Henry Ferguson

“ The godly and judicious Winthrop, the statesmanlike founder and governor of Massachusetts, had died, sorrowing on his death-bed for the harshness in religious matters into which he had been forced; and in his place was the severe and fanatical Endicott, a man of gloomy intensity of nature, a stern logician, a man who neither asked nor granted mercy. The clergy were fanatically devoted to their religious and political peculiarities, and were inferior in wisdom and judgment to the great leader who had come out from England with the early settlers at the beginning of the colony. ”

“ Now, under the influence of calmer consideration, men are beginning to admit that something may be said for men like Andros, who strove against the separatist spirit which seemed to New England to be the very essence of liberty, and even for those unfortunates who valued the connection with Great Britain more than they did the privileges of self-government,7 and who were compelled in grief and sorrow, from their devotion to their principles, to leave forever the homes they loved. The war of secession has taught Americans to understand the term, and appreciate the sentiment, of loyalty. ”

“ The methods of the growth of popular mythology have been the same in America as elsewhere; the gods of one party have become the devils of the other. The haze of distance has thrown a halo around the American leaders, softening their outlines, obscuring their faults, while the misdeeds of Tories and Hessians have grown with the growth of years. ”

“ Lecky’s tribute to the loyalists may be added: “There were brave and honest men in America who were proud of the great and free empire to which they belonged, who had no desire to shrink from the burden of maintaining it, who remembered with gratitude the English blood that had been shed around Quebec and Montreal, and who, with nothing to hope for from the crown, were prepared to face the most brutal mob violence and the invectives of a scurrilous press, to risk their fortunes, their reputations, and sometimes even their lives, in order to avert civil war and ultimate separation. ”

“ It is very hard for us to put ourselves in the place of men of a century ago, and to think their thoughts and surround ourselves in imagination with their environment; we naturally carry back much of the nineteenth century into the eighteenth. We know the America of to-day, a vigorous, healthy, prosperous, mighty nation, reaching from sea to sea, filled with a busy people, adorned with the achievements of a hundred years, hallowed by many sacred memories. ”

“ The penal measures imposed by the Parliament upon the town of Boston and the colony of Massachusetts had been brought upon themselves by the so-called patriots. One rather wonders at the slowness and mildness of the British government, and at their miserable inefficiency, than at any repressive measures that they undertook. They deserved to lose the colonies for their invincible stupidity, which led them from one blunder into another; they irritated when they ought either to have crushed or conciliated ”

“ Even Wilson and Norton, who exulted in the blood of the Quakers, thought witch-finding a cowardly yielding to popular folly. The responsibility of the men of the first generation lies rather in the character of the religious training they gave their successors, a gloomy religion, which in themselves had been mitigated by a piety, sincere if fanatical, and perhaps also by some recollection of the brighter experiences of their childhood’s days in the more genial religious life of England, a life their children had never known. ”

“ Oglethorpe’s philanthropy had left the legacy of disorder and inefficiency to the colony of Georgia, a legacy which the Empire State of the South has now nobly and grandly outlived. North Carolina had a most heterogeneous population, and was, perhaps, the most barbarous of all the colonies; while in South Carolina the extremes in the social scale were most strongly marked, from the high-spirited Huguenot gentlemen to the poor whites who formed the bulk of the population, worse taught, worse fed, and worse clad than the182 negro slaves. ”

“ Beliefs for which one age has suffered become crystallized into formulas for the next, and divines wonder at the hardness of men’s hearts in refusing obedience to what once indeed had been a law of life, but by being made a commandment has become a law unto death.
So, while our New England forefathers were clever politicians, shrewd and adroit men of affairs, practical and full of ingenious expedients, intelligent and clear-headed about their secular business, they retrograded in religion, and became formalists and controversialists. ”

“ The story is a sad one of misdirected earnestness and zeal on the one side, of mistaken consistency and fidelity to principle, however false, upon the other. We condemn while we admire; we wonder at the steadiness and constancy of both judged and judges, while we regret the tragic results that stained the new commonwealth with innocent blood. ”

“ There could hardly be a finer example of this loyalty to an idea than was shown by those Americans who condemned the stupid errors of the king and his advisers,173 and realized fully the danger to liberty in the system of government that George the Third was attempting to carry out in England and in America, and yet, in spite of all, remained patriotic subjects, not from affection but from principle, trusting to constitutional methods to overcome the evils which they felt as strongly as any of those who made them a justification for revolution. ”

“ Some were active favorers of the cause of the king, doing whatever they could to assist it and to injure the cause of their rebellious neighbors. Others sadly left their homes at the outbreak of the war and took refuge in England or in some of the English provinces, suffering want, anxiety, and despair, snubbed and despised by the insular English, compelled to hear America and Americans insulted, dragging along a miserable existence, like that of the shades whom Virgil found upon the bank of the infernal river, not allowed to return to earth or to enter either Elysium or Tartarus. ”

“ Unhappily oppressed by a real tyranny, the colonists of those days beheld every action with diseased eyes, and their distempers have descended in a great measure to their historians, who have retailed political fictions as indubitable truths.” And again: “What a spectacle does the administration of Andros hold up to mankind for their instruction; under a form of government, plainly arbitrary and tyrannous, more real liberty was actually enjoyed than under the boasted system, which appeared so fair.” ”

“ The circumstances of the settlement of the various colonies had been such as to render the colonists extremely tenacious of their own privileges, and extremely jealous of any interference from the other side of the ocean. The people of Massachusetts, especially, lived in constant dread of their much-prized charter being taken away from them by the king, from whom it had been obtained, or by the parliament, which considered that it was its province to meddle with and to regulate all things in heaven and on earth. ”

“ It is no longer an unmeaning word, fit only to be ridiculed in scurrilous doggerel by patriot rhymsters, as was the case a hundred years ago, but appeals to an answering chord in the heart of every man who remembers the quick heart-beats and the grand enthusiasm of those four years of struggle, the true heroic age of American history. ”

“ If the loyalists of New York, Georgia, and the Carolinas reasoned in this manner, we cannot blame them, unless we are ready to maintain the proposition that the cause of every revolution is necessarily so sacred that those who do not sympathize with it should at least abstain from forcibly opposing it. ”

“ And we, moreover, find that in those places where these people aforesaid in this colony are most of all suffered to declare themselves freely, and are only opposed by arguments in discourse, there they least of all desire to come. And we are informed that they begin to loathe this place, for that they are not opposed by the civil authority, but, with all patience and meekness, are suffered to say over their pretended revelations and admonitions. Nor are they like or able to gain many here to their way. Surely, we find that they delight to be persecuted by civil powers ”

“ The settlers had been for the most part emigrants from quiet country towns and villages in England, put down in the unknown wilderness, to work out, under the pressure of religious enthusiasm, a new social and religious polity. The life was small, narrow, and squalid, only redeemed from utter sordidness by gleams of religious66 idealism and by the stern resolution of the better class of the settlers to keep themselves and their neighbors in the paths of righteousness. Their religion was a sombre Calvinism, giving more prominence to the terrors of the law than to the comforts of the gospel. ”

“ What made it objectionable to the colonies was not that it was bad, but that it was different from what they had had. The man who does his arithmetic upon his fingers would count it a hardship if he were compelled to use the much more convenient processes known to better educated men. The case was the same in New England. They did not want to be improved; they had no desire for any more efficient or regular administration than they were accustomed to. ”

“ The leaders of thought in New England had advanced in some directions far beyond their contemporaries; in political insight and political adroitness they have had few equals in any period; but they were hampered and burdened by the very religion which to their fathers had been a gospel of liberty and a source of inspiration. ”

“ The caustic pens of the Mathers and the bitter spite of the early New England historians have drawn for us an Andros whose haughty and vindictive face rises before the mind whenever the name is mentioned. Local patriotism in Connecticut has created a series of poetical myths in regard to his administration, which tend to obscure the sober truth of history. New York has more grateful memories of the governor who secured and extended her dominion and by his wise and steady policy protected her from her most dangerous foes. ”

“ Cotton Mather may be taken as a characteristic specimen of the more intelligent and devout thinkers among the men of the second generation, and for him the whole daily life of the colony was a spiritual warfare. The very object of his greatest work, the “Magnalia Christi,” is to show the special workings of Divine Providence in favor of the people of Massachusetts, and to exhibit how they had battled against “principalities and powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” ”

“ James II., by his foolish and wicked projects in England, discredited his really statesmanlike object in America; the union, so desirable in itself, was discredited by the methods used to effect it, and the narrow theory of colonial integrity and independence survived to plague the descendants of the men who maintained it. It is important always to discriminate between the object sought and the means used to effect it. ”

“ The temporary overthrow of the comprehensive church establishment of the judicious statesmen and reformers of Elizabeth’s reign had opened the gates to a flood of irreligion and fanaticism. The ecclesiastical despotism established by the Westminster Assembly was more repugnant to Englishmen than the old church which had been suppressed, and the condition of England in religious matters during the Commonwealth forms one of the best apologies for the severe reactionary measures that were adopted when the king and the bishops were restored in 1660. ”

“ Theological orthodoxy supplanted intelligent Christianity, and New England religion sank into a dreary series of wranglings about Cambridge platforms and Saybrook platforms, half-way covenants and whole-way covenants, old lights and new lights, consociations and associations, until it became, for a time at least, more arid and lifeless than ever had been the Church of England, against the formalism of which they were continually protesting. ”

“ Are these the men that fled for Religion all people may say, that now Hang, Burn, Imprison, Cut, Fine, and spoil the Goods, and drink the blood of the innocent. God will give you a Cup of trembling, that you shall be a by-word, and a hissing to all your neighbours. ”

“ Cases of witchcraft now disappeared from New England, while in other lands, where there was the same sombre Calvinism but less enlightenment, as in Scotland, the delusion continued for many years.100
The theological spirit now devoted itself to barren questions of little moment, around which wordy battles raged and hatreds developed, only less destructive than those in the previous century because the divines were no longer the rulers of the state. Religion sank into a barren formalism, which had no noble or time-honored forms to redeem it from utter indifference. ”

“ Persecution had never been a feature of Connecticut religion, and its history is not disgraced with the accounts of frequent religious quarrels, excommunications, and expulsions which are so familiar to that of the neighboring colony. In Massachusetts Andros found himself opposed and thwarted in every way that the angry leaders could devise; in Connecticut, though men were attached to their self-government and resented its loss, he was received with respect and consideration. ”

“ Andros was chosen by the king for the important post of governor-general, not, as Palfrey insinuates, because he was peculiarly disagreeable to Massachusetts, and so likely to carry out the objects of the king; but because the king knew him personally, and knew him to be a man of capacity and integrity. It is absurd to suppose that James,133 who was an experienced man of business himself, and more familiar with colonial affairs than any king of England before or since, would have intentionally selected a man for the purpose who would endanger the success of the undertaking. ”

“ This remarkable body of men, whose history has presented such strange contrasts of wild enthusiasm and imperturbable stolidity, of fanaticism and quietism, of contempt for the world and its rewards on the one side, and of sordid love of peace and money-getting upon10 the other, had recently come into being as one of the natural results of the unsettling of religious faiths and practices which had accompanied the political revolution in England. ”