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Chapter 18:
The result Thus far.
THUS have we traced, almost exclusively from con-
temporary documents and records, the colonization of the twelve oldest states of our Union.
At the period of the great
European revolution of 1688, they contained not very many beyond two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom
Massachusetts, with
Plymouth and
Maine, may have had forty-four thousand;
New Hampshire and
Rhode Island, with
Providence, each six thousand;
Connecticut, from seventeen to twenty thousand; that is, all
New England, seventy-five thousand souls;
1 New York, not less than twenty thousand;
New Jersey, half as many;
Pennsylvania and Del-aware, perhaps twelve thousand;
Maryland, twentyfive thousand;
Virginia, fifty thousand, or more; and the two Carolinas, which then included the soil of
Georgia, probably not less than eight thousand souls.
The emigration of the fathers of these twelve commonwealths, with the planting of the principles on which they rested, though, like the introduction of Christianity
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into
Rome, but little regarded by contemporary
writers, was the most momentous event of the seventeenth century.
The elements of our country, such as she exists to-day, were already there.
Of the institutions of the Old World, monarchy had no motive to emigrate, and was present only by its shadow; in the proprietary governments, by the shadow of a shadow.
The feudal aristocracy had accomplished its mission in
Europe; it could not gain new life among the equal hardships of the wilderness; in at least four of the twelve colonies, it did not originally exist at all, and, in the rest, had scarcely a monument except in the forms of holding property.
Priestcraft did not emigrate; by the steadfast attraction of interest, it was retained in the Old World; to the forests of
America, religion came as a companion; the
American mind never bowed to an idolatry of forms; and there was not a prelate in the whole English part of the continent.
The municipal corporations of the
European commercial world, the close intrenchments of burghers against the landed aristocracy, could not be transferred to our shores, where no baronial castles demanded the concerted opposition of guilds.
Nothing came from
Europe but a free people.
The people, separating itself from all other elements of previous civilization; the people, self-confiding and industrious; the people, wise by all traditions that favored popular happiness,— the people alone broke away from
European influence, and in the New World laid the foundations of our republic,
Plebeian, though ingenuous the stock
From which her graces and her honors sprung.
The people alone were present in power.
Like
Moses,
they had escaped from
Egyptian bondage to the wilderness,
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that God might there give them the pattern
of the tabernacle.
Like the favored evangelist, the exiles, in their western
Patmos, listened to the angel that dictated the new gospel of freedom.
Overwhelmed in
Europe, popular liberty, like the fabled fountain of the sacred
Arethusa, gushed forth profusely in remoter fields.
Of the nations of the
European world, the chief emigration was from that Germanic race most famed for the love of personal independence.
The immense majority of American families were not of ‘the high folk of
Normandie,’ but were of ‘the low men,’ who were Saxons.
This is true of
New England; it is true of the south.
Shall the Virginians be described in a word?
They were Anglo-Saxons in the woods again, with the inherited culture and intelligence of the seventeenth century.
‘The major part of the house of burgesses now consisted of
Virginians that never saw a town.’
The Anglo-
Saxon mind, in its serenest nationality, neither distorted by fanaticism, nor subdued by superstition, nor wounded by persecution, nor excited by new ideas, but fondly cherishing the active instinct for personal freedom, secure possession, and legislative power, such as belonged to it before the reformation, and existed independent of the reformation, had made its dwelling-place in the empire of
Powhatan.
With consistent firmness of character, the Virginians welcomed legislative power; displaced an unpopular governor; at the overthrow of monarchy, established the freest government by happy intuition; rebelled against the politics of the Stuarts; and, uneasy at the royalist principles which prevailed in its forming aristocracy, soon manifested the tendency of the age at the polls ‘The inclinations of the country,’ wrote
Spotswood,
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when the generation born during the period of
Bacon's
rebellion had grown to maturity, ‘are rendered mysterious by a new and unaccountable humor, which hath 1710 obtained in several counties, of excluding the gentlemen from being burgesses, and choosing only persons of mean figure and character.’
But
Spotswood, a royalist, a High Churchman, a traveller, reverenced the virtues of the people.
‘I will do justice to this country,’ he writes to the bishop of
London—and his evidence is without suspicion of a bias; ‘I have observed here less swearing and prophaneness, less drunkenness and debauchery, less uncharitable feuds and animosities, and less knaverys and villanys, than in any part of the world where my lot has been.’
Of the systems of philosophy of the Old World, the colonists, including their philosophy in their religion, as the people up to that time had always done, were neither skeptics nor sensualists, but Christians.
The school that bows to the senses as the sole interpreter of truth, had little share in colonizing our
America.
The colonists from
Maine to
Carolina, the adventurous companions of
Smith, the
Puritan felons that freighted the fleet of
Winthrop, the
Quaker outlaws that fled from jails with a Newgate prisoner as their sovereign,—all had faith in God and in the soul.
The system which had been revealed in Judea,—the system which combines and perfects the symbolic wisdom of the Orient and the reflective genius of
Greece,—the system, conforming to reason, yet kindling enthusiasm; always hastening reform, yet always conservative; proclaiming absolute equality among men, yet not suddenly abolishing the unequal institutions of society; guarantying absolute freedom, yet invoking the inexorable restrictions of duty in the highest degree theoretical, and yet in
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the highest degree practical; awakening the inner man
to a consciousness of his destiny, and yet adapted with exact harmony to the outward world; at once divine and humane,—this system was professed in every part of our widely-extended country, and cradled our freedom.
Our fathers were not only Christians; they were, even in
Maryland by a vast majority, elsewhere almost unanimously, Protestants.
Now the Protestant reformation, considered in its largest influence on politics, was the common people awakening to freedom of mind.
During the decline of the
Roman empire, the oppressed invoked the power of Christianity to resist the tyranny of brute force; and the merciful priest assumed the office of protector.
The tribunes of
Rome, appointed by the people, had been declared inviolable by the popular vote; the new tribunes of humanity, deriving their office from religion, and ordained by religion to an inviolable sanctity, defended the poor man's house against lust by the sacrament of marriage; restrained arbitrary passion by a menace of the misery due to sin unrepented and unatoned; and taught respect for naked humanity by sprinkling every new-born child with the water of life, confirming every youth, bearing the oil of consolation to every death-bed, and sharing freely with every human being the consecrated emblem of God present with man.
But the protection from priests became a tyranny Expressing all moral truth by the mysteries of symbols, and reserving to itself the administration of the seven sacraments, the priesthood claimed a monopoly of thought, and exercised an absolute spiritual dominion.
Human bondage was deeply riveted; for tyranny
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had fastened on the affections, the understanding, and
reason.
The priesthood, ordaining its own successors, ruled human destiny at birth, on entering active life, at marriage, in the hour when frailty breathed its confession, in the hour when faith aspired to communion with God, and at death.
The fortunes of the human race are embarked in a lifeboat, and cannot be wrecked.
Mind refuses to rest; and active freedom is a necessary condition of intelligent existence.
The instinctive love of truth could warm even the scholastic theologian; but the light which it kindled for him was oppressed by verbal erudition, and its flickering beams, scarce lighting the cell of the solitary, could not fill the colonnade of the cloister, far less reach the busy world.
Sensualism also was free to mock superstition.
Scoffing infidelity put on the cardinal's hat, and made even the Vatican ring with ribaldry.
But the indifference of dissoluteness has no creative power; it does but substitute the despotism of the senses for a spiritual despotism; it never brought enfranchisements to the multitude.
The feudal aristocracy resisted spiritual authority by the sword; but it was only to claim greater license for their own violence.
Temporal sovereigns, jealous of a power which threatened to depose the unjust prince, were ready to set prelacy against prelacy, the national church against the Catholic church, but it was only to assert the absolute liberty of despotism.
By slow degrees the students of the humanities, as they were called, polished scholars, learned lessons of freedom from Grecian and Roman example; but they hid their patriotism in a dead language, and forfeited the claim to higher influence and enduring fame by
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suppressing truth, and yielding independence to the in-
terests of priests and princes.
Human enfranchisement could not advance securely but through the people; for whom philosophy was included in religion, and religion veiled in symbols.
There had ever been within the Catholic church men who preferred truth to forms, justice to despotic force.
‘Dominion,’ said
Wickliffe, ‘belongs to grace;’ meaning, as I believe, that the feudal government, which rested on the sword, should yield to a government resting on moral principles.
And he knew the right method to hasten the coming revolution.
‘Truth,’ he asserted with wisest benevolence, ‘truth shines more brightly the more widely it is diffused;’ and, catching the plebeian language that lived on the lips of the multitude, he gave
England the
Bible in the vulgar tongue.
A timely death could alone place him beyond persecution; his bones were disinterred and burnt, and his ashes thrown on the waters of the
Avon.
But his fame brightens as time advances; when
America traces the lineage of her intellectual freedom, she acknowledges the benefactions of
Wickliffe.
In the next century, a kindred spirit emerged in Bohemia, and tyranny, quickened by the nearer approach of danger, summoned
John Huss to its tribunal, set on his head a paper cap, begrimmed with hobgoblins, permitted the bishops to strip him and curse him, and consigned one of the gentlest and purest of our race the the flames.
‘Holy simplicity!’
exclaimed he, as a peasant piled fagots on the fire; still preserving faith in humanity, (the Quakers afterwards treasured up the example,) though its noblest instincts could be so perverted; and, perceiving the only mode through which reform could prevail, he gave as a last counsel to his
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multitude of followers—‘Put not your trust in
princes.’
Of the descendants of his Bohemian disciples, a few certainly came to us by way of
Holland; his example was for all.
Years are as days in the providence of God and in the progress of the race.
After long waiting, an Augustine monk at
Wittenberg, who had seen the lewd corruptions of the
Roman court, and who loathed the deceptions of a coarse superstition, brooded in his cell over the sins of his age, and the method of rescuing conscience from the dominion of forms, till he discovered a cure for its vices in the simple idea of justification by faith alone.
With this principle, easily intelligible to the universal mind, and spreading, like an epidemic, widely and rapidly,—a principle strong enough to dislodge every superstition, to overturn every tyranny, to enfranchise, convert, and save the world,—he broke the wand of papal supremacy, scattered the lazars of the monasteries, and drove the penance of fasts, and the terrors of purgatory, masses for the dead, and indulgences for the living, into the paradise of fools.
That his principle contained a democratic revolution, Luther saw clearly; he acknowledged that ‘the rulers and the lawyers needed a reformer;’ but he ‘could not hope that they would soon get a wise one,’ and in a stormy age, leaving to futurity its office, accepted shelter from feudal sovereigns.
‘It is a heathenish doctrine’—such was his compromise with princes—‘that a wicked ruler may be deposed.’—‘Do not pipe to the populace, for it any how delights in running mad.’—‘God lets rogues rule for the people's sin.’—‘A crazy populace is a desperate, cursed thing; a tyrant is the right clog to tie on that dog's neck.’—And yet, adds Luther, ‘I have no word of comfort for the usurers
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and scoundrels among the aristocracy, whose vices
make the common people esteem the whole aristocracy to be out and out worthless.’
And he praised the
printing-press, as the noblest gift of human genius.
He forbade priests and bishops to make laws how men shall believe; for, said he, ‘man's authority stretches neither to heaven nor to the soul.’
Nor did he leave Truth to droop in a cloister or wither in a palace, but carried her forth in her freedom to the multitude; and when tyrants ordered the German peasantry to deliver up their Saxon New Testament, ‘No,’ cried Luther, ‘not a single leaf.’
He pointed out the path in which civilization should travel, though he could not go on to the end of the journey.
In him, freedom of mind was like the morning sun, as it still struggles with the sickly dews and vanishing spectres of darkness.
In pursuing the history of our country, we shall here after meet in the largest Lutheran state, at one time an active ally, at another a neutral friend.
The direct influence of Lutheranism on
America was inconsiderable.
New Sweden had the faith and the politics of the German reformer; no democratic ideas distracted its single-minded loyalty.
The Anglican church in
Virginia may, in one sense, be traced through
Cranmer to Luther.
But as the New World sheltered neither bishops nor princes, in respect to political opinion, the English church was there but an enfranchisement from Popery, favoring humanity and freedom.
The inhabitants of
Virginia were conformists after the pattern of
Bacon2 and of
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Shakspeare, rather than of
Whitgift and
Laud.
Of
themselves they asked no questions about the surplice, and never wore the badge of non-resisting obedience.
The meaner and more ignoble the party, the more general and comprehensive are its principles; for none but principles of universal freedom can reach the meanest condition.
The serf defends the widest philanthropy; for that alone can break his bondage.
The plebeian sect of Anabaptists, ‘the scum of the reformation,’ with greater consistency than Luther, applied the doctrine of the reformation to the social relations of life, and threatened an end to kingcraft, spiritual dominion, tithes, and vassalage.
The party was trodden under foot, with foul reproaches and most arrogant scorn; and its history is written in the blood of myriads of the German peasantry; but its principles, safe in their immortality, escaped with
Roger Williams to
Providence; and his colony is the witness that, naturally, the paths of the Baptists were paths of freedom, pleasantness, and peace.
Luther finished his mission in the heart of
Germany, under the safeguard of princes.
In
Geneva, a republic on the confines of
France,
Italy, and
Germany, Calvin, appealing to the people for support, continued the career of enfranchisement by planting the institutions which nursed the minds of
Rousseau, Necker, and
De Stael.
The political character of Calvinism, which, with one consent and with instinctive judgment, the monarchs
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of that day feared as republicanism, and which
Charles II.
declared a religion unfit for a gentleman, is expressed in a single word—
predestination. Did a proud aristocracy trace its lineage through generations of a high-born ancestry, the republican reformer, with a loftier pride, invaded the invisible world, and from the book of life brought down the record of the noblest enfranchisement, decreed from all eternity by the
King of kings.
His few converts defied the opposing world as a world of reprobates, whom God had despised and rejected.
To them the senses were a totally-depraved foundation, on which neither truth nor goodness could rest.
They went forth in confidence that men who were kindling with the same exalted instincts, would listen to their voice, and be effectually ‘called into the brunt of the battle’ by their side.
And, standing serenely amidst the crumbling fabrics of centuries of superstitions, they had faith in one another: and the martyrdoms of Cambray, the fires of
Smithfield, the surrender of benefices by two thousand nonconforming Presbyterians, attest their perseverance.
Such was the system, which, for a century and a half, assumed the guardianship of liberty for the
English world.
‘A wicked tyrant is better than a wicked war,’ said Luther, preaching non-resistance; and
Cranmer echoed back, ‘God's people are called to render obedience to governors, althoa they be wicked or wrong-doers, and in no case to resist.’—‘Civil magistrates,’ replied
English Calvinism,—I quote the very words, in which, under an extravagant form, its champion asserted the paramount power of general principles, and the inalienable rights of freedom,—‘civil magistrates must be servants unto the church; they must remember to submit their sceptres, to throw down
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their crowns before the church, yea, as the prophet
speaketh, to lick the dust of the feet of the church.’
To advance intellectual freedom, Calvinism denied, absolutely denied, the sacrament of ordination; thus breaking up the great monopoly of priestcraft, and scattering the ranks of superstition.
‘Kindle the fire before my face,’ said Jerome meekly, as he resigned himself to his fate; to quench the fires of persecution forever, Calvinism resisted with fire and blood, and, shouldering the musket, proved, as a foot-soldier, that, on the field of battle, the invention of gunpowder had levelled the plebeian and the knight.
To restrain absolute monarchy in
France, in
Scotland, in
England, it allied itself with the party of the past, the decaying feudal aristocracy, which it was sure to outlive; to protect itself against feudal aristocracy, it infused itself into the mercantile class, and the inferior gentry; to secure a life in the public mind, in
Geneva, in
Scotland, wherever it gained dominion, it invoked intelligence for the people, and in every parish planted the common school.
In an age of commerce, to stamp its influence on the New World, it went on board the fleet of
Winthrop, and was wafted to the
Bay of
Massachusetts.
Is it denied that events follow principles, that mind rules the world?
The institutions of
Massachusetts were the exact counterpart of its religious system.
Calvinism claimed heaven for the elect:
Massachusetts gave franchises to the members of the visible church.
Calvinism rejected the herd of reprobates:
Massachusetts inexorably disfranchised Churchmen, royalists, and all world's people.
Calvinism overthrew priestcraft: in
Massachusetts, none but the magistrate could marry; the brethren could ordain.
Calvinism saw, in
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goodness infinite joy, in evil infinite woe, and, recog-
nizing no other abiding distinctions, opposed secretly, but surely, hereditary monarchy, aristocracy, and bondage:
Massachusetts owned no king but the
King of heaven; no aristocracy, but of the redeemed; no bondage, but the hopeless, infinite and eternal bondage of sin. Calvinism invoked intelligence against Satan, the great enemy of the human race; and the farmers and seamen of
Massachusetts nourished its college with corn and strings of wampum, and in every village built the free school.
Calvinism, in its zeal against
Rome, reverenced the
Bible even to idolatry; and in
Massachusetts, the songs of
Deborah and David were sung without change; hostile Algonquins, like the Canaanites, were exterminated or enslaved; and a peevish woman was hanged, because it was written, ‘the witch shall die.’
‘Do not stand still with Luther and Calvin,’ said the father of the Pilgrims, confident in human advancement.
From Luther to Calvin, there was progress; from
Geneva to
New England, there was more.
Calvinism,—I speak of its political character, in an age when politics were controlled by religious sects; I pass no judgment on opinions which relate to an unseen world,—Calvinism, such as it existed, in opposition to prelacy and feudalism, could not continue in a world where there was no prelacy to combat, no aristocracy to overthrow.
It therefore received developments which were imprinted on institutions.
It migrated to the
Connecticut; and there, forgetting its foes, it put off its armor of religious pride.
‘You go to receive your reward,’ was said to
Hooker on his death-bed.
‘I go to receive mercy,’ was his reply.
For predestination
Connecticut substituted benevolence.
It hanged no
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quakers, it mutilated no heretics.
Its early legislation
is the breath of reason and charity; and
Jonathan Edwards did but sum up the political history of his native commonwealth for a century, when, anticipating, and in his consistency excelling,
Godwin and
Bentham, he gave Calvinism its political euthanasia, by declaring virtue to consist in universal love.
In Boston, with
Henry Vane and
Anne Hutchinson, ‘Calvinism ran to seed;’ and the seed was ‘incorruptible.’
Election implies faith, and faith freedom.
Claiming the Spirit of God as the companion of man, the Antinomians asserted absolute freedom of mind.
For predestination they substituted consciousness.
‘If the ordinances be all taken away,
Christ cannot be;’ the forms of truth may perish; truth itself is immortal.
‘God will be ordinances to us.’
The exiled doctrine, which established conscience as the highest court of
appeal, fled to the island gift of
Miantonomoh; and the records of
Rhode Island, like the beautiful career of
Henry Vane, are the commentary on the true import of the creed.
Faith in predestination alone divided the Antinomians from the Quakers.
Both reverenced and obeyed the voice of conscience in its freedom.
The near resemblance was perceived so soon as the fame of
George Fox reached
America; and the principal followers of
Anne Hutchinson,
Coddington,
Mary Dyer,
Henry Bull, and a majority of the people, avowed themselves to be Quakers.
Thus had the principle of freedom of mind, first asserted for the common people, under a religious form, by
Wickliffe, been pursued by a series of plebeian sects, till it at last reached a perfect development, coinciding with the highest attainment of
European philosophy.
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By giving a welcome to every sect, America was
safe against narrow bigotry.
At the same time, the moral unity of the forming nation was not impaired Of the various parties into which the reformation divided the people, each, from the proudest to the most puny sect, rallied round a truth.
But as truth never contradicts itself, the collision of sects could but eliminate error; and the
American mind, in the largest sense eclectic, struggled for universality, while it asserted freedom.
How had the world been governed by despotism and bigotry; by superstition and the sword; by the ambition of conquest and the pride of privilege!
And now the happy age gave birth to a people which was to own no authority as the highest, but the free conviction of the public mind.
Thus had
Europe given to
America her sons and her culture.
She was the mother of our men, and of the ideas which guided them to greatness.
The relations of our country to humanity were already wider.
The three races, the Caucasian, the Ethiopian and the
American, were in presence of one another on our soil.
Would the red man disappear entirely from the forests, which, for thousands of years, had sheltered him safely?
Would the black man, in the end, be benefited by the crimes of mercantile avarice?
At the close of the middle age, the Caucasian race was in nearly exclusive possession of the elements of civilization, while the Ethiopian remained in insulated barbarism.
No commerce connected it with
Europe; no intercourse existed by travel, by letters, or by war; it was too feeble to attempt an invasion of a Christian prince or an Arab dynasty.
The slave-trade united the rates by an indissoluble bond; the first ship that brought Africans to
America, was a sure pledge, that,
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in due time, ships from the New World would carry
the equal blessings of Christianity to the burning plains of Nigritia, that descendants of Africans would toil for the benefits of
European civilization.
That
America should benefit the African, was always the excuse for the slave-trade.
Would
America benefit
Europe?
The probable influence of the New World on the
Old became a prize question at
Paris; but not one of the writers divined the true answer.
They looked for it in commerce, in mines, in natural productions; and they should have looked for revolutions, as a consequence of moral power.
The
Greek colonists planted free and prosperous cities; and in a following century, each metropolis, envying the happiness of its daughters, imitated its institutions, and rejected kings.
Rome, a nation of soldiers, planted colonies by the sword; and retributive justice merged its liberties in absolute despotism.
The American colonists founded their institutions on popular freedom, and ‘set an example to the nations.’
Already the plebeian outcasts, the Anglo-
Saxon emigrants, were the hope of the world.
We are like the Parthians, said
Norton in
Boston; our arrows wound the more for our flight.
‘Jotham upon Mount Gerizim is bold to utter his apologue.’
We have written the origin of our country; we are now to pursue the history of its wardship.
The relations of the rising colonies, the representatives of democratic freedom, are chiefly with
France and
England;—with the monarchy of
France, which was the representative of absolute despotism, having subjected the three estates of the realm, the clergy by a treaty with the pope, feudalism by standing armies, the communal institutions by executive patronage and a vigorous police; with the
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parliament of England, which was the representative
of aristocratic liberties, and had ratified royalty, primogeniture, corporate charters, the peerage, tithes, prelates, prescriptive franchises, and every established immunity and privilege.
The three nations and the three systems were, by the revolution of 1688, brought into direct contrast with one another.
At the same time, the
English world was lifted out of theological forms, and entered upon the career of commerce, which had been prepared by the navigation acts and by the mutual treaties for colonial monopoly with
France and
Spain.
The period through which we have passed shows why we are a free people; the coming period will show why we are a united people.
We shall meet no scenes of more adventure than the early scenes in
Virginia, none of more sublimity than the Pilgrims at
Plymouth.
But we are about to enter on a wider theatre; and, as we trace the progress of commercial ambition through events which shook the globe from the wilds beyond
the Alleghanies to the ancient abodes of civilization in Hindostan, we shall still see that the selfishness of evil defeats itself, and God rules in the affairs of men.
end of vol.
II.
