Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
his mouth, what Platforme of Government he hath therein commanded
and prescribed.
From his Scriptural premises Eliot deduced a system of government that
is altogether remarkable, not only for its rejection of the Separatist
theory of natural rights, but for its naïve simplicity. Since the
law has been declared once for all, perfect and final, there is no
need for a legislative branch of government; and since Christ is sole
ruler and king, there is no place for a profane head of the state;
it remains only for the Christian theorist to provide a competent
magisterial system to hear causes and adjudicate differences. Society
is concerned wholly with duties and not at all with rights; government,
therefore, begins and ends with the magistrate. In order to secure a
suitable magistracy, Eliot proposed to divide society into groups of
tens, fifties, hundreds and thousands, each of which should choose its
rulers, who in turn should choose their representatives to the higher
councils; and so there was evolved an ascending series of magistrates
until the supreme council of the nation was reached, the decisions of
which should be final.
The duties of all the Rulers of the civil part of the Kingdom of
Christ, are as followeth: ... to govern the people in the orderly
and seasonable practice of all the Commanders of God, in actions
liable to Political observations whether of piety and love to God,
or of justice and love to man with peace.
Far removed as _The Christian Commonwealth_ was from the
democratic political theory of the Army radicals, or the practical
constitutionalism of Nathaniel Ward, it was the logical culmination
of all theocratic programs. The ideal of social unity, of relentless
conformity, according to which the rebel is a social outcast to be
silenced at any cost, dominates this godly Utopia as mercilessly as
it dominated the policy of Laud. In setting up King Jesus for King
Charles, there was to be no easing of the yoke upon rebellious spirits;
and in binding society upon the letter of the Scripture there was to
be no consideration for the aspirations of the unregenerate. It is not
pleasant to consider what the Saints would have made of New England if
their will had prevailed. Curious as this little work is--testifying
rather to the sincerity of Eliot’s Hebraism than to his political
intelligence or his knowledge of men--it is characteristic of the
idealist who consecrated his life to the Indian mission. How little
disturbed he was by the perversities and limitations of everyday fact,
is revealed in the policy which he laid down for his Indian converts:
And this Vow I did solemnly make unto the Lord concerning them;
that they being a people without any forme of Government and now
to chuse; I would endeavour with all my might, to bring them to
embrace such Government, both civil and Ecclesiastical, as the Lord
hath commanded in the holy Scriptures; and to deduce all their
Lawes from the holy Scriptures, that so they may be the Lord’s
people, ruled by him alone in all things.
Which vow, considering the state of the Indian tribes to whom it was to
apply, may serve to throw light upon the reason for the scant success
of the Saints in their dealings with the red-men.
Footnotes
[70] _The Simple Cobler_, edition of 1843, pp. 89-90.
[71] _Ibid._, pp. 54-55.
[72] _Ibid._, pp. 8, 10.
[73] _Ibid._, Introduction.
[74] Dean, _Memoir of the Rev. Nathaniel Ward_, pp. 56-57.
[75] _Massachusetts Historical Society Publications_, Vol. IX, Third
Series, p. 128.
Part Two: the Twilight of the Oligarchy • 1660-1720
It is not pleasant to linger in the drab later years of a century that
in its prime had known able men and accomplished notable things. A
world that accepted Michael Wigglesworth for its poet, and accounted
Cotton Mather its most distinguished man of letters, had certainly
backslidden in the ways of culture. The final harvest of the theocracy
must be reckoned somewhat scanty. English Independency had been the
robust and rebellious child of a great age; New England Puritanism
was the stunted offspring of a petty environment. With the passing
of the emigrant generation, a narrow provincialism settled upon
the commonwealth of Massachusetts Bay. Not a single notable book
appeared; scarcely a single generous figure emerged from the primitive
background. A thin soil and the law of Moses created a capable but
ungainly race, prosaic and niggardly. Their very speech lost much of
the native English beauty that had come down from medieval times.
The clean and expressive idiom that Bunyan caught from the lips of
English villagers, with its echoes of a more spontaneous life before
the Puritan middle class had substituted asceticism for beauty, grew
thinner and more meager, its bright homespun dyes subdued to a dun
butternut. The town records which in the first years had been set
down in dignified and adequate phrase became increasingly crabbed and
illiterate, laboriously composed by plain men to whom spelling had
become a lost art. The horizons of life in New England were contracting
to a narrow round of chores and sermons. “When I first saw the Lieut.
Governor,” Sewall remarked of Stoughton, “He was Carting Ears of Corn
from the Uper Barn.” The picture suggests the pastoral note, but it
suggests much else as well.
Against this incursion of the provincial the church was the single
force to be counted on to do battle. The ministers did their best,
but it needed abler men than were available to counteract the growing
formalism of the times. They might lament that their admonitions fell
on unheeding ears, that they preached in vain to a “sermon-proof,
gospel-glutted generation”; but the blame must attach in part to the
formalism of their appeals. The straw was over-threshed. The common
provincialism infected the pulpit as well as the pew, and the creative
vigor of the ministry steadily declined. The ground was being prepared
for superstition and bigotry. As the belief spread through the New
England villages that the end of the world would fall on the end of the
century, men’s thoughts naturally ran much on the demonology that is a
logical consequence of the Hebraic dualism, and the most intelligent
saw no reason to doubt that “the Evening Wolves will be much abroad,
when we are near the Evening of the World.” The psychology was being
prepared for the witch-mania of Salem, and Cotton Mather was only
echoing the common belief when he cried, “An Army of Devils is horribly
broke in upon the place which is the _Centre_, and after a sort, the
First-born of our _English Settlements_.”[76] In this matter, as in so
many others, the ministers were no better than their congregations;
they were blind leaders of the blind, and they lent their sanction to
the intolerance of the mass judgment. In an environment so stifling,
with every unfamiliar idea likely to be seized upon as evidence of the
devil’s wiles, there was no room for free speculation. A generation
under the terror of witchcraft was given over to stark reaction.
The Salem outbreak was the logical outcome of the long policy of
repression, that had hanged Quakers and destroyed independent thought,
in its attempt to imprison the natural man in a strait-jacket of
Puritan righteousness. Emotions long repressed sometimes find sinister
outlets, and the witchcraft madness was only a dramatic aftermath of a
generation of repressions and inhibitions.[77]
It was during these unhappy years that power finally slipped from
the hands of the oligarchy. With the charter gone, a Royal Governor
presiding over the Council, and a property qualification instead of a
religious test for suffrage, the old order was broken past mending.
The members of the oligarchy still hoped against hope, and under the
governorship of Phips they made heroic attempts to bolster up the
cause; but the Quebec expedition was so badly muddled as to bring
the commonwealth to the verge of ruin, and the Governor and Council
wrote to England that God had “spit in our faces.”[78] Whether or
not that was a correct analysis of the divine reaction to the Quebec
fiasco is of no importance today; a good many New Englanders, it would
seem, doubted it, and under the pressure of high taxes, a depreciated
currency and a great debt, they made their dissatisfaction heard at the
royal court. When the English government at last “resolved to settle
the Countrey,” the end of the oligarchy was come. The cautious amongst
them were for throwing the whole responsibility on the Lord: “the
foundations being gone, what can the righteous do?” argued Judge Sewall
with shrewd worldly-wisdom. But the ministers would make no compromise
with Baal. The tongues of false prophets might seduce the people, but
they stood for the old order, fighting a losing fight with righteous
zeal. On June 1, 1702, Sewall noted in his diary that he had “much
adoe to persuade Mr. Willard to dine with me,” the pastor being in a
sulk because the civil representatives had taken precedence over the
ministers in the procession for proclaiming Queen Anne. But in the end
even “good Mr. Willard” was forced to acknowledge that his loyalty was
given to a lost cause.
Footnotes
[76] _Wonders of the Invisible World_, p. 14.
[77] See Lucien Price, “Witchcraft, Then and Now,” in _The Nation_,
Vol. CXV, No. 2987.
[78] J. T. Adams, _The Founding of New England_, p. 442.
Chapter I • Samuel Sewall • Yankee
By good fortune an intimate record of daily life in old New England
has been preserved in abundant detail. The diary of Samuel Sewall
not only narrates the homely activities of Boston in the evening of
the theocracy, _antiquis moribus, prisca fide_, but it unconsciously
reveals the transformation of the English Puritan into the New England
Yankee. The sober Boston citizens who on the Sabbath droned Windsor and
York tunes, and took notes of long sermons, on week-days plied their
gospel of thrift with notable success. They loved the meetinghouse as
their fathers had loved it, but they were the sons and grandsons of
tradesmen, and true to their English instincts they set about erecting
a provincial mercantile society, dominated by the ideals of the little
capitalist. Of this rising world of mercantilism, Samuel Sewall was a
worthy representative. A Puritan magistrate and village capitalist, he
made full use of his opportunities to worship God, to thrive and to
rise. As the older ideal of theocratic stewardship is revealed in the
career of John Winthrop, the newer practice of incipient capitalism is
revealed in the life of Samuel Sewall.
The _Diary_ is a fascinating book, with its petty gossip interwoven
with matters of public concern, and its brisk activities set in a
black border of innumerable funerals: the one among all the books
of the time that is still quick with life after these two hundred
years and more. In its meager entries we can trace the change that
was coming to Massachusetts in the transition from a theocracy to a
royal colony; and we can feel the strong emotions which that change
aroused. The dry facts of history take on flesh and blood; forgotten
names become living men walking the streets of Boston or arguing in
the Council Chamber; Samuel Sewall himself becomes more real to us
than our own contemporaries. He was the veritable embodiment of his
serious, prudential Massachusetts, reflecting its changing fortunes
with painstaking fidelity. In that petty world of conventional piety
and shrewd self-interest, the kind-hearted Judge bustled about, a
sermon in one hand to soothe the doubts of the troubled, and a bit
of chocolate in the other to comfort the bedridden--as honest and
friendly and prosaic a soul as Massachusetts ever bred. If one wishes