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Thomas Hooker (search for this): chapter 2
ister's black Veil and The Scarlet letter. Yet it must be said that men like Hooker and Cotton, Shepard and Norton, had every instinct and capacity for leadership. With the notable exception of Hooker, such men were aristocrats, holding John Winthrop's opinion that Democracy is, among most civil nations, accounted the meanest lerical architects of the Cambridge Platform. Yet no one would today call Thomas Hooker a liberal in religion, pioneer in political liberty though he proved to be.Sodom and Gomorrah they burnt in brimstone and they shall burn in hell. One of Hooker's successors has called him a son of thunder and a son of consolation by turns.an to his literary power. Yet even that was thought commanding. Trained, like Hooker and Shepard, at Emmanuel College, and fresh from the rectorship of St. Botolph'the flourishing town of Providence in 1684. He had already outlived Cotton and Hooker, Shepard and Winthrop, by more than thirty years. Inevitably men began, toward
Dudley (search for this): chapter 2
the nervous little parson. But no living poet can move his readers to the fascinated horror once felt by the Puritans as they followed Wigglesworth's relentless gaze into the future of the soul's destiny. Historical curiosity may still linger, of course, over other verse-writers of the period. Anne Bradstreet's poems, for instance, are not without grace and womanly sweetness, in spite of their didactic themes and portentous length. But this lady, born in England, the daughter of Governor Dudley and later the wife of Governor Bradstreet, chose to imitate the more fantastic of the moralizing poets of England and France. There is little in her hundreds of pages which seems today the inevitable outcome of her own experience in the New World. For readers who like roughly mischievous satire, of a type initiated in England by Bishop Hall and Donne, there is The simple Cobbler of Agawam written by the roving clergyman Nathaniel Ward. But he lived only a dozen years in Massachusetts
Daniel Gookin (search for this): chapter 2
The noble savage note may be found in John Rolfe, the husband of Pocahontas, with whom, poor fellow, his best thoughts are so intangled and enthralled. Other Virginians, like Smith, Strachey, and Percy, show close naturalistic observation, touched with the abounding Elizabethan zest for novelties. To Alexander Whitaker, however, these naked slaves of the devil were not so simple as some have supposed. He yearned and labored over their souls, as did John Eliot and Roger Williams and Daniel Gookin of New England. In the Pequot War of 1637 the grim settlers resolved to be rid of that tribe once for all, and the narratives of Captain Edward Johnson and Captain John Mason, who led in the storming and slaughter at the Indians' Mystic Fort, are as piously relentless as anything in the Old Testament. Cromwell at Drogheda, not long after, had soldiers no more merciless than these exterminating Puritans, who wished to plough their fields henceforth in peace. A generation later the sto
George Percy (search for this): chapter 2
case it is admirable writing, flexible, sensitive, shrewdly observant. Whitaker, the apostle of Virginia, mingles, like many a missionary of the present day, the style of an exhorter with a keen discernment of the traits of the savage mind. George Percy, fresh from Northumberland, tells in a language as simple as Defoe's the piteous tale of five months of illness and starvation, watched by those wild and cruel Pagans. John Pory, of the strong potations, who thinks that good company is the son of the two races and the doom of the native. The noble savage note may be found in John Rolfe, the husband of Pocahontas, with whom, poor fellow, his best thoughts are so intangled and enthralled. Other Virginians, like Smith, Strachey, and Percy, show close naturalistic observation, touched with the abounding Elizabethan zest for novelties. To Alexander Whitaker, however, these naked slaves of the devil were not so simple as some have supposed. He yearned and labored over their souls,
Anne Bradstreet (search for this): chapter 2
ng poet can move his readers to the fascinated horror once felt by the Puritans as they followed Wigglesworth's relentless gaze into the future of the soul's destiny. Historical curiosity may still linger, of course, over other verse-writers of the period. Anne Bradstreet's poems, for instance, are not without grace and womanly sweetness, in spite of their didactic themes and portentous length. But this lady, born in England, the daughter of Governor Dudley and later the wife of Governor Bradstreet, chose to imitate the more fantastic of the moralizing poets of England and France. There is little in her hundreds of pages which seems today the inevitable outcome of her own experience in the New World. For readers who like roughly mischievous satire, of a type initiated in England by Bishop Hall and Donne, there is The simple Cobbler of Agawam written by the roving clergyman Nathaniel Ward. But he lived only a dozen years in Massachusetts, and his satirical pictures are scarcel
John Harvard (search for this): chapter 2
ck Veil and The Scarlet letter. Yet it must be said that men like Hooker and Cotton, Shepard and Norton, had every instinct and capacity for leadership. With the notable exception of Hooker, such men were aristocrats, holding John Winthrop's opinion that Democracy is, among most civil nations, accounted the meanest and worst form of government. They were fiercely intolerant. The precise reason for the Hooker migration from Cambridge to Hartford in 1636-the very year of the founding of Harvard -was prudently withheld, but it is now thought to be the instinct of escape from the clerical architects of the Cambridge Platform. Yet no one would today call Thomas Hooker a liberal in religion, pioneer in political liberty though he proved to be. His extant sermons have the steady stroke of a great hammer, smiting at the mind and heart. Others because they have felt the heavy hand of God . . . upon these grounds they build their hopes: I have had my hell in this life, and I hope to ha
True Relation (search for this): chapter 2
Chapter 2: the first colonial literature The simplest and oldest group of colonial writings is made up of records of exploration and adventure. They are like the letters written from California in 1849 to the folks back East. Addressed to home-keeping Englishmen across the sea, they describe the new world, explain the present situation of the colonists, and express their hopes for the future. Captain John Smith's True Relation, already alluded to, is the typical production of this class: a swift marching book, full of eager energy, of bluff and breezy picturesqueness, and of triumphant instinct for the main chance. Like most of the Elizabethans, he cannot help poetizing in his prose. Cod-fishing is to him a sport ; and what sport doth yeald a more pleasing content, and lesse hurt or charge then angling with a hooke, and crossing the sweete ayre from Isle to Isle. over the silent streams of a calme Sea? But the gallant Captain is also capable of very plain speech, Cromwel
Samuel Lincoln (search for this): chapter 2
is in matter, but he writes throughout as a ruler of men should write, with decent plainness and manly freedom. His best known pages, justly praised by Tyler and other historians of American thought, contain his speech before the General Court in 1645 on the nature of true liberty. No paragraphs written in America previous to the Revolution would have given more pleasure to Abraham Lincoln, but it is to be feared that Lincoln never saw Governor Winthrop's book, though his own ancestor, Samuel Lincoln of Hinglam, lived under Winthrop's jurisdiction. The theory of government held by the dominant party of the first two generations of New England pioneers has often been called a theocracy, that is to say, a government according to the Word of God as expounded and enforced by the clergy. The experiment was doomed to ultimate failure, for it ran counter to some of the noblest instincts of human nature. But its administration was in the hands of able men. The power of the clergy was w
Francis Parkman (search for this): chapter 2
d. Of all the colonial writings of the seventeenth century, those that have lost least of their interest through the lapse of years are narratives of struggles with the Indians. The image of the bloody savage has always hovered in the background of the American imagination. Our boys and girls have played Indian from the beginning, and the actual Indian is still found, as for three hundred years past, upon the frontier fringe of our civilization. Novelists like Cooper, historians like Parkman, poets like Longfellow, have dealt with the rich material offered by the life of the aborigines, but the long series begins with the scribbled story of colonists. Here are comedy and tragedy, plain narratives of trading and travel, missionary zeal and triumphs; then the inevitable alienation of the two races and the doom of the native. The noble savage note may be found in John Rolfe, the husband of Pocahontas, with whom, poor fellow, his best thoughts are so intangled and enthralled.
Oliver Cromwell (search for this): chapter 2
an unkindly one. He seems to have shared some of the opinions of Anne Hutchinson, though he pronounced the sentence of admonition against her, says Winthrop, with much zeal and detestation of her errors. Hawthorne, in one of his ironic moods, might have done justice to this scene. Cotton was at heart too liberal for his r61e of Primate, and fate led him to persecute a man whose very name has become a symbol of victorious tolerance, Roger Williams. Williams, known today as a friend of Cromwell, Milton, and Sir Harry Vane, had been exiled from Massachusetts for maintaining that the civil power had no jurisdiction over conscience. This doctrine was fatal to the existence of a theocratic state dominated by the church. John Cotton was perfectly logical in enlarging Roger Williams into the wilderness, but he showed less than his usual discretion in attacking the quick-tempered Welshman in pamphlets. It was like asking Hotspur if he would kindly consent to fight. Back and forth th
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