the Puritans established a government in America such as the laws of natural justice warranted, and such as the statutes and common law of England did not warrant; and that was done by men who still acknowledged a limited allegiance to the parent state. The Episcopalians declared themselves the enemies of the party, and waged against it a war of extermination; Puritanism excluded them from its asylum. Roger Williams, the apostle of "soul-liberty," weakened civil independence by impairing its unity; and he was expelled, even though Massachusetts bore good testimony to his spotless virtues. Wheelwright and his friends, in their zeal for liberty of speech, were charged with forgetting their duty as citizens, and they also were exiled. The Anabaptist, who could not be relied upon as an ally, was watched as possibly a foe. The Quakers denounced the worship of New England as an abomination, and its government as treason; and they were excluded on pain of death. The fanatic for Calvinism was a fanatic for liberty; and, in the moral warfare for freedom, his creed was his most faithful counsellor and his never-failing support. For "New England was a religious plantation, not a plantation for trade. The profession of the purity of doctrine, worship, and discipline was written on her forehead." "We all," says the confederacy in one of the two oldest of American written constitutions, "came into these parts of America. to enjoy the liberties of the gospel in purity and peace." "He that made religion as twelve, and the world as thirteen, had not the spirit of a true New England man." Religion was the object of the emigrants, and it was their consolation. With this the wounds of the outcast were healed, and the tears of exile sweetened. Of all contemporary sects, the Puritans were the most free from credulity, and, in their zeal for reform, pushed their regulations to what some would consider a skeptical extreme. So many superstitions had been bundled up with every venerable institution of Europe that ages have not yet dislodged them all. The Puritans at once emancipated themselves from the thraldom to observances. They established a worship purely spiritual. They stood in prayer. To them the elements remained but wine and bread, and in communing they would not kneel. They invoked no saints; they raised no altar; they adored no crucifix; they kissed no book; they asked no absolution; they paid no tithes; they saw in the priest nothing more sacred than a man; ordination was no more than an approbation of the officer, which might be expressed by the brethren just as well as by other ministers; the church, as a place of worship, was to them but a meetinghouse; they dug no graves in consecrated earth; unlike their posterity, they married without a minister, and buried the dead without a prayer. Witchcraft had not been made the subject of skeptical consideration; and, in the years in which Scotland sacrificed hecatombs to the delusion, there were three victims in New England. Dark crimes, that seemed without a motive, may have been pursued under that name; I find one record of a trial for witchcraft where the prisoner was proved a murderess. On every subject but religion the mildness of Puritan legislation corresponded to the popular character of Puritan doctrines. Hardly a nation of Europe has as yet made its criminal law so humane as that of early New England. A crowd of offences was at one sweep brushed from the catalogue of capital crimes. The idea was never received that the forfeiture of life may be demanded for the protection of property; the punishment for theft, for burglary, and highway robbery was far more mild than the penalties imposed even by modern American legislation. The habits of the young promoted real chastity. The sexes lived in social intimacy, and were more pure than the recluse. Marriage was a civil contract; and under the old charter of Massachusetts all controversies respecting it were determined by the court of assistants which decreed divorces especially for adultery or desertion. The rule in Connecticut was not different. Separation from bed and board without the dissolution of the marriage, an anomaly which may punish the innocent more than the guilty, was abhorrent to every thought of that day. The sanctity of the nuptial vow was protected by the penalty of death. If in this respect the laws were more severe, in another they were more lenient than modern manners approve. The girl whom youth and affection and the promise of marriage betrayed into weak ness was censured, pitied, and forgiven; the law compelled the seducer of innocence to marry the person who had imposed every obligation by the concession of every right. The law implies an extremely pure community; in no other could it have found a place in the statute-book. The benevolence of the Puritans appears from other examples. Their thoughts were always fixed on posterity. Domestic discipline was highly valued; the law was severe against the undutiful child; and it was severe against a faithless parent. Till 1654, the laws did not permit any man's person to be kept in prison for debt, except when there was an appearance of some estate which the debtor would not produce. Even the brute creation was not forgotten; and cruelty toward animals was a civil offence. The sympathies of the colonists were wide; a feeling for Protestant Germany is as old as emigration; and during the thirty years' war the people of New England held fasts and offered prayers for the success of their German brethren. The earliest years of the residence of Puritans in America were years of great hardship and affliction; this short season of distress was promptly followed by abundance and happiness. The people struck root in the soil immediately. They were, from the first, industrious, enterprising, and frugal; and affluence followed of course. When persecution ceased in England, there were already in New England "thousands who would not change their place for any other in the world;" and they were tempted in vain with invitations to the Bahama isles, to Ireland, to Jamaica, to Trinidad. The purity of morals completes the picture of colonial felicity. "As Ireland will not brook venomous beasts, so will not that land vile livers." One might dwell there "from year to year, and not see a drunkard, or hear an oath, or meet a beggar." As a consequence, the average duration of life in New England, compared with Europe of that day, was doubled; and, of all who were born into the world, more than two in ten, full four in nineteen, attained the age of seventy. Of those who lived beyond ninety, the proportion, as compared with European tables of longevity, was still more remarkable. I have dwelt the longer on the character of the early Puritans of New England, for they were the parents of one third the whole white population of the United States as it was in 1834. Within the first fifteen years-and there was never afterward any considerable increase from England-we have seen that there came over twenty-one thousand two hundred persons, or four thousand families. Their descendants were, in 1834, not far from four millions. Each family had multiplied, on the average, to one thousand souls. To New York and Ohio, where they then constituted half the population, they carried the Puritan system of free schools; and their example is spreading it through the civilized world. Historians have loved to eulogize the manners and virtues, the glory and the benefits, of chivalry. Puritanism accomplished for mankind far more. If it had the sectarian crime of intolerance, chivalry had the vices of dissoluteness. The knights were brave from gallantry of spirit; the Puritans, from the fear of God. The knights obeyed the law of honor; the Puritans hearkened to the voice of duty. The knights were proud of loyalty; the Puritans, of liberty. The knights did homage to monarchs, in whose smile they beheld honor, whose rebuke was disgrace; the Puritans, in their disdain of ceremony, would not bow at the name of Jesus, nor bend the knee to the King of kings. Chivalry delighted in outward show, favored pleasure, multiplied amusements, and degraded the human race by an exclusive respect for the privileged classes; Puritanism bridled the passions, commanded the virtues of self-denial, and rescued the name of man from dishonor. The former valued courtesy; the latter, justice. The former adorned society by graceful refinements; the latter founded national grandeur on universal education. The institutions of chivalry were subverted by the gradually increasing weight and knowledge and opulence of the industrious classes; the Puritans, rallying upon those classes, planted in their hearts the undying principles of democratic liberty. The age of Puritanism was passing away. Time was silently softening its asperities, and the revolutions of England prepared an era in its fortunes. Massachusetts never acknowledged Richard Cromwell; it read in the aspect of parties the impending restoration. |