Читать книгу A School History of the United States - John Bach McMaster - Страница 19

%30. The Beginnings of New England.%—When the Dutch put up their trading posts where New York and Albany now stand, all the country east of New York, all of what is now New England, was a wilderness. As early as 1607 an attempt was made to settle it and a colony was planted on the coast of Maine by two members of the Plymouth Company, Sir John Popham, Lord Chief Justice of England, and Sir Ferdinando Gorges, governor of Plymouth. But the colonists were half starved and frozen, and in the spring of 1608 gladly went home to England.

Six years later John Smith, the hero of Virginia, explored and mapped the coast from the Penobscot to Cape Cod. He called the country New England; one of the rivers, the Charles; and two of the promontories, Cape Elizabeth and Cape Ann. Three times he attempted to lead out a colony; but that work was reserved for other men.

%31. The Separatists.%—The reign of Queen Elizabeth had witnessed in England the rise of a religious sect which insisted that certain changes should be made in the government and ceremonials of the Established or State Church of England. This they called purifying the Church, and in consequence they were themselves called Puritans.[1] At first they did not intend to form a new sect; but in 1580 one of their ministers, named Robert Brown, urged them to separate from the Church of England, and soon gathered about him a great number of followers, who were called Separatists or Brownists. They boldly asserted their right to worship as they pleased, and put their doctrines into practice. So hot a persecution followed, that in 1608 a party, led by William Brewster and John Robinson, fled from Scrooby, a little village in northern England, to Amsterdam, in Holland; but soon went on to Leyden, where they dwelt eleven years.[2]

[Footnote 1: Read Fiske's Beginnings of New England, pp. 50–71. The teacher may read "Rise and Development of Puritanism" in Eggleston's Beginners of a Nation, pp. 98–140.]

[Footnote 2: Read Eggleston's Beginners of a Nation, pp. 141–157; Fiske's Beginnings of New England, pp. 71–80; Doyle's Puritan Colonies, Vol. I., pp. 47–81; Palfrey's New England, Vol. I., pp. 176–232.]

%32. Why the Separatists went to New England%.—They had come to Holland as an organized community, practicing English manners and customs. For a temporary residence this would do. But if they and their children's children after them were to remain and prosper, they must break up their organization, forget their native land, their native speech, their national traditions, and to all intents and purposes become Dutch. This they could not bring themselves to do, and by 1617 they had fully determined to remove to some land where they might still continue to be Englishmen, and where they might lay the foundations of a Christian state. But one such land could then be found, and that was America. To America, therefore, they turned their attention, and after innumerable delays formed a company and obtained leave from the London Company to settle on the coast of what is now New Jersey.[1]

[Footnote 1: Eggleston's Beginners of a Nation, pp. 159–176.]

This done, Brewster and Bradford and Miles Standish, with a little band, sent out as an advance guard, set sail from the Dutch port of Delft Haven in July, 1620, in the ship Speedwell. The first run was to Southampton, England, where some friends from London joined them in the Mayflower, and whence, August 5, they sailed for America. But the Speedwell proved so unseaworthy that the two ships put back to Plymouth, where twenty people gave up the voyage. September 6, 1620, such as remained steadfast, just 102 in number, reëmbarked on the Mayflower and began the most memorable of voyages. The weather was so foul, and the wind and sea so boisterous, that nine weeks passed before they beheld the sandy shores of Cape Cod. Having no right to settle there, as the cape lay far to the northward of the lands owned by the London Company, they turned their ship southward and attempted to go on. But head winds drove them back and forced them to seek shelter in Provincetown harbor, at the end of Cape Cod.

[Illustration: The Mayflower[1]]

[Footnote 1: From the model in the National Museum, Washington.]

[Illustration: THE MASSACHUSETTS COAST (map)]

%33. The Mayflower Compact%.—Since it was then the 11th of November, the Pilgrims, as they are now called, decided to get permission from the Plymouth Company to remain permanently. But certain members of the party, when they heard this, became unruly, and declared that as they were not to land in Virginia, they were no longer bound by the contracts they had made in England regarding their emigration to Virginia. To put an end to this, a meeting was held, November 21, 1620, in the cabin of the Mayflower, and a compact was drawn up and signed.[1] It declared

1. That they were loyal subjects of the King.

2. That they had undertaken to found a colony in the northern parts of Virginia, and now bound themselves to form a "civil body politic."

3. That they would frame such just and equal laws, from time to time, as might be for the general good.

4. And to these laws they promised "all due submission and obedience."

[Footnote 1: The compact is in Poore's Charters and Constitutions, p. 931, and in Preston's Documents Illustrative of American History, pp. 29–31. Read, by all means, Webster's Plymouth Oration.]

[Illustration: Plymouth Rock]

%34. The Founding of Plymouth%.—The selection of a site for their home was now necessary, and five weeks were passed in exploring the coast before Captain Standish with a boatload of men entered the harbor which John Smith had noted on his map and named Plymouth. On the sandy shore of that harbor, close to the water's edge, was a little granite bowlder, and on this, according to tradition, the Pilgrims stepped as they came ashore, December 21, 1620. To this harbor the Mayflower was brought, and the work of founding Plymouth was begun. The winter was a dreadful one, and before spring fifty-one of the colonists had died.[1] But the Pilgrims stood fast, and in 1621 obtained a grant of land[2] from the Council for New England, which had just succeeded the Plymouth Company, under a charter giving it control between latitudes 40° and 48°, from sea to sea.[3] It was from the same Council that for fifteen years to come all other settlers in New England obtained their rights to the soil.

[Footnote 1: In the trying times which followed, William Bradford was chosen governor and many times reëlected. He wrote the so-called "Log of the Mayflower,"—really a manuscript History of the Plymouth Plantation from 1602 to 1647—a fragment of which is reproduced on the opposite page.]

[Footnote 2: This grant had no boundary. Each settler might have 100 acres. Fifteen hundred acres were set aside for public buildings.]

[Footnote 3: Fiske's Beginnings of New England, pp. 80–87; Palfrey's New England, Vol. I, pp. 176–232; Thatcher's History of the Town of Plymouth.]

[Illustration: Fragment of History of the Plymouth Plantation.]

%35. A Puritan Colony proposed.%—Among those who obtained such rights was a company of Dorchester merchants who planted a town on Cape Ann. The enterprise failed, and the colonists went off and settled at a place they called Naumkeag. But there was one man in Dorchester who was not discouraged by failure. He was John White, a Puritan rector. What had been done by the Separatists in a small way might be done, it seemed to White, on a great scale by an association of wealthy and influential Puritans. The matter was discussed by them in London, and in 1628 an association was formed, and a tract of land was bought from the Council for New England.

%36. The "Sea to Sea" Grant%.—Concerning the interior of our continent absolutely nothing was known. Nobody supposed it was more than half as wide as it really is. The grant to the association, therefore, stretched from three miles north of the Merrimac River to three miles south of the Charles River, along these rivers to their sources, and then westward across the continent from sea to sea.[1]

[Footnote 1: You will notice that when this grant was made in 1628 the Dutch had discovered the Hudson, and had begun to settle Albany. To this region (the Hudson and Mohawk valleys) the English had no just claim.]

As soon as the grant was obtained, John Endicott came out with a company of sixty persons, and took up his abode at Naumkeag, which, being an Indian and therefore a pagan name, he changed to Salem, the Hebrew word for "peace."

%37. The Massachusetts Charter, 1629%.—The next step was to obtain the right of self-government, which was secured by a royal charter creating a corporation known as the Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay in New England. Over the affairs of the company were to preside a governor, deputy governor, and a council of eighteen to be elected annually by the members of the company.[2]

[Footnote 2: The charter is printed in Poore's Charters and Constitutions, pp. 932–942, and in Preston's Documents, pp. 36–61.]

Six ships were now fitted out, and in them 406 men, women, and children, with 140 head of cattle, set sail for Massachusetts. They reached Salem in safety and made it the largest colony in New England.

%38. Why the Puritans came to New England.%—It was in 1625 that Charles I. ascended the throne of England. Under him the quarrel with the Puritans grew worse each year. He violated his promises, he collected illegal taxes, he quartered troops on the people, he threw those into prison who would not contribute to his forced loans, or pressed them into the army or the navy. His Archbishop Laud persecuted the Puritans with shameful cruelty.

Little wonder then that in 1629 twelve leading Puritans met in consultation and agreed to head a great migration to the New World, provided the charter and the government of the Massachusetts Bay Company were both removed to New England. This was agreed to, and in April, 1630, John Winthrop sailed with nearly one thousand Puritans for Salem. From Salem he moved to Charlestown, and later in the year (1630) to a little three-hilled peninsula, which the English called Tri-mountain or Tremont. There a town was founded and called Boston.