 the first tragic winter. He desires that 
 his body may be laid as near as conveni- 
 ently may be to his two dear daughters, 
 Lora his daughter, and Mary, his daughter- 
 in-law. He commends his dear and lov- 
 ing wife, Barbara Standish, to the Chris- 
 tian counsel and advice of his dear friends, 
 Mr. Timothy Hatherly and Captain James 
 Cudworth. " Further, my will is that 
 Marcye Kobenson, whom I tenderly love 
 for her grandfather's sake, shall have three 
 pounds." 
 
 So he died, on the 3d day of October, 
 1656, with the regard of all who knew him, 
 having rendered inestimable service to the 
 cause of religion, of freedom, and of 
 humanity.
 
 THE EDUCATION OF JOHN 
 HARVARD
 
 IV 
 
 THE EDUCATION OF JOHN 
 HARVARD 
 
 A ili that was known of John Harvard 
 before the 22d of February, 1884, may 
 be stated in two minutes. It was based 
 on a will, a signature, a record, and a book. 
 
 A will had been found in London drawn 
 by a Eobert Harvard, one of whose sons 
 was named John. It was possible that this 
 John was the benefactor of New England, 
 but there was no proof. If he was, then 
 his father belonged to the parish of St. 
 Saviour's, Southwark, and was by trade 
 a butcher. 
 
 A signature had been found in Cam- 
 bridge, England, plainly that of our John 
 when he took his degree. This showed that 
 he studied at Emmanuel College, and was 
 made B.A. in 1631 and M.A. in 1635. 
 
 A record remaining in the annals of the 
 
 149
 
 150 THE EDUCATION OF 
 
 First Church of Charlestown, Massachu- 
 setts, showed that John Harvard came to 
 this country in 1637, was admitted a min- 
 ister of God's Word in that place, died in 
 1638, and left to the neighboring college, 
 newly founded, his library and half of his 
 estate. A curious particularity in the 
 midst of the general ignorance recorded 
 that this contribution was 779 17s. 2d. 
 The twopence were especially provoking. 
 
 Beside the will, the signature, and these 
 local facts, was one book remaining from 
 the library. All the others were burned at 
 the destruction of Harvard Hall in 1764. 
 This volume was a stout folio entitled 
 11 The Christian Warfare." A borrower 
 had it on the day when the library was 
 destroyed. 
 
 In 1882 persons interested in genealogy 
 raised money to have English records 
 searched for facts about New England 
 families. The results were to be published 
 in the " New England Historical and 
 Genealogical Register." Mr. H. F. Waters,
 
 JOHN HARVARD 151 
 
 a graduate of Harvard interested in such 
 matters, was intrusted with this commis- 
 sion, and went to England and set about 
 reading seventeenth century wills. In the 
 midst of this business, having already con- 
 sulted several thousands of these docu- 
 ments, suddenly, on Washington's Birth- 
 day, 1884, he rose up from his reading and 
 said to his fellow antiquaries: " I have 
 put my finger on John Harvard!" 
 
 Mr. Waters had found the will of 
 Thomas Harvard, of Southwark, cloth- 
 worker. His estate was to be divided be- 
 tween his widow and his living brother, 
 John Harvard. He gave directions con- 
 cerning his funeral at St. Saviour's, South- 
 wark, and left forty shillings to Mr. Nich- 
 olas Morton, the minister, in recompense 
 of the funeral sermon. One of the execu- 
 tors was Mr. Morton, the other was John 
 Harvard. A note attesting the proving of 
 the will by Mr. Morton, May 5, 1637, pro- 
 vided for a commission to be issued to John 
 Harvard when he should come to seek it.
 
 152 THE EDUCATION OF 
 
 Here, accordingly, was a John Harvard 
 absent from England in 1637, at the exact 
 time when our John Harvard was on the 
 sea coming in this direction. 
 
 This clue led the way to such discoveries 
 that there is now no New Englander 
 of that generation concerning whose 
 relatives we know so much. 
 
 Another dramatic moment in these 
 genealogical adventures came at Strat- 
 ford-on-Avon. Mr. Waters found that 
 John Harvard's mother was Katherine 
 Rogers, of Stratford. He went to the par- 
 ish church there and spent a day, as he 
 says, from matins to evensong, examining 
 the records, learning about the Eogers's. 
 As he walked about the town in the long 
 English twilight, he looked with interest 
 at the timbered front of a fine Elizabethan 
 house, under whose second story window 
 stood the inscription T. E. 1596 A. R. At 
 once there came to his mind the names of 
 Thomas Rogers and Alice, his wife. No- 
 body in Stratford knew what the initials
 
 JOHN HARVARD 153 
 
 meant, but the records of the property veri- 
 fied his conjecture. It was the house of 
 John Harvard's grandfather, his mother's 
 father. 
 
 These two incidents, the clause in the 
 will and the inscription on the house, were 
 but more dramatic events in a process of 
 patient research whereby the facts con- 
 cerning John Harvard became known. 
 These facts are centred mainly about 
 three places, Southwark, Cambridge, and 
 Charlestown. 
 
 John Harvard was born in the London 
 borough of Southwark, at the south end of 
 London Bridge, in 1607, the Jamestown 
 year. The date is determined by an entry 
 in the parish register of St. Saviour's 
 Church, showing that he was baptised in 
 that year, on the 29th of November. The 
 site of the house is located by the token 
 books of St. Saviour's Church. According 
 to ancient custom a token in the shape of 
 a lead or pewter ticket was given to every 
 communicant once a year, and was by him
 
 154 THE EDUCATION OF 
 
 returned to the vicar on the occasion of 
 his attendance at the service. A record of 
 these tickets was kept in the token book, 
 wherein were entered the name and address 
 of every communicant. The book shows 
 that the Harvards lived in High Street, 
 opposite the Boar's Head Inn. 
 
 The father of John Harvard, like the 
 father of Cardinal Wolsey, was a butcher. 
 It was a good business in Southwark, ex- 
 ceeded only, if at all, by that of inn-hold- 
 ing; the place was filled with inns and 
 butcher shops. For London Bridge was 
 the great gate of London. There began 
 the road to Winchester and to Canterbury, 
 and to the great world in general. There 
 was continual coming and going ; hence the 
 demand for inns, and the demand for 
 butchers to supply them. 
 
 John Harvard's mother, Katherine 
 Eogers, knew the Shakespeares, at Strat- 
 ford. Her father and Shakespeare's 
 father were aldermen together and near 
 neighbors. From 1596 to 1611, that is, till
 
 JOHN HARVARD 155 
 
 John Harvard was four years of age, Will- 
 iam Shakespeare had his residence in 
 Southwark, where his Globe Theatre stood 
 not far from the Harvard house. It is a 
 fair guess that he visited his old friends, 
 and that on the occasion of these visits he 
 held John Harvard on his knee. As for 
 Katherine, she was three times married: 
 to Eobert Harvard, the butcher ; after his 
 death to John Elletson, the cooper; after 
 his death to Richard Yearwood, a grocer, 
 having a seat in the Puritan Parliament. 
 She was evidently a pleasant person. The 
 money which founded Harvard College 
 came from the earnings of these honest 
 tradesmen. 
 
 There were brothers and sisters. Mary 
 and Eobert were older than John ; Thomas, 
 Katherine, and Peter were younger. 
 
 The town of Southwark of that day was 
 a busy and interesting place. Standing at 
 the door of the Harvard house and look- 
 ing to the left one saw the Thames, crossed 
 by London Bridge, whose formidable gate
 
 156 THE EDUCATION OP 
 
 served for the purpose of defence and for 
 the display of heads of offenders. In a 
 picture made in 1616, when John Harvard 
 was of the age of nine, eighteen such heads 
 on pikes are displayed above the gate. 
 
 Looking to the right, one saw the street, 
 gradually widening, ascend St. Margaret's 
 hill. In the middle, almost in front of the 
 Harvard house, were the pillory and the 
 cage, and beyond these the bull ring, for 
 baiting bulls. The bear garden for bait- 
 ing bears was on the river bank, next to 
 the Globe Theatre. The process of bait- 
 ing was to fasten the bull or the bear be- 
 hind and let the dogs loose upon him. The 
 Puritans were said to object to this en- 
 tertainment, not on account of the pain 
 which it gave to the bear, but on ac- 
 count of the pleasure which it gave to the 
 spectators. In this they were quite right. 
 
 Directly across the road from the Har- 
 vard door was the Boar's Head Inn, and 
 to the right, in almost continuous row, 
 were nine other taverns; including the
 
 JOHN HARVARD 157 
 
 Tabard, memorable as the meeting place 
 of the Canterbury Pilgrims, and the White 
 Hart, where Mr. Pickwick made the ac- 
 quaintance of Sam Weller ; and the Queen's 
 Head, which John Harvard's mother left 
 him in her will. Behind the Boar's Head, 
 in large grounds, stood St. Thomas's Hos- 
 pital. On one side of the Harvard house 
 was the Bull's Head Inn, on the other side 
 was the east chain gate of the churchyard 
 of St. Saviour's Church. Near the church 
 in the same enclosure was the Grammar 
 School, which the church maintained. 
 
 John Harvard began his schooling, ac- 
 cording to custom, at the age of seven, and 
 continued this form of education for a 
 dozen years till he was prepared for col- 
 lege. Shakespeare gives a picture of the 
 schoolboy of John Harvard's time: 
 
 "The whining schoolboy with his satchel 
 And shining morning face, creeping like a snail 
 Unwillingly to school." 
 
 The day began in winter at seven, in sum- 
 mer at six, and continued, with two hours
 
 158 THE EDUCATION OF 
 
 intermission for dinner, until five or six. 
 Thus the rules required a boy to bring, not 
 only a Bible and other books, pens, paper 
 and ink in his satchel, but candles for the 
 early and late hours of the dark days of 
 winter. There was a vacation of one week 
 at the time of the Southwark Fair. One 
 reason why the whining schoolboy went un- 
 willingly to school is seen by the advice 
 given by the authorities to parents " to 
 manage with great discretion and severity 
 at home, which will make him love his 
 school." Every quarter every boy paid 
 twopence for brooms and rods; these 
 brooms were not intended for domestic use, 
 but were applied to the dusting of the 
 boys' backs. The boy of seven must al- 
 ready know the rudiments of Latin gram- 
 mar, and be able to read Tully, his Second 
 Epistle, and Corderius, his " Dialogues." 
 Thence he proceeded along the ways of 
 Latin and Greek and Hebrew. 
 
 St. Saviour's Church, whose bells 
 sounded in John Harvard's ears from his
 
 JOHN HARVARD 159 
 
 earliest infancy, had been the chapel of a 
 priory of Augustinian monks, and was then 
 named St. Mary Overy, which is inter- 
 preted to mean St. Mary of the Ferry, for 
 the church antedated London Bridge. But 
 Henry the Eighth had suppressed the pri- 
 ory, and, putting the two parishes together, 
 had named the church St. Saviour's. It is 
 still a noble sanctuary, with long aisles and 
 clustering chapels and ancient monuments, 
 and serves to-day as the Cathedral of 
 Southwark. 
 
 A canon of 1603 designated sixteen as the 
 age of first communion. It is, therefore, 
 to be inferred that John Harvard was con- 
 firmed about the year 1623. The vicar at 
 that time was Dr. Sutton, who is remem- 
 bered by two incidents. He hated the 
 theatre and attacked it in his sermons. 
 Southwark, at that time, was the theatrical 
 centre of London. The Globe and the 
 Eose were both within the parish of St. 
 Saviour's. One of Dr. Sutton 's sermons 
 was answered with some indignation by an
 
 160 THE EDUCATION OF 
 
 actor. John Harvard's father was a church 
 warden, and the boy probably heard both 
 the sermon and the discussion which fol- 
 lowed. Dr. Button was also an enemy of 
 Eoman Catholics. In October, 1623, after 
 the vicar 's death by drowning, a large con- 
 gregation of Eoman Catholics, meeting in 
 an upper room in London, heard a sermon 
 preached by Father Drury, a Jesuit, 
 against Luther, Calvin, and Dr. Sutton. 
 The sea, he said, had swallowed the vicar 
 because he was unworthy to be buried in 
 the earth. At that moment the floor gave 
 way and the preacher and the con- 
 gregation were precipitated into the cellar. 
 
 The bishop to whom Dr. Sutton prob- 
 ably presented John Harvard for confirma- 
 tion was that most devout, learned, and 
 large-minded prelate, Launcelot Andrewes, 
 in whose charge was the diocese of Win- 
 chester. 
 
 Thus John Harvard spent his boyhood 
 in a good home, in an interesting town, and 
 under the profitable instruction of church
 
 JOHN HARVARD 161 
 
 and school. The high street was of itself an 
 education. It was a place of continual pro- 
 cession, merchants and dignitaries from 
 foreign lands passing daily on the way to 
 London. And along with this went the nor- 
 mal life of childhood. The picture which 
 shows the heads on the pikes shows also 
 a boy rolling a hoop, and another boy 
 catching on behind a cart. 
 
 But in 1625 the plague came. The sani- 
 tary conditions were indescribable, and of- 
 fered an imperative invitation to the pesti- 
 lence. The street around the corner was 
 named Foul Lane, and, no doubt, deserved 
 that title. Within a space of five weeks five 
 members of the Harvard household died: 
 first Mary, then Eobert, four days later; 
 then little Katherine and little Peter; 
 finally the father. There remained the 
 mother and her two sons, John and 
 Thomas. 
 
 It may have been this tragedy which 
 turned young Harvard's thoughts towards 
 the ministry. Or it may have been the in-
 
 162 THE EDUCATION OF 
 
 fluence of the Rev. Nicholas Morton, of St. 
 Saviour's, whom we have seen already as a 
 close friend of the family. It was prob- 
 ably the influence of Morton which sent him 
 to Cambridge and to Emmanuel College, of 
 which Morton was himself a graduate. It 
 is interesting to remember in this connec- 
 tion that Morton's son, Charles, came 
 afterwards to this country. He had done 
 some tutoring in the midst of his ministry, 
 and one of his pupils had been De Foe, the 
 author of " Eobinson Crusoe." Charles 
 became vice-president of Harvard College, 
 being, perhaps, the only person who ever 
 occupied that unusual academic position. 
 They would have appointed him president 
 but for the fact that he had made himself 
 obnoxious to James U, and such honor 
 seemed politically unwise. He became min- 
 ister of the First Church in Charlestown. 
 So John Harvard went to Cambridge, the 
 Puritan University. The Reformation had 
 divided Christianity in Europe into two 
 distinct companies, Catholic and Protes-
 
 JOHN HARVARD 163 
 
 tant. The Catholics upheld the value of 
 the institution, the Protestants the impor- 
 tance of the individual. In England the 
 two companies dwelt together in one 
 church. Two sects had, indeed, appeared 
 at the extremes ; on the one side, the Sep- 
 aratists ; on the other side, the Eomanists, 
 had separated from the Church. But the 
 men of the Old Learning and the New 
 Learning, as they were called at that time, 
 the High Church and the Low Church, as 
 they are called to-day, were still united. 
 The time was indeed approaching when 
 Charles and Laud in their endeavor to en- 
 force uniformity should disrupt the church. 
 But to the end of John Harvard's life there 
 was no definite division. The words Puri- 
 tan and Non-conformist, like the word 
 Ritualist, were party names. The time 
 came when Puritans and Non-conformists 
 were forced out, but so long as John Har- 
 vard lived they were simply Low-Church 
 members of the Church of England. They 
 subtracted from the rubrics, as the Ritual-
 
 164 THE EDUCATION OF 
 
 ists added to them, but they did not sep- 
 arate. The loyal and affectionate words 
 of Higginson and Winthrop express their 
 relation to their brethren. It came to pass, 
 indeed, in New England, partly by reason 
 of distance, partly by reason of the attrac- 
 tive sample of the Separatists of Plym- 
 outh, partly on account of the extremes 
 into which they were driven by controversy, 
 that they set up a church order of their 
 own. But of this John Harvard saw noth- 
 ing in his native land. 
 
 Cambridge had been an inhabited place 
 from times immemorial. In the flat land 
 by the little river the Britons had made 
 a hill, heaping up the earth. Around this 
 hill the Romans had built a fort. On the 
 site of the Eoman fort William the Con- 
 queror had built a castle. And nearby, in 
 1284, Bishop Hugh de Balsham, of Ely, had 
 founded the first college and named it 
 Peterhouse. Then another college had 
 been founded and another, until, in John 
 Harvard's time, there were sixteen, with
 
 JOHN HARVARD 165 
 
 masters, tutors, fellows, and students to the 
 number of three thousand. 
 
 It was, no doubt, the expectation in New 
 England in 1636 that beside Harvard Col- 
 lege would be other colleges, with other 
 founders, as beside Peterhouse grew 
 Kings' and Trinity, and that these, to- 
 gether, would constitute a university. For 
 in the minds of Englishmen of the seven- 
 teenth century, university did not mean a 
 combination of faculties, but a combination 
 of colleges. The university gave examina- 
 tions, conferred degrees, and provided cer- 
 tain courses of lectures. The colleges pro- 
 vided places of residence, kept men under 
 regulation, and prepared them, each in its 
 own fashion, to be examined. Take the 
 fraternity houses of a small college, set in 
 each a number of resident graduates called 
 fellows, appoint a dean for discipline, and 
 provide tutors, leaving the college to set 
 the examinations and to conduct the exer- 
 cises of commencement, and the place is 
 transformed into a university of the Eng-
 
 166 THE EDUCATION OF 
 
 lish type. Build the chapter houses after 
 monastic models : a central quadrangle, on 
 one side a dormitory, on another side a re- 
 fectory, on the third a library, on the 
 fourth a chapel, and a group of such resi- 
 dences will be the heart of a university 
 town. 
 
 Such was the Cambridge to which John 
 Harvard went at the age of twenty, and 
 in Emmanuel College, then an establish- 
 ment of sixty or seventy men, he took up 
 his residence. 
 
 The little town lay beside the Cam as the 
 Massachusetts Cambridge lies beside the 
 Charles, except that the English colleges 
 passed the banks of the river. The gardens 
 ran green to the water. The main street 
 in the midst of the town curved, like Brat- 
 tle Street, with the curves of the stream, 
 and took a new name at almost every turn. 
 It was a narrow, ill-paved thoroughfare, 
 and the upper stories of the houses pro- 
 jected over the way. There were plentiful 
 materials for the plague, and once during
 
 JOHN HARVARD 167 
 
 Harvard's residence the University had to 
 be dismissed on account of it. 
 
 Midway in the course of the main street, 
 in the heart of the town, was St. Mary's 
 Church, where the University sermons 
 were preached and public meetings were 
 held. The church fronted on th market. 
 Out of the market-place, away from the 
 river, a short street led to Christ's Col- 
 lege, founded by Lady Margaret, Henry 
 VII 's mother. Here, in the garden, is still 
 an aged mulberry, which Milton planted 
 in John Harvard's time. On one side of 
 Christ's College stood Sidney Sussex, on 
 the other side, Emmanuel. 
 
 Sidney Sussex .and Emmanuel were the 
 newest colleges, the only ones then in the 
 University founded after the Eeformation. 
 But they were seated in places long occu- 
 pied by monasteries: Sidney Sussex on 
 the site of a monastery of Franciscan 
 Friars ; Emmanuel on the site of a monas- 
 tery of Dominican friars. 
 
 The two colleges were alike, not only
 
 168 THE EDUCATION OF 
 
 in taking their places back from the river, 
 where no room was left, but in being 
 founded by Puritans for the advancement 
 of Puritanism. It seemed to the founders 
 that the supreme need of England was god- 
 liness, and that the means thereto was 
 preaching. So on the mediaeval founda- 
 tions of preaching friars they established 
 these training places for preachers. 
 
 Emmanuel College was a divinity school. 
 Founded in the reign of Elizabeth, it con- 
 tinued until the reign of Charles II, a sem- 
 inary for Puritan clergymen of the Church 
 of England. It bore over its gate an in- 
 scription to testify that Sir Walter Mild- 
 may had established it for the study of 
 theology. This matter Sir Walter made 
 unmistakable in his nineteenth statute: 
 " I wish all to understand, whether fel- 
 lows, scholars, or even pensioners who are 
 admitted into the college, that the one ob- 
 ject which I set before me in erecting this 
 college was to render as many as possible 
 fit for the administration of the divine
 
 JOHN HARVARD 169 
 
 word and sacraments; and that from this 
 seed ground the English church might 
 have those that she can summon to instruct 
 the people and undertake the office of pas- 
 tors, which is a thing necessary above all 
 others. Therefore, let fellows and scholars 
 who obtrude into the college with any other 
 design than to devote themselves to sacred 
 theology and, eventually, to labor in 
 preaching the Word know that they are 
 frustrating my hope and occupying the 
 place of fellow or scholar contrary to my 
 ordinance." 
 
 Statutes may be put out of sight, as this 
 one is in the present administration of the 
 college, and ivy may grow over inscrip- 
 tions, but in those days nobody could at- 
 tend a service at Emmanuel without per- 
 ceiving plainly the intention and the dis- 
 position of the place. The founder had 
 turned the chapel of the friars into a dining 
 hall, and had the chapel north and south in- 
 stead of east and west, in evident disregard 
 of ecclesiastical tradition. As for the serv-
 
 170 THE EDUCATION OF 
 
 ice, it was described in 1636 in a report 
 made to Laud: " Their chapel is not con- 
 secrate. At surplice prayers they sing 
 nothing but rhyming psalms of their own 
 appointment instead of the hymns between 
 the lessons. And lessons they read not 
 after the order appointed in the calendar, 
 but after another continued course of their 
 own. All service is there done (psalms and 
 hymns and all if they read any) by the 
 minister alone. The students are not 
 brought up nor accustomed to answer any 
 verse at all. Before prayers begin the 
 boys come in and sit down and put on and 
 talk around of what they will. Their seats 
 are placed round about and above the com- 
 munion table. When they preach or com- 
 monplace they omit all service after first or 
 second lesson at the farthest." This is a 
 graphic picture of non-conformity. These 
 brethren were but exercising the freedom 
 which they felt belonged to them of 
 right as clergymen of the Church of 
 England.
 
 JOHN HARVARD 171 
 
 Such was the little college in which John 
 Harvard took up his studies in 1627. The 
 course extended over four years, leading to 
 the degree of bachelor of arts. For the 
 master's degree men stayed three years 
 longer. The subjects studied at Emmanuel 
 did not differ greatly from those pursued 
 in the other colleges,<for all led to the same 
 examinations, except that rather more at- 
 tention was paid to theology and the 
 interpretation of Holy Scripture. But al- 
 ready in John Harvard's day Cambridge 
 showed the characteristic bent towards 
 mathematics. In Emmanuel, contemporary 
 with him, were Wallis, who carried the 
 study of mathematics farther than any 
 man in England till the time of Newton, 
 and Horrocks, who was the first to both 
 predict and observe a transit of Venus. 
 So far as Harvard's books show the bent 
 of his mind, he did not care particularly 
 for the arts of calculation. Neither does 
 he appear to have had any great enthusi- 
 asm for philosophy, which was another
 
 172 THE EDUCATION OF 
 
 favorite study among his fellows. Aristotle 
 was still the master of the mind at Cam- 
 bridge, though at Emmanuel was a group 
 of devout Platonists. There is a little nat- 
 ural history among Harvard's books, and 
 a little law, but most of the books are con- 
 cerned with the Greek and Latin classics 
 and the interpretation of the Bible. 
 
 The college day began at five o'clock, 
 when the bells rang for prayers. There 
 were two meals, at eleven and three, with 
 lectures, studies, and disputations between. 
 There was the river for rowing, and the 
 fields for archery and football. On Sunday 
 morning all went for the university ser- 
 mon to St. Mary's. At eight in the even- 
 ing every man was expected to present 
 himself in the room of his tutor, partly for 
 the purpose of an evening prayer, and 
 partly as evidence that he was within the 
 college walls. At a quarter after nine the 
 bell of St. Mary's rang, ending its peal as 
 it does to this day with a tolling of the day 
 of the month. At ten the college bell
 
 JOHN HARVARD 173 
 
 warned all hearers that the college gates 
 were locked. 
 
 The buildings were as severe within as 
 they were stately without. There was 
 plenty of carving and rich stained glass, 
 but very little fire. In the bleak rooms 
 three or four men were lodged together. 
 If one of the company was a master of arts 
 lie slept in the great bed and the under- 
 graduates must be content with trundle 
 beds, which, in the daytime, were trundled 
 under the big bed out of sight. Life was 
 pretty rough, as it was in the contemporary 
 world. Even at Emmanuel there was more 
 fighting and drinking and disturbance at 
 prayers than one would expect in a Puri- 
 tan divinity school. Offenders were flogged 
 in public, a discipline which is commended 
 to the president in the early statutes of 
 Harvard College. 
 
 At the same time there was high think- 
 ing. Contemporary with Harvard in the 
 university were Fuller, the historian ; Cra- 
 shaw, the poet ; Pearson, whose lectures on
 
 174 THE EDUCATION OF 
 
 the creed are still studied in conservative 
 schools of theology ; More, the Platonist, of 
 whom it is said that, rejecting Calvin, he 
 came into " a most joyous and lucid frame 
 of minde ' ' ; Jeremy Taylor, the preacher, 
 and, supreme among them all, John Mil- 
 ton. Milton entered Cambridge two years 
 before Harvard. They were both members 
 of the University when he wrote his Ode on 
 the Nativity, his lines on Shakespeare, and 
 his " H Penseroso." Both men came from 
 London, and must have journeyed back 
 and forth in the same conveyance. Hobson 
 was then alive, whose impartial method of 
 suiting his customers became a proverb. 
 He was the first man in England to keep 
 a livery stable. He had a monopoly of the 
 carrying trade between the university and 
 the metropolis. The two young men would 
 naturally meet in the process of these 
 journeys. 
 
 It is to be hoped that the Puritanism of 
 Harvard was of the gentle quality which 
 shines in the verse of Milton. Having a
 
 JOHN HARVARD 175 
 
 mother who had known Shakespeare from 
 childhood, he may well have shared in Mil- 
 ton's appreciation of that poet. Brought 
 up as a boy at St. Saviour's, he may well 
 have entered with the delight of Milton 
 into the influences of that stately architec- 
 ture. Certain it is that Whichcote, one of 
 his fellow-students, master of King's in the 
 troubled days which followed, saved that 
 glorious chapel from harm at Puritan 
 hands. 
 
 A memorial window on the chapel of 
 Emmanuel College shows the figures of 
 John Harvard and Lawrence Chaderton. 
 Chaderton was the first master of the col- 
 lege, and though he was no longer in the 
 discharge of his duties when Harvard was 
 in residence, his influence was still very 
 strong. He is remembered as a preacher 
 of such eloquence that on one occasion after 
 preaching for two hours and making ready 
 to bring his sermon to a close, the congre- 
 gation begged him to continue, which he 
 did to the space of one hour longer. He
 
 176 THE EDUCATION OF 
 
 was one of the revisers who made the King 
 James version of the Bible, being on the 
 committee to which was assigned the books 
 from First Chronicles to Ecclesiastes. 
 After him in the rectorship came Preston, 
 some of whose books John Harvard had 
 in his library, and Sandcroft, a man of 
 liberal spirit. 
 
 Under these masters the students who 
 were contemporary with Harvard took 
 some one side and some another in the con- 
 tention between the High Church and the 
 Low. Thus, of the two Pierreponts, one 
 served the Parliament and the other served 
 the King. There was Spurstowe, who was 
 on the committee to treat with the King in 
 his captivity, and who, having him thus at 
 disadvantage, told him that unless he abol- 
 ished episcopacy he would be damned ever- 
 lastingly; and there was Sancroft, who 
 became Archbishop of Canterbury. And 
 quite apart from these vigorous partisans 
 were philosophers of gentle spirit, the 
 Platonists, of whom "Whichcote and Cud-
 
 JOHN HARVARD 177 
 
 worth were Harvard's fellow-students at 
 
 t 
 
 Emmanuel, studying Plato in an atmos- 
 phere of Aristotle, maintaining the free- 
 dom of the will in the midst of Calvinism, 
 and upholding the value of learning in the 
 face of a generation disposed to accept a 
 pious intention as a fair substitute for 
 scholarship. 
 
 Harvard completed his course with the 
 degree of master of arts in 1635. Simonds 
 D'Ewes, who was at that tune in the col- 
 lege, noted in his diary that the commence- 
 ment sermon upheld the principles of 
 popish doctrine and gave great offence to 
 evangelical minds. It would have been 
 pleasant to have had some account of the 
 speech of the Prevaricator, a privileged 
 person who had the right on that solemn 
 occasion to make whatever remarks he 
 chose. In 1635 Harvard was ordained. In 
 his mother's will she died in that year 
 he is called " clerk." The same title, 
 equivalent to " clergyman," occurs in a 
 deed which he made about that time at the
 
 178 THE EDUCATION OP 
 
 sale of some property. Later he is so styled 
 in the will of his father-in-law. If he was 
 ordained in his own diocese of Winchester, 
 the ordaining bishop would have been 
 Walter Curie; but he was a follower of 
 Laud. The young Low Churchman may 
 have sought some more congenial digni- 
 tary. The records have not, as yet, ap- 
 peared. 
 
 In 1636 he was married at South Mailing 
 Church to Ann Sadler, daughter of the rec- 
 tor of the parish of Eingmer in Kent, and 
 sister of a college friend. 
 
 About this time he completed the col- 
 lection of his library, the books which he 
 left to the young college. These numbered 
 over three hundred, mostly in two styles 
 of bookmaking now rarely used, some of 
 them being folios and some duodecimos, the 
 big and the little side by side. The classics 
 were represented by Homer, Plutarch, 
 Pliny, Horace, and Cicero, with the satires 
 of Juvenal and the comedies of Terence. 
 Most of the books were theological, great
 
 JOHN HARVARD 179 
 
 tomes of eager controversy written by men 
 who wrote in a mighty passion, and read by 
 men who clenched their fists in the prog- 
 ress of the pages, now dreary and dull be- 
 yond all modern patience. They have 
 been, in many instances, replaced by dupli- 
 cates in the library at Harvard College, 
 but not with the idea of attracting readers. 
 Three of these books have a certain per- 
 sonal interest. One is " Vox Civitatis," 
 being a description of the plague which de- 
 vastated London in the days so tragic and 
 memorable for the Harvard household. 
 Another is ' ' The Art and Science of Pre- 
 serving Body and Soul in Health, Wisdom 
 and the Catholic Religion," by Dr. John 
 Jones. " Eight profitable," says the 
 author, " for all persons, but chiefly for 
 Princes, Eulers, Nobles, Bishops, Preach- 
 ers, Parents, and those of the Parliament 
 House." It is possible that young Har- 
 vard consulted this book in the hope of 
 finding some defence against those ills 
 of body which already assailed him. The
 
 180 THE EDUCATION OF 
 
 third book is " A Little Description of 
 the Great World," written by Heylin. 
 He did not find here any information 
 useful to one who was looking toward 
 these shores, for Heylin confines his ac- 
 count of this continent mostly to Mexico 
 and Peru. His second edition was pub- 
 lished in 1633, but even here he makes no 
 mention of the settlement of Plymouth. 
 
 For some reason, the young parson's 
 mind was turned in this direction. Other 
 Emmanuel men had already made their 
 way to this country, and the memory and 
 fame of them may have attracted him. 
 There was "William Blackstone, the first 
 settler of Boston, a quiet person, detesting 
 controversy, enough of a Low Churchman 
 to dislike my lords the bishops, but enough 
 of a High Churchman to dislike, also, my 
 lords the brethren. There was John Cot- 
 ton, once rector of St. Botolph's, now min- 
 ister of Boston in New England. There 
 were Francis Hooker, of Hartford, and 
 Thomas Shepherd, of Cambridge. These
 
 JOHN HARVARD 181 
 
 were great names among the men with 
 whom John Harvard was congenial, and 
 their example may well have seemed to him 
 a pleasant one to follow. In February, 
 1637, he sold some property in Southwark. 
 In May, when the will of his brother 
 Thomas was waiting for his signature, he 
 was on the sea. On the 6th of August, 1637, 
 he was admitted a freeman in Charlestown. 
 When John Harvard and his wife ar- 
 rived at Charlestown they found the whole 
 colony absorbed in the controversy which 
 had arisen concerning the teachings of 
 Mrs. Hutchinson. It is likely that Har- 
 vard's first sight of Cambridge was on the 
 occasion of his attendance at the famous 
 trial which resulted in Mrs. Hutchinson 's 
 excommunication. Thus he found that in 
 removing to New England he had, indeed, 
 changed the scenery and the architecture, 
 and had substituted the brethren for the 
 bishops, but that there was no real dif- 
 ference in the prevailing disposition in 
 religion. In America, as in England,
 
 182 THE EDUCATION OF 
 
 there were two contending parties. Each 
 was confident of its own right, and felt it- 
 self conscientiously bound to put dissenters 
 out. The chief difference between Arch- 
 bishop Laud and Dr. Wilson, pastor in the 
 church in Boston, was that Laud had bet- 
 ter manners. Winthrop expressed the sit- 
 uation when he said, after the synod in 
 Cambridge, that the majority, " finding, 
 upon consultation, that two so opposite 
 parties could not continue in the same body 
 without apparent hazard of ruin to the 
 whole, agreed to send away some of 
 the principals." It was the policy of 
 " Thorough " which Charles and Straff ord 
 were pushing in England. In John Har- 
 vard's day tolerance had not yet come into 
 the order of the virtues. 
 
 Like other Puritan congregations, the 
 Charlestown church was ministered to by 
 a pastor and a teacher. Lacking a teacher 
 at that moment, they asked Harvard to dis- 
 charge that duty, and he accepted the posi- 
 tion. Johnson, who wrote the " Wonder-
 
 JOHN HAEVAED 183 
 
 Working Providence, ' ' and probably heard 
 some of Harvard's preachings, says that 
 he " preached with tears and evidence of 
 strong affection." This is our only sight 
 of Harvard himself. On the fourteenth of 
 September, 1638, he died, at the age of 
 twenty-nine, leaving the will which has 
 made his name immortal. The essential 
 importance of his gift appears in the fact 
 that, though the General Court appro- 
 priated four hundred pounds for the col- 
 lege, it had not paid it. Indeed, so poor 
 was the General Court itself that it pres- 
 ently borrowed two hundred pounds from 
 the Harvard legacy. 
 
 In January, 1696, Judge Sewall wrote in 
 his diary : "I lodged at Charlestown at 
 Mrs. Shepherd's, who tells me that Mr. 
 Harvard built that house. I lay in the 
 chamber next the street. As I lay awake 
 past midnight, in my meditation I was af- 
 fected to consider how long ago God had 
 made provision for my comfortable lodg- 
 ing that night, seeing that was Mr. Har-
 
 184 EDUCATION OF JOHN HARVARD 
 
 yard's house." The students of the Uni- 
 versity to-day may echo that reflection, 
 and may profitably be affected to consider 
 how long ago God made provision for their 
 education; seeing that is Mr. Harvard's 
 college.
 
 THE FOREFATHERS OF 
 JAMESTOWN
 
 THE FOREFATHERS OF 
 JAMESTOWN 
 
 THE emphasis of interest in the study 
 of American history has rested upon 
 Plymouth rather than upon Jamestown. 
 
 This is due, in part, to the fact that 
 Jamestown has not been a populated place 
 for over two hundred years. The town 
 was burned at the end of the seventeenth 
 century, and was never rebuilt. Indeed, the 
 very land on which the pioneers put their 
 feet has long since fallen into the James 
 Eiver. The river and the land were con- 
 tending when the settlement began, and the 
 river was, even then, getting the best of it. 
 The year of 1607 found a peninsula, but 
 the peninsula became an island, and the 
 island, year by year, lost ground. To-day, 
 for the first time, the river is kept back 
 by an effective barrier. Meanwhile Plym- 
 
 187
 
 188 THE FOREFATHERS OF 
 
 outh has lived its uninterrupted life, an ac- 
 cessible place, attractive to visitors, pre- 
 serving its traditions and its intimate 
 memorials of the saints and heroes of the 
 old time. 
 
 Moreover, Plymouth has been a fertile 
 soil for the substantial rooting of family 
 trees. All over the country there are per- 
 sons whose ancestral past is associated 
 with that place, and who hold it in rever- 
 ence on that account. But few of the first 
 families of Virginia go further back than 
 1649. At that time, when the beheading of 
 King Charles made England an unpleasant 
 residence for many excellent people, there 
 was a considerable increase of emigration 
 into that Southern colony, whose sympa- 
 thies were with the church and state which 
 the Commonwealth had for the moment 
 superseded. These newcomers found that 
 the men who began and continued the set- 
 tlement at Jamestown had for the most 
 part died under the hardships of their diffi- 
 cult life. The pioneers left few lineal sue-
 
 JAMESTOWN 189 
 
 cessors. The colony at the beginning 
 lacked the domestic element which was the 
 joy and the salvation of the settlement at 
 Plymouth. There were no children to per- 
 petuate their names. Moreover, the new- 
 comers, instead of settling at Jamestown, 
 planted their farms all along the river as 
 far as the falls at Richmond. 
 
 But the chief and prevailing disadvan- 
 tage of Jamestown in its competition with 
 Plymouth for the gratitude of good Amer- 
 icans lay in the fact that it was so far away 
 from Boston. It was unhappily beyond 
 the power of any Jamestown man to repeat 
 the daily devotions of Mr. Emerson, who 
 said that every morning, when he opened 
 the shutters of his bed-chamber and looked 
 out, he thanked God that he lived in so fair 
 a world, and so near Boston. 
 
 This distance is suggested but dimly on 
 the map. The two colonies, Massachu- 
 setts and Virginia, hundreds of miles apart 
 geographically, were separated by a space 
 of thousands of miles socially and ecclesi-
 
 190 THE FOREFATHERS OF 
 
 astically. These differences were not in- 
 herent in the nature or even in the disposi- 
 tion of the original colonists. They grew 
 gradually, as we shall see, out of the soil. 
 In the beginning the men who settled in 
 the south and the men who settled in the 
 north were of the same sort, belonged to 
 the same social class, and held, in the main, 
 the same position in religion. 
 
 As history comes to be studied in the 
 light of human nature, some of its con- 
 trasts lose their sharpness. It is perceived 
 that nations are composed of men and 
 women, and that men and women, with all 
 their differences, are a good deal alike. It 
 is not true of any of the hostile divisions 
 of humanity that one side is made up of 
 angels and the other side of animals. 
 There are always good and bad, and wise 
 and unwise, on both sides. The official 
 statements of the differences are com- 
 monly more exact and emphatic than the 
 differences themselves. When a witty 
 writer begins a book with the phrase,
 
 JAMESTOWN 191 
 
 " The human race, to which so many of 
 my readers belong," he is gently satirising 
 an ancient blindness of historians. The dis- 
 covery that all of our forefathers belonged 
 to the human race, and thus had the same 
 parts and passions, and were brother : and 
 sisters in the same family, is causing his- 
 tory to be written with a new understand- 
 ing of old situations. This is notably the 
 case as regards the contrasts which have 
 long been the commonplaces of historians 
 between the men who settled Plymouth and 
 the men who settled Jamestown. It is now 
 seen that the old adjectives, " Puritan," 
 and " Cavalier, " do not adequately explain 
 the difference between Virginia and Mas- 
 sachusetts. The truth is that the James- 
 town men and the Plymouth men were 
 very much alike, both socially and 
 ecclesiastically. 
 
 As for their social standing, the settlers 
 of both colonies were, for the most part, 
 of the middle class, that is, as distinguished 
 on the one side from the gentry, and on
 
 192 THE FOREFATHERS OF 
 
 the other side from the peasantry. It is 
 true that the father of Edward Wingfield, of 
 Virginia, had had for sponsors Queen Mary 
 and Cardinal Pole, but John Winthrop, of 
 Massachusetts, was Edward Wingfield 's 
 cousin. It is true that the early sailing 
 lists to Virginia show the names of an in- 
 ordinate number of ' ' gentlemen, ' ' and that 
 the early sailing lists to Massachusetts 
 show the names of an inordinate number of 
 preachers of the gospel; and there is no 
 doubt but that these two facts represent 
 diverse and potent influences. But later 
 lists corrected this disproportion. It is 
 true, also, that when the Discovery, the 
 Godspeed, and the Susan Constant made 
 their first voyage, England was a pleasant 
 and desirable residence for churchmen, 
 and that, in 1630, when seventeen ships 
 brought the people of a new exodus to these 
 northern shores, England was not a pleas- 
 ant or desirable residence for Puritans. 
 And that signifies some difference in the 
 quality of the colonists. There would nat-
 
 JAMESTOWN 193 
 
 urally be a larger number of solid and 
 successful men in the settlement of Mas- 
 sachusetts than in the settlement of Vir- 
 ginia. But the change in the political for- 
 tunes of the two parties speedily changed 
 that. In the time of Cromwell, England 
 was as inhospitable to churchmen, as she 
 had been to Puritans in the times of James 
 and of Charles, and the church colony 
 improved accordingly. 
 
 The society of Virginia and the society 
 of Massachusetts developed differently, 
 but the differences were mainly due not 
 to an original unlikeness in the men, but to 
 an original unlikeness in the land. The 
 land in Massachusetts was adapted to the 
 growth of small towns ; the land in Virginia 
 was adapted to the growth of great estates. 
 The northern settlers gathered into little 
 communities by the harbors of the sea and 
 by the falls of /the rivers under conditions 
 which fostered democracy. But in the 
 south it was soon found that the best crop 
 was tobacco. When Governor Argall ar-
 
 194 THE FOREFATHERS OF 
 
 rived in Jamestown in 1616, he found to- 
 bacco growing in the street ; it had invaded 
 the towns. Tobacco plants and towns did 
 not thrive together. Even in 1624 there 
 were only two communities in Virginia 
 which consisted of clustered houses as in a 
 New England village. The cultivation of 
 tobacco demanded wide tracts of land, and 
 a great amount of unskilled labor. In the 
 midst of his estates, surrounded by em- 
 ployes of a lower social class, and sepa- 
 rated from his neighbors by several miles 
 of bad road, the Virginian settler lived in 
 his great house. These were conditions 
 which fostered aristocracy. But it was an 
 American aristocracy, with very slight con- 
 nections with England. It met in parish 
 meetings, as the Massachusetts people met 
 in town meetings. And it produced George 
 Washington. With its good and its ill, it 
 was the result, not of a different kind of 
 settler, but of a different kind of soil. 
 
 Also, in religion, the men of Jamestown 
 and the men of Massachusetts Bay, even of
 
 JAMESTOWN 195 
 
 Plymouth, were of the same stock. There 
 were obvious differences which, because 
 they are obvious, have been overestimated, 
 but they were mainly superficial. The men 
 of Jamestown were churchmen, that is, 
 they were of the Church of England, or, as 
 we say in this country, Episcopalians. And 
 that seems to make them very different 
 from the Independents of Plymouth and 
 the Presbyterians of Boston. But the idea 
 is what is called in logic the fallacy of the 
 undistributed middle. For example, we 
 used to be taught in school that the Amer- 
 ican Eevolution was fought between the 
 Americans on one side and the British on 
 the other, and an easy inference was that 
 we, as good Americans, ought to hate the 
 British. But the truth is that the War of 
 the Eevolution was fought between the 
 Whigs and the Tories: and there were 
 Tories in America as well as in England, 
 and Whigs in England as well as in Amer- 
 ica. It happened that in England at that 
 moment the Tories were in power, so they
 
 196 THE FOREFATHERS OF 
 
 represented England officially, but they did 
 not represent Edmund Burke or William 
 Pitt, or any of their party. Thus, instead 
 of England making war upon America, we 
 have an English political party, tempo- 
 rarily in power, carrying on that war 
 against the protests of another English 
 party, temporarily out of power. 
 
 The same confusion has attended the 
 use of the phrase " Church of England." 
 For in the Church of England, as in the 
 nation, there have been, since the Bef orma- 
 tion, and are to this day, two parties as 
 distinct and different as Whigs and Tories. 
 The original name, and still the best name 
 for them, was the Old Learning and the 
 New Learning: that is, on one side were 
 men- whose sympathies were with the me- 
 diaeval church, and on the other side were 
 men whose sympathies were with the re- 
 formed church. Sometimes one of these 
 parties was in popular power, and some- 
 times the other. In the reign of Edward 
 the Sixth, the New Learning was dominant,
 
 JAMESTOWN 197 
 
 under Archbishop Cranmer; in the reign 
 of Charles the First, the Old Learn- 
 ing was dominant, under Archbishop 
 Laud. In the time of Elizabeth, after the 
 medieval reaction under Mary, nearly two 
 hundred clergymen of the Old Learning 
 were turned out by the party of the New 
 Learning, among them being fourteen 
 bishops and twelve presidents of colleges. 
 In the time of Charles the Second, after the 
 reform reaction under Cromwell, eighteen 
 hundred clergymen of the New Learning 
 were turned out by the party of the Old 
 Learning. But these were consequences of 
 national revolution : commonly the two par- 
 ties live in peace together. Together they 
 compose the church, as Republicans and 
 Democrats compose the state. Their joint 
 existence occasions that diversity of ritual 
 and of opinion which is one of the most 
 notable characteristics of the Episcopal 
 Church. 
 
 Now, at the beginning of the seventeenth 
 century the men of the New Learning, the
 
 198 THE FOREFATHERS OF 
 
 men whom we now call Low Churchmen 
 and Broad Churchmen, were in part con- 
 servative and in part radical. The differ- 
 ence between them has been happily com- 
 pared to the differences, before our Civil 
 War, between the Eepublicans and the 
 Abolitionists. In 1607 the radical Low 
 Churchmen had gone out of the church, 
 and in the fall of that year a company of 
 them went out of the country, and estab- 
 lished themselves in Holland. These were 
 our forefathers, who came afterwards to 
 Plymouth. In 1630 a thousand conserva- 
 tive Low Churchmen came to these shores, 
 landing at Salem and settling presently in 
 Boston. These were they who said as they 
 departed : ' ' Farewell, dear England ! 
 Farewell, the Church of God in England, 
 and all the Christian friends there ! We do 
 not go to New England as Separatists 
 from the Church of England, though we 
 cannot but separate from the corruptions 
 of it." These were they in whose behalf 
 John Winthrop wrote, " We desire you
 
 JAMESTOWN 199 
 
 would be pleased to take notice of the prin- 
 cipals and body of our company as those 
 who esteem it our honour to call the Church 
 of England from which we rise our dear 
 mother, and we cannot part from our na- 
 tive country where she specially resideth, 
 without much sadness of heart, and tears 
 in our eyes, ever acknowledging that such 
 hope and part as we have obtained in the 
 common salvation, we have received it in 
 her bosom, and suckt it from her breasts." 
 It was such men as these who had come in 
 1607 and settled at Jamestown. 
 
 That these companies of colonists at 
 Salem and at Jamestown developed differ- 
 ently in religion was due, in part, to the dif- 
 ference of a score of years in the time of 
 their landing, for in that period the politi- 
 cal and ecclesiastical contentions in Eng- 
 land had sharpened the differences between 
 the church parties to a degree unknown 
 at the settlement of Jamestown. It was 
 also due, in part, to the influence of our an- 
 cestors at Plymouth. Under this influence,
 
 200 THE FOREFATHERS OF 
 
 the conservatives became radicals, and 
 separated themselves from the church. 
 But, at the beginning, the founders of Mas- 
 sachusetts and the founders of Virginia 
 were all of the same religion ; all Calvinists 
 in doctrine, all Puritans, and all except 
 at Plymouth members of the Church of 
 England. 
 
 How far the northern and southern col- 
 onies, thus alike, became different in the 
 course of time is plain ^n the accusation of 
 atheism which the Puritans of Boston made 
 against Morton of Merrymount. Mr. John 
 Fiske says that the chief ground on which 
 they held Morton to be an atheist was that 
 he was accustomed to use the Book of 
 Common Prayer! And this hostility is 
 further indicated in that pleasant story 
 about Governor Winthrop's books and 
 rats. Winthrop had a lot of books stored 
 in a loft, together with some corn. One of 
 the books was the New Testament and the 
 Prayer-book bound together. The rats got 
 in and ate the corn and destroyed a part
 
 JAMESTOWN 201 
 
 of that book. They completely demolished 
 the Common Prayer, leaving the New Tes- 
 tament scrupulously untouched. That 
 seemed to Winthrop an exercise of the di- 
 vine discrimination. That was in every 
 way a proper disposition of the Book of 
 Common Prayer. 
 
 And here comes in the curious condition 
 which worked the discomfiture of the fame 
 of Jamestown. 
 
 For a long time all of the " articulate 
 classes " lived in the near neighborhood 
 of Boston. The writers of books, the ora- 
 tors, the preachers, the poets, the histori- 
 ans, and presently the makers of profitable 
 reading for schools, were all residents 
 within an easy radius of Beacon Hill. 
 To these audible and influential persons the 
 adventures and achievements of their own 
 ancestors had a natural and dominant in- 
 terest. Plymouth was close at hand. As 
 for Jamestown, not only was it so remote 
 that they rarely thought about it, but when 
 they did think about it they disliked it. In
 
 202 THE FOREFATHERS OF 
 
 all honesty, they disregarded or disparaged 
 it. And this prejudice they communicated 
 to the children in the schools. Even to this 
 day it is commonly taken for granted 
 among intelligent people, that our charac- 
 teristic institutions, and especially our lib- 
 erties, civil and religious, began at Plym- 
 outh. As a matter of historical fact, they 
 began a dozen years before, at Jamestown. 
 
 The story of Jamestown is in three chap- 
 ters: the Landing; the Tragedy; the Set- 
 tlement. 
 
 All attempts at American colonization 
 by individual adventurers having failed, a 
 new start was made in 1606 by introducing 
 into the enterprise the joint-stock method. 
 In that year James I chartered the Vir- 
 ginia Company. The land thus granted ex- 
 tended along the Atlantic Coast from Cape 
 Fear to the Bay of Fundy. It was divided 
 into three parts, of which the southern, 
 from Cape Fear to the Potomac, was as- 
 signed to a group of proprietors who from 
 their residence in London were called the
 
 JAMESTOWN 203 
 
 London Company. The northern portion, 
 from Long Island Sound to the Bay of 
 Fundy, was assigned to another group of 
 proprietors, who, from their residence in 
 and about Plymouth in Devonshire, were 
 called the Plymouth Company. The middle 
 section was to be awarded to such colonists 
 of either company as should first establish 
 self-supporting settlements in it. Each of 
 these tracts extended back to the Pacific 
 Ocean, which was thought to be one or two 
 hundred miles distant across the country. 
 
 On New Year's Day, 1607, the London 
 Company sent three ships to sea, the Dis- 
 covery, the Godspeed, and the Susan Con- 
 stant. The names fitted well the aspira- 
 tions of the men who in the spirit of ad- 
 venture and of religion were seeking to set 
 up a new home in a foreign land. 
 
 The commander of the fleet was Captain 
 Christopher Newport, who had once re- 
 trieved the fortunes of Sir Walter Raleigh 
 by capturing a Spanish treasure-ship 
 whose cargo was worth four million dol-
 
 204 THE FOREFATHERS OF 
 
 lars. The council of the colony was com- 
 posed of Bartholomew Gesnold, Edward 
 Wingfield, John Smith, John Ratcliffe, 
 John Martin, and George Eandall. The 
 chaplain was Eobert Hunt, * * an honest, re- 
 ligious and courageous Divine " of the 
 English Church. 
 
 Of these men, the most eminent and dra- 
 matic was John Smith. Bearing as he did 
 the most commonplace of names, he had 
 nevertheless lived a life crowded so full of 
 romantic adventure that some very sober 
 historians have accounted it too interesting 
 to be true. Smith of late years has fallen 
 under a serious suspicion, which has arisen 
 in part from the new methods of historians. 
 
 How pleasantly does Plutarch begin his 
 life of Theseus. He confesses that there 
 are fables in the accounts of antiquity, but 
 he regrets that in some of them the fabu- 
 lous element is so obvious, since otherwise 
 he ' ' might have graced them with some ap- 
 pearance of historical narration. ' ' And as 
 for the statements which he proposes to
 
 JAMESTOWN 205 
 
 present to the reader with this grace of his- 
 toricity, * ' if by chance in some places they 
 range a little too boldly out of the bounds 
 or limits of true appearance and have no 
 manner of conforming with any credible- 
 ness of matter, the readers in courtesy 
 must needs have me excused, accepting in 
 good part that which may be written and 
 reported of things so extremely old and an- 
 cient." That is, Plutarch frankly tries to 
 please. 
 
 Not so, the remote successor of Plutarch 
 engaged in writing and reporting things 
 old and ancient. Even old and ancient, 
 and presumably venerable men not to 
 mention things are here put upon a cross- 
 examination. The only presupposition 
 which some writers seem to permit them- 
 selves is the general proposition that all 
 the persons whom we used to think were 
 good were really bad, and those we used 
 to revere as saints were really sinners like 
 ourselves. The classic instance is Mr. 
 Froude's rehabilitation of King Henry into
 
 206 THE FOREFATHERS OF 
 
 the character of a faithful and tender hus- 
 band. And it has been predicted that we 
 shall presently discover that Nero, instead 
 of fiddling while Kome burned, really 
 played a violin at a concert given for the 
 benefit of the sufferers. Another canon of 
 contemporary historical criticism declares 
 that any statement which is made by one 
 person only is to be regarded as probably 
 untrue. All respectable facts will be ac- 
 companied by other facts to identify them. 
 Unhappily for Smith, most of his adven- 
 tures took place in remote regions, without 
 the observation of reporters, and all that 
 we know about them is what he tells him- 
 self. It is a remarkable story. Smith's 
 parents died in his early childhood, and 
 left him to the care of guardians who were 
 much more interested in his property than 
 in his education. Thus in the course of 
 time he easily got their permission to seek 
 his fortune, and went to the wars which 
 were perennially in progress on the conti- 
 nent of Europe. Tiring of this activity
 
 JAMESTOWN 207 
 
 after a few years he came home and, seek- 
 ing a secluded spot amidst the woods, de- 
 voted himself to the diligent reading of 
 Marcus Aurelius and Machiavelli, two writ- 
 ers who bore little more in common than 
 the coincidence that their names begin with 
 the same letter. But this, too, failed to sat- 
 isfy Smith's restless spirit, and again he 
 sought the enthusiastic land of France. 
 There he fell in with thieves who, having 
 plundered him of all his possessions, left 
 him for dead. He was found, however, by 
 a friendly farmer, in whose house he was 
 nursed back to life. After that he went to 
 sea; and the winds blew and the masts 
 broke, and down went the ship into the 
 great deep; but Smith was a good swim- 
 mer, and made his way to shore. But the 
 shore, on exploration, proved to be at- 
 tached to a desert island, and it appeared 
 that, having escaped the perils of the water, 
 the great adventurer was fated to perish 
 by starvation. His luck, however, contin- 
 ued constant; there came along a compas-
 
 208 THE FOREFATHERS OF 
 
 sionate ship and picked him up, and off he 
 went on the way to Egypt. Eeturning in 
 the same ship, they fell in with a richly 
 freighted argosy from Venice, of whose 
 treasures they promptly possessed them- 
 selves, and in the distribution of the spoil 
 a good share came to Smith. He wandered 
 for some months, seeing the sights of Italy, 
 but his spirit was unsatisfied and he offered 
 his sword as a volunteer against the Turks. 
 It was in this campaign that there took 
 place the crowning exploit of his life. 
 
 They were besieging the town of Kegal, 
 and the days grew dull. Neither the be- 
 siegers nor the besieged were in the mood 
 for fighting. At last the Turks suggested 
 a tournament. It would please the ladies, 
 they said, if the lists might be set in sight 
 of the walls and there might be some brisk 
 engagements of champions. This was more 
 than acceptable to the Christians. And so 
 it was. The Turks chose a champion, and 
 the Christians, on their side, casting lots, 
 the lot fell on Smith. And out came the
 
 JAMESTOWN 209 
 
 Turk and Smith, in view of both the ex- 
 pectant armies, each with his lance. And 
 Smith was so fortunate as to drive his 
 lance through the body of his adversary, 
 and thus to win the day. On the morrow, 
 the Turks challenged Smith by name to try 
 the fortunes of the fight again. This time 
 they fought with swords, and Smith was 
 again able to give his opponent a mortal 
 wound. But this occurred a third time; 
 on the third day a new Turk with a battle 
 axe fell upon Smith, but Smith's axe hewed 
 a better line, and the third Turk followed 
 the other two. 
 
 This tale, which makes a stiffer demand 
 upon the reader's credulity than any of the 
 others, is happily attested by three quite 
 independent evidences. One is an Italian 
 book entitled " The Wars of Transylva- 
 nia," from which the Eev. Samuel Purchas, 
 in 1625, quoted along account of this adven- 
 ture on the authority of one of the secre- 
 taries of Prince Sigismund. Another is an 
 entry at the Heralds' College in London,
 
 210 THE FOREFATHERS OF 
 
 recording the grant of a coat-of-arms " to 
 John Smith, captain of 250 soldiers, in 
 memory of three Turks' heads, which with 
 his sword before the town of Eegal he did 
 overcome, kill and cut off, in the province 
 of Transylvania." A third is the fact that 
 when Smith explored the New England 
 coast in 1614 he named three little islands 
 in the neighborhood of Cape Anne the 
 Turks' Heads. 
 
 Then Smith's luck turned and the winds 
 of fortune blew from the opposite quarter. 
 At the battle of Rothenthurm he was 
 taken prisoner and was carried to Constan- 
 tinople as a slave. But there he attracted 
 the kind attention and sympathy, and per- 
 haps the affection, of the lady Tragabi- 
 zanda, in whose house he served. She sent 
 him to her brother, the pasha of Nalbrits, 
 beyond the Sea of Azof; but her good of- 
 fices in his behalf were disregarded. Smith 
 was dressed in the skin of a wild beast, had 
 an iron collar about his neck, and was both 
 overworked and beaten. One day, how-
 
 JAMESTOWN 211 
 
 ever, getting the pasha conveniently alone, 
 he knocked him down, pounded the life out 
 of him, dressed himself in the dead man's 
 clothes, took the dead man's horse, and 
 away he went into the deserts. Finally he 
 found some friendly Russians, and made 
 his way back to Prince Sigismund at Leip- 
 sic, and thence by easy stages to England, 
 where he arrived just in time to join the 
 expedition which was being fitted out for 
 Jamestown. 
 
 This is indeed a story of considerable 
 dimensions. Our acceptance or rejection 
 of it should be determined, the cautious his- 
 torians tell us, by our estimation of the 
 character of Smith. Happily, there are 
 sufficient materials for making such an es- 
 timate. John Smith was as ready with his 
 pen as with his sword. His published 
 works occupy several fat volumes. They 
 do not at all support the charge of boast- 
 fulness. He tells his adventures with the 
 straightforwardness of a sturdy soldier. 
 We have also the testimony of contempo-
 
 212 THE FOREFATHERS OF 
 
 raries, some of them his friends, others, 
 by reason of contentions over the affairs of 
 the colony, his enemies. He is accused 
 of impatience and a hasty temper and a 
 disposition to take control of the situation, 
 but not of any narrow self-conceit. As for 
 his friends, one of them, after Smith went 
 back from Jamestown to England, wrote 
 this concerning him : 
 
 " Thus we lost him that in all our pro- 
 ceedings made justice his chief guide . . . 
 ever hating baseness, sloth, pride, and in- 
 dignity more than any dangers ; that never 
 allowed more for himself than his soldiers 
 with him ; that upon no danger would send 
 them where he would not lead them him- 
 self ; that would never see us want what he 
 either had or could by any means get us ; 
 that would rather want than borrow, or 
 starve than not pay ; that loved action more 
 than words, and hated falsehood and covet- 
 ousness worse than death; whose adven- 
 tures were our lives and whose loss our 
 deaths."
 
 JAMESTOWN 213 
 
 The little company, thus provided with 
 a council, a chaplain, and a hero, consisted 
 of 105 persons ; almost exactly the number 
 of those who came in 1620, in the May- 
 flower. The expedition was a commercial 
 enterprise. It was not undertaken, like 
 the settlement at Plymouth, under the 
 stress of ecclesiastical conditions, nor pri- 
 marily for the advancement of religion. 
 But it was sent forth in a religious spirit. 
 " The way to prosper and achieve good 
 success," said the paper of instructions, 
 "is to make yourselves all of one mind 
 for the good of the country and your own, 
 and to serve and fear God, the giver of all 
 goodness, for every plantation which our 
 Heavenly Father hath not planted shall be 
 rooted up. ' ' 
 
 After a long and stormy passage, the 
 three ships entered Chesapeake Bay in the 
 last week in April, and made their way into 
 Hampton Eoads. The name Point Com- 
 fort testifies to their relief and joy. Sail- 
 ing up the wide river which they named
 
 214 THE FOREFATHERS OF 
 
 for King James, their patron, they disem- 
 barked on the 13th of May at a little penin- 
 sula. They called the place Jamestown, 
 thus connecting the King's, name with Eng- 
 glish Christianity in America, as it was 
 soon to be connected with the English 
 Bible. The land was low, and, as the col- 
 onists discovered later to their cost, was 
 marshy and malarious. But it was far 
 enough up the river to be out of the easy 
 reach of Spaniards, and the narrow neck 
 of land which connected it with the shore 
 seemed well adapted for defence against 
 the Indians. And in the spring, and after 
 the discomforts of the sea, the place seemed 
 a Garden of Eden. The birds sang, the 
 flowers bloomed, the trees invited the way- 
 farers to the safety and rest of their cool 
 shadows, and the hearts of the colonists 
 beat high. One of them, George Percy, 
 gives an account of the landing: 
 
 " After much and weary search (with 
 their barge coasting still before, as Virgil 
 writeth JEneas did, arriving in the region
 
 JAMESTOWN 215 
 
 of Italy called Latium upon the banks of 
 the river Tiber) in the country of a Wero- 
 wance called Wo-Win-Chapunka (a di- 
 tionary to Powhatan) within this fair river 
 of Paspiheigh, which we have called the 
 King's River, they selected an extended 
 plain and spot of earth, which thrust out 
 into the depth and midst of the channel, 
 making a kind of Chersonesus or penin- 
 sula. The trumpets sounding, the admiral 
 struck sail, and before the same the rest 
 of the fleet came to anchor, and here to 
 lose no further time the colony disem- 
 barked, and every man brought his par- 
 ticular store and furniture, together with 
 the general provision, ashore; for the 
 safety of which, as likewise for their own 
 security, ease and better accommodating, 
 a certain canton and quantity of that little 
 half-island was measured, which they be- 
 gan to fortify, and thereon in the name of 
 God to raise a fortress, with the ablest and 
 speediest means they could." 
 The landing took place on Wednesday.
 
 216 THE FOREFATHERS OF 
 
 On Thursday they set about the erection 
 of a fort, a three-cornered structure with 
 a cannon at each angle. They prepared 
 for Sunday by hanging up an old sail, fas- 
 tening it to three or four trees, to shelter 
 them from sun and rain; seats they made 
 of logs ; a bar of wood between the trees 
 served for a pulpit. This was the Sunday 
 after Ascension Day. The words of the 
 Epistle, ' ' The end of all things is at hand, ' ' 
 might have sounded for the moment as a 
 prophecy of disaster; but they prayed, 
 " We beseech Thee, Lord, leave us not 
 comfortless," and the ascription, " That 
 God in all things may be glorified through 
 Jesus Christ, to whom be praise and do- 
 minion forever and ever," expressed the 
 desires of their souls. 
 
 " This," says Smith, in words which en- 
 able us to see that sight with the eyes of 
 one who was himself a part of it, " this 
 was our church, till we built a homely thing 
 like a barne, set upon cratchets, covered 
 with rafts, sedge and earth, so was also the
 
 JAMESTOWN 217 
 
 walls : the best of our houses [were] of the 
 like curiosity: but for the most part farre 
 much worse workmanship that could nei- 
 ther well defend [from] wind nor raine." 
 First the fort, for the preservation of their 
 lives ; then the Church for the salvation of 
 their souls; this was the order of their 
 building. ' ' We had daily Common Prayer 
 morning and evening," says Smith," every 
 Sunday two sermons, and every three 
 months the Holy Communion, till our min- 
 ister died; but our prayers daily, with a 
 homily on Sundaies, we continued two or 
 three years after, till more preachers 
 came. ' ' There in the wilderness, with the 
 river before, and the unbroken forest be- 
 hind, every day began and ended with the 
 Prayer-book prayers. 
 
 The settlers had immediate need of all 
 the means of grace. Hardly had their 
 landing been effected when the scene 
 changed to tragedy. This was the result 
 of three influences. It came in part from 
 the savages, in part from the swamps, and
 
 218 THE FOREFATHERS OF 
 
 in part from the inexperience and incom- 
 petence of the settlers. 
 
 The savages belonged to the same Algon- 
 quin race as those who met our fathers in 
 New England, but the New England In- 
 dians had been depleted by pestilence and 
 disheartened by defeat, and were in little 
 mood to fight. The Virginia Algonquins 
 were in good savage form. Within a space 
 of two weeks from the landing, they came 
 upon the settlement, two hundred strong, 
 and made a fierce attack. One they killed, 
 several they wounded with their arrows; 
 and thereafter, for a long time, they lurked 
 behind the trees watching for unwary white 
 men. They were a terror and a menace at 
 Plymouth, but at Jamestown they were 
 persistent, active, and aggressive enemies. 
 
 Out of the early stages of this peril the 
 colonists were saved by the coolness and 
 courage of John Smith. He was small of 
 stature, but afraid of nothing ; and he had 
 a way of scaring savages by looking at 
 them which was as good as a battery of
 
 JAMESTOWN 219 
 
 guns. He saved the colony. Without him, 
 the settlement at Jamestown would have 
 perished miserably, like its predecessors. 
 His famous encounter with Powhatan, and 
 his rescue by Pocahontas, fit excellently 
 with the lists at Eegal and the tender in- 
 terest of Tragabizanda. Happily, this 
 adventure is attested by the fact that the 
 account of it was printed in London at a 
 time when there were residing in that city 
 not only several persons who bore the cap- 
 tain no good will, but the heroine herself. 
 If it had been untrue, or even exaggerated, 
 contradiction would have been easy. This 
 exploit brought about a truce between the 
 red men and the whites, but the fighting 
 began again; until in 1622, the Indians 
 arose one dark night and effected a general 
 massacre, killing one out of ten all along 
 the thin line of settlements from James- 
 town to Richmond. So effective, however, 
 was the revenge of the colony that from 
 that time the Indians ceased to be a 
 dreaded foe.
 
 220 THE FOREFATHERS OF 
 
 Meanwhile, tragedy came from the ma- 
 larious swamps. The first hot summer at 
 Jamestown, like the first cold winter at 
 Plymouth, killed half of the company. 
 George Percy, who described the landing 
 in such good spirits, gives this account of 
 the fever time which followed : 
 
 " There were never Englishmen left in 
 a foreign country in such misery as we 
 were in this new discovered Virginia. We 
 watched every three nights, lying on the 
 bare cold ground, what weather soever 
 came; and waded all the next day; which 
 brought our men to be most feeble 
 wretches. Our food was but a small can 
 of barley sodden in water, to five men a 
 day. Our drink, cold water taken out of 
 the river; which was at a flood very salt; 
 at a low tide full of slime and filth ; which 
 was the destruction of many of our men. 
 Thus we lived for the space of five months 
 (Aug. 1607 Jan. '08) in this miserable 
 distress, not having five able men to man 
 our bulwarks upon any occasion. If it had
 
 JAMESTOWN 221 
 
 not pleased God to put a terror in the 
 savages' hearts, we had all perished by 
 those wild and cruel Pagans, being in that 
 weak estate as we were ; our men night and 
 day groaning in every corner of the fort 
 most pitiful to hear. If there were any 
 conscience in men, it should make their 
 hearts to bleed to hear the pitiful murmur- 
 ings and outcries of our sick men without 
 relief, every night and day for the space 
 of six weeks; some departing out of the 
 world; many times three or four in a 
 night; in the morning their bodies being 
 trailed out of their cabins like dogs to be 
 buried." 
 
 All this distress was aggravated by the 
 ignorance of the settlers themselves. The 
 English nation was in the painful process 
 of learning the difficult art of colonization ; 
 a lesson whose pages are written by the 
 hard hand of experience. They did not 
 know what sort of place it was to which the 
 colony was bound. There was a common 
 notion that it was a place of great wealth.
 
 222 THE FOREFATHERS OF 
 
 A popular play, acted in 1605, had charmed 
 the ears and dazzled the eyes of the adven- 
 turous with descriptions of its golden 
 shores. 
 
 ' ' I tell thee, gold is more plentiful there 
 than copper is with us. . . Why, man, all 
 their dripping pans are pure gold ; and all 
 the chains with which they chain up their 
 streets are massy gold; all the prisoners 
 they take are fettered in gold ; and for ru- 
 bies and diamonds they go forth on holi- 
 days and gather 'em by the seashore to 
 hang on their children's coats, and stick 
 in their children's caps, as commonly as 
 our children wear saffron-gilt brooches 
 and groats with holes in 'em." 
 
 This had attracted into the expedition 
 to Jamestown a number of unstable and 
 adventurous spirits. There was a lack of 
 practical persons, who know what to do 
 with their hands. The " gentlemen " out- 
 numbered the farmers and the carpenters. 
 The first settlers were mostly city men, 
 from London ; who had no idea of even the
 
 JAMESTOWN 228 
 
 elementary principles of getting a living 
 in the woods. They could neither hunt nor 
 fish. The result was that they starved. 
 Supplies of colonists came again and again, 
 but they added new mouths rather than 
 new hands. Industrial conditions in Eng- 
 land contributed another element to the 
 colonial situation in Virginia. The land 
 had not yet recovered from the social 
 changes consequent upon the dissolution of 
 the monasteries. When agriculture began 
 to give place to sheep-raising, this turned 
 great numbers of small farms into wide 
 ranges of pasture land, and left farm labor- 
 ers without employment. Moreover, the 
 unprecedented increase in the amount of 
 available gold from the mines of Peru had 
 caused a calamitous rise in prices, thus 
 magnifying the cost of living. The idle 
 people, victims of these various changes, 
 offered a tremendous economic problem 
 for which the colonies seemed to offer some 
 solution. For the good of England, num- 
 bers of these people were transported to
 
 224, THE FOREFATHERS OF 
 
 these shores. The good of America was 
 not especially considered. 
 
 When Smith, injured by an explosion of 
 powder, left for England in October, 1609, 
 there were five hundred persons in the com- 
 munity. In May, 1610, when Gates arrived, 
 only sixty of them still lived. Some had 
 been killed by the Indians, some had died 
 of the cold in the fierce winter; some had 
 starved to death. The cabins, as their oc- 
 cupants perished, were burned for fuel; 
 nobody daring to venture into the woods 
 for fear of the savages. Jamestown had 
 become a cemetery rather than a settle- 
 ment. When Gates came with new colo- 
 nists themselves the survivors of a ship- 
 wreck and the forlorn men met in the 
 church to consider the situation, it was de- 
 termined to abandon the place. And they 
 did abandon it. They were in their boats 
 on the river, making their way to the sea, 
 when suddenly the ships of Lord Delaware 
 appeared, with new men, new provisions, 
 and new courage, and they turned back.
 
 JAMESTOWN 225 
 
 From that time, the fortunes of the col- 
 ony were never in doubt. Even the general 
 massacre did not discourage the colonists. 
 They had planted the roots of their settle- 
 ment deep in the soil. They had definitely 
 established the first permanent residence 
 of Englishmen upon these shores. But at 
 what a cost ! Between 1607 and 1625, five 
 thousand persons landed at Jamestown. 
 In 1625 only a thousand of these remained 
 alive. Such were the tragic conditions 
 under which English civilization was 
 founded on this continent. 
 
 There was civilization here before that ; 
 the French were in Canada and the Span- 
 iards were in Florida, but this was Latin 
 civilization. It differed from English in 
 its theory as to the right residence of 
 power. According to the Latin idea, power 
 should be centralized; it resides properly 
 in the hand of one man. According to the 
 English idea, power should be distributed ; 
 it resides properly in the hands of many 
 men. These theories lead in very differ-
 
 226 THE FOREFATHERS OF 
 
 ent directions; the Latin theory toward 
 a monarchy in politics and a papacy in 
 religion; the English theory towards de- 
 mocracy and Protestantism. Upon the 
 success or failure of the particular ex- 
 periment depended the whole constitution 
 of American life. The men who died be- 
 side the James River in the maintenance 
 of that colony, died that English civ- 
 ilization, with all that thereunto pertains, 
 might live. They were the pioneers, the 
 heroes, the martyrs, of all our liberties. 
 
 When Lord Delaware came, and the col- 
 ony was raised from death to life, it was in 
 the church that the men said their thanks- 
 givings and their prayers. And the new 
 life thus begun was lived in the sight of 
 the church tower and in the sound of the 
 church bell. Lord Delaware adorned the 
 church with chancel furniture of walnut 
 and pews of cedar. Every morning at ten 
 and every afternoon at four the settlers 
 were called to service. The place was 
 sweet with flowers, and gay with the red
 
 JAMESTOWN 227 
 
 cloaks of Delaware's fifty halberdiers. 
 There Pocahontas was married, with many 
 Indians attending. There they had two 
 sermons every Sunday, and, in pleasant 
 anticipation of a good Boston custom, 
 a lecture every Thursday. There the Eev. 
 Richard Buck, who had been wrecked with 
 Gates on the Bermudas, in the midst of 
 adventures of which Shakespeare made 
 use in " The Tempest, " was the pastor of 
 the parish. For that is what the colony 
 was, an English parish, established on 
 these shores, gathered about the parish 
 church. 
 
 In this parish church were enacted two 
 significant scenes which represent still fur- 
 ther the likeness between the men of 
 Jamestown and the men of Plymouth. The 
 two colonies not only shared in the same 
 experience of tragedy, and not only showed 
 the same regard for religion, but they were 
 animated by the same enthusiasm for civil 
 liberty. In the Jamestown church was 
 held the first American representative as-
 
 228 THE FOREFATHERS OF 
 
 sembly; and within the same walls oc- 
 curred the first American revolution. 
 
 In 1619, the year before the landing of 
 the Pilgrims, the first American represen- 
 tative assembly was convened at James- 
 town. There had been some mismanage- 
 ment in the colony, and laying down of laws 
 obnoxious to the people, and the settlers 
 asked that they might rule themselves. The 
 request came to Sir Edwin Sandys, the 
 leading spirit of the Virginia company, who 
 was at that moment assisting our fathers 
 at Leyden to arrange their emigration to 
 Plymouth. He was of the party of the 
 Parliament as opposed to the party of the 
 King, and the request was congenial with 
 all his principles. Thus the company 
 granted it, and the governor appointed by 
 the company summoned the assembly. 
 Each settlement in the colony sent repre- 
 sentatives to meet the governor and the 
 appointed council. The governor and 
 council sat in the chancel, the burgesses sat 
 in the body of the church. The Rev. Eich-
 
 JAMESTOWN 229 
 
 ard Buck opened the first session with a 
 prayer that it would please God to guide 
 and sanctify all the proceedings to His 
 own glory and the good of the plantation. 
 There in the name of God and in the church 
 of God, our free government had its begin- 
 ning. The first American Congress con- 
 tinued to hold its meetings in the James- 
 town church for twenty years. 
 
 The laws which were enacted by the 
 House of Burgesses touched the same notes 
 which were soon to be sounded in New Eng- 
 land. They regulated the conduct of the 
 people : they provided penalties for drunk- 
 enness, for excess in apparel, for slander, 
 for profane swearing. They enacted ' ' for 
 the better observation of the Sabbath " 
 that no person ' ' shall take a voyage upon 
 the same, except it be to church or for other 
 cases of extreme necessity." They re- 
 quired that every master of a family when 
 he came to church should bring with him 
 a serviceable gun, and they passed without 
 a dissenting voice this declaration : ' * That
 
 230 THE FOREFATHERS OF 
 
 the governor shall not lay any taxes or im- 
 positions upon the colony, otherwise than 
 by the authority of the general assembly, 
 to be levied and employed as the said as- 
 sembly shall appoint." 
 
 In 1635, the year before the founding 
 of Harvard College, this assembly rose up 
 against the governor, and sent him back a 
 prisoner to England, to his royal master. 
 Governor Harvey had made himself vari- 
 ously objectionable. He had been found 
 arrogant and avaricious, not to say dis- 
 honest. He had proclaimed laws on his 
 own authority. He had sided with Mary- 
 land in a dispute between the colonies. He 
 had finally removed the secretary of state, 
 whom everybody liked, and had appointed 
 another of whom everybody disapproved. 
 The people held a massmeeting, to voice 
 their indignation, and the next day the gov- 
 ernor had the speakers arrested. He de- 
 manded that the council should send them 
 to the gallows. But the patience of the 
 burgesses was now exhausted. They vio-
 
 JAMESTOWN 231 
 
 lently laid hands on the governor, and 
 thrust him out of his government, and sent 
 him back to answer to King Charles. It 
 was the first American revolution, the first 
 dramatic negative pronounced by English- 
 men in America against the oppression of 
 a representative of the crown. It was the 
 splendid spirit of the Puritans of Massa- 
 chusetts in the souls of the churchmen of 
 Virginia. 
 
 The brick church, whose tower remains, 
 was built in 1639. As the century ap- 
 proached its end, this church was the scene 
 of the establishing of the second college in 
 this country, the College of William and 
 Mary. The massacre of 1622 had post- 
 poned until this time the founding of this 
 school of higher learning. 
 
 " It is a just and wholesome pride," says 
 Mr. Fiske, * ' that New England people feel 
 in recalling the circumstances under which 
 Harvard College was founded, in a little 
 colony but six years of age, still struggling 
 against the perils of the wilderness and the
 
 232 THE FOREFATHERS OF 
 
 enmity of its sovereign. But it should not 
 be forgotten that aims equally lofty and 
 foresight equally intelligent were shown 
 by the men who from 1614 to 1624 con- 
 trolled the affairs of Virginia." At the 
 moment of the general massacre, while 
 Cambridge on the Charles was still a part 
 of the unbroken wilderness, these men were 
 ready to begin a college. 
 
 They proposed to establish a university 
 for English and Indian youths. The Lon- 
 don Company endowed it with ten thou- 
 sand acres of land; the Archbishops con- 
 tributed fifteen hundred pounds; the 
 Bishop of London added another thousand. 
 An anonymous contributor, who signed 
 himself " Dust and Ashes," promised a 
 thousand more. Another benefactor was 
 Nicholas Ferrar, of Little Gidding, the 
 friend of George Herbert and Izaak Wal- 
 ton. One donor gave his library, another 
 provided Bibles and Prayer-books, another 
 presented the Communion plate. Mr. 
 George Thorp came over to be the rector
 
 JAMESTOWN 233 
 
 of the college. He had hardly arrived 
 when the savages fell upon the settlements 
 and he was killed. Then for a good while 
 the energies of the colony were all needed 
 for preservation and recuperation. 
 
 The new college was planted not at 
 Jamestown, but at Williamsburg. Pres- 
 ently, when the old town was burned, the 
 people moved away from the malarious 
 swamps and built their houses in the new 
 place. Jamestown fell into ruins. Only 
 the tower of the church remained to mark 
 the spot where our American institutions 
 began. No symbol could be more signifi- 
 cant. It means that the foundation of the 
 Eepublic was laid, in the midst of martyr- 
 dom, upon the solid basis of religion. 
 
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