Chapter VIII

THE COLONIES IN THE UPPER HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

The Young Colonies watched by the “Old Folks at Home.”—Required to
furnish Inventories of their Property.—Old People particular as to
Shops where the Youngsters traded.—Several Articles of Political
Housekeeping, as Printing-Presses, Jury-Boxes, etc., not allowed.—Some
Favorites among the Children.—The first American Ring.—Cromwell as a
Step-Father.—The Atlantic Swimming-Bath.—Political Rights jarred off
the Parent Tree; others fell when ripe.—Some Proprietors sell out to
raise Money for Costs.—General Thaw in High Places.—Legislative Mills
with two Runs of Stone.—Woman’s Rights in Capsules.—How hard Puritan
Wood got softer.—Episcopal Race-Courses enlarged.—A Black Frost curls
up the Green Leaves of the Charters.—What Sir Edmund Andros swallowed
and the Fit of Indigestion which followed.—Effect of European
Housecleaning in setting Colonial Brooms in Motion.—New York swept
into the English Pan.—Result of James II.’s Over-stay in Paris.—Slaps
in the Face of Canada and their Return.—How Public Events tell on
Family Matters tolled long and loud.—People occasionally subject to
Scarlet Fever and Fourth of July, but can’t live on either.—Kidd at
Sea; takes off a few People.—How the Deficiency was supplied.—Number
of Colonists at close of Seventeenth Century.—Would have been more had
Chicago started.—Colonial Colts at the Bars of the Eighteenth Century.

By the middle of the seventeenth century, the young colonial damsels from England, Holland, Sweden, and Germany had, in the main, obtained comfortable and satisfactory settlements along the Atlantic slopes. The jealous “old folks at home” kept a strict watch on their doings, and sent servants to look after their ways. Here and there some stolen interviews with that very disreputable acquaintance, Legislative Liberty, had been detected; and the servants were especially charged to keep both eyes upon any renewal of such improprieties. Frequent inventories of property were insisted on. All the household stuff was required to be bought at the home shops; and, what hurt the feelings and interests of the young people more than anything else, they were forbidden even to send back what they did not want to use themselves, unless in ships built and despatched from England for them. There were some articles, as printing-presses, jury-boxes, etc., which were deemed by the anxious parents as particularly unnecessary and even improper. Two whims there were, which the youngsters had of late got into their heads, that they were repeatedly enjoined to banish, once for all: namely, the notion of electing somebody to go and meet somebody else and have a talk over that foolish and altogether unsatisfactory subject the taxes; and that other equally absurd fancy of counting over occasionally the loose change collected for public purposes. They told them that such things were above their years, and that, in fact, they knew nothing about them; and moreover, that such whimsies had made a great deal of trouble even among the wiser heads on the old island, and, if indulged in, would be sure to bring their progeny into bad habits and to worse ends. These injunctions and warnings of course only increased curiosity, led to talks across the dinner-table and in the evenings after the day’s work was over. The more they talked it over, the more, of course, they set their hearts upon having the forbidden fruit. It was found that Virginia had enjoyed the dangerous luxuries of sending two men from every one of her eleven boroughs to do both these improper things, ever since she was twelve years old. She, too, had been permitted to have a jury-box, and liked the music of it right well, although some of the twelve strings sometimes got out of order, and the instrument occasionally played too long when badly wound up. Favoritism in a family is never pleasant for the unfavored ones. The others could not see why they should not have what Virginia was allowed. The subject became at last a sore one, and several times ended in angry flushes and muttered adjectives that went off without any nouns to touch them; some into the air, and some—we are forced to say—right into the faces of the old people.

Cromwell, that brusk English step-father, who, after the sudden taking off of his predecessor, Charles I., vigorously seized the cold hand of Albion, had his favorites among the step-children, the New-Englanders. Yet he did not hesitate to trounce them as soundly as he did Virginia and the two Carolinas, whenever they set up their wills against his. It was he who, in 1651, tied up all the colonies by those leading-strings, the Navigation Acts. When Charles II. came into the family, these colonial cords were not cut, but multiplied and tied into knots, not at all sailor fashion. In fact, whoever ruled the house, Commonwealth, Stuart, or Orange, strengthened and doubled these vexatious marine strings, until finally father and children were threatened with the fate of Laocoön.

TEMPTATION; OR, THE FIRST AMERICAN “RING.”
(p. 153)
]

The large swimming-bath of the Atlantic, so near their doors, sorely tempted the young swimmers; but the old people insisted upon nothing so much as the maxim, not to go into the waters of commerce until they had learned to swim, and never to begin to learn an art so perilous to—themselves. In fact, the entire maritime policy of England towards the colonies was very dry nursing on very wet principles.

At one time, Virginia was the pet, and got several sugar-plums from royal bounty. Then Connecticut came in for some caressing. The younger Winthrop presented to Charles II., in 1662, a petition for a new toy,—a charter. He would have been refused, but that he slipped in, at the same time, a ring given to his own grandfather by the father of Charles, which so pleased the dress-loving king, that he gave to Connecticut one of the best charter hobby-horses ever seen at that time in America. This, it may be remarked, is the earliest example in our history of what “a ring” can effect.

We cannot record in detail the successive struggles of the Colonies to free themselves from political and commercial restrictive rules,—for rights of representation in assemblies of their own, for the privilege of taxing themselves, and spending their own assessments, and for the many solid and large freedoms which we now enjoy without question or fear. The story of the way in which the cellar was dug, through obstructions of root and stone, the walls sunk, the beams of the lower floor, hewn out amid discouragements and opposition, laid and primed, ought not to be otherwise than pleasant, even when rehearsed to those who have long and securely revelled in all the comforts and luxuries of the completed building; in its hot and cold water baths of free discussion; the numerous call-pipes through the wall, for public servants; the cedar closets for the best clothes of liberty; the iron safe for the family silver or greenbacks; the gas-pipes of illuminating knowledge; and the varied upholstery to soothe labor-aching limbs, or to gratify luxurious and even extravagant tastes. But space, like nobility, obliges; and although, like those experts who write the Lord’s Prayer on a sixpence, we can condense Genesis on the smallest historic disk, we cannot crowd all creation on the rim of the same piece. Speaking in a general way, however, we may affirm that for forty years preceding the accession of James II. in 1685, the Colonies, on the whole, steadily gained from jealous political privilege and chartered monopoly some of the rights enjoyed at home. As these rights fell, one after another, upon colonial soil, they were carefully secured by strong hands. Sometimes they were jarred suddenly from the parent tree by the iron hand of war. Sometimes they fell carelessly, like great, golden pippins, over the royal enclosure into the king’s highway, ripe and well flavored. Sometimes they matured naturally under the very eyes of those keepers of the royal Transatlantic preserves,—the colonial governors,—and when mellow, were seized and hurried out of reach until it was safe to give them to the hungry people.

Thus, in various ways, by different hands and from different parts of the colonial orchard, the precious fruit was gathered for present or future use.

In some of the plantations the proprietors, those

“Gentlemen of England, who sat at home in ease,”

expecting their stone ships to come in, filled with promised colonial stuff for presents to their children, became tired of waiting, and sold out their large airy bills of lading for very small earthly crowns sterling. In other Colonies the heirs of the original grantees, after spending all their ready means in lawsuits with the hard-working settlers, _videlicet_, “squatters,” guilty in complainants’ eyes, not only of “disturbing the peace of our lord the King,” but of attempting to appropriate unlawfully a piece of his colonial kingdom, compromised, as other parties have before done, for sums barely sufficient to cover the costs of litigation. In a few instances, suitors to the affections of the coy colonial heiresses, thinking by courtly ways to acquire their landed possessions and the common-law right to govern their persons, were dismissed with good-natured assurances that they should continue to look upon them as friends, but declined any more intimate relationships. In a few other cases still—like those of William Penn, Roger Williams, and Cecil Calvert—the tenants were freely and generously left to manage their civil and political affairs, without suit, let, or hindrance, while individual conscience was erected into a high court of equity, with supreme jurisdiction in things spiritual.

Representative government took at first different forms. In some of the settlements legislative grists were put into a mortar and pounded out into a simple, healthy, easily digested, coarse meal. Maryland and Massachusetts set up more luxurious mills, provided with double runs of stone,—an upper and lower one, which was supposed to grind out a finer kind of legislative flour. The brand, we need scarcely add, is now the popular American one, and is being, in limited amounts, exported for foreign use.

In some of these establishments “bolts” were now and then introduced, by some bran-new representative miller, and expectations were immediately held out to the anxious customers of better flour, and of a whiter color,—expectations, we regret to add, that rarely came to anything except increased fatness to the miller’s live stock, always grunting and grubbing around the mill doors.

Woman’s rights, too, thus early took root, sprouting out like young shoots from the old rotting stumps of a decaying civilization. Anne Hutchinson,—not Dickinson,—grieved in soul by the exclusion of her sex from the right to discuss and criticise, at the weekly meeting of the congregation, the last Sunday’s discourse,—a right now practised all over the world,—created by her fiery eloquence such a blaze in Massachusetts, that she soon made the Colony too hot for her. Sir Harry Vane, strange to say, did not turn the way that the wind blew; but, although a governor and a baronet, veered against the current of hot air. Let reformers pluck from these pages a fragrant leaf pressed and preserved for their reading when faint. It was from this little seed capsule, enwrapping a precious life, warmed by the heat of a woman’s mind, there sprang up in a few years that beautiful flower of spiritual liberty that now sends its rippling odor from sea to sea.

WOMAN’S RIGHTS IN 1637.
(p. 158)
]

Thus in all high places of political power there was a general thaw of royal prerogative and proprietarial claim; and popular rights trickled down upon the plain below. Galileo, in 1633, was condemned for asserting that the earth was a confirmed revolutionist; yet even fifty years after there might have been wafted back over his tomb on the Arno, from the shores of the James, the Susquehanna, and even from the Merrimack, a wind-gram, iterating his own protesting words, “_E pur il se muove._”

Yes, the world did move! Even that hard part of it, crusted over with stern though earnest religious dogmas, began to stir. The austerity of Puritan faith, conscientious yet severe, which had worn the russet grimness which its own persecution in England had gathered around it—as hard woods, lying in damp, imprisoning places, become clothed with fungus growths—began to feel some of the sunny effects of the Hutchinson illumination. In Virginia time and free discussion were wearing away the granite barriers within which its legislation and loyalty had always sought to hem into a single channel, the Episcopal, the diverging streams of religious convictions.

The narrow bigotries of the times, showing themselves under different aspects, sprang naturally out of the various soils in which the seeds had taken root. The early colonists of New England, escaping like the Jews from Egyptian bondage, and lit by flaming torches and cloudy providences to their promised land, compelled every one, Canaanite and Quaker, independent Philistine and non-conforming Episcopalian, to bring offerings to their cherished altar, under pain of banishment to the wilderness beyond. Those of Virginia, on the contrary, bringing with them their own lares and penates from their father’s house, and fearing the introduction of strange deities, fenced in the sacred images with sharp picket-palings set by legal enactment. Over both, however, the new Evangel of toleration began to break, and voices of those “crying in the wilderness,” divinely sent, cleaving with gentle strokes the consciences of thoughtful men, and heard around the altar and inside the guarded pickets, heralded the coming Emanuel.

We have said that, up to the time of the accession of James II. in 1685, the fruits of civil liberty were gradually maturing in the growing settlements.

Immediately after that event, however, a chilling black frost fell upon them, rolling up the green leaves of the charters and threatening to kill outright all the chance-sown trees, as well as the more promising cultivated grafts. During the three and a half years that this blight continued, the greater part of the popular governments were stunted or destroyed. The Connecticut rocking horse, conjured from King Charles II. by Winthrop’s ring, was hid away in a hollow oak at Hartford. Sir Edmund Andros, a man of narrow spirit and keen temper, was sent out with instructions so large that he swallowed up the governments of all the New England Colonies and New York. A severe fit of indigestion followed, acidulating and fermenting, taking away the general appetite, and causing painful memories of the time when there were no heart-burnings and dangerous blood-rushings headward. And so, when in 1688 the Revolution brought in the Orange Prince, health bloomed again on the colonial cheek, and the constitution seemed to acquire a more vigorous tone than ever.

The colonists had early learned the strength which comes from union. From 1643 onwards for forty years the New England settlements joined hands with each other against the French of New France and Acadia, the French Indian allies, and the Dutch of New York; and while, like man and wife, they had their own healthy troubles, curtain lectures, poutings and make-ups, they stoutly defended the common home against all neighboring invasion. Persons once married are not apt to forget it, nor cease to sigh, after the tie is dissolved, for the benefits which accrued from it. The colonial widowers found it easier afterwards to contract a new union than the bachelor communities to form their first match. Eight years after the death of the first union the bereaved New-Englanders went out on a second courtship,—the trysting place being New York,—and there agreed upon a sort of runaway match to Canada. The honeymoon journey was not as pleasant as bridal trips through the Thousand Isles to Montreal and Quebec now are. In fact, although bound for Quebec, and even reaching it, they were not suffered by the French to enter it. They returned not over well pleased with each other, but particularly out of temper with the armed discourtesy of the French.

This little trip away from home was not the first nor the last which the Colonies were led to make. In fact, our people from the very beginning seem to have been curiously addicted to foreign missionary efforts. They acquired the passion at the outset from European suggestions. Whenever the state skeins there got into a tangle, some of the outside threads were sure to run into a dreadful kink here. No sooner was there a scrubbing and house-cleaning among the old folks on the Thames, Seine, Scheldt, or Rhine, than the brooms were got out on the Hudson, the James, and Connecticut, and up they all went at that standing bother of our colonial housewives, the nest of lively French flies in our northeast corner, or at those old yellow-legged Dutch hornets that had settled down on Manhattan and Long Island. The war between the English and Dutch Commonwealths in 1652, which sent Van Tromp’s broom over the seas, brushing down the red spots of St. George, set the colonial sweepers at work. The big and little brooms were, however, put aside after two years; but in 1663 they were all seized again, and by a single dash New York was swept into the English pan.

Amid all this dust and refuse matter of war one can pick out now and then some stray grains of shining value. Such was Mary’s and William’s College, established in Virginia in 1693, making the second bright college speck in America. Such were the gold and silver ores of thought found by George Fox, Increase Mather, and others, mixed with brown earth or imbedded in quartz, but valuable in any collection. Such, too, the loving messages sent from Friends in England to their brethren here, which we can now pick from that colonial dust-heap where they shine like plates of mica.

The Orange William could not of course long bloom in peace in his new royal bed. His father-in-law, James II., had fled across the channel to Louis XIV., and was selfishly entertained by him at Paris. William objected—as some people do nowadays—to his relative’s prolonged stay in that fascinating capital. This little unpleasantness resulted in a war which lasted until 1697. Of course the Colonies were highly offended too; and as soon as the two rather elderly gentlemen at Versailles and St. James had taken snuff, there was a general sneeze from Passamaquoddy Bay to the Altamaha River. Getting thus very red in the face, the colonists flung out their hands, which of course hit Canada right in the face. The French resented the slap, and pommelled away at New York, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, scratching off many scalps at Dover, Schenectady, and along the Penobscot. A regular settler was aimed back by the Colonies at the very nob of the French settlements, Quebec. An arm-ament, directed by Sir William Phipps, was flung out towards the St. Lawrence, but a skilful fence by the alert French warded off the blow. To heat the pokers in these fires, kindled in Europe, blown over to this side and fed here by wood furnished by the colonists, and often hauled from a great distance, was laborious and expensive. But this was a small care for England who coolly took out the irons when well aglow.

Little, however, did she then imagine that the young arms thus smiting the irons on these French and Indian anvils were making and hardening muscle that would one day resist her own heavy and long-reaching blows. Slowly, slowly, but surely. Wheat left in Egyptian cases for quite other purposes, three thousand years ago, patiently sleeping, sprouts at the call of the sun in after centuries. The colonial seeds carelessly or selfishly cast by royal hands into furrows, seeming like very rugged and ugly blotches on the wide wintry-looking fields of North America, quickened in less than a hundred years by the rain-patters, were to wave in ridges as green and blossoming, as English hedges in June.

None of our illuminated readers will fall down into that exalted, but still very common mistake, of supposing that the great mass of the men, women, and children, living here in the latter half of that seventeenth century, were all the while, or indeed to any great extent, occupied by, interested in, or even measurably affected by, these large public events. The old man who thought it strange that all the millions of people in the Roman Empire, who he naturally supposed, from his reading of history, were present at the killing of Cæsar, did not rise against Brutus, Cassius, and the rest and prevent it, is now dead, but he has left successors to his historical notions. Most people are just as apt to think that everybody at Jerusalem knew King David as certainly as the Skibbareen Irishman that every American whom he meets in Ireland must be acquainted with his cousin whose going off from Skibbareen was so well understood there. Louis Napoleon, in his Life of Cæsar, may magnify the importance and influence over his times of his self-reflecting hero; but we all know that, in fact, as soon as the large imperial microscope is taken off from the single spot, Cæsar goes back again into a speck on the broad Roman sheet. To the ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine Romans in one hundred thousand, it was practically of less consequence whether Cæsar, Antony, or Julius Scipio Smith ruled Rome, than whether the season was wet or dry, or whether their wives and children kept well and healthy. To the few around the court, to the mammas with eligible daughters just in the city of Rome, to a few vestimentary Jenkins who retailed to the dozen families of their set the latest scandals on the Palatine, it was a matter of some moment; to the farmers, mechanics, working-people paving the wide empire with their labor and patient, endless industries, of comparatively little consequence whatever. Doubtless great numbers of these hard-working Romans, in those unfortunate towns where there were no presses or telegraphs, lived forty, fifty, or sixty years after “great Cæsar had turned to clay,” without suspecting that he was not decorated china still at Rome; without dreaming that, while they themselves had been raising pulse and sour wine for their own little house sovereigns in Gaul or Germania, Augustus had succeeded to Cæsar’s power at the capitol, and had set those scribblers, Virgil, Livy, and Horace, to writing, and had made much history for Bohemians since. Little did they know that Tiberius had meanwhile succeeded Augustus and crucified more men at that Roman New York than he had hairs on his hard pate, and so kept on the imperial pastime with a keen appetite, until he was served with the same sauce that he had dished out so freely; nor had they ever heard tell that during the same interval, so uneventful for them in their far-off silent occupations, Caligula had crawled up to the place vacated by Tiberius, and from its slimy top had pitched victims to wild beasts and voracious fish, and amused the bloody pauses in his grim, mad humors by feeding his favorite horse with gilded oats, and would have made him consul had not the least inhuman brute died before his quadripedal instalment into the office which Cicero sought so long and praised so loudly.

The great events, especially if at a distance, fill large spaces in our histories; but, like a marriage or death in the family, they occupy but a comparatively brief part of the life of any of its members. There is a great deal of water, even in rivers that are famous for large fish, that holds no fish at all,—waters whose onflow gladdens and refreshes large districts. A nation or a community must at some time have marked events to stir its blood and create noble memories; but it cannot live on Fourth of July or the remembrance of Waterloo. The life of the greater part of the colonists passed, as that of most people in all times and countries is spent, in quiet, steady work during the day, eating three meals if they had them, and two if they had not, and in sleeping as well nights as the hot or cold weather, wives or children, or other disturbers of the peace, would permit. We read of some red-letter event, like Kidd’s piracies in 1696–1698, that tossed from the deck possibly twenty people; and fancy that this Semmes must have borne an important part in those closing years of the century, without reflecting that almost every week in the year records more victims on our rivers and railroads,—victims despatched by us between the mouthfuls of our toast at breakfast. Such events bear the same relation to the volume of life as the capital letters, which head the chapters of a book, to its solid contents. They are the daubs of paint on the card of gingerbread; the small pinholes pricked in the large family loaf. We eat one thousand and ninety-four meals in the year without any recollection of them; we remember only the one Thanksgiving dinner which did us no more good than the others, and which probably, like Kidd’s piracies, stuck in our crops very distressingly. No doubt many of the colonists never heard of Robert Kidd; and others, who had listened to Mary Jane singing the song which told “how he sailed,” fancied that, like Bluebeard, he was only invented for songs and red-covered primers. In fine, these notable events are, in general, but the froth-bubbles on the river’s surface. The solid on-pressing mass does not feel the puffy little globes, iridescent though they be, and swells though they may appear to the few fish just around them. There was only one Kidd on the wide seas. Of the many other craft, carefully managed, sailing slowly and wearily, earning patient wages, and making port at the same time, we hear nothing.

So the race drifts, scuds, tacks, works, or runs towards the great harbor. So was it in the seventeenth century. Old people, as now, took to tea, dozy armchairs, tedious gossip, and mumbling recollections of the golden days of youth,—golden even if actually passed amid steel points, arrow-heads, or among the rude ploughshares of ever-recurring, never-ending toil. Grief and gladness pendulated with regular swings and carried the hour-hands of family life evenly and surely on through the uneventful spaces, until at last the solemn bell struck. Then a new mound was sodded under the willow-trees in the rude churchyard, whose slate-stones notched the advance of the Colonies. Among the young people love crept in, too, under shaggy vests and calico bodices. Soft words passed into earnest vows, and clergymen or country squires welded the glowing pieces into instruments of uncomplaining labor and life-long use. Then came new voices into the house, and,—well, at the winding-up of the century there were two hundred and thirty-five thousand people in the settlements. There would have been more, but—Chicago had not yet started.

And now, tying our coltish Colonies to the bars of the eighteenth century, we leave them for a short time while we run down a few stray subjects, skittishly grazing in the back pastures. We shall soon return to drive them all into the ranker grass of the opening plantations.