Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
halberd-bearers refused to provide the usual formality to his little
progresses. But if they aspired to be rated as gentlemen, there
was much also of the burgess nature in them. They were potential
capitalists, eager to accumulate ample landholdings, keen to drive a
bargain, given to trade and with as sharp an eye to the main chance as
any London merchant. The community of goods that marked the early days
of Plymouth they disliked so greatly as to account it almost sinful. In
the infancy of the settlement they entered upon an active mercantile
life, building their ships for the West Indian trade, joining in the
fisheries off the Newfoundland coast, venturing far in pursuit of gain.
Active, capable men, excellent administrators rather than speculative
thinkers, stewards of the public interests as well as their own, they
would take it ill to have their matured plans interfered with by
busybodies and incompetents. Their own counsel sufficed them and they
wanted no help from outsiders.
Endow such men with religious zeal; let them regard themselves as
particular repositories of righteousness; give them a free hand to work
out their program unhampered by rival policies; provide them with a
handbook elaborated in complete detail by a master system-maker; and
the result was certain. Their Utopia must be a close-knit church-state,
with authority reserved to the aristocracy of Christian talent. It
is needless to inquire whether a definite conception of a theocracy
was in their minds before their coming over; some such order was
clearly implicit in their religious fervor, their Hebraic theology,
their Genevan discipline, their aristocratic prejudices. They might
nominally accept the Plymouth model of church-government, but they
would meddle with democracy in church and state no more than necessity
compelled. Circumstances, as well as their own promptings, would
counsel quite an opposite course. They were engaged in a difficult and
perilous undertaking, begirt by wilderness enemies, and fearful of
hostile interference by the home authorities. If the venture were to
survive, a drift towards centralization of power was as natural as it
was inevitable. The common security would not suffer any dispersion of
forces or domestic bickerings over authority. Dissatisfied members must
be held in subjection and dangerous swarmings from the mother-hive must
be prevented. The principle of Separatism was too disruptive to insure
cohesive solidarity; the parts must be welded into a protective whole;
and for such business what ideal was more efficient than a theocracy
with Jehovah substituted for King Charles--not openly and seditiously,
but quietly, in the hearts of the people. The historian need not
wander far in search of the origin of the theocratic principle; it
is to be found in the self-interest of the lay and clerical leaders.
Ambitious men could not have devised a fitter means to weld together
the two groups of magistrates and ministers, and endow their charter
prerogatives with divine sanction. The Stuarts were bunglers at the
business in comparison with Winthrop and Cotton. But if they worked the
metal to such shape as they chose we must not forget that it had been
well heated in the smithy of John Calvin. Overlook that fact and the
theocracy becomes incredible.
There are perhaps sufficient grounds to assume that some plan of
minority control was worked out before the migration took place. The
preliminary discussions in England had been long and the terms of
the charter were carefully seen to. By its provisions the right of
franchise rested with the freemen of the corporation, in number about
a hundred and ten. Of the total body of freemen it was known that
only a small group would undertake the venture; probably fewer than
a score came over with the emigrants, and through removals and death
the number was speedily reduced to about a dozen. This handful of
freemen constituted the court, and chose the governor, deputy governor,
and the assistants or magistrates. These latter were to number
eighteen according to the charter provision; but with more offices
than eligible candidates, the number was necessarily reduced, and six
assistants with the governor came to be reckoned a quorum of the court
with sovereign powers.[2] It was a patriarchal undertaking, and to
Carolinian gentlemen there was nothing unusual or unjust in a handful
of leaders exercising plenary powers over the lives and fortunes of two
thousand members of the commonwealth. If the charter could not have
been construed as granting such powers, it is reasonable to assume
that they would not have entered upon the business. The lay leaders
were practical men. They had ventured their estates in the hope of
bettering their condition, both spiritual and material, and with their
personal fortunes at stake they were in no mind to intrust the fate of
the undertaking to other hands than their own. They loved power quite
as much as did the ungodly, and accounting themselves God’s stewards
they reckoned it sin not to use it in his name. As Puritans they would
not keep a weather eye on the majority will. God did not speak in the
Scriptures through majority votes; his chosen were a minority, the
remnant in Israel.
A further sanction was at hand. If these Hebraized Englishmen created
a close corporation and ruled magisterially, if the order in the new
church-state was inquisitorial and stern, it was in strict conformity
with the teachings and example of Calvin. Men deeply read in the
_Institutes_, familiar with the Genevan Ordinances and the practices
of the Consistory, were not likely to discover in them any lessons
in democratic toleration. Righteousness may be fearfully relentless,
and John Calvin had been a tyrant on principle. Iron-willed and
masterful, he had risen to power in the turbulent city-state of Geneva
in sixteenth-century fashion. A few splotches of blood on the white
garments of the Church did not greatly trouble him. He was never
squeamish about ways and means of furthering the Lord’s work. He
violated the right of refuge to bring to the stake the pantheistic
Unitarian Servetus, and he thanked God when the bungling of the
executioner prolonged the sufferings of certain others of his victims.
The Genevan discipline was rigorous, and the clerical inquisitors were
more relentless than the lay. The tyrannies that have been freely
charged upon the New England oligarchy are easily explained in the
light of the Calvinistic Ordinances. There were no whippings or
banishments or hangings in early Pennsylvania where Quaker and Lutheran
dwelt together in peace if not in fellowship. But they were New
Testament men and not out of the Old, like the Saints in Massachusetts
Bay. They worshiped a God of love rather than a God of wrath.
Granted the conception on which the theocratic experiment went forward,
namely, that Jehovah was the sole lawgiver and the Bible the sufficient
statute-book; granted also that these priests and magistrates were
stewards of God’s will; and the centralization of power in the
commonwealth becomes invested with a higher sanction than the terms
of the charter. It was an oligarchy of Christian grace. The minister
was the trained and consecrated interpreter of the divine law, and
the magistrate was its trained and consecrated administrator; and
both were chosen by free election of the Saints. If unfortunately the
Saints were few and the sinners many, was not that a special reason for
safeguarding the Ark of the Covenant from the touch of profane hands?
Hence all legislative experiments by annually elected deputies, no
matter how exactly those experiments might fall in with the wishes of
the majority, were sternly frowned upon or skillfully nullified. Not
only were such popular enactments, it was held, too often prompted by
the carnal desires of the natural man, but they were no better than an
insult to God, as implying the insufficiency of the Scriptures to every
temporal need. Unregenerate and sinful men must have no share in God’s
work. The Saints must not have their hands tied by majority votes. This
explains, quite as much as mere love of power, the persistent hostility
of the leaders to every democratic tendency. Such institutions as grew
up spontaneously out of the necessities of the situation, were sharply
hedged about by restrictions. The town meeting, which was extra-legal
under the charter, was safeguarded by limiting the right of voting
to freemen, except in a few trivial matters; and the more popular
deputies, who inclined to become self-willed, were forced to accept the
principle of magisterial veto on their actions. When a law was passed,
it was purposely left vague as to penalties, in order to give a free
hand to the judges to punish as they wished; and it was not till 1641,
after much insistence from the representatives of the people, that
Ward’s Body of Liberties was finally adopted.
Later critics of Puritanism discover in the theocratic experiment of
Massachusetts Bay a preposterous attempt to turn back the pages of
history, and refashion Englishmen after an ungainly Hebraic pattern.
But to the leaders of that experiment it seemed rather a Utopian
venture to create in the new world a nobler social order than elsewhere
existed. Whether such a society was either possible or desirable, has
long since become only an academic question; what is more suggestive
is the fact that in spite of some bitterness on the part of a small
minority, the stewardship of an oligarchy remained the accepted
principle of government in Massachusetts Bay until the vacating of the
charter in 1684. That it lingered out so long a life is a testimony to
the skillful opportunism of the leaders. They early adopted a strategic
policy which the British ministry foolishly refused to adopt a hundred
years later; they cautiously undermined any potential disaffection by
admitting the wealthiest and most influential to the rights of freemen,
thus allying the ambitious and capable members of society with the
ruling group, and laying the foundations of a provincial aristocracy,
which in the course of time would secularize the government and
substitute an economic for a theocratic basis of authority. The loss of
the charter only hastened what in the nature of things must have come
about eventually.
III • Certain Mistakes
Skillful as were the theocratic rulers and logical as was their
course, it seems plain in the light of later developments that they
fell into certain grave mistakes at the very beginning of their work
that were to hamper them seriously in after days. Those mistakes
were the adoption of the covenant-principle of church organization
borrowed from Plymouth, that started the new churches on the road
to Congregationalism, and the granting of the land in fee-simple
to non-freemen, that was to create an independent yeomanry. Of the
two the second was far graver, for it threw the economics of the
developing commonwealth on the side of local home rule and provided a
substantial foundation for the erection of a democratic opposition to
the oligarchy. If the plantation system of Virginia, or the Patroon
system of New York, had been adopted, the covenanted church would
naturally have followed the path of Genevan Presbyterianism in harmony
with the desires of the leaders, and the democratic opposition both in
church and state must have been starved into submission. But with the
system of small holdings and the development of a vigorous yeomanry,
the eventual development of Congregationalism into a federated group
of self-governing churches, was predetermined more rigidly than by any
logic of John Calvin. The defeat of the Presbyterian program of the
theocrats was implicit in a decentralized land system.