WE now enter upon the study of the earliest contributions made to American literature by New England. We begin with its historical writings—historical writings relating to New England, and produced in New England, in its very first century, nay, in its very first generation. Of course history, as signifying the act by which the present reviews the past and utters a passionless, wise, and final verdict upon it, New England had not and could not have,

either in its first generation or in its first century. But this it had, an historical consciousness; a belief, born with itself, in the large human significance of its great task of founding a new order of things in America; an assurance that what it was then doing the future would desire to know about, and therefore that for the benefit of the future the present should keep a record of itself. The history that the earliest men of New England wrote was what we may call contemporaneous history; it was historical diarizing; it was the registration of events as they went by, or as they yet lived in the memories of the living. Here, indeed, are extraordinary facts,—the early development of the historical consciousness in New England, the large number of historical writers that it produced in its primal age, the amount and the quality of the work that these writers did. We find in our first literary period no less than six writers who deserve mention as historians; and it is through a study of what they wrote that we can best make our way into the very heart of the intellectual life of the period, and qualify ourselves to judge of all its literary memorials.

     William Bradford, of the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock, deserves the pre-eminence of being called the father of American history. We pay to him also that homage which we render to those authors who even by their writings give to us the impression that, admirable as they may be in authorship, behind their authorship is something still more admirable—their own manliness. He was born in Austerfield, Yorkshire, in 1588; at the age of seventeen he became a zealous member of the little company of separatists who, under the ministry of the saintly John Robinson, fled from England into Holland; at the age of thirty-two he appeared as a prominent man among that portion of John Robinson’s flock who landed in New England in 1620; and from 1621 until his death in 1657 he was annually chosen

governor of the colony, excepting on five occasions when “by importunity he got off.” After he had been in America ten years and had seen proof of the permanent success of the heroic movement in which he was a leader, his mind seems to have been possessed by the historic significance of that movement; and thenceforward for twenty years he gave his leisure to, the composition of a work in which the story of the settlement of New England should be told in a calm, just, and authentic manner. The result was his “History of Plymouth Plantation,”—a book which has had an extraordinary fate. It was left by its author in manuscript. After his death, it came into the hands of his nephew, Nathaniel Morton, by whom it was profusely used in the composition of his famous “New England’s Memorial,” published in 1669. Afterward, the manuscript belonged to Thomas Prince, who drew from it what he desired when writing his “Chronological History of New England.” By Prince the old book was left at his death in his library in the tower of old South Church, Boston, where it was used by Thomas Hutchinson when engaged on his “History of Massachusetts Bay.” During the occupation of Boston by the British troops in 1775 and 1776, Prince’s library was plundered, and many precious historical documents were destroyed. Bradford’s manuscript was known to have been in that library not long before; and as afterward it did not appear among the remains of the library, it was given up for lost, and was mourned over by American scholars for nearly a hundred years. In 1855, however, the long-lost treasure was discovered in England, in the Fulham library, the ancient and rich collection belonging to the Bishop of London. It was thereupon at once copied, and published in this country;¹ and by American historical students it was welcomed back into life with a sort of jubilant all-hail.

     There is no other document upon New England history

that can take precedence of this either in time or in authority. Governor Bradford wrote of events that had passed under his own eye, and that had been shaped by his own hand; and he had every qualification of a trust worthy narrator. His mind was placid, grave, well-poised; he was a student of many books and of many languages;¹ and being thus developed both by letters and by experience, he was able to tell well the truth of history as it had unfolded itself during his own strenuous and benignant career. His history is an orderly, lucid, and most instructive work; it contains many tokens of its author’s appreciation of the nature and requirements of historical writing; and though so recently published in a perfect form, it must henceforward take its true place at the head of American historical literature, and win for its author the patristic dignity that we have ascribed to him.

     The philosophical thoroughness of his plan is indicated at the very beginning of his book. In relating the history of Plymouth plantation he undertakes to go back to “the very root and rise of the same,” and to show its “occasion and inducements;” and he avows his purpose to write “in a plain style, with singular regard unto the simple truth in all things.” This plan of course conducts him into an account of the origin of religious dissent in England, and of the lamentable blunders of English churchmen and statesmen in their attempts to beat back that dissent into submission and to throttle its free voice. There is a charm in the simple English and in the quiet pathos of his words as he depicts the sufferings of these persecuted ones, particularly of the little congregation at Scrooby, with which the author himself was identified: “But after these things

they could not longer continue in any peaceable condition, but were hunted and persecuted on every side, so as their former afflictions were but as flea-bitings in comparison of these which now came upon them. For some were taken and clapped up in prison; others had their houses beset and watched night and day, and hardly escaped their hands; and the most were fain to fly and leave their houses and habitations and the means of their livelihood. Yet these and many other sharper things which afterward befel them, were no other than they looked for, and therefore were the better prepared to bear them by the assistance of God’s grace and spirit. Yet seeing themselves thus molested, and that there was no hope of their continuance there, by a joint consent they resolved to go into the Low-Countries, where they heard was freedom of religion for all men.”¹ He then proceeds to tell “of their departure into Holland and their troubles thereabout, with some of the many difficulties they found and met withal;”² “of their manner of living and entertainment there;”³ of “the reasons and causes of their removal”⁴ across “the vast and furious ocean.” “The place they had thoughts on was some of those vast and unpeopled countries of America, which are fruitful and fit for habitation, being devoid of all civil inhabitants, where there are only salvage and brutish men which range up and down, little otherwise than the wild beasts of the same.”⁵ There is something very impressive in the quiet, sage words in which he pictures the conflicts of opinion among the Pilgrims over this question of their removal to America, their clear, straight view of the perils and pains which it would involve, and finally the considerations that moved them, in spite of all the tremendous difficulties they foresaw, to make their immortal attempt. No modern description of these modest and unconquerable

heroes can equal the impression made upon us by the reserve and the moral sublimity of the historian’s words: “It was answered that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and must be both enterprised and overcome with answerable courages. It was granted the dangers were great, but not desperate; the difficulties were many, but not invincible. For though there were many of them likely, yet they were not certain; it might be sundry of the things feared might never befall; others by provident care and the use of good means might in a great measure be prevented; and all of them, through the help of God, by fortitude and patience, might either be borne or overcome. True it was that such attempts were not to be made and undertaken without good ground and reason; not rashly or lightly as many have done for curiosity or hope of gain, and so forth. But their condition was not ordinary; their ends were good and honorable; their calling lawful and urgent; and therefore they might expect the blessing of God in their proceeding. Yea, though they should lose their lives in this action, yet might they have comfort in the same, and their endeavors would be honorable.”¹ A minute account is then given of their negotiations in England and in Holland for permission to settle in America; of their difficulties about money, ships, food, destination; and finally of their departure from Holland, their delays, toils, and risks, in getting free of the English coast, their long voyage over the sea, their groping and dubious approach to Plymouth harbor, and their final debarkation there. The language in which the historian describes their condition and their emotion on reaching shore is a noble specimen of simple, picturesque, and pathetic eloquence, and deserves an honorable place in the record of contemporaneous English style: “Being thus arrived in a good harbor and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed the

God of heaven, who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stable earth, their proper element. And no marvel if they were thus joyful, seeing wise Seneca was so affected with sailing a few miles on the coast of his own Italy, as he affirmed, that he had rather remain twenty years on his way by land, than pass by sea to any place in a short time; so tedious and dreadful was the same unto him. But here I cannot but stay and make a pause, and stand half amazed at this poor people’s present condition; and so I think will the reader too when he well considers the same. Being thus passed the vast ocean and a sea of troubles before, in their preparation, . . . they had now no friends to welcome them, nor inns to entertain or refresh their weather-beaten bodies, no houses or much less towns to repair to, to seek for succor. It is recorded in Scripture as a mercy to the apostle and his shipwrecked company, that the barbarians shewed them no small kindness in refreshing them; but these savage barbarians when they met with them . . . were readier to fill their sides full of arrows than otherwise. And for the season, it was winter; and they that know the winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search an unknown coast. Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men? And what multitudes there might be of them, they knew not. Neither could they, as it were, go up to the top of Pisgah, to view from this wilderness a more goodly country to feed their hopes; for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to the heavens) they could have little solace or content in respect of any outward objects. For summer being done, all things stand upon them with a weather-beaten face; and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hue. If they

looked behind them, there was the mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a main bar and gulf to separate them from all the civil parts of the world. . . . What could now sustain them but the spirit of God and his grace? May not, and ought not, the children of these fathers rightly say: ‘Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean and were ready to perish in this wilderness; but they cried unto the Lord and he heard their voice and looked on their adversity. . . . When they wandered in the desert wilderness out of the way, and found no city to dwell in, both hungry and thirsty, their soul was overwhelmed in them. Let them confess before the Lord his loving-kindness, and his wonderful works before the sons of men.”¹

     As the history proceeds year by year, few things are omitted that a noble curiosity could desire to look into, the bright and the sombre side of that primal life, its inadequate shelter, its sickness, its weariness, its long pressure upon the verge of famine and assassination, its roughness, its grim toils, its ignoble wranglings and meannesses, its incongruous outbreaks of crime, its steady persistent ascent into prosperity through sagacious enterprise, hard work, and indomitable faith, its piety, its military exploits, its philanthropy, its acute diplomacy, its far-eyed statesmanship. As the book is composed in the form of annual records of experience, it has the privilege of stopping where it will without violating its own unity. The historian’s hand kept moving upon this task for twenty years; and when at last old age and public cares rested too heavy upon it, the work, brought down to 1646, was finished so far as it went. Break off when it would, that work could not be a fragment.

     The prevailing trait of its pages is of course grave; but at times this sedateness is relieved by a quaint and pithy emphasis of phrase that amounts almost to humor. But

a writer like Bradford is more likely to condescend to a solemn sort of sarcasm than to humor; as, for instance, in his dealing with John Lyford, the mischievous clerical impostor who in 1624 found his way to Plymouth, and vexed the souls of the Pilgrims by the antics of his sly, sensual, and malignant life. Some lines in Bradford’s sketch of this fawning swindler remind one of the more elaborate work of a mighty painter of human character in our own time, having particularly an amusing resemblance to that great artist’s portrait of Uriah Heep. The historian ushers Lyford upon the stage under the ironical title of an “eminent person,” and adds that when he “first came ashore, he saluted them with that reverence and humility as is seldom to be seen, and indeed made them ashamed, he so bowed and cringed unto them, and would have kissed their hands if they would have suffered him; yea, he wept and shed many tears, blessing God that had brought him to see their faces; and admiring the things they had done in their wants, and so forth, as if he had been made all of love, and the humblest person in the world.”¹ In the early and doubtful days of the Plymouth colony, the true men were troubled by the querulous and paltry complaints which by some of the weaker brethren were sent back or carried back to England, and which had the effect of discouraging the flow of emigration thither. Many of these complaints seemed to a man like Bradford to be too despicable for serious notice, as this, “that the people are much annoyed with mosquitoes.” His contemptuous answer was: “They are too delicate, and unfit to begin new plantations and colonies, that cannot endure the biting of a mosquito. We would wish such to keep at home till at least they be mosquito-proof.”²

     This old document brings into view some aspects of character now not commonly presented as belonging to those august personages whom we reverently name the

Pilgrim Fathers. Through the thick haze of oratorical compliment that has so long enveloped their persons, we perhaps fail to see the literal and prosaic truth concerning them. They were not all of the saintly and heroic type, bearing every burden with speechless and devout endurance. Even while their feet had but just touched the sacred granite of Plymouth Rock, “discontents and murmurings” arose among some, and “mutinous speeches and carriages” among others.¹ Even some of the best of them, perhaps, would have seemed to us rather pragmatical and disputatious persons, with all the edges and corners of their characters left sharp, with all their opinions very definitely formed, and with their habits of frank utterance quite thoroughly matured. Certainly, in these pages, they do not seem to have been a company of gentle, dreamy, and euphemistical saints, with a particular aptitude for martyrdom, and an inordinate development of affability. The world, it appears, is indebted for much of its progress to uncomfortable and even grumpy people; and the Pilgrim Fathers had so implacable a desire to have things quite right according to their own austere standard, that even on the brink of any momentous enterprise, they would stop and argue the case, if a suspicion occurred to them that things were not quite right. This exacting and tenacious propensity of theirs was not a little criticised by some who had business connections with them. Thomas Weston of London, in his disgust at the first return of the Mayflower from Plymouth without any lading, told them by letter that “a quarter of the time” they “spent in discoursing, arguing, and consulting” would have enabled them to make a better showing of the commercial success of their expedition. The impetuous and noble-hearted Robert Cushman, with his practical eye, and his keen zest for unhindered action, complained of the interminable disputations of the Pilgrims when hovering

upon the English coast preparatory to their famous ocean voyage: “We that should be partners of humility and peace shall be examples of jangling and insulting;” ‘there is fallen already amongst us a flat schism; and we are readier to go to dispute, than to set forward a voyage.”¹

     Nevertheless, upon almost every page of this history there is some quiet trace of the lofty motives which conducted them to their great enterprise, and of the simple heroism of their thoughts in pursuing it. They had undertaken the voyage, “for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith,” and for the honor of their “king and country.”² In computing the prodigious labors and sufferings of it, they deliberately judged themselves to be suitable to encounter them; for “it is not with us as with other men, whom small things can discourage, or small discontentments cause to wish themselves at home again.”³ “We are well weaned from the delicate milk of our mother-country, and inured to the difficulties of a strange and hard land, which yet in a great part the have by patience overcome.”⁴ With all their hard grip of the things of this world, their carefulness in bargains, their mechanic industry, their pecuniary thrift, they had a just estimate of the limited value of earthly possessions, and a sincere habit of unworldly-mindedness. Being baffled in one of their projects for getting to America, after having much trusted to this plan, they were greatly disappointed; and Bradford calls it “a right emblem, it may be, of the uncertain things of this world; that when men have toiled themselves for them, they vanish into smoke.”⁵ Upon their final departure from Leyden, he says: “So they left that goodly and pleasant city which had been their resting place near twelve years; but they knew they were pilgrims, and looked not much on those things, but lift up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest country, and quieted their spirits.”⁶

     Thus are made plain to us the commanding qualities of the mind and style of our first American historian,—justice, breadth, vigor, dignity, directness, and an untroubled command of strong and manly speech. Evidently he wrote without artistic consciousness or ambition. The daily food of his spirit was noble. He uttered himself, without effort, like a free man, a sage, and a Christian.

     Nathaniel Morton, whose name we place next to that of William Bradford merely on account of the close personal connection between the two men, was born in England in 1613. With his father’s family he came to Plymouth in 1623. In 1624, his father died, and thenceforward Nathaniel was the object of paternal kindness from his illustrious uncle, Governor Bradford. In 1645, being thirty-two years old, he was elected secretary of Plymouth Colony, and continued to hold that office until his death forty years afterward.

     The occupation of his life, his presence in the colony almost from the beginning, and his familiar acquaintance with its leading men, all directed his thoughts toward the composition of its history. The result was the publication at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1669, of “New England’s Memorial,” which the author himself describes as “a brief relation of the most memorable and remarkable passages of the providence of God manifested to the planters of New England in America, with special reference to the first colony thereof called New Plymouth.”¹ He takes pains to mention that his principal authorities are the manuscript history of his uncle, and “certain diurnals of the honored Mr. Edward Winslow.” The use which he made of these authorities was to transcribe large portions of them with almost literal exactness to his own

pages.¹ Bradford’s manuscript ends with 1646; Winslow’s could not have continued later than 1649; and from about this time, Morton’s history, deprived of the copious currents of their assistance, dwindles into a mere rill of obituary notices relating principally to godly ministers thereafter from time to time defunct.

     Morton’s modesty in alluding to his own literary merits would perhaps disarm us of severity in criticising him, even if we were not already intimidated by the quaint and tremendous dehortation with which he has undertaken to shield his book: “Let not the harshness of my style prejudice thy taste or appetite to the dish I present thee with. Accept it as freely as I give it. Carp not at what thou dost not approve, but use it as a remembrance of the Lord’s goodness, to engage to true thankfulness and obedience; so it may be a help to thee in thy journey through the wilderness of this world, to that eternal rest which is only to be found in the heavenly Canaan.”²

     We need not expect to find in an author who is a mere historical copyist, any individual force or originality. Morton was shaped plastically by the hand of his sect and of his locality; and wherever he utters anything that is not the echo of Bradford or of Winslow, it is likely to be the echo of the common opinion or passion of the community in which he passed his painstaking life. He squares off, for example, against poor Samuel Gorton—the favorite target of orthodox New England invectives in those days—and safely pommels with blows a man who was already down,

and whom everybody else was pommelling.¹ A far greater man than Samuel Gorton, Roger Williams, was handled by the historian in the same manner, and apparently for the same reason.² The historian was in no respect superior to his age; and the venom and the pettiness of his age mix themselves with the ink that flows from his pen.

     For nearly two hundred years his book has enjoyed the reputation of an original and a classic document in our early annals. Thomas Prince, the historian, indicates its great celebrity in his time by the remark that in his own childhood next to religious history he was instructed in the history of New England, and that the first book put into his hands upon the latter subject was Morton’s “Memorial.”³ Since the recent publication of Bradford’s history, however, that of Morton has declined rapidly toward the fate of being utterly unread. Henceforward they who wish to seek our earliest history at its head waters will of course pass by Nathaniel Morton, and draw from the same limpid and sweet well-spring that he drew from.

     In the early spring of the year 1630, a fleet of four vessels sailed out into the sea from a beautiful harbor in the Isle of Wight, their prows pointed westward. On board that fleet were the greatest company of wealthy and cultivated

persons that have ever emigrated in any one voyage from England to America. They were prosperous English Puritans. They had in England houses and lands and social consideration. With all the faults of England, in church and state, they loved her still. Their departure from England was not the effort of poverty in an old country seeking to better itself in a new one, nor of smirched reputations fleeing away to find in distance the solace of being unknown, nor of uneasy spirits changing their abode on account of the mere frenzy for changing something. Their expatriation was their own act; and it was prompted both by the noblest self-denial and by the shrewdest statesmanship.

     Foremost among them in intellectual power and in weight of character was John Winthrop, already chosen governor of the Massachusetts company, and qualified by every personal trait to be the conductor and the statesman of the new Puritan colony of Massachusetts Bay. He was then just forty-two years old. Born at Groton, in Suffolk, of a family honored in that neighborhood for its high character and its wealth, he had been trained to the law, as his father and his grandfather had been before him. He was a man of good books and of good manners; catholic in opinion and sympathy; a deeply conscientious man; not willing that his life should be a thing of extemporized policies and make-shifts, but building it up clear from the foundation on solid principle.

     The little fleet that carried to New England John Winthrop and his fortunes, was more than two months upon the voyage; and he made such use of this sea-born leisure, that we have occasion to commemorate it yet. Brooding upon the new life they were about to begin in the new land, he saw that only in one way could it be saved from becoming base, discordant, and disappointing: that way was by their carrying into it, for every day and for every act, the Christ-like spirit of disinterestedness. The thought grew in his mind and asserted itself in the

form of a little treatise which he entitled “A Model of Christian Charity.”¹ It is an elaborate exposition of the Christian doctrine of unselfishness, and bears especially upon the condition awaiting the colonists in the new, perilous, and struggling life toward which they were going. It shows that if each man be for himself, their great enterprise would come to nothing. Only by mutual love and help, and a grand, patient self-denial, could they all meet the tasks that lay before them. “We must be knit together in this work as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities for the supply of other’s necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality. We must delight in each other; make other’s conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work as members of the same body.”²

     As John Winthrop, while upon the voyage, wrote this discourse to prepare the spirits of himself and his associates for the toils and frets and depressions of their pioneer life, so also immediately upon going on board ship he began another piece of writing, which he continued to work at not only during the rest of the voyage but during the rest of his life, and which is a treasure beyond price among our early historic memorials. It was on Easter Monday, March the twenty-ninth, 1630, his ships still riding in the harbor of Cowes, that he wrote the first record in that journal of his which grew to be “The History of New England.” His plan was to jot down significant experiences in the daily life of his company, not only while at sea but after their arrival in America,—thus writing their history as fast as they should make it. Accordingly, the long voyage is registered in an almost daily

chronicle, giving faithful mention of the changes of the winds, the various behavior of the ocean, the routine and the caprices of ship-life, the temperate diversion afforded by daily prayers and frequent sermons, the interchange of social courtesies between the passengers belonging to the different vessels, and such other items as were wont to fill up the sluggish days of sea-travel in the seventeenth century. At last, on the eighth of June, “we had sight of land to the north-west about ten leagues. . . . We had now fair sunshine weather, and so pleasant a sweet air as did much refresh us, and there came a smell off the shore like the smell of a garden.”¹

     For one in Winthrop’s station the end of his voyage was the end of his leisure; and his journal thenceforward shows that he had too much to do every day to write much about it. Here are frequent breaks and blanks in the record, rallyings of remembrance, many a great day having to content itself with small mention, tokens enough that the resolute diarist was forced to wrestle continually with the temptation of yielding all to the overpowering encroachments of haste and fatigue. Yet, in spite of all, he kept on sturdily, making such headway as he could, fixing a date even when he could not expand a scene, and securing to us, notwithstanding all interruption and reticence, a clear, true story of the way in which the fathers and mothers of the commonwealth of Massachusetts labored and suffered in the days of that stern beginning. For almost twenty years the story went forward, from 1630 until a few weeks before the writer’s death in 1649. It is quite evident that Winthrop wrote what he did with the full purpose of having it published as a history; but he wrote it amid the hurry and weariness of his unloitering life, with no anxiety about style, with no other purpose than to tell the truth in plain and honest fashion. The native qualities of the man were lofty, self-respecting, grave; by culture and

habit he expressed himself spontaneously in dignified and calm words; and at times, when the thought lifted him, he rose to a stately unconscious eloquence. He was no artist, only a thinker and a doer. Of course he never aimed at effect. His moral qualities are plainly stamped upon his manner of expression—moderation, disinterestedness, reverence, pity, dignity, love of truth and of justice. The prevailing tone is judicial: he tells the truth squarely, even against himself. The greatest incidents in the life of the colony are reported; also the least. The pathos, and heroism, and pettiness of their life, all are here. “My son, Henry Winthrop, was drowned at Salem.”¹ “A cow died at Plymouth, and a goat at Boston, with eating Indian corn.”² Monday we kept a court.”³ The rivers were frozen up, and they of Charlestown could not come to the sermon at Boston till the afternoon at high water.”⁴ “Billington executed at Plymouth for murdering one.”⁵ “The governor and deputy and Mr. Nowell . . . went to Watertown to confer with Mr. Phillips, the pastor, and Mr. Brown, the elder of the congregation there, about an opinion which they had published that the churches of Rome were true churches. The matter was debated before many of both congregations, and by the approbation of all the assembly except three, was concluded an error.”⁶ “The night before, alarm was given in divers of the plantations. It arose through the shooting off some pieces at Watertown by occasion of a calf which Sir Richard Saltonstall had lost.”⁷ “At the same court one Henry Linne was whipped and banished for writing letters into England full of slander against our government and orders of our churches.”⁸ “The governor went on foot to Agawam, and because the people there wanted a minister, spent the Sabbath with them, and exercised by way of prophecy, and returned home the tenth.”⁹

     That last bit of narration is delightful for the clear glimpse it gives us of the spirit of early New England society, and of the plain devout ways of “the governor” himself. Again and again this good governor comes into the story, always in thoroughly modest reference. Once, he tells us, he got benighted in the woods, and had to pass the whole night there; and out of this arose an amusing little incident, which, with the peril it involved of having his moral reputation misconstrued, he faithfully relates, all unconscious of the somewhat comic aspect in which he would thus present himself for a moment to the contemplation of posterity: “The governor being at his farmhouse at Mistick, walked out after supper, and took a piece in his hand, supposing he might see a wolf; . . . and being about half a mile off, it grew suddenly dark, so as, in coming home, he mistook his path, and went till he came to a little house of Sagamore John, which stood empty. There he stayed; and having a piece of match in his pocket (for he always carried about him match and a compass, and in summer-time snake-weed) he made a good fire near the house, and lay down upon some old mats which he found there, and so spent the night, sometimes walking by the fire, sometimes singing psalms, and sometimes getting wood, but could not sleep. It was through God’s mercy a warm night; but a little, before day it began to rain, and having no cloak he made shift by a long pole to climb up into the house. In the morning there came thither an Indian squaw: but perceiving her before she had opened the door, he barred her out; yet she stayed there a great while, essaying to get in, and at last she went away, and be returned safe home, his servants having been much perplexed for him, and having walked about, and  shot off pieces, and hallooed in the night; but he heard them not.”¹

     There lived in those days near Medford a farmer named

Dalkin; and to him and his wife there happened a grotesque experience to which they are indebted for being immortalized in Winthrop’s usually solemn pages. They were coming home by night, and had to cross the river at the ford before the tide had fallen. “The husband adventured over, and finding it too deep persuaded his wife to stay awhile; but it raining very sore, she would needs adventure over, and was carried away with the stream past her depth. Her husband, not daring to go help her, cried out; and thereupon his dog, being at his house near by, came forth, and seeing something in the water swam to her; and she caught hold on the dog’s tail, so he drew her to the shore and saved her life.”¹

     There is in this history one vein of writing that is of deep interest to us now for its frank mention of certain strange psychological phenomena in the experience of our ancestors. Living as they did on a narrow strip of land, between the two infinities of the ocean and the wilderness, and under the consciousness that the mysteries of the unseen world were close about them, it is not strange that they fell into glooms and fantasies. They had overpowering manifestations of spiritual force; they heard awful voices in the air; strange sights glimmered before their eyes on the verge of the forest, or flitted along the sea. Of all this, here are characteristic examples: “About midnight three men coming in a boat to Boston, saw two lights arise out of the water near the north point of the town cove, in form like a man, and went at a small distance to the town, and so to the south point, and there vanished away. They saw them about a quarter of an hour, being between the town and the governor’s garden. The like was seen by many, a week after, arising about Castle Island, and in one fifth of an hour came to John Gallop’s Point. . . . A light like the moon arose about the north-east point in Boston, and met the former at Nottle’s

Island, and there they closed in one, and then parted, and closed and parted divers times, and so went over the hill in the island and vanished. Sometimes they shot out flames, and sometimes sparkles. This was about eight of the clock in the evening, and was seen by many. About the same time a voice was heard upon the water between Boston and Dorchester, calling out in a most dreadful manner, ‘Boy! boy! come away! come away!’ and it suddenly shifted from one place to another a great distance about twenty times. It was heard by divers godly persons.”¹

     There is one portion of this History that has acquired great celebrity: it is the one embodying Winthrop’s speech, in 1645, in the general court, on his being acquitted of the charge of having exceeded his authority as deputy-governor. The speech as a whole, especially when read in connection with the touching circumstances of its delivery, is one of great nobility, pathos, and grave eloquence;² and one passage of it, containing Winthrop’s statement of the nature of liberty, is of pre-eminent merit, worthy of being placed by the side of the weightiest and most magnanimous sentences of John Locke or Algernon Sidney. A distinguished American publicist has declared that this is the best definition of liberty in the English language, and that in comparison with it what Blackstone says about liberty seems puerile. “The great questions,” says Winthrop, “that have troubled the country, are about the authority of the magistrates and the liberty of the people. . . Concerning liberty, I observe a great mistake in the country about that. There is a twofold liberty, natural, . . . and civil or federal. The first is common to man with beasts and other creatures. By this, man, as he stands in relation to man simply, hath liberty to do

what he lists; it is a liberty to evil as well as to good. This liberty is incompatible and inconsistent with authority, and cannot endure the least restraint of the most just authority. The exercise and maintaining of this liberty makes men grow more evil, and in time to be worse than brute beasts: omnes sumus licentiâ deteriores.¹ This is that great enemy of truth and peace, that wild beast, which all the ordinances of God are bent against, to restrain and subdue it. The other kind of liberty I call civil or federal; it may also be termed moral, in reference to the covenant between God and man, in the moral law, and the politic covenants and constitutions amongst men themselves. This liberty is the proper end and object of authority, and cannot subsist without it; and it is a liberty to that only which is good, just, and honest. This liberty you are to stand for, with the hazard not only of your goods but of your lives, if need be. Whatsoever crosseth this, is not authority, but a distemper thereof. This liberty is maintained and exercised in a way of subjection to authority; it is of the same kind of liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free. . . . If you stand for your natural corrupt liberties, and will do what is good in your own eyes, you will not endure the least weight of authority, but will murmur, and oppose, and be always striving to shake off that yoke; but if you will be satisfied to enjoy such civil and lawful liberties, such as Christ allows you, then will you quietly and cheerfully submit unto that authority which is set over you, in all the administrations of it, for your good. Wherein, if we fail at any time, we hope we shall be willing by God’s assistance to hearken to good advice from any of you, or in any other way of God; so shall your liberties be preserved in upholding the honor and power of authority amongst you.”²

     The explorer of our early literature meets at many a turn in his wanderings one title whose quaintness appeals to his imagination as well as to his curiosity: “The Wonder-Working Providence of Zion’s Saviour in New England.” The book to which this title belongs was written by a man who had made something of a name in his day for quite other things than writing books, Captain Edward Johnson, immigrant in 1630 to New England from Herne Hill, in Kent; a man of property in both countries; principal founder of the town of Woburn, in Massachusetts, in 1640; and from that year until his death in 1672, entrusted by his fellow-townsmen with almost every responsible office they had to bestow—town-clerk, delegate to the general court, and so forth. He was a very devout and explicit Puritan; his square, stalwart common-sense made itself felt in public and private; he had a strong taste and aptitude for military affairs; and it is significant of his soundness of brain that, amid the general frenzy of the early witchcraft excitement, he was one of the few that kept their heads cool and opposed all judicial prosecution of those uncomely hags that were suspected of unlawful intimacy with the devil.

     Had a man like this—a ship-carpenter and farmer, unlettered, unversed in affairs, a sort of rural alderman and militia-hero—lived anywhere else than in New England in the seventeenth century, we should by no means have suspected him of any inclinations toward authorship. But whatever inclinations of this kind he had he could not help; for there was so earnest and stimulating a quality in the grand tasks which these men of New England had undertaken in the world, that even ship-carpenters and country-politicians could not escape the occasional propensity to clutch the pen, and rough-hew a handful of sentences, especially when any good thing was to be accomplished

by the job. It was no ambition of authorship that prompted Edward Johnson to write his book, but an important tangible result which could be achieved in no other way. He handled the pen as he did the sword and the broadaxe—to accomplish something with it; and the precise object just then before him was this. Through such unfriendly gossips as Sir Christopher Gardiner, Philip Ratcliff, and Thomas Morton, the people of England had been all along receiving ill tidings of the people of Massachusetts; and it was somebody’s duty to put down these lies by the truth. The truth was well known to Edward Johnson. Why might it not be the duty of Edward Johnson to tell it? To him it seemed plain that the planting of God’s church and state in New England was a thing that God himself had taken a very active part in, in fact was directly responsible for; that instead of being calumniated, it ought to be celebrated; and that the straightforward way of doing this would be merely to give a history of the wonder-working providence of God in the country spoken of.¹ This single object, held steadily before him as he wrote, gave an epic unity to his work, and makes it strong and interesting yet, notwithstanding the literary clumsiness of the author.

     The significance and the glory of God’s intervention in all that mighty business of erecting a great religious commonwealth in America could not be felt without a knowledge of the dismal state of England at the time God began to rescue his chosen ones from it. Accordingly, the book opens with a homely but graphic picture of “the sad condition of England when this people removed.” It was in this dark time that “Christ the glorious king of his churches” came to their deliverance; and in 1628, he stirred up his heralds to make this proclamation: “All

you, the people of Christ that are here oppressed, imprisoned, and scurrilously derided, gather yourselves together, your wives and little ones, and answer to your several names, as you shall be shipped for his service in the western world, and more especially for planting the united colonies of New England, where you are to attend the service of the King of Kings.”¹

     Here we have the clue to the whole book. The departure from England, the long peril on “a dreadful and terrible ocean,” and the erection of a pure church in “the far-remote and vast wilderness,” are but the successive stages in a stupendous religious campaign, inaugurated by Christ for a hallowed purpose, and sustained by him with marvellous exhibitions of divine power. Their emigration was, in the author’s view, not a secular act but a sacred one; they who went to New England went upon a spiritual crusade; they were not adventurers, wandering traders and agriculturists seeking earthly gain, but soldiers of Christ, doing battle under his banner, fighting in a holy war, and looking for their reward beyond the clouds. The whole book is pervaded by this thought; and a thousand incidental phrases express it. The colonists are “brethren and fellow-soldiers;”² the addition at one time of forty-six freemen is the addition of so many “soldiers listed;”³ in looking about upon their antagonists they “face to the right,” they “face to the front,” they “face to the left;”⁴ and the great service of “this poor people” in populating the “howling desert,” is simply “marching manfully on—the Lord assisting through the greatest difficulties and forest labors that ever any with such weak means have done.”⁵

     Believing thus with a stanch and literal faith that they were volunteers in the immediate service of their “great Lord Paramount,” they had the invincible cheer and

courage of knowing that he “stood not as an idle spectator beholding his people’s ruth and their enemies’ rage, but as an actor in all actions, to bring to naught the desires of the wicked, . . . having also the ordering of every weapon in its first produce, guiding every shaft that flies, leading each bullet to his place of settling, and weapon to the wound it makes.”¹ Under such a leader, upon such a crusade, the humblest soldier was ennobled, and the pettiest undertaking made grand: “for the Lord Christ intends to achieve greater matters by this little handful than the world is aware of;” and “although it may seem a mean thing to be a New England soldier,” yet some of them were to “have the battering and beating down, scaling, winning, and wasting the overtopping towers of the hierarchy.”² And as the august leadership and the sublime service under which they marched gave rank and statelifless to them and to their small doings, so it lifted them out of timidity and petulance, and armed them with a virtue that could defy both temptation and pain: “As Death, the King of Terror, with all his dreadful attendance inhumane and barbarous, tortures doubled and trebled by all the infernal furies, have appeared but light and momentary to the soldiers of Christ Jesus, so also the pleasure, profits, and honors of this world, set forth in their most glorious splendor and magnitude by the alluring Lady of Delight, proffering pleasant embraces, cannot entice with her siren songs such soldiers of Christ, whose aims are elevated by him many millions above that brave warrior Ulysses.”³

     But from premises like these followed some stern and terrible conclusions; for if they were actual soldiers of Christ, and in a state of war, any toleration of disbelievers was an enormous military crime-it was giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Hence came, by a logic that had

in it no flaw, the whole dire philosophy and ethics of persecution: “You are not set up for tolerating times, nor shall any of you be content with this that you are set at liberty; but take up your arms and march manfully on till all opposers of Christ’s kingly power be abolished. And as for you who are called to sound forth his silver trumpets, blow loud and shrill to this chiefest treble tune—for the armies of the great Jehovah are at hand.”¹

     It is in this spirit of rapt and austere Puritan confidence, that Edward Johnson wrote his history of New England from the establishment of Salem in 1628, to the time of John Endicott’s governorship in 1651. His words are those of a spectator of most of the events which he describes. He omits many things which we should now like to read of, but which did not so immediately illustrate the religious significance of New England life. He tells particularly the story of the successive formation of towns and churches, as the people pushed inland, and up and down the coast. He chronicles the annual elections of governor and deputy-governor; the arrival of godly ministers from England; the troubles incident to all primitive settlements in a rough country and in a harsh climate; Indian wars; religious controversies; and, in general, the pangs and risks and deliverances of God’s chosen troops in their appointed campaign in the wilderness.

     The value of this book, of course, is not that which attaches to what we commonly call history. Here are lacking impartiality, coolness, comprehensiveness, critical judgment, and the delight of a masterly and sweet expression. It is crude enough in thought and style, avowedly partisan, and pitched upon a key of wild religious rhapsody. Yet with all its limitations, it is the sincere testimony of an eye-witness and an honest man; it preserves the very spirit and aroma of New England thought and experience in the seventeenth century; it supplies us with a multitude

of tints and tones which, without this book, we should not have; its very faults of diction, its grotesque and fanatic zeal, its narrowness, its harshness, its frank and bloodthirsty Hebraisms, its touching and sublime simplicity of trust, its choice of what is noble and everlasting in existence, its disdain of lies and toys and fleshly phantoms, all make it a most authentic and a priceless memorial of American character and life in the heroic epoch of our earliest men.

     An admirable quality in the book is its concentrated sketches of the leading men of the time. Thus, John Endicott was “a fit instrument to begin this wilderness work, of courage bold, undaunted, yet sociable, and of a cheerful spirit, loving and austere, applying himself to either as occasion served.”¹ His references to the great personages in secular life, Winthrop, Sir Harry Vane, Hopkins, Bradstreet, and others, are indeed laudatory, but they are cold in comparison with the intensity of his reverent language concerning the principal ministers of the young nation. The vocabulary of Puritan admiration is strained to give utterance to his laic affection and loyalty towards “the grave, godly, and judicious Hooker,” “the reverend and much desired Mr. John Cotton,” “the rhetorical Mr. Stone,” “the reverend and holy man of God, Mr. Nathaniel Rogers,” and “the holy, heavenly, sweet-affecting, and soul-ravishing minister, Mr. Thomas Shepard.” The natural rebound of this rapturous enthusiasm for the ministers was an equally rapturous contempt for their opponents—the unsanctioned preachers, the heretics, babblers, and illiterate agitators who infested those pioneer communities; and in his opinion all that was odious in such talking vagrants was brought together in the person of the troublesome prophetess of New England, Anne Hutchinson. He seldom condescends to mention her by name; but he points at her with scornful allusions that are unmistakable.

She is the “woman that preaches better gospel than any of your black-coats that have been at the Ninneversity;”¹ she is the “master-piece of women’s wit, . . . backed with the sorcery of a second who had much converse with the devil;”² she is “the grand-mistress of them all who ordinarily prated every Sabbath day.”³

     It would be true to say that there is hardly a trait of Puritanism, either noble or narrow or grim, that does not represent itself in some line of this book. Here, for example, we have in the author’s description of what the ruling elders should be, the lofty confidence of Puritanism in the unseen and supernal Righteousness: they should be “not greedily given to hoard up for themselves, but by their own example leading others to liberality and hospitality, having the earth in low esteem, and faith in exercise when cattle and corn fail.”⁴ For the narrowness of Puritanism, the examples here at hand are of an embarrassing multitude; but this may serve. The belief in a present, watchful, and benign Providence, is the source of the sweetest comfort and the most perfect fortitude that can live in human nature; but when this belief intensifies itself into a microscopic and picayune Providence, to be interpreted in detail by man as an expression of the divine favor or wrath in the case of every falling tower, or launched thunderbolt, or capsized sail-boat, or lost cow, it becomes a creed ministering to abject superstition and vindictiveness. Thus, Edward Johnson mentions, as an instance of “the sad hand of the Lord” against a person, the case of a certain barber of Boston who was summoned one day to Roxbury to draw a tooth, and who, being overwhelmed upon the journey by a snow-storm, was found several days after frozen to death: “in which sad accident this was taken into consideration by divers people, that

this barber was more than ordinary laborious to draw men to those sinful errors that were formerly so frequent, . . . he having a fit opportunity, by reason of his trade, so soon as any were set down in his chair, he would commonly be cutting off their hair and the truth together.”¹ And for the grimness of Puritanism, the following passage will be nicely to satisfy the most exacting. After describing the famous war of extermination against the Pequots, the author thus concludes: “The Lord in mercy toward his poor churches, having thus destroyed these bloody barbarous Indians, he returns his people in safety to their vessels, where they take account of their prisoners. The squaws and some young youths they brought home with them; and finding the men to be deeply guilty of the crimes they undertook the war for, they brought away only their heads.”²

     In a book like this we are not apt to expect much gayety; but one may find in it, here and there, some hint of an effort on the author’s part to relax his visage into a smile. Thus, in one place he deigns to speak rather facetiously of so serious a thing as the Atlantic Ocean, which he calls in familiar style “the ditch between England and their now place of abode;” and he even proceeds to the playful remark that this ditch, forsooth, “they could not leap over with a lope-staff,”³—doubtless the nearest approach to a jest that the author of “Wonder-Working Providence” was ever frivolous enough to indulge in.

     But though he intended it not, the book is nevertheless somewhat mirth-inspiring. Its very seriousness has a comic aspect, most of all when it rises into the awful shape of verse; for, this retired ship-carpenter of Woburn hewed out poetry in a manner worthy of his original trade. His first official entry in the town records of Woburn took a metrical

form; and in his history, no important person is introduced upon the scene without some brief poetic tribute. He has indeed a half abashed air, a virgin coyness, so to speak, as he brings forward these tiny trinkets in rhyme, as if he were himself remotely conscious of some impropriety in the manufacture of such things by a respectable man like himself; and yet, on the other hand, he seems to have a sturdy faith that since these things are poetry, there must be a sort of immortalizing virtue in them. “And now,” says he, as he is about to hold up before us his poetic apostrophe to Governor John Endicott, “let no man be offended at the author’s rude verse, penned of purpose to keep in memory the names of such worthies as Christ made strong for himself, in this unwonted work of his.”¹ One couplet of this little poem will be quite enough:

     The following lines are a portion of his “metre” composed “for the future remembrance” of the celebrated Hugh Peters:

     But even from the literary aspect there are some qualities of this book that we may not use for our mirth, yea for our laughter, when we are waspish. It has not infrequently, even amid its most ungainly sentences, a charm of picturesque simplicity, an unconscious and unadorned beauty of honest speech. Speaking of the work they hoped to do in the fields when a certain long winter should

have passed away, he says that they discoursed “between one while and another, of the great progress they would make after the summer’s sun had changed the earth’s white furred gown into a green mantle.”¹ One of their Providential deliverances on the sea as they were nearing the American coast is thus pictured to us: “The night newly breaking off her darkness, and the daylight being clouded with a gross vapor, as if night’s curtains remained half-shut, the seamen and passengers standing on the decks suddenly fixed their eyes on a great boat, as they deemed; and anon after, they spied another, and after that another; but musing on the matter, they perceived themselves to be in great danger of many great rocks. With much terror and affrightment they turned the ship about, expecting every moment to be dashed in pieces against the rocks. But He whose providence brought them in, piloted them. out again, without any danger, to their great rejoicing.”² In speaking of Christ’s tenderness and care toward his persecuted church, the author has a sentence that anyone might take to be a bit of the prose of John Milton: “With his own blessed hands wiping away the tears that trickle down her cheeks, drying her dankish eyes, and hushing her sorrowful sobs in his sweet bosom.”³ In the following sentence, wherein he cheers up the good people of New England by reminding them of more helpers already on the way to them from England, one may hear a sort of plaintive and lingering melody: “There are for your further aid herein many more of these sincere soldiers floating upon the great ocean toward you.”⁴

     In our first literary period there remain two other historical writers who have this in common, that their writings

relate to the Indians of New England, and to the dreadful conflicts that raged there in the seventeenth century between those Indians and the white people who had undertaken to settle near them.

     The ability of the English to establish themselves in New England in spite of the objections of the original inhabitants, was tested in a serious manner twice, and only twice. The first occasion was in 1637 and gave rise to the Pequot war; the second was in 1675 and brought on King Philip’s war. Of course, at other times, before and afterward, there were innumerable petty collisions of the rival races, casual jets of murder, fitful paroxysms of wrath and vengeance on both sides; but these two were the only occasions on which the red men in that portion of the continent, alarmed and maddened by the danger ever swelling and darkening over them from the increasing multitude of their English invaders, deliberately combined in large numbers, formed comprehensive plans, and moved toward the extermination of the English colonists with a method in their ferocity, with a wide-reaching concert of action, with a skill and a ruthless vigor, that for a time threw some doubt over the possibility of preserving the English settlements there.

     These events are now so far away from us that we do not realize their appalling character; but during the first century and a half of American history, the Indian peril was the one frightful fact perpetually hovering, by day and by night, near every white community. These two wars were the two great acts in early New England history. They marked the heroic epochs of colonial existence. The men who, in these two wars, led the colonists to victory and to safety were thenceforward the popular heroes, the persons of might and renown. It is not strange that each of these tremendous conflicts should have a literature of its own—a crop of writings commemorative of events that had brought to every cottage in New England so much both of agony and of exultation.

     Of the first of these wars—that with the Pequots—Captain John Mason was the historian as well as the hero. On many accounts he is an interesting personage for us to look at in that early time. Though less famous now than Captain Miles Standish, he was in that age fully his equal in reputation, even as he fully equalled him in military service. Like Miles Standish, too, he had been trained to warfare in the Netherlands, where his commander was that Sir Thomas Fairfax who afterward became so distinguished as the leader of the parliamentary forces in the English civil wars; and who, while so engaged, remembered his ancient military pupil then in New England, and sent to him an invitation to come back to England and take a hand in the fight then going forward. But John Mason had important work to do in the new world; and he staid there, and did it. And he did his work so well that his very name became a terror to the Indian tribes, and was a wall of safety around the scattered farmhouses and the feeble villages of his pioneer countrymen. Moreover he lived to a good old age, honored to the last for the courage and the generous wisdom of his life.

     It was at the request of the general court of Connecticut that he wrote “The History of the Pequot War,”¹ a work of only thirty-three pages, giving a plain but vigorous narrative of a very plain and very vigorous campaign. Naturally enough, the historian writes not from documents, but from his own recollection of the events in which he bore so large a part. His style is that of a fighter rather than of a writer; there is an honest bluntness about it, an unaffected rough simplicity, a manly forth-rightness of diction, all the charm of authenticity and strength. It is fortunate that he dashed off his little book without the

expectation of printing it: “I never had thought that this should have come to the press . . .; if I had, I should have endeavored to have put a little more varnish upon it.”¹ We like his bluff narrative all the more because the varnish was left off; and we like him all the more as we get acquainted with the modest and frank spirit in which he wrote it. “I shall only draw the curtain,” he says, “and open my little casement, that so others of larger hearts and abilities may let in a bigger light; that so, at least, some small glimmering may be left to posterity, what difficulties and obstructions their forefathers met with in their first settling these desert parts of America.”²

     The history begins with an account of the first treacherous assaults of the Pequot Indians upon the English “about the year 1632,” and of their further acts of perfidy and violence until, in the year 1637, they had drawn other Indian tribes into a conspiracy for the annihilation of the white settlements in Connecticut. The condition of the latter “did look very sad, for those Pequots were a great people, being strongly fortified, cruel, warlike, munitioned, and so forth; and the English but an handful in comparison.”³ In May, 1637, the English, knowing that the hour was come, gathered two little armies, one under Captain John Underhill, the other under Captain John Mason, and pushed swiftly into the country of the Pequots, and by night drew near to the fort at Mystic in which the most of the Pequot warriors were gathered. There the white men lay down, “much wearied with hard travel, keeping great silence; . . . the rocks were our pillows; yet rest was pleasant. . . . We appointed our guards and placed our sentinels at some distance, who heard the enemy singing at the fort, who continued that strain until midnight, with great insulting and rejoicing.”⁴ By daybreak, the Indians having sunk into a deep sleep, the

whites awoke, crept up to the fort, forced their way into it, and got the savages within their grip. Sword and musket did their work too slowly. “The Captain told them that we should never kill them after that manner; . . . we must burn them; and immediately stepping into the wigwam . . . brought out a firebrand, and putting it into the mats with which they were covered, set the wigwams on fire. . . . When it was thoroughly kindled the Indians ran as men most dreadfully amazed. And indeed such a dreadful terror did the Almighty let fall upon their spirits, that they would fly from us and run into the very flames. . . . And when the fort was thoroughly fired, command was given that all should fall off and surround the fort. . . . The fire . . . did swiftly overrun the fort, to the extreme amazement of the enemy: . . . some of them climbing to the top of the palisado; others of them running into the very flames; many of them, gathering to windward, lay pelting at us with their arrows, and we repaid them with our small shot. Others of the stoutest issued forth, as we did guess, to the number of forty—who perished by the sword. . . . Thus were the stout-hearted spoiled, having slept their last sleep; and none of their men could find their hands. Thus did the Lord judge among the heathen, filling the place with dead bodies. . . . In little more than one hour’s space was their impregnable fort, with themselves, utterly destroyed, to the number of six or seven hundred. . . . There were only seven taken captive, and about seven escaped.”¹

     Such was the famous ‘Mystic-fight,-‘ a thorough piece of work, fought over again and again in talk around many a New England fire-side for a hundred years afterward, and never forgotten by the red men who were left alive to remember anything. With that fight the war was really over, even as all was over with the terrible tribe of

the Pequots; and the book, after relating some minor incidents, more or less bloody, rises at the close into a Davidic chant of exultation at the victory of Jehovah over them that do evil, and at the glorious deliverance wrought by him for his people.¹

     The reputation of Daniel Gookin has fallen among us far below his deserts. As we study his writings, we see shining through them the signals of a very noble manhood, modesty, tenderness, strength, devoutness, a heart full of sympathy for every kind of distress, a hand able and quick to reach out and obey the promptings of his heart. Then, too, we are impressed by his uncommon intellectual value. We find that he had width and grip in his ideas; his mind was trained to orderly movement; his style rose clear and free above the turbid and pedantic rhetoric of his age and neighborhood; his reading was shown, not in the flapping tags of quotation, but in a diffused intelligence, fullness, and poise of thought; as an historian, he had the primary virtues—truth, fairness, lucidity.

     Thus, as we begin to get acquainted with the man through his writings and to like him more and more, we turn with quite a new zest to the study of his personal history. His life, we find, was a noble one from end to end: not in all respects prosperous, but rugged and sometimes sorrowful; having in fact the veiled prosperities of hinderance, disappointment, struggle; but cheerful always with the firmness and brightness of high trust, manly pluck, and Christian

resignation. Moreover, he belonged to that large type of manhood that England produced so many specimens of in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Elizabethan men, who settled the antique quarrel between the life of thought and the life of action, by leading both lives. Over against this prosaic, old name of Daniel Gookin, it is right for us to set the two descriptive words that throw some gleam of poetry upon it—the words, author, soldier.

     The date of his birth can be only approximately stated: it was about 1612. He probably came to America with his father in 1621. It is a notable thing about him that though he had grown up to manhood in the Cavalier colony of Virginia, in theology and in politics he was a very Puritan. But in the year 1643, Virginia had a renewed attack of the disease that was then epidemic throughout Christendom—the disease of religious intolerance; and under the paroxysms of this disease Virginia proceeded to expel from her borders certain persons who did not conform to the Episcopal church as there established. This seems to have been the cause of Gookin’s removal to Massachusetts, where he was made a freeman of the colony in May, 1644; taking up his residence subsequently at Cambridge, which continued to be his home during the remainder of his long life. The aptitude of the man for public service was soon recognized; for he was thenceforward in constant employment in matters of war and peace, of piety and politics; he was made captain of militia, member of the house of deputies, speaker of the house of deputies, one of the general magistrates of the colony, a licenser of the printing press, and at last commander-in-chief of the colonial military forces. In 1655, and again in 1657, Gookin went to England, and spent two or three years there, enjoying the acquaintance and confidence of the Protector; for it was through Daniel Gookin that Cromwell sent to the men of Massachusetts his celebrated proposition, that they should abandon the rugged land in which they had settled and transfer

themselves to the balm and bloom of Jamaica. Of all Daniel Gookin’s public employments, the one that was most congenial to his humane spirit was that of superintendent of the Indians within the jurisdiction of Massachusetts. This position he held during the last thirty years of his life, performing its duties with a heartiness and fidelity that were more than official. During all those years he and the apostle Eliot went hand in hand in Christlike labor and provident care for the Indians; and when in 1675 and 1676 the red men of New England under the lead of King Philip made their last great concerted effort to exterminate the white men who had taken possession of their hunting-fields, Gookin and Eliot were among the very few persons who did not give way to insane terror and exasperation. Almost alone, these two men stood up against the popular delirium, and they pleaded even then on behalf of the execrated copper-face the pleas of reason, and Christian pity, and common justice. For this crime Gookin especially was for a time punished with the popular hatred. He was hooted at in public places. He said from the bench where he sat as a magistrate that it was dangerous for him to walk along the streets. He was denounced as a traitor to his own kind. But it was not in Daniel Gookin, doing the right, to bend before any sort of storm; and at last the storm passed by; and he abode still. Later in his life, the same resolute obstinacy, under altered circumstances, brought to him a popularity as prodigious as had been his previous unpopularity; for, when that dogged political conflict with Randolph and Andros came, on, and the people of New England were in danger of being robbed both of property and of freedom by those rapacious menials of James the Second, once more the undaunted courage and the rock-like firmness of Daniel Gookin were a power in the land. He fought Randolph and Andros upon every item of their demands. He opposed every concession to them. He opposed the sending of agents to England. He opposed any submission to the

acts of trade. He stood for a strict construction of the colonial charter. He nourished his patriotic jealousy for every specific American right, political or commercial. He was the originator and the prophet of that immortal dogma of our national greatness—no taxation without representation. Of course, in this bitter and perilous battle with the enemies of his own people, his own people at least were with him; and he who ten years before had been so obnoxious to them that his name was “a by-word among men and boys,”¹ and that jeers and threats pursued him along the streets, in his last years was permitted to taste the flavor of a public approbation that filled all the air about him and thronged after his footsteps wherever he went. Finally, in honor of this man, three things remain to be said. First, his piety was Puritanic without being vitriolic. Second, he had been in the public service a large part of his life; but he died so poor that his surviving friend, the apostle Eliot, wrote to the bountiful and wise Robert Boyle in England, asking him in charity to send over to the poor man’s widow the sum of ten pounds. Third, he was a white man; yet the rumor of his death carried sorrow into every red man’s wigwam in Massachusetts.

     The writings left to us by this grand old American patriarch and sage are two treatises, both historical, and both relating to the Indians of New England. He had indeed worked out an admirable plan for a general history of New England,—the most comprehensive and philosophical plan, perhaps, that was projected by any one before the present century. He was about sixty-two years old when he gave to the public a description of this plan; and in doing so he used these interesting sentences of self-reference: “You may here see my design, which I earnestly desired might have been drawn by a more able pen; and I have often earnestly moved able persons to undertake

it; but not knowing of any, and being unwilling that a matter of so great concernment for the honor of God and the good of men, should be buried in oblivion, I have adventured in my old age, and in a plain style, to draw some rude delineaments of God’s beautiful work in this land. I have, through grace, travelled half way in this work, as is said before; but in truth I find myself clogged with so many avocations, as my public employ among the English and Indians, and my own personal and family exercises, which by reason of my low estate in the world are the more obstructive and perplexing, so that I cannot proceed in this work so vigorously as I desire. Yet I shall endeavor, by God’s assistance, if he please to spare me life and ability, to make what speedy progress I can. If this tract concerning the Indians find acceptance, I shall be the more encouraged to finish and send forth the other; which although it should prove very imperfect, by reason of the weakness and unworthiness of the author, yet I shall endeavor that it be drawn according to truth; and then, if it be of no other use, it may serve to inform my children, or possibly contribute some little help to a more able pen, to set forth the same thing, more exactly and exquisitely garnished, in after times.”¹

     These sentences occur in the postscript of his first work, “Historical Collections of the Indians in New England,” which he made ready for publication in 1674, and dedicated to Charles the Second. Though carefully finished for the press, the work slumbered in manuscript one hundred and eighteen years, and first awoke to the privilege of print in 1792, in the earliest volume of the Massachusetts His torical Society. It describes the several Indian nations of New England, their customs, their religious beliefs, their forms of government; it particularly tells of the Indians who had accepted Christianity; and it gives affectionate sketches of such noble white men as had devoted themselves

to the task of helping the Indians to find the way to a better life. The author gathered his materials with care, and arranged them with clearness; and his book abounds in calm, pleasant, and judicial statements concerning those crabbed an d forlorn creatures, earth-men, anthropoid animals, whose fate it seemed to be to wither and disappear before the breath of the pale-faces.

     The second work written by Daniel Gookin was finished in 1677, and was dedicated to Robert Boyle. It was probably sent over to England for publication; and in England it remained in manuscript, and was lost, until the present century, when it was brought to the light once more, sent back to this country, and in the year 1836 printed for the first time.¹ This also relates to the Indians of New England; and its composition was prompted by certain incidents connected with King Philip’s war, at that time but recently ended. That terrible war had kindled among the white inhabitants of New England a delirium of wrath against the Indians which cast away all pity, all justice; which embraced in an awful doom of destruction the Christian Indian and the pagan, the friend and the enemy. Against this brutal and indiscriminate fury, Daniel Gookin had all along protested; and he wrote this book for the purpose of showing that the Indians who had avowed themselves Christians, had taken no part in the conspiracy that their pagan kindred had formed for the extermination of the English. It was entitled “An Historical Account of the Doings and Sufferings of the Christian Indians in New England.” It is written with tranquillity of tone, without bitterness even toward his own bitter assailants; and its calm and massive accumulation of facts rises to an irresistible and even pathetic vindication of the Christian Indians from the monstrous charges that had been cast against them. It shows that months before the war actually burst upon the white settlements, these true-hearted

Indian disciples gave repeated warning of the coming danger; that when at last the war camcr on, they offered their services as soldiers, servants, scouts, and spies; that down to the very close of the war, they rendered invaluable aid to the English in many ways; and yet, that from the beginning to the end, they and their harmless families were treated by their white patrons with unmeasured contempt and distrust; that they were insulted everywhere, were denied the ordinary comforts of life, and that some of them were murdered atrociously in cold blood, even by white women; but that in spite of all these cruelties, they remained faithful to the English, and bore their hardships with a meekness and a fortitude which implied that these swarthy religious disciples of the white men had already got far beyond their teachers in the scholarship of the Christian graces. “I had need apologize,” says the author, “for this long story concerning the Indians. But the true reason of being so particular is that I might, in the words of truth and soberness, clear the innocency of those Indians, unto all pious and impartial men that shall peruse this script; and so far as in me lies, to vindicate the hand of God and religion that these Christians profess and practise; and to declare I cannot join with the multitude that would cast them all into the same lump with the profane and brutish heathen, who are as great enemies to our Christian Indians as they are to the English.”¹

     In spite of old age, poverty, and public cares, Daniel Gookin completed his large scheme of a “History of New England;” but the manuscript, which at his death was left to a son, is supposed to have been burned some years afterward in the house of that son, in Sherburne, Massachusetts. This was probably the only existing copy of the work. The loss of it is a calamity to early American history.