Chapter IV

OF THE SETTLEMENT OF THE NEW ENGLAND STATES.

Views of the New England States and Character determined by one’s
Church.—Partial Notions about Clocks, Nutmegs, Pumpkin Pies,
etc.—Getting an Historical Coach to one’s self.—Why the Puritans did
not hang up their Stockings on their first Christmas Eve.—Their
nearest Neighbors.—Indian Points and other Points.—Governor Carver and
Want of Meats.—Massasoit, and how he kept his Faith in-violate.—New
Hampshire on the Rampage.—Why Boston was begun, and why it is not
finished.—Roger Williams and his Providential Ways and
Doings.—Connecticut founded, although its Charter not found.—The Wind
against Cromwell.—Harvard College.—Vermont and her Ways and Means.

“Tell me,” says a witty Frenchman, “what time in the morning a man rises, and I will tell you his notions of the character of the Germans.” Tell us the kind of church a man attends, and we will undertake to give you his opinion of the character of the Puritan Pilgrims, and the objects and value of the New England settlements. Not more various are men’s religions than their New England convictions; as checkered and contrary as the black and white squares on a Scotch shawl. Some people, of pious trainings but of an agricultural turn of mind, hold the idea that New England came, like the wonderful coach in the story of Cinderella, from a pumpkin; and hence travel naturally to the conclusion that the principal mission of her people is to keep up Thanksgiving day.

Others run all their lives with the notion that the Yankee States were settled by a race of peripatetic traders,—a revival of the school of Aristotle,—let out in Greece, and taking a play-spell here. Their picture of New England would be a pedler, dipped like a tallow-candle in an economical, tight-fitting suit of tawny homespun, driving a wagon full of tin notions, clocks, and a variety of domestic nutmegs, artistically whittled out of bass-wood, singing Old Hundred, with a pitch-pipe close to his nose to keep it in tune. Others, on the contrary, regard it as a large, full-bearing orchard in autumn, laden with golden fruit, fall-pippins, pearmains, seek-no-furthers, russets, and spitzenbergs, supplying its owners, the neighborhood, and the distant market with their incomparable harvest. Fortunate for the historian, for debating-societies, and the magazines are these variegated opinions. They give a spiciness to New England, as if she were a tropical garden instead of a poor-man’s patch, fenced in with rocks and spiked down with long pegs to prevent the frost in the spring from heaving her up uncomfortably. They serve, like French cookery, to present the same dish simmering in various sauces under different aspects and names, and yet all from the same little market-basket.

Cooke, the comic actor, who hated to be crowded, once so successfully used upon a stage-driver his extraordinary power of changing the expression of his face,—getting in at one door of the coach, slipping out of the one opposite, and again presenting himself with a new style of visage,—that he took all the inside to himself. And so it has been with the New England character. It has so many phases that it requires almost the entire omnibus of American history to itself. One point is quite certain, that the first settlers had a hard place to land on, and a great many sharp Indian points to provide against after they had landed.

St. Augustine was fifty-five, Jamestown fourteen, and the baby Dutch settlement on Manhattan Island ten years of age, when the little English congregation which had passed thirteen years at Leyden in Holland,—stowed away in two small vessels, one of sixty and the other of one hundred and eighty tons,—stepped out of their cold cabins upon the colder rock of Plymouth. It was four days before Christmas; but for want of good fireplaces they did not hang up their stockings. It was as much as they could do to keep from hanging themselves. Their nearest white neighbors were at Port Royal, Nova Scotia, five hundred miles distant,—a trifle too far away to invite New-Year’s calls.

Most of the party were obliged to wade on shore, thus breaking the ice for those who followed; the spray of the sea freezing as it fell upon them, making them quite ice-clad, in fact almost as shaggy and pointed as their inside purposes and character.

They carried on shore one dead body, the only one who had died on the voyage of one hundred and six days; the first planting in that field, which in time, like the rest of the world, was to be claimed as God’s acre.

LANDING OF THE PILGRIM FATHERS AND MOTHERS.
(p. 118)
]

The soil upon which they settled bore more charters, Indian arrows, and gravestones than pumpkins or corn; and even two years after the landing, we are told that the stock on hand of the latter was so small that only five kernels were allowed for each private,—an allowance which, since the great Rebellion, seems incredibly small.

There was a Carver among the party, and, being a sharp fellow, he was appointed Governor; but as there was but little meat to be sliced,—deer being scarce and high priced,—and the Indians seldom giving any quarter, he soon pined away and died. Cape Cod was not far distant, but the emigrants being without boats, the fish, especially without potatoes, were poor picking. A few years later, however, and there were large fishing-parties made up, which not only took in fish, but each other, by hook and by crook. The grapes of Martha’s Vineyard, at the time of which we speak, hung so high as to be very sour. Besides the Puritans, it is well known, set their faces against the cup, as they did against kissing. The modern town of Dux-bury, which nudges Plymouth on the east, was then too young to afford much game, even for the long reaches of Miles Standish, who was obliged to content himself with such small shooting as the Narragansetts afforded.

Massasoit, however, was the fast friend of the settlers, and made a treaty which, in the bluest times, he always kept in-violate.

In 1629 a patent was received from that accomplished penman Charles I., incorporating “The Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay, in New England”; which eventually proved to be, what most patents are, not worth the paper it was written on. New Hampshire and a part of Maine, included in this patent, was as early as 1622 sold out to two enterprising young gentlemen, Sir Ferdinand Gorges and Captain John Mason; but after an experiment of nineteen years, these royal speculators resold their state rights to Massachusetts, which held on to them until 1680, when Charles II., in order to make a place for a friend and to encourage lawsuits about titles in the idle courts, erected New Hampshire into a separate Province, independent of Massachusetts, but dependent on himself.

Lying under cold snow-white sheets, with jealous neighbors, the French settlers of Canada and Acadia, ready to put pins in the youngster and keep her crying, and if possible to stunt her growth, Maine was longest in her cradle of any of the infant settlements. As early as 1602 some Frenchmen landed on her coast, but only remained long enough to make a few eyelet-holes in that watery frill which the busy but chill fingers of the Atlantic has wrought upon her eastern hem. It was reserved for the sturdier Saxon race to take the infant in hand, and, by hardier treatment, to bring her up to robuster strength. The first serious effort was made in 1622. That court pet, Gorges, obtained, in 1639, a charter, which not only covered the present State, but lapped over into the borders of Massachusetts. The latter resented this interference with her own by making counter-claims, and in 1652 insisted upon taking the child under its exclusive protection. The contest, carried into the English courts, outlived of course its original promoters, but was at last, in 1677, terminated, to the astonishment of the suitors and the disgust of the lawyers. The custody of the infant, now grown to be a stripling, was awarded to Massachusetts, which, always looking after the Maine chance, got a most obstreperous minor in charge.

In 1630 a band of eight hundred and forty bodies and souls, led by John Winthrop, and tempted by a spring of good water, settled on the peninsula of Shawmut, and began Boston, which, we are glad to say, is not finished yet. May it never be; but, ever growing, may it carry on wagon-making as successfully as in former days, furnishing hubs for those covered transportation carts which trundle westward, and which, if allowed to stand still over night, swarm into a new colony the next morning.

The following year a miniature church and state experiment was made in the Massachusetts settlement, by limiting the eligibility to civil office to church-members, whether civil or not.

The first log-cabin builders, who had themselves fled from the knife of the law, whetted it to a keen edge and turned it upon their fellow-sufferers, who differed from them in their religious or moral sentiments. Profane swearing, tippling, taking interest on loans of money, and wearing expensive jewelry became legal crimes, among those who had suppressed with Spartan rigor their exercise in themselves and their families. The next generation, in 1658, could not tolerate drab coats or drab principles, and sought to put down the new fashions by hanging up several of their owners in them. The wood-colored styles multiplied of course, notwithstanding the crimson mode of dealing with them,—a mode which, whenever mentioned, brings up a flush on every fair New England cheek to this day. The flush is not likely to be left unsummoned so long as the enemies of New England have any ink left, or so long as her own gifted sons preserve in choicest amber the well-embalmed and dramatic specimens.

In 1635 Roger Williams, illuminated by principles of religious toleration, unkindled as yet in the Puritan settlements of Massachusetts Bay, Salem, and Boston, carried his softly burning torch out of the reach of the chill breath of the General Court, which sought in vain to blow out the wavering flame.

He pitched his tent on the Blackstone River where it widens into Narragansett Bay, and there grafted such a lovely little bud of religious equality upon the old trunk of settled law, that, swelling under Providence into the State of Rhode Island, it has become one of the finest fruit-trees in our American orchard. Some people, of aquatic notions and learning their geography in the pitching hold of a yacht, have erroneously supposed that Rhode Island was included in the state of Newport. Such notions rest on very sandy foundations, and are no more to be trusted than the speculations of the idly learned about the round tower of that resort for capital sea-bathing.

The settlement of Rhode Island, like the other American plantations, was kept alive and stirring by Indian wars; but, aided by the Narragansetts, she succeeded at last, after attempting to bury their hatchets, in burying the Pequods themselves, leaving not one to perpetuate the seed.

Meanwhile, the valley of the Connecticut, visited by exploring parties from Plymouth Colony under the younger Winthrop, and by heavy flanked Dutchmen from the island of Manhattan, had also attracted attention to its valuable real estate; and its lots of course were mapped out and deeded in that first-class broker’s office, the Court of Charles I., situated in London.

Wethersfield, although it then had no onions to affect their eyes, made the mouths of a party of emigrants, who went there under Hooker in June, 1636, to water pleasantly, as they gaped over its broad meadow-lands, shaded with huge trees, and dipping their heavy grasses into the wide and flowing river.

But these huge trees at Wethersfield and Windsor, under which the infant plantations of Connecticut were made, were less valuable than the large old oak at Hartford, which afterwards became more famous for standing mute, and hiding its secrets, than the talking oak of Tennyson.

Ten years later, in 1638, New Haven was founded, built from the first on the square; its long sand-reaches cooled in the shade of branches that waved frequent welcomes to successive bands of settlers. But a shadier event for Charles I. occurred this year in England, in the detention of John Hampden and Oliver Cromwell, with all their traps and plunder, after it and they had been safely stowed away under hatches on board ship.

How little do we know what’s in the wind? Had it blown that day southwest instead of northeast, Charles I. might have worn his handsome but worthless head many years longer; the Stuart family to-day might perhaps be occupying the state chair of Victoria and the heavy Hanoverians; and the descendants of Messrs. Cromwell and Hampden be keeping store in some of our villages, or even got so low as to become aldermen, members of assembly, or even descended to the House of Representatives.

The same year John Harvard left a donation of three thousand dollars to a select school, founded two years previously at Newtown, which took his money and name. From this small, yet early laid foundation, Harvard College has since got up several Storeys; and although Sparks have been applied to the edifice, it still stands, like a tower set on a hill, diffusing its learned light to Holmes happy and genial, reaching upward to Longfellow, and even illuminating men Whittier than he.

We have now briefly traced the settlements of five of the New England States, bringing down their history to 1643, when, with the exception of spunky Rhode Island, they formed their first union against the witty but out-witted French of Acadia on the northeast, the trading, solid Dutch of Manhattan, and the universally hostile Indian tribes, whose enmity now became in the inverse ratio of their hunting-grounds. The sixth of these States, Vermont, came late and strugglingly among her brothers and sisters. Both New York and New Hampshire pouted and grumbled at the appearance of the new-comer, and threatened to smother her in the cradle. But the child, fed on simple food, and breathing the healthy air of the Green Mountains, grew apace after its birth in 1724, and got such a good Constitution in 1777, that she at length acquired all her rights; and what by fishing in the Connecticut, hunting among her evergreen hills, and keeping to her mutton and her last, she looked as she sat in the old continental schoolhouse as fresh, blooming, and thrifty as any. Vermont early sent away her surplus beef and swine, but she kept plenty of pluck at home.

It is sometimes said that if the Western States had been first discovered, New England would never have been settled at all; but this seeming reproach upon the hard and stern features of New England soil and climate warms into a compliment when we see what fabrics of iron, cotton, and woollen have been conjured from her narrow means, what wealth dangles from her hooks, what oil she gets without blubbering, what a clean white marble face she puts on our houses and stores, and what nutmegs and tropical wonders she picks up from her beeches and haze-le bushes, and what seasoning she distributes to spice our tables with literary condiments.