New Englanders

“ In the blue haze of that incense in honor of the colonial New Englanders, lighted by themselves and tended by their descendants, we are apt, a little absurdly sometimes, to lose sight of coarse fundamentals. The average man or boy in the New England of this period probably looked upon the theory that the main end of the colony’s existence was to make the world safe for the Congregational church, in very much the same way in which those of us who happened to be in France lately found that the average “doughboy” regarded his main end there to be making the world safe for democracy. ”

“ But if in a certain pitilessness of character the New Englanders are more English than the English, they still resemble the Puritans of the seventeenth century in their love of a well-ordered life. It was in their towns and villages that the old colonial life flourished to the wisest purpose. ”

“ On the whole the New Englanders have exerted a more profound and wholesome influence upon the development of our common country than has ever been exerted by any other equally numerous body of our people. They have led the nation in the path of civil liberty and sound governmental administration. But too often they have viewed the nation's growth and greatness from a narrow and provincial standpoint, and have grudgingly acquiesced in, rather than led the march towards, continental supremacy. In shaping the nation's policy for the future their sense of historic perspective seemed imperfect. ”

“ There was as great a variety in social and economic organisation as in religious beliefs between the aristocratic planter colonies of the south and the democratic agricultural settlements of New England. In one thing only was there uniformity: every settlement possessed self-governing institutions, and prized them beyond all other privileges. None, indeed, carried self-government to so great an extent as the New Englanders. ”

“ It is rather interesting to find that their contemporaries of the Revolutionary period did not share that high estimation of the New Englanders which they themselves clung to so tenaciously and have writ so large in our history that the tradition of New England's unselfish wonder-working in that olden time has never perished. ”

“ The chief pride of the New Englanders is in their unmixed descent;—a virtuous pride, but not the most favourable to a progression which must antiquate some of the qualities to which they are most attached. ”

“ There was undoubtedly a market among the French colonists, which was all the New England merchants could desire; and so ready were the French peasants to trade, that no prohibitory action of their rulers could conceal their desire, although in a great measure it might prevent its gratification. The knowledge of this made the New Englanders frantic. They were men of immense energy, as they are now; they were of magnificent physique, made for war and hardship; and they rebelled against any obstacle to what they deemed their legitimate wishes. ”

“ Yet when all the factors in our national history shall be given their full value, none will seem more potent than the great racial drift from the New England frontier into the heart of the continent. The New Englanders who formed a broad belt from Vermont and New York across the Northwest to Kansas, were a social and political force of incalculable power, in the era which ended with the Civil War. ”

“ There has been an idea that some part of the active, spreading and increasing influence of the New England people as they moved about the world, was from a meddlesome disposition to interfere with other people. There is nothing in that. If there ever was a race that confined itself strictly to minding its own business, it is the New Englanders ”

“ You will excuse me for this digression, which you will readily forgive when you reflect that I but agree with you in the opinion that, much as the New-Englanders are to be esteemed at home,—and there is none more ready to pay homage to their public and private virtue than myself,—they are nevertheless among the dullest, driest, and most disagreeable adventurers one meets abroad. ”

“ It was twilight, and their blanketed forms, in listless groups or stealing along the bank, with a lounge and a stride so different in its wildness from the rudeness of the white settler, gave me the first feeling that I really approached the West.
The people on the boat were almost all New Englanders, seeking their fortunes. They had brought with them their habits of calculation, their cautious manners, their love of polemics. ”

“ I imagine them wandering about the streets, telling the town's-people, in outlandish, unintelligible words, that no earthly affliction ever equalled what had befallen them. Man's brotherhood with man was sufficient to make the New Englanders understand this language. ”

“ The New Englanders should not take this as an affront to themselves. It is also natural enough that the New Englanders should think and speak alike, and be fond of acting together; and the westerners should not complain of their being clannish. ”

“ On the banks gathered the patriotic factions,—the New Englanders in the open field on the left, swaggering merrily about their fires and hurling derisive cheers across the ice to the Western contingent, who were established among the pines on the right. ”

“ They must emigrate before they can become rich or comfortable [Pg 341] in our sense of the word. Hence their poverty is to be attributed to their geographical position. Put the New Englanders there, even they would be a poor people. ”

“ Settlement in communities and rooted Puritan habits and ideals had enduring influences in the regions settled by New Englanders; but it was in this Old West, in the years just before the Revolution, that individualism began to play an important rôle, along with the traditional habit of expanding in organized communities.
The opening of the Vermont towns revealed more fully than before, the capability of New Englanders to become democratic pioneers, under characteristic frontier conditions. Their economic life was simple and self-sufficing. ”

“ This constant employment of every moment of the waking hours contributed to impart to New Englanders a regard and method of life which is spoken of by many outsiders with contempt, namely, a closely girded and invariable habit of economy. ”

“ The land was covered with huge stumps and was difficult to farm but the New Englanders were accustomed to difficulties and were not discouraged. The land was deep and rich and the people who had settled upon it were poor but hopeful. ”

“ We are prone to excuse this, however, on the score {445} of their intolerant Puritanism, and taught by our New England schoolmasters, most of us, at least, fondly cherish the notion that all the New Englanders made supreme sacrifices for the country and did it with a whole-hearted spirit of self-forgetfulness that made every man, above all in Massachusetts, an out-and-out patriot. ”

“ They feel an influence which their fellow-countrymen do not feel. But besides this, because they are New Englanders, they note and weigh every idea and practice they find in European society; and everything that approves itself to their understanding, they adopt readily and without prejudice. ”

“ It has left its impress upon the minds of their children's children down to our own time, and has affected the opinions held about them by other people. It has had something to do with a certain tacit assumption of superiority on the part of New Englanders, upon which the men and women of other communities have been heard to comment in resentful and carping tones. ”

“ The Colonies begin to prosper.—Notwithstanding all their hardships, the colonies prospered. The people were wonderfully enterprising. They built ships and made a great deal of money by trading with the West Indies, France, Spain, and other countries. The New Englanders alone had over five hundred vessels engaged in domestic and foreign commerce and in profitable fisheries.
The early colonists were ingenious. They built and ran a sawmill a hundred years before one was erected in England. ”

“ The New Englanders always take the initiative in great national movements. At Lexington and Concord they marched out alone without waiting for the rest of the Colonies, to have their fling at the red-coats, and a number of the colonists on that occasion succeeded in interfering with British bullets. ”

“ In this population the presence of a sprinkling of Northerners from Pennsylvania was resented and an occasional stray Yankee was scarcely tolerated. The settlement of the northern part of the State by New Englanders was made to a marked extent by colonies or organized groups, and from the early thirties one reads continually of the movement of caravans from all the New England States and western New York. ”

“ Judging from English experience in the north, and Spanish in Mexico and South America, it would seem as though the white man and the red cannot exist on the same soil. Step by step the English have driven back the braves, till New Englanders now remember that there were Indians once in Massachusetts, as we remember that once there were bears in Hampshire. King Philip‘s defeat by the Connecticut volunteers seems to form part of the early legendary history of our race ”

“ They are a young and powerfully built race of men, mostly New Englanders, generally unmarried, and, though rude and intemperate 274 in their manners, are very intelligent. They seem to have a passion for their wild and toilsome life, and, judging from their dresses, I should think possess a fine eye for the comic and fantastic. ”

“ In everything which pertains to progress in the West, the Yankee reėnforcements step rapidly to the front. Every year she needs more of them, and as the country grows the annual demand becomes greater. Genuine New Englanders are to be had on tap only in six small States, and remembering this we feel that we have the right to demand that in the future, even more than in the past, the heads of the New England households weary not in the good work. ”

“ They were strong men, one and all, quiet and self-contained in years of peace, grim fighters in seasons of war, and prominent citizens at all times, a godly, gritty, and prosperous race. Of such is the greatness of New England. ”

“ But beyond all the charters and laws which modern criticism had raked out from buried or forgotten records, there is something in the character of the English yeoman which even better explains what is most noticeable in the settlement of the American Colonies, especially in New England. The restless passion for personal independence, the patience, the energy, the enterprise, even the narrowness and bigotry which marked the English middle classes in all the crises of their history, stand out in bold relief in the character of the New England settlers. ”

“ It was usual, in an earlier and less critical day, to trace all of New England's greatness, and of her noble contributions to our common American life, to the same little group of leaders, who were supposed to have done all because they did much. Life is not so simple as that, and in the founding of New England, and the development of her liberties, we must find place for English kings and statesmen, for colonial liberals and martyrs, as well as for Pilgrim Father and Puritan Priest. ”

“ Yet the pages which record the story of those seventeen years are among the least attractive in New England history. There is hardly an incident to stir the imagination or to fire a noble pride. Freed from all restraint, the best use that the colonies could make of their liberty was to quarrel among themselves over boundaries, annexations, and taxes; to contend, without honor, with the Dutch and French; to carry on inglorious controversies with the savages; and to indulge in the only example of bloody religious persecution that the United States has known. ”

“ Moreover, in the discussion of Puritanism, we noticed how that movement was strongest, struck its roots deepest, and assumed its most uncompromising form, in the very class which thus became almost synonymous with the New England population. ”

“ We doubt whether any marked event, for good or evil, ever befell New England, from its settlement down to Revolutionary times, of which the inhabitants had not been previously warned by some spectacle of this nature. ”

“ The colonial union was the crowning service of the founders of New England to humanity. Now they began, one by one, to descend into the grave, worn to early death by a toilsome grapple with the rough and grinding forces of nature. ”

“ The English company wanted a successful settlement, one to which they could themselves retreat if political and ecclesiastical oppression in the old country should prove too great for their endurance; and they well knew that prosperity depended upon order, sobriety, thrift, and piety. The splendid history and the moral leadership of New England in these three centuries have justified this painstaking, minute, even exasperating watch over the welfare of a colony far from the restraints of an old civilization, in peril from hostile savages and lawless adventurers on an inhospitable soil. ”

“ The New England leaders were, indeed, of a more intellectual type generally than came to the other colonies, and there was, perhaps, more play of mind among the people than in either the southern continental or the island settlements. ”

“ The “New England idea” and the “New England type” have been as sharply defined as they have been persistent; and, if, in our own day, they seem, to some extent, to be passing, their influence may be no less living because spread broadcast throughout the whole land, and absorbed into the common national life. Effective natural boundaries, defining a limited area, are of determining influence in fostering the life of primitive peoples or of civilized colonies. ”