Penguin History of the United States of America (10 page)

It was not an ideal which could make much headway in a society whose prime preoccupation was religion. But (here the history turns comic) though the subject continued fascinating, the preoccupation did not last very long – certainly not so long as the ministers’ obsession with the idea of New England’s divine errand and covenant with God. Soon the men of Marblehead near Salem were coarsely telling their minister that he was mistaken as to their motive in travelling to America – ‘our main end was to catch fish’. For fishing proved almost as lucrative as John Smith had foreseen. The New Englanders soon ventured to the Grand Banks and steadily improved the design of their fishing vessels. The result was that in 1641 alone 300,000 barrels of cod were exported; herring, mackerel, alewives and delicious bass also found ready markets. Great Britain had her own fishermen, but Europe was happy to take the best of New England’s catches; the middling grades were sold to farmers of the American back-country, the worst fed slaves on West Indian plantations. Prosperity was fostered by the fur-trade too, which, lucrative in itself (though rapidly declining after the first decade of settlement), also opened up the back-country of New England to farmers. It proved impossible to export the region’s plentiful timber, labour and transportation costs being so high, but the shipbuilders of Boston and the coast made good use of it, as they did of other marine stores. For overseas trade boomed. Some of its ingredients have been mentioned. Others were, for export: pipe-staves, barrel-staves, clapboard, sheep, goats, hogs, horses, barley, wheat, oats, rye, dried beef, pork, rum, cheese, butter, soap, frames of houses, peas; for import: from the West Indies, molasses (for making rum), sugar, cotton, tobacco, indigo, slaves; from Europe, wine, salt, fruits, raisins, silk, olive oil, laces, linen, cloth; from the southern English colonies, tobacco, corn, beans, meat. Trade became a fascination for the children of the Puritans, and the ministers found that they were distressingly ready to tell lies to help it, and their fortunes, along. There were even graver consequences. As early as 1634 a sumptuary law had to be passed forbidding the use of ‘lace, silver, gold’ in clothing, and ‘slashed clothes, other than one slash in each sleeve and another in the back; also, all cutworks, embroidered or needlework caps, bands and rails’. To no effect: forty years later it was frequently necessary to fine humble persons for impudently wearing the fabric of their betters, silk. Then, drink, that staple of the trade, had distressing effects: in 1673 a minister lamented ‘How has wine and cider, but most of all rum, debauched multitudes of people, young and old?’ Most dreadful, however, was the distracting effect of mere prosperity itself. By 1660 Boston was a thriving town of 3,000 people, clear evidence of God’s favour; but to what avail if it had forgotten its mission?
Ministerial outcries became incessant: ‘It concerneth New England always to remember that originally they are a plantation religious, not a plantation of trade.’ No use – the gloomy verdict could not be avoided: ‘Outward prosperity is a worm at the roots of godliness, so that religion dies when the world thrives.’

Matters were no better in the back-country. On their arrival the Puritans had quickly sensed how well adapted the traditional English manor-village was to their purposes; so they organized the New England countryside accordingly. This was a superficially more significant importation than the Essex weatherboarding which covered their houses and barns; yet it has left less of a mark on the American landscape. Weatherboarding can now be found in quantity in every state of the Union; the godly township of the Puritans’ plans, nowhere. Yet the idea had seemed so good! The nuclear village, surrounded by fields farmed in strips, such as the settlers had known in England, would be economically self-sufficient and keep the villagers close under the minister’s eye. It would make easy the maintenance of a school, and the Christian training of servants and children. It would prevent the intellectual and moral stagnation in isolation of adults, and facilitate local self-government, since town-meetings could easily be arranged. Thus a congregation, whether meeting as a civil or as an ecclesiastical community, could observe the principles of its institution, and its members (powerfully egged on by a preaching minister’s eloquence) could act against any backsliding.

To a wonderful extent the New England township achieved all these things; and, in purely secular form, it lingers still, with its characteristic institutions, the town-meeting and the selectmen (annually elected administrative officers), in the quieter corners of New England. But land-hunger in Connecticut and Massachusetts continued to be strong. Land was plentiful; and, until the looming of the English Civil War dried up the supply of new immigrants, there was, as has been stated,
²³
an eager market for agrarian products of all kinds. Prices collapsed, it is true, in 1642; but they gradually recovered as New England sailors found markets abroad. Soon the demands of the market made themselves felt again on the farm; and, thus assured of profit, the farmers opened up more and more new land. They could not be kept within range of the towns and the ministers, and their land-hunger made them somewhat unreceptive to exhortations. ‘Outlying places’, said one preacher, ‘were nurseries of ignorance, profaneness and atheism.’ Said another, ‘The first that came over hither for the Gospel could not tell what to do with more land than a small number of acres, yet now men more easily swallow down so many hundreds and are not satisfied.’ A third exclaimed, ‘Sure there were other and better things the People of God came hither for than the best spot of ground, the richest soil.’ No doubt: but the People of God chose to forget it. They chose to live in America, not as
members of a close-knit community of piety, but as individualist farmers, each seeking his and his family’s salvation, economically and spiritually, on his own. Had they cared to they could have argued that they were the truest Puritans, individual salvation being the central value of Puritanism; no wonder that, in propitious circumstances (and the frontier of settlement in North America was very propitious), the value was followed to its logical, ‘he travels fastest who travels alone’, conclusion. But by the perhaps excessively strict standards of its founders the city on the hill began to look less like Jerusalem than like a displaced Sodom or Gomorrah; and Bradford shook his head over the degeneracy of Plymouth, too.

So perhaps it was as well that the eyes of all people were directed elsewhere; but this, too, was a cause of distress and saddened John Winthrop before his death. First there was Laud: they had fled him. Then there was the Presbyterian Parliament: they defied it. Then Cromwell arose, an Independent, one of their own – and instead of adopting the New England way of compulsory Congregationalism, as exemplified in Plymouth, Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Haven, he took up the ideas of the black flock among them, Roger Williams’s sheep of Rhode Island, that hotbed of religious liberty! ‘Toleration’ was all the cry.
²⁴
The New England Puritans were rising to the peak of their political strength: Connecticut and New Haven were settled, and in 1652 Massachusetts asserted its dominion over the regions of New Hampshire and Maine to the north, where many of the ungodly had been rash enough to settle within reach of the saintly commonwealth’s long arm. In the same year it assumed one of the chief attributes of sovereignty and began to mint its own money. But to what avail? The errand into the wilderness had failed. Very success was corrupting the new Canaan from within; and the Puritans they had left behind were neglecting the lessons of Massachusetts orthodoxy. What could it matter to an English Independent that Master Thomas Shepard, the minister of Cambridge, Massachusetts, had declared it ‘Satan’s policy, to plead for an indefinite and boundless toleration’? To the men of Bunyan’s generation only the adoption of such a policy could save them from Bedford jail. To their eyes (some of them began to say so as early as 1643, when Roger Williams, seeking, successfully, to protect Rhode Island from Massachusetts expansionism, went to England for help) the compulsory orthodoxy of New England was cold and sterile. Later holders of this opinion were to talk of the ‘glacial age’ of the New England mind. The saga was over.

Had it nothing to show but anticlimax? The
diminuendo
of a commercial republic where the founders had intended to build the City of God? ‘Thus stands the case between God and us,’John Winthrop had boasted in 1630, ‘we are entered into Covenant with him for this work, we have taken out a Commission, the Lord hath given us leave to draw our own Articles, we
have professed to enterprise these Actions upon these and these ends, we have hereupon besought him of favour and blessing.’ He had earnestly warned his followers that there must be no backsliding, for fear of the Lord’s judgement; and he had promised them God’s blessing if they were faithful. Perhaps the promise was a presumptuous mistake. ‘Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.’ They had backslid; and yet, to judge by all earthly standards, God had blessed them. It was more than a little awkward and absurd. A sense of humiliating failure haunted the ministers at the end of the seventeenth century. New England was no longer the land of the covenant. They could take no comfort in its sublunar achievements: a high, and improving, standard of living for all; a free and stable society; a thriving life of the mind and spirit.
²⁵
Where was Zion?

Perhaps there was one answer which would have comforted them somewhat. At any rate it must be offered today. Puritanism, it must be said again, influenced the whole of English Protestantism, being only its most radical form. Its most characteristic note was one of intense introspection, intense concern with individual salvation. As it seeped through England and conquered America it deeply affected the lives of countless men and women, many of whom were anything but Puritans in the strict sense. The result was that, in spite of clerical jeremiads, the English and American character, at its best and most effective, was sober, respectable, self-reliant, energetic, content on the whole with decent, homely pleasures. Its dominant traits of earnestness and uprightness can be found as much in Jane Austen and Dr Johnson as in John Adams and Dr Franklin, and lay behind the greatest achievements of the Victorians. It was the most remarkable work of the English Reformation, and might, however reluctantly, have been accepted as a sufficient justification by those ministers who tried so earnestly to create a godly people. They well knew, after all, how inevitably far short of perfection all human endeavour must fall.

In America, the New England character became almost proverbial. We shall see it making the Revolution, the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution. Its greatness lay in its reasonableness, earnestness and zeal for righteousness; its weakness in a tendency towards hypocrisy, covetousness and self-righteousness. Through it Puritanism persisted into later times. The city on a hill failed; but it was one of greater authority even than John Winthrop’s who promised that ‘the Kingdom of Heaven is within you’. The course of American history would have given a Puritan reason to suppose that this promise, at least, had been kept.

We were happy when he first came. We first thought he came from the Light; but he comes like the dusk of the evening now, not like the dawn of the morning. He comes like a day that has passed, and night enters our future with him…

Plains Chieftain,
c
. 1870

Friends, it has been our misfortune to welcome the white man. We have been deceived. He brought with him some shining things that pleased our eyes; he brought weapons more effective than our own. Above all he brought the spirit-water that makes one forget old age, weakness and sorrow. But I wish to say to you that if you wish to possess these things for yourselves, you must begin anew and put away the wisdom of your fathers. You must lay up food and forget the hungry. When your house is built, your store-room filled, then look around for a neighbour whom you can take advantage of and seize all he has.

Chief Red Cloud of the Oglala Sioux

Like the miner’s canary, the Indian marks the shift from fresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere; and our treatment of Indians, even more than our treatment of other minorities, reflects the rise and fall of our democratic faith.

Felix S. Cohen, 1949

Virginia and Massachusetts exacted the space devoted to them here, for not only did they retain their primacy among the English settlements down to the American Revolution and beyond, but between them they perfectly illustrate, indeed epitomize, the great colonizing movement and its roots. But the sister settlements that followed them rapidly must not be forgotten. As England put forth her strength in the seventeenth century her colonies spread further along the Atlantic coast of North America, and flourished
in the West Indies. Massachusetts bred New Hampshire (finally created an independent province in 1692) as well as Connecticut and Rhode Island. The Dutch of New Amsterdam extinguished New Sweden (the future state of Delaware) only to fall themselves to English conquest in 1664, when New Amsterdam and New Netherland became the city and colony of New York. Further south three proprietary colonies were planted – ‘New Caesarea or New Jersey’ (1664), the work of Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret; Pennsylvania (1681), founded by William Perm to be a refuge for Quakers and to enrich his family; and Maryland (1632), founded by the first Lord Baltimore as a refuge (though it was not to be much used as such) for Catholics. Virginia sprouted North Carolina, on Albemarle Sound, first settled from the older colony during the 1650s, though its legal existence dates from 1663. South Carolina, on the other hand, though born legally of the same 1663 charter, acquired no settlers until 1670, when it began a thriving career. The last addition to this string of colonies was Georgia, founded in 1732, in part to serve as a place of rehabilitation for persons imprisoned for debt in England, partly as a plantation for the cultivation of silk, but chiefly as a buffer state against the Spanish in Florida and the French in Louisiana.