Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
not easily turned aside from the path of duty, possessing much of
the old bishop’s courage in dealing with great men and their follies.
He knew a fool and a tyrant in high places, and was bold to call them
by their true names. “He was a person,” said Cotton Mather, “who
while doing his Master’s work, would put a king in his pocket.” He
was the more dangerous because he had put his own temper under strict
governance--“For though he were a man of cholerick disposition, and had
a mighty vigour and fervour of spirit ... yet he had ordinarily as much
government of his choler as a man has of a mastiff dog in a chain; he
‘could let out his dog, and pull in his dog, as he pleased.’”
So ardent a temperament, joined to remarkable powers of oratory, gave
to Thomas Hooker very unusual popular influence, some measure of which
is revealed in a letter of a certain sycophant of the court party, who
wrote to Laud’s tool, Chancellor Duck, under date of May 20, 1629, as
follows:
All men’s eares are now filled with ye obstreperous clamours of his
followers against my Lord ... as a man endeavouring to suppress
good preaching and advance Popery. All would be here very calme
and quiet if he [Hooker] might depart.... If he be suspended its
the resolution of his friends and himselfe to settle his abode in
Essex, and maintenance is promised him in plentifull manner for
the fruition of his private conference, which hath already more
impeached the peace of our church than his publique ministry. His
genius will still haunte all the pulpits in ye country, where any
of his scholers may be admitted to preach.... There be divers
young ministers about us ... that spend their time in conference
with him; and return home and preach what he hath brewed.... Our
people’s pallats grow so out of tast yt noe food contents them
but of Mr. Hooker’s dressing. I have lived in Essex to see many
changes, and have seene the people idolizing many new ministers
and lecturers, but this man surpasses them all for learning and
some other considerable partes and ... gains more and far greater
followers than all before him.... If my Lord tender his owne future
peace ... let him connive at Mr. Hooker’s departure.[39]
Clearly the England of Laud with its pursuivants and tattling tongues
of “dumb ministers”--who might well be jealous of his eloquence--was no
fit place for the activities of Thomas Hooker. Even though he should
be suspended, he would still be reckoned dangerous to prerogative with
his private conferences and his following of young ministers. So he
was driven overseas into Holland, whence after a few years’ experience
with the Archbishop’s spies, and dislike of the Presbyterian system
there practiced, he set forth for America where he arrived on the same
boat with John Cotton and Samuel Stone, and was inducted as pastor of
the church at Newtown which had been awaiting his coming over. Shortly
thereafter began the open dissatisfaction of the Cambridge congregation
with the policy of the oligarchy, which resulted three years later in
the removal of Hooker and his church to Hartford. The causes of this
removal--an event that profoundly agitated the colony--have been much
discussed, but they have never been cleared of what may have been
an intentional vagueness. Possibly, as Hubbard suggests, there were
jealousies between Hooker and Cotton, Winthrop, and Haynes, which it
would have been unseemly to expose in open court;[40] but the likelier
explanation would seem to lie in the incompatibility of political
views, which at bottom was a division on the question of aristocracy or
democracy in church and state. The Cambridge men seem to have disliked
the oligarchic rule of the magistrates; they doubtless sympathized with
the popular party and may have encouraged the counter aggressions of
the deputies, whose assertiveness fills so much space in Winthrop’s
journal and betokens his concern. It is likely that there was more
dissatisfaction than got into journals, either private or official;
and it is equally likely that Thomas Hooker was a prime force in
quickening the democratic unrest. “After Mr. Hooker’s coming over,”
said Hubbard in an often quoted passage, “it was observed that many of
the freemen grew to be very jealous of their liberties.” Nevertheless,
Hooker was not a contentious person, to spread a clamor through the
commonwealth and endanger the success of the plantation. He believed
that “Time, Place, Outward Decency and Comelinesse” were desirable in
the management of public affairs; and so instead of descending to sharp
dispute with men whom he respected and loved even though he disagreed
with them in political views, he chose to remove quietly out of their
jurisdiction, making as little cause for embroilment as possible.
After all, the most illuminating commentary upon the causes of
the removal is the spirit of the institutions set up in the new
settlement. While we need not go so far as to assert, with the
historians of Connecticut, that “the birthplace of American democracy
is Hartford,” we must recognize in the Fundamental Orders adopted by
the General Assembly, January 14, 1639, a plan of popular government
so broadly democratic as to entitle it to be called “the first written
constitution of modern democracy.”[41] Concerning the important part
played by Hooker in this work there can be no doubt. His influence
was commanding, and the sneer of old Samuel Peters--“Hooker reigned
twelve years high-priest over Hertford”--scarcely overstates the
fact. And this great influence was thrown persistently in favor of
democratic procedure in church and state. He definitely rejected the
Boston practice of magisterial autocracy. In opposition to Winthrop,
who asserted, “Whatsoever sentence the magistrate gives, the judgment
is the Lord’s, though he do it not by any rule prescribed by civil
authority,” Hooker argued:
That in the matter which is referred to the judge, the sentence
should lie in his breast, or be left to his discretion, according
to which he should go, I am afraid it is a course which wants both
safety and warrant. I must confess, I ever looked at it as a way
which leads directly to tyranny, and so to confusion, and must
plainly profess, if it was in my liberty, I should choose neither
to live nor leave my posterity under such a government.[42]
At another time, replying to Winthrop’s justification of oligarchic
rule on the ground that “the best part is always the least, and of that
best part the wiser is always the lesser,” Hooker frankly rested his
case for democracy on the good sense of the people as a whole:
It is also a truth that counsel should be sought from counsellors;
but the question yet is, who should those be. Reserving smaller
matters which fall in occasionally in common course, to a lower
counsel, in matters of greater importance which concerns the common
good, a general counsel chosen by all, I conceive, under favour,
most suitable to rule and most safe for relief of the whole.[43]
Before the General Court, on May 31, 1638, eight months before the
Fundamental Orders were adopted, Hooker preached a remarkable sermon
on popular sovereignty. Taking for his text Deut. 1:13--the passage
on which John Eliot later erected his fantastic Utopia--he elaborated
the thesis that “the foundation of authority is laid, firstly, in
the free consent of the people,” and therefore that “the choice of
public magistrates belongs unto the people by God’s own allowance,”
and “they who have the power to appoint officers and magistrates, it
is in their power also, to set the bounds and limitations of the power
and place unto which they call them.”[44] This was Hooker’s reply to
the oligarchic policy of the Bay in limiting the number of freemen
in order to maintain the supremacy of the magistrates; and it throws
light on the comment written out of England in the spring of 1636,
to John Wilson, that “there is great division of judgment in matters
of religion amongst good ministers & people which moved Mr. Hoker
to remove”; and that “you are so strict in admission of members to
your church, that more than halfe are out of your church in all your
congregations, & that Mr. Hoker befor he went away preached against
yt (as one reports who hard him).”[45] In the new commonwealth there
was neither a property qualification nor a religious test limiting the
right of franchise; the admission of freemen was reckoned a political
matter and left to the several township democracies. The reaction
against the oligarchic policy of Massachusetts Bay carried far.
If we had Hooker’s sermon in full we should know much more about
his political theory; yet even from the meager and tantalizing
notes that have been preserved, we can deduce fairly certainly the
major principles of his philosophy. Three creative ideas seem to
have determined his thinking: the compact theory of the state, the
doctrine of popular sovereignty, and the conception of the state as a
public-service corporation, strictly responsible to the will of the
majority--ideas that Roger Williams elaborated in detail and during
many years of service reduced to a working system in the commonwealth
of Rhode Island. That Hooker should have grasped so firmly the
essentials of the new democratic theory will surprise no one who is
acquainted with the political speculations of English Independency.
They were all implicit in the new theory of church and state that such
thinkers as Williams and Vane and Milton were clarifying, and since the
days of Robert Browne they had been familiar in one form or another
to the young Puritan radicals at the universities. The compact idea,
which held in solution the doctrine of natural rights, had established
itself firmly in New England with the coming of the Pilgrims. The
Mayflower compact and the church covenant provided the basis for the
social organization of Plymouth; and the covenant idea had taken so
strong a hold on the popular mind of Massachusetts Bay that the astute
leaders of the oligarchy were quick to see the advantage of investing
the charter, in the popular imagination, with the sanctity of the
compact idea; and by a subtle process of idealizing, they transmuted
the charter of a trading company into a fundamental organic law, that
was reckoned an adequate written constitution to safeguard the rights
of the people. It was a clever political move, but it seems not to have
satisfied Thomas Hooker, who was too liberal in his views to accept the
shadow for the substance. As a left-wing Independent he would have a
real compact, and a popular fundamental law to safeguard the liberties
of the people; and he saw to it that the new commonwealth was broadly
based on the common will, rather than narrowly on the rule of the
gentry. The democratic order of Connecticut was English Independency
transplanted to the new world.
To Hooker New England Congregationalism owes as great a debt as
does New England democracy. The last great work he undertook was a
defense of the New England way against the criticism of the English
Presbyterians. He was to prove a powerful advocate, for not only was
he intellectually equipped to write a knotty book in answer to other
knotty books, but unlike Cotton and Davenport and Mather, he was
wholly in sympathy with Congregationalism, and had no mind to conceal
or equivocate concerning its democratic tendencies. He would write
no apology, but a frank and vigorous defense. His church polity, as
elaborated in his _Survey of the Summe of Church Discipline_, is
professedly Hebraic. “Ecclesiastical Policy,” he asserts baldly, “is
a skill of ordering the affairs of Christ’s house, according to the
pattern of his word,” and he then proceeds to postulate the principle