Mary Howitt

“ Friends that are gone to make plantations in America, keep the plantations in your hearts, that your own vines and lilies be not hurt. You that are governors and judges, eyes you should be to the blind, and feet to the lame, and fathers to the poor; that you may gain the blessing of those who are ready to perish, and cause the widow’s heart to sing for gladness. If you rejoice because your hand hath gotten much; if you say to fine gold, Thou art my confidence, you will have denied the God that is above. The Lord is ruler among nations ”

“ These they asserted to be, “to choose their own governor, deputy-governor, and representatives; to admit freemen on terms to be prescribed at their own pleasure; to set up all sorts of officers, superior and inferior, with such powers and duties as they might appoint; to exercise, by their annually-elected magistrates and deputies, all authority legislative, executive and judicial; to defend themselves by force of arms against any aggression; and to reject any and every imposition which they might judge prejudicial to the colony, and contrary to any just act of colonial legislation.” ”

“ Marquette and Joliet were the first white men who trod the soil of Iowa. Commending themselves to God, they raised a shout, on which four old men advanced slowly to meet them, bearing the peace-pipe, brilliant with many-coloured plumes. ‘We are Illinois,’ said they—that is, when translated, ‘We are men!’—and they offered the calumet. An aged chief received the strangers with great joy at his cabin, and the whole village gazed on them with friendly astonishment.
“At a great council Marquette published to them the One true God, their Creator. ”

“ These conditions, so favourable to liberty, worthy to be granted by the champions of political and civil liberty in England, were a cause of great satisfaction to Virginia; and so earnest was the spirit of her submission and her desire to establish an amicable understanding with the mother-country, that Richard Bennett, one of the commissioners of the Parliament, a merchant and a Roundhead, was unanimously elected governor in the place of Sir William Berkeley.
The spirit of democratic liberty, like a strong young tree, grew with every change of season. ”

“ And again, “It is the great end of government to support power in reverence with the people, and to secure the people from the abuse of power; for liberty without obedience is confusion, and obedience without liberty is slavery.” ”

“ Connecticut showed her respect and affection for Winthrop, by annually electing him for fourteen consecutive years as her governor.
The result of this ample charter, this liberty of self-government, was a social condition so nearly approaching to the Utopia of philosophers, and the golden age of the poets, that we must be allowed to dwell somewhat at length upon the beautiful and refreshing picture. It stands almost alone in the history of man. ”

“ Through this terrible war the Mohegans had remained faithful to the English, and no blood had been shed in happy Connecticut. The war was at an end, but vengeance was not yet appeased. Many chiefs, noted warriors of their respective tribes, were executed at Boston and Plymouth; 200 Indians, who had on one occasion come to treat of peace, were treacherously taken prisoners and carried to Boston, where some were hanged, and others sold as slaves. A bloodthirsty and remorseless spirit governed the whole colony. ”

“ If we could not assure people of an easy, free and safe government, liberty of conscience and an inviolable possession of their civil rights and freedoms, a mere wilderness would be no encouragement. It were madness to leave a free country to plant a wilderness, and give another person an absolute title to tax us at will.
“The customs imposed by the government of New York are not only a burden but a wrong. The King of England cannot take his subjects’ goods without their consent. This is a home-born right, declared to be law by divers statutes. ”

“ Every family was taught to look up to God, as the fountain of all good. Yet life was not sombre; the spirit of frolic mingled with innocence; religion itself assumed a garb of gaiety, and the annual thanksgiving was as joyous as it was sincere. Frugality was the rule of life, both private and public. Half a century after the concession of the charter, the annual expenses of government did not exceed £800. ”

“ As he had sifted out the baser elements by suffering, death and much sorrow before the colonisation of Virginia was permitted to take deep root and flourish, so now, more memorably in the case of New England, was his arm stretched forth to prevent and counteract its appropriation by any but those for whom it was intended, and who there might remain for ages to become a purer and better people;—for those who, though they had not yet attained to the glorious accomplishment of Christianity in its perfect law of love, were yet the great and shining lights of God’s truth at that time. ”

“ The aged Andrew Hamilton, a lawyer of Philadelphia, addressed the jury for the printer. “This is not,” he said, “the cause of a poor printer of New York alone; it is the best cause—the cause of liberty. Every man who prefers freedom to a life of 389slavery will bless and honour you as men, who, by an impartial verdict, lay a noble foundation for securing to ourselves, our posterity, and our neighbours, that to which nature and the honour of our country have given us a right—the liberty of opposing arbitrary power by speaking and writing truth.” ”

“ George Fox himself, in 1672, visited his “Friends” there, and committed to them “the firm support of the good of the people.” The creative power of good in the colony he declared to be the instruction of all the people in their rights; “you are the unworthiest men upon earth,” added he, “if you do lose the liberty wherewith Christ hath made you free in life and glory,”—for he and his early Friends regarded Christianity, taken in its own broad and catholic spirit, as the great emancipator of the human race.
The joy of the colonists, on receiving their noble charter, was extreme. ”

“ And now, on the tenth of June, 1673, Marquette, Joliet and their French companions, being, as Marquette himself says, “left alone, in this unknown land, in the hands of Providence,” embarked on the Wisconsin, and sailed “between alternate prairies and hill-sides, without seeing a single Indian; and for the first time beholding herds of buffalo, the lowings of which and the splash of their oars, were the only sounds which broke the silence of the primeval wilderness. ”

“ Plymouth now began to flourish; the land was equitably divided; each man laboured for himself and his family, burdened neither by debt to foreign usurers, nor having to provide for “quarter-day.” Their government was a pure democracy; each male inhabitant had a vote, the governor had two. Admirable and loyal as was the conduct of the Plymouth colony, and deep root as it had immediately taken in the soil to which the Indians themselves had made them welcome, they found it impossible to obtain a charter from King James. ”

“ It was on the 11th of June, and with solemn services of thanksgiving to Heaven, the restored colonists took possession of their former place. A deep sense of the infinite mercies of God now, for the first time, impressed its character upon the colony. The remnant of the original colonists who had been saved from famine, the remnant of the former emigrants who had been saved from shipwreck, were now restored and provided for as by a miracle, whilst they, the new-comers, who had expected joy and prosperity, and found instead misery and want, were evidently the angels of God’s providence. ”

“ Nothing but the preserving power of God could have left a remnant alive.
Still, though silenced by law and forbidden to preach or circulate their opinions, their views operated as leaven through the whole mass of society. Prohibitions, fines, imprisonments, ignominy, loss of property, nay, even of life, could not extinguish their zeal. Their works, produced at secret printing-presses, were diffused through the whole of the land as by invisible agency. ”

“ Noble words, noble spirit of religious liberty, worthy to be spoken by the genius of the New World!
Years afterwards, when on some occasion it was necessary to defend the measures of Lord Baltimore, it was declared that no person in Maryland had ever been persecuted for religion, and that the colonists ever enjoyed freedom of conscience no less than freedom of person and estate. ”

“ The Quakers, like the pilgrim fathers of the Mayflower, prepared the fundamental law of the colony even before they took possession, so that from the first they were under the guidance of an enlightened legislation. The quaker proprietaries, in their “Concessions,” “laid a foundation,” to use their own words, “for after ages to understand their liberty as Christians and as men, that they may not be brought into bondage but by their own consent; for we put the power in the people.” ”

“ There is a close analogy between the popular revolutions of France and England. In France the same symbols and principles reappeared, but more rapidly, and on a wider theatre. The elements of humanity are always the same. The inner light dawns upon every nation, and is the same in every age; and the French Revolution was a result of the same principles as these of George Fox gaining dominion over the mind of Europe. ”

“ Penn, who had come to America with the hope of ending his days in this province of his love, found it necessary immediately to return to England, to defend the common rights of himself and Pennsylvania. His hopes seemed in all ways destined to disappointment. At this moment his words to the assembly were: “Since all men are mortal, think of some suitable expedient and provision for your safety, as well in your privileges as your property, and you will find me ready to comply with whatever may render us happy by a nearer union of our interests. ”

“ During the summer, Colonel Church, so famous in King Philip’s war, led a party against the eastern tribes, and attacked an Indian settlement, at what is now Lewistown, where he burnt the corn and killed many, not sparing women and children. But this only led to retaliation, which the Indians understood but too well. Terror and dismay spread through all the frontier settlements. The Indians lay in ambush, and the ploughman was shot in the furrow by the unseen foe; it was necessary to go armed to gather in the crop; every house became a garrison liable to attack at any moment. ”

“ Stuyvesant, a man of good education, as well as a truehearted, brave old soldier, who had lost a leg in the wars, introduced a much milder line of policy into the government of New Netherlands as regarded the natives. In comparison with the New England settlements, New Netherlands could not be said to have flourished, nor even had they, in a pecuniary point of view, with all their trading engagements, proved a lucrative speculation to the Dutch West India company; the truth was, they lacked that element of freedom, both politically and commercially, on which true prosperity is based. ”

“ Tyranny however, is powerless against the human will based on the rights of conscience; and spite of the prohibitions of law, the persecuted Calvinists fled in thousands to that happy land beyond the Atlantic, the noblest privilege of which has ever been, that it furnished a safe asylum to the truehearted and the conscientious of every European land, and where men might worship their Maker according to the dictates of their own souls. These refugees were warmly welcomed to New England and New York, but the mild congenial climate of South Carolina was more attractive to the exiles of France. ”

“ Unlike the New England colonists, the spirit of whose life was organisation and government; who, naturally forming themselves into communities, established towns with corporate authorities; who regarded religions instruction as the first concern, and secular instruction as the second; who, while yet small as a people, branched out into colonies, and impelled by the spirit of commercial activity, traded to all parts of the world; unlike these determined, energetic, and expansive settlers, the people of Virginia showed from the first an aversion to congregate in towns, or to engage in commerce. ”

“ And Rhode Island, as Roger Williams had prayed might be the case, became a secure home for liberty of conscience. “No person within the said colony,” it was enacted, “at any time hereafter shall be anywise molested, punished, disquieted, or called in question for any differences in opinion in matters of religion; but that all and every person may at all times hereafter freely and fully have and enjoy his and their own judgments and consciences, in matters of religious concernments.” ”

“ The Iroquois, possessed of fire-arms obtained from the Dutch, now also their partisans, resolved on the extermination of the French, and their war-parties triumphed at Three Rivers and advanced to Quebec, killing the governor at the one place, and a priest at the other. “No frightful solitude of the wilderness,” says Bancroft, “no impenetrable recess of the frozen north, was safe against the passions of the Five Nations. Their chiefs, animated not only by cruelty but by pride, were resolved that no nation should role but themselves.” ”

“ The jury returned a verdict of “Not Guilty;” and not only the colony of New York, but all the other colonies in which the struggle for the birth of liberty had commenced, exulted as for a great triumph. At the same time, Benjamin Franklin, through a paper which he had established in Philadelphia, was giving a voice to the sentiment which was vital in every American breast. “The judgment of a whole people,” declared he, “if unbiased by faction, undeluded by the tricks of designing men, is infallible. ”

“ Within two years of their landing, seven churches were firmly established and provided with devout ministers. Their second object was the settlement of a government which was to secure their beloved popular liberties. Their charter provided that laws were to be enacted in the assembly of all the freemen of the colony, but a fear soon crept in of this being susceptible of too wide an interpretation; already above a hundred old planters and members of no church “were freemen equally with themselves.” The stem, uncompromising spirit of the religionist awoke. ”

“ Rudyard was succeeded as deputy-governor, in 1684, by Gawin Laurie, a Scotch Quaker and merchant of London, who endeavoured, but in vain, to establish a commercial capital at Perth Amboy, on Raritan Bay, to rival New York.
Thus were the Quakers firmly established in the New World; like the Puritans of New England, whom they equalled in stability and every sterling quality of character, they took deep root wherever they fixed themselves. We must now follow them to the other side of the Delaware, where William Penn is at this very time planting his colony of peace. ”

“ Rumours of an English invasion filled the colony; and the representatives, seeing the paucity of means of defence, contemplated very coolly the necessity of submission to this new enemy. “If you cannot defend us,” said they, addressing the governor, “to whom shall we turn?” And the governor, wishing to rouse a spirit of patriotism in their souls, proposed that “every third man should enlist for the defence of their adopted country, as had once been done in the Fatherland.” ”