PROSPERITY OF MASSACHUSETTS.

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council about New England, were, for the present, as CHAP. fruitless as the inquiries how nutmegs and cinnamon might be naturalized in Jamaica.

Massachusetts prospered by the neglect. "It is,"

said Sir Joshua Child, in his discourse on trade, “the 1670 most prejudicial plantation of Great Britain; the frugality, industry, and temperance of its people, and the happiness of their laws and institutions, promise them long life, and a wonderful increase of people, riches, and power." They enjoyed the blessings of selfgovernment and virtual independence. The villages of New England were already the traveller's admiration; the acts of navigation were not regarded; no custom-house was established. Massachusetts, which now stretched to the Kennebeck, possessed a widelyextended trade; acting as the carrier for nearly all the colonies, and sending its ships into the most various climes. Vessels from Spain and Italy, from France and Holland, might be seen in Boston harbor, commerce began to pour out wealth on the colonists. generous nature employed wealth liberally; after the great fire in London, even the miserable in the mother country had received large contributions. It shows the character of the people, that the town of Portsmouth agreed for seven years to give sixty pounds a year to the college, which shared in the prosperity of Boston, and continued to afford "schismaticks to the church;" while the colony was reputed to abound in "rebels to the king." Villages extended; prosperity was universal. Beggary was unknown; theft was If "strange new fashions" prevailed among "the younger sort of women," if "superfluous ribbons" were worn on their apparel, at least "musicians by trade, and dancing schools," w re not fostered. It

rare.

A

XII.

CHAP. was still remembered that the people were led into the wilderness by Aaron, not less than by Moses; and, in spite of the increasing spirit of inquiry and toleration, it was resolved to retain the Congregational churches "in their purest and most athletick constitution.” 1

Amidst the calmness of such prosperity, many of the patriarchs of the colony,-the hospitable, sincere, but 1667 persecuting Wilson; the uncompromising Davenport, 1370 ever zealous for Calvinism, and zealous for independence, who founded New Haven on a rock, and, having at first preached beneath the shade of a forest tree, now lived to behold the country full of convenient 1671. churches; the tolerant Willoughby, who had pleaded 1672. for the Baptists; the incorruptible Bellingham, precise

in his manners, and rigid in his principles of independence ;—these, and others, the fathers of the people, lay down in peace, closing a career of virtue in the placid calmness of hope, and lamenting nothing so much as that their career was finished too soon for them to witness the fulness of New England's glory.

This prosperity itself portended danger; for the increase of the English alarmed the race of red men, who could not change their habits, and who saw themselves deprived of their usual means of subsistence. It is difficult to form exact opinions on the population of the several colonies in this earlier period of their history; the colonial accounts are incomplete; and those which were furnished by emissaries from England are extravagantly false. Perhaps no great error will be committed, if we suppose the white population of New England, in 1675, to have been fifty-five thousand

1 Hutchinson, i. 251.

2

2 The account in Hutch. Coll. 484, has been very often repeated. It is worthless. The population

and wealth of the country are described in hyperboles, that there may be the greater opportunity for obtaining revenues from the colonists.

POPULATION OF NEW ENGLAND IN 1675.

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souls. Of these, Plymouth may have contained not CHAP. many less than seven thousand; Connecticut, nearly fourteen thousand; Massachusetts proper, more than 1675 twenty-two thousand; and Maine, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, each perhaps four thousand. The settlements were chiefly agricultural communities, planted near the sea-side, from New Haven to Pemaquid. The beaver trade, even more than traffic in lumber and fish, had produced the villages beyond the Piscataqua; yet in Maine, as in New Hampshire, there was "a great trade in deal boards." Most of the towns were insulated settlements near the ocean, on rivers, which were employed to drive "the sawmills," then described as a "late invention;" and cultivation had not extended far into the interior. Haverhill, on the Merrimack, was a frontier town; from Connecticut, emigrants had ascended as far as the rich meadows of Deerfield and Northfield; but to the west, Berkshire was a wilderness; Westfield was the remotest plantation. Between the towns on Connecticut River and the cluster of towns near Massachusetts Bay, Lancaster and Brookfield were the solitary abodes of Christians in the desert. The government of Massachusetts extended to the Kennebeck, and included more than half the population of New England; the confederacy of the colonies had also Hazard been renewed, in anticipation of dangers.

The number of the Indians of that day hardly amounted to thirty thousand in all New England west of the St. Croix. Of these, perhaps about five thousand dwelt in the territory of Maine; New Hampshire may have hardly contained three thousand; and Massachusetts, with Plymouth, never from the first peopled by many Indians, seems to have had less than eight thousand. In Connecticut and Rhode Island, never

ii. 511

throp, i.

105. Trumbull, i.

40.

Wil

son, i.

483.

CHAP. depopulated by wasting sickness, the Mohegans, the XII. Narragansetts, the Pokanokets, and kindred tribes, 1675. had multiplied their villages round the sea-shore, the inlets, and the larger ponds, which increased their Win- scanty supplies by furnishing abundance of fish. Yet, of these, the exaggerated estimates melt away, when subjected to criticism. To Connecticut, rumor, in the liam days of the elder Winthrop, gave three or four thouGalla- sand warrior Indians; and there may have been half of the larger number: the Narragansetts, like so many other tribes, boasted of their former grandeur, but "Hist. they could not bring into action a thousand bowmen. Thus, therefore, west of the Piscataqua, there eral As- were probably about fifty thousand whites and hardly in 1680, twenty-five thousand Indians; while east of the same mers, stream, there were about four thousand whites, and perhaps more than that number of red men.

tin, 36,

37.

Gookin.

and Holmes,

in Mass.

Coll. i.

and ix. Answer of Gen

sembly

In Chal

308

A sincere attempt had been made to convert the natives, and win them to the regular industry of civilized life. The ministers of the early emigration were fired with a zeal as pure as it was fervent; they longed to redeem these "wrecks of humanity," by planting in their hearts the seeds of conscious virtue, and gathering them into permanent villages.

No pains were spared to teach them to read and write; and, in a short time, a larger proportion of the Massachusetts Indians could do so, than recently of the inhabitants of Russia. Some of them spoke and wrote English tolerably well. Foremost among these early missionaries—the morning star of missionary enterprise-was John Eliot, whose benevolence almost amounted to the inspiration of genius. An Indian grammar was a pledge of his earnestness; the pledge was redeemed by his preparing and publishing a trans

THE PRAYING INDIANS.

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.ation of the whole Bible into the Massachusetts dialect. CHAP His actions, his thoughts, his desires, all wore the hues of disinterested love. His uncontrollable charity welled out in a perpetual fountain.

Eliot mixed with the Indians. He spoke to them of God, and of the soul, and explained the virtues of self-denial. He became their lawgiver. He taught the women to spin, the men to dig the ground; he established for them simple forms of government; and, in spite of menaces from their priests and chieftains, he instructed them in his own religious faith, and not without success. Groups of Indians used to gather round him as round a father, and, now that their minds were awakened to reflection, often perplexed him with their questions. The minds of the philosopher and the savage are not so wide apart as is often imagined, they both alike find it difficult to solve the problem of existence. The world is divided between materialists

and-spiritualists. "What is a spirit?" said the Indians of Massachusetts to their apostle. "Can the soul be inclosed in iron so that it cannot escape ? ”—“ When Christ arose, whence came his soul?" Every clan had some vague conceptions of immortality.' “Shall I know you in heaven?" said an inquiring red man. "Our little children have not sinned; when they die, whither do they go?"-" When such die as never heard of Christ, where do they go?"-" Do they in heaven dwell in houses, and what do they do?"—“ Do they know things done here on earth?" The origin of moral evil has engaged the minds of the most subtle. "Why," demanded the natives on the banks of the Charles, "why did not God give all men good hearts ? " "Since God is all-powerful, why did not God kıll

Day-breaking, if not Sun-rising, of the Gospel, 7