The Beginners of a Nation Part 34

[Sidenote: Note 2.]

Theological differences were early apparent in the teachings of the two leaders. Trivial enough to the modern mind are these questions concerning works as an evidence of justification and concerning active and pa.s.sive faith in justification. Hooker maintained all by himself that there was "a saving preparation in a Christian soule before unyon with Christ." The other ministers pretended to understand what he meant by this, and at first opposed him unanimously. No doubt, too, Hooker and his disciples found some fault with the outer form of the church as shaped by Cotton. Certain it is that Hooker's theories of civil government were more liberal and modern than Cotton's, though like Cotton's they were hung upon texts of Scripture. Hooker lacked Cotton's superfluity of ingenuity; he had less imagination and less poetic sentiment than Cotton, but his intellect was more rugged, practical, and virile. He was not a man to have visions of a political paradise; he did not attempt to limit citizens.h.i.+p to church members when he framed a const.i.tution for the Connecticut towns. Nor did he give so much power and privilege to the magistrate as was given in Ma.s.sachusetts. He disapproved of Cotton's aristocratic theory of the permanence of the magistrate's office, as he did apparently of the negative vote of the upper house and of the arbitrary decisions which the Ma.s.sachusetts magistrates a.s.sumed the right to make.

VII.

[Sidenote: Attractions of Connecticut.]

One other potent motive there was. Stories of the fertility of the "intervale" land on the Connecticut River came by the mouth of every daring adventurer who had sailed or tramped so far. There one might find pasture for the priceless cattle and hay to last the long winter through, and in that valley one might cultivate plains of great fertility.

VIII.

[Sidenote: Obstacles to removal.]

[Sidenote: Savage's Winthrop, i, 167, 168.]

There were dangerous Pequots on the Connecticut, it is true, and the Dutch had already planted a trading house and laid claim to the territory. The Plymouth people who traded there were also claimants.

And, more than all, leaving Ma.s.sachusetts in a time of danger from the machinations of Laud would seem desertion. The government of the Ma.s.sachusetts Bay colony was anomalous; it partook of the character of the commercial company from which it sprang, yet it had traits of a religious or at least a voluntary society. It was the accepted opinion that those who had taken the freeman's oath were "knit" together "in one body," and that none of them ought to leave the colony without permission. Hooker's party gained the consent of a majority of the representative members of the General Court, but not of a majority of the a.s.sistants. This precipitated a debate in the colony on the const.i.tutional question of the right of the a.s.sistants, or magistrates, to form an upper house and veto a decision of the chosen deputies of the towns.

IX.

[Sidenote: Attempts to prevent removal.]

It is no part of our purpose to unravel the tangle of ecclesiastical and civil politics in which the proposed emigration had now become involved. The Dorchester church and a part of that of Watertown were ready to follow the lead of Hooker and Newtown. Days of fasting and prayer were appointed to prevent the removal of these "candlesticks,"

as the churches were called, out of their places; but in spite of humiliations and of Cotton's persuasive eloquence, which at one time almost charmed away the discontent, the emigration set in, stragglingly at first.

[Sidenote: Explorers and pioneers.]

[Sidenote: 1633.]

John Oldham, an adventurous man of a rather lawless temper--one of those half-ruffians that are most serviceable on an Indian frontier--had been expelled from Plymouth. He was now a resident of Watertown, one of the centers of discontent and next neighbor to Newtown. He had gone with three others on a trading expedition to the westward overland. Walking along trails from one Indian village to another they discovered a large river, which they found to be the Fresh River of the Dutch and the Connecticut of the Plymouth traders.

They probably brought back to Watertown accounts that produced a fever for removal. Oldham was not a man to stand on the manner of his emigration. Waiting for n.o.body's consent, he led out a small company from Watertown the next year. These settled at what is now Wethersfield. From Dorchester, which had no alewife fishery with which to enrich its fields, settlers removed in 1634 to the Connecticut, where the soil did not need to be "fished." In 1635 the number of emigrants was larger, and there was much suffering during the following winter and many of the cattle perished.

X.

[Sidenote: Emigration by churches.]

[Sidenote: 1636.]

[Sidenote: Note 3.]

But the unit of New England migration was the church. No doubt the cohesiveness of the towns.h.i.+ps, and of the churches which were the nuclei of the towns, was re-enforced by provincial differences between the several communities. In 1636 Hooker, the real founder of Connecticut, and his congregation of Ess.e.x people, sold their houses and meadows and home lots and acre rights in the commonage in Cambridge to a new congregation led by Thomas Shepard. From Newtown and from Dorchester the churches emigrated bodily--pastors, teachers, ruling elders, and deacons--carrying their organization with them through the wilderness like an ark of the covenant. New churches were soon afterward formed in the places they had left. Naturally, town government became the princ.i.p.al feature of civil organization in states thus planted by separate and coherent groups.

XI.

[Sidenote: The new government.]

[Sidenote: Conn. Hist. Soc. Coll., i, 20, 21.]

[Sidenote: Conn. Hist. Soc. Coll., i, 3, and ff.]

The Connecticut rulers acted at first as a government subordinate to Ma.s.sachusetts; but the settlements, except that of people from Roxbury at Springfield, were south of the line of the Ma.s.sachusetts colony, and it was not in the nature of things that Hooker and Haynes should subordinate themselves to Cotton and Winthrop. There was indeed no little exasperation between the two colonies. An independent const.i.tution was adopted in Connecticut, on principles which Hooker thought he found in the first chapter of Deuteronomy, and which were not exactly those that Cotton had managed to deduce from Scripture in his Model of Moses his Judicials. The Ma.s.sachusetts people, whose government aspired to dominate all New England, seem to have been angered by Hooker's secession and by his refusal to subordinate the new state to their own. Ma.s.sachusetts a.s.serted its authority over Springfield, which was within its limits, and every effort possible was made to prevent new emigrants who landed at Boston from going to the west. Even in England accounts adverse to Connecticut were circulated. Hooker, the real head of the new state, resented this in a letter of great vigor and some pa.s.sion.

XII.

[Sidenote: Instability of a theocracy.]

In its early years Ma.s.sachusetts had no rest. Three profound disturbances--the expulsion of Williams, the secession of Hooker and his followers, and the Hutchinsonian convulsion--followed one another in breathless succession, and a dangerous Indian war ran its course at the same time. That the early settlements were founded on "rocks and sands and salt marshes" was not the chief misfortune of the Bay colony. Its ecclesiastical politics proved explosive, to the consternation of its pious founders, who like other settlers in Utopia had neglected to reckon with human nature.

XIII.

[Sidenote: Severity of Puritanism.]

It has been the habit of modern writers on the subject to dismiss the Hutchinsonian controversy as a debate about meaningless propositions in an incomprehensible jargon. Yet there was in it but the action of well-known tendencies in human nature which might almost have been predicted from the antecedent circ.u.mstances. Puritanism had wrapped itself in the haircloth of austerity, it took grim delight in harsh forbiddings, and heaped up whole decalogues of thou-shalt-nots. Nor did it offer, as other intense religious movements have done, the compensation of internal joys for the gayety it repressed.

Theoretically Calvinist, it was practically an ascetic system of external duties and abstentions, trampling on the human spirit without ruth.

[Sidenote: Reaction toward a subjective joyousness.]

[Sidenote: Magnalia B. III, c. I, 32.]

[Sidenote: Compare Cotton's Fountain of Life, 35.]

[Sidenote: Note 4.]

[Sidenote: Note 5.]

[Sidenote: Shepard's Memoirs in Young, 505.]

But the heart will not be perpetually repressed; kept from natural pleasures, it will seek supernatural delights. Men were certain sooner or later to soften the iron rigidity of Puritanism by cultivating those subjective joys for which Calvinism provided abundant materials.

While preachers like Hooker were scourging the soul into a self-abas.e.m.e.nt that could approve its own d.a.m.nation, and while ingenious scribes were ama.s.sing additional burdens of scruple for heavy-laden shoulders, there arose in England a new school of Puritan pietists. These s.h.i.+rked none of the requirements of the legalists, but their spirits sought the sunnier nooks of Calvinism, and they preached the joy of the elect and the delight of a fully a.s.sured faith. Cotton, whose fair complexion, brown hair, and ruddy countenance attested a sanguine temperament, belonged by nature to this new order. He rejoiced that he had received the "witness of the Spirit" on his wedding day, and he delighted to draw out Scripture imagery to a surprising tenuity in describing the "covenant of marriage" and the intimacy of the "covenant of salt" or of friends.h.i.+p between G.o.d and the soul of the believer. Preachers of the same sort brought relief to mult.i.tudes in various towns of England. The people, tired of churchly routine on the one hand and of legalism on the other, thronged to hear such divines "filling the doores and windows."

It was the evangelicalism of the following century sending up its shoots prematurely into a frosty air. The old-fas.h.i.+oned Puritan had always conceived of religion as difficult of attainment. It was a paradoxical system wherein men were saved by the works they theoretically abjured. Conservative Puritans complained of the preachers who spread a table of "dainties," as though it were meritorious to sustain the soul on a rugged diet of rough doctrine. In Thomas Shepard's Memoirs of his own Life we may overhear "a G.o.dly company" of the time in familiar "discourse about the wrath of G.o.d and the terror of it, and how intolerable it was; which they did present by fire, how intolerable the torment of that was for a time; what, then, would eternity be?"

XIV.

[Sidenote: Cotton's revivalism.]

[Sidenote: Winthrop's Journal, i, 144.]

[Sidenote: Report of Record Com. ii, 5. Boston Town Records, 1635.

Hutchinson Papers, p. 88.]

Cotton professed that he loved to sweeten his mouth with a piece of Calvin before he went to sleep. His emotional rendering of Calvinistic doctrines wrought strongly on the people of the new Boston, and his advent was followed by widespread religious excitement. More people were admitted to the church in Boston in the earlier months of Cotton's residence than to all the other churches in the colony.