The transit of civilization from England to America in the seventeenth century

Preface

In seeking to give a history of the civilization of the seventeenth century there was little help in anything American, and, to my surprise, I found long ago that I could not count on anything English. There were many books on Shakespeare, more or less good when they were not bad, and there was Masson's ponderous Life and Times of John Milton in six octavo volumes. These afforded something, but the civilization of the century was not told in any of them. It became necessary to build a description from the ground. The complex states of knowing and thinking, of feeling and passion, must be explained. The little world as seen by the man of the seventeenth century must be understood. Its sun, moon, and planets were flames of fire without gravity, revolved about the earth by countless angels ; its God governed this one little world with mock majesty. Its heaven, its horrible hell of material fire blown by the mouth of God, its chained demons whose fetters might be loosed, its damnation of infants were to be appreciated and expounded. The inhumanity of punishments and of sport in that day, the mixture made of religion and revenge — these and a hundred other things went to make up the traits of the century. To explain the things in this other age in which I found myself it was necessary to go to England. To understand England one must understand the Continent ; to make this out one must often thread his way to antiquity. The use of Latin by nearly all scholars made the world's knowledge more

The Transit of Civilization.

or less common to all. My little corner widened out into a part of all human history.

Eclipses, parhelia, comets, were danger signals hung out in the heavens as warnings. Logic was the only implement for the discovery of truth. Observation was in its birth throes. Medicines were recognized by signaturism ; on this slender basis what a towering structure was built ! Right and wrong were thought of only as the result of direct revelation ; they had not yet found standing room in the great theater of natural knowledge. Until we understand these things we write the history of the seventeenth century in vain. It is the last age which sought knowledge of physical things by deduction. The next century brought philosophy and philosophy dawned into science.

We must apply to the seventeenth century the severe canons of history ; people with ancestors will be disappointed. We can not make out in the seventeenth century the great destiny of Virginia in the eighteenth. We must not be sure that the future greatness of later New England is wrapped up in the peculiarly narrow and forbidding husk of the later seventeenth century. Nor can commercial greatness be predicted of New York ; nor did Pennsylvania show signs of the great industries developed from her coal fields. The causes of greatness are not always traceable. Where least looked for may develop the next group of statesmen and authors, of inventors and great merchants. We may write history, but we may not prophesy.

Chapter The First. Mental Outfit Of The Early Colonists

What are loosely spoken of as national characteristics are probably a result not so much of heredity as of controlling traditions. Seminal ideas received in childhood, standards of feeling and thinking and living handed down from one overlapping generation to another, make the man English or French or German in the rudimentary outfit of his mind. A gradual change in fundamental notions produces the difference between the character of a nation at an early epoch and that of the same people in a later age. In taking account of the mental furniture which the early English emigrants carried aboard ship with them, we shall gain a knowledge of what may be called the original investment from which has been developed Anglo-Saxon culture in America. The mother country of the United States was England in the first half of the seventeenth century, or, at most, England before the Revolution of 1688. From the English spoken in the days of the Stuart kings came

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our primitive speech, and the opinions, prejudices, and modes of thinking of the English in that day lay at the bottom of what intellectual life there was in the colonies. Some seventeenth-century characteristics, long since lost or obscured in England, may yet be recognized in the folk-lore and folk-speech, the superstitions and beliefs of people in America. The number of English who crossed the seas before the middle of the century was above thirty thousand. Those who survived the first rude outset of pioneer life, with their fast-multiplying progeny, numbered probably fifty thousand in 1650, and this population was about halved between the colonies on the Chesapeake waters and those to the northward of the Dutch settlement on the New England coast. To these early comers it is due that the speech, the usages, the institutions, and the binding traditions of the United States are English.

II

In reckoning the mental outfit of the first comers we should only mislead ourselves by recalling the names of Jonson and Shakespeare and the other lights that were shining when the Susan Constant and her two little consorts sailed out of the Thames to bear a company of English people to the James River. Nor will it avail much to remember that Milton was a Puritan at the same time with Cotton and Hooker and Winthrop. The emigrants had no considerable part in the

Mental Outfit of the Early Colonists.

higher intellectual life of the age ; the great artistic passions of Shakespeare and Milton touched them not at any point. Bacon's contribution to the art of finding truth did not belong to them. Men may live in the same time without being intellectual contemporaries.

III

The science that touched the popular imagination in the seventeenth century was astronomy. " God gave to man an upright face that he might view the stars and learn astronomy," according to a couplet of the time. As then accepted astronomy was a jumble of the prevalent Ptolemaic theory of the universe with the world at the center, and of the odds and ends of mediaeval astrology — moon -signs, zodiac -signs, horoscopes, ominous eclipses followed by devastating fires, and comets presaging disaster and the death of princes, with the mystical doctrine of the dominance of planets over plants, minerals, and diseases. The Copernican system, which essayed to displace the " firmset earth "from that central position in the universe it had so long occupied, made headway slowly. In the interval between the landing of the Jamestown gold hunters and that of the Plymouth Pilgrims, the great Kepler, working in obscurity, developed the three principles which are the foundations of modern astronomy. It was two years before the beginning of the Plymouth settlement that, in poverty and neglect, he wrote: " Fare-

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well, Ptolemy ! I am turning back to Aristarchus under the lead of Copernicus " ; and in the loneliness of his convictions he said in the same year, " My book may well wait a hundred years for a reader, since God himself for six thousand years awaited a discoverer." After Virginia and New England were securely settlej^, Galileo was imprisoned for demonstrating the earth's motion regardless of the time-honored opinion of Joshua the son of Nun and the indubitable witness of everybody's senses. As the middle of the century approached, one finds Copernicanism spoken of as " the theory that has so stirred all our modern wits." In strictly orthodox circles, in good society, and among the people generally, the sun, the moon, the planets, and the fixed stars continued to revolve round the earth as aforetime to lighten the paths of men or at least to twinkle on them, to lord it over plants and animals, to indicate the nature of diseases, and to foretell to the expert the fortunes of the future. The rhetoric of colonial preachers still turned the universe of fiery lights about the solid earth. In 1666 and afterward one may read between the lines in the non-committal writings of some Harvard mathematicians a possible preference for Copernicanism. Throughout the century the English-American colonists with a few exceptions rested undisturbed in the notion that the center of universal motion was the earth, and that the heavenly bodies were imponderable flames hung up for the convenience of man.

Mental Outfit of the Early Colonists.

IV

The interest in astronomy was mainly practical ; the stars were thought to exert a controlling influence on human affairs. Kepler himself lived in part by casting horoscopes for princes, as Tycho had done before him ; it is by such scullion work that the world in every age contrives to degrade its superior men and dissipate their energies. John Winthrop, the younger, Governor of Connecticut, a fellow of the Royal Society and a man of much learning, as learning was then understood, possessed some of the works on astrology so much esteemed at that time. Among these is a book with astrological figures set one on each page with the lower half of the page blank. These diagrams are for every four minutes of time, and by means of them " any reasonable artist " in such things " may give judgment of a question." On one page some reasonable artist has essayed to find out, by casting a horoscope, what was the ailment afflicting one Alice Wilkins in 1656. Medicines were administered when the moon was in the proper sign, and the almanacs of the eighteenth century told the farmer to cut his brushwood in certain signs of the zodiac and in the decrease of the moon, that it might not grow again, but to cut firewood in the increase. Timber to last must be cut in the last quarter of the moon. So Tusser, in his Points of Good Husbandry, says, " The moon in the wane gather fruit for to last." The Rev. Jared Elliot,

Chap. I. Astrology

A Table of

the Astro-

log^ical

Houses

of the

Heaven,

Note 4.

Note s.

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the leading colonial writer on agriculture in the middle of the eighteenth century, shows great respect to the zodiac, and the prosperity of the Pennsylvania German was attributed to his regard for the moon's phases. In many regions to-day the moon rules the planting of potatoes, the cutting of hair, and the killing of pigs ; and women wean their infants in the proper sign of the zodiac. These are the ragged remnants of the ancient and complicated science of astrology which survived from the middle ages, and which with much other strange baggage of the sort crossed the wide seas with the emigrants to America.

V

Most people knew little of the complicated mysteries of horoscopes, and they understood less of the jargon of astrology. But the unlearned kept pace with the learned in looking with religious dread upon comets. " Experience Attests and reason Asserts that they have served for sad Prologues to tragical Epilogues." The words are those of perhaps the earliest American writer on astronomy ; the opinion was that of the world at large in his time. On the science of prognostication by comets learned men disagreed. " Some," says the writer we have just quoted, "put much trust or vertue in the tail, terming it the Ignomon." Naturally enough a comet " operated most powerfully " on the people to whom it was " vertical "

Mental Outfit of the Early Colonists.

— that is to say, over whose heads the body of it passed. Some thought that comets were themselves agents of mischief, drying up the moisture of Nature and thus producing droughts and pestilential fevers, and inflaming the anger of princes ; as they were supposed to be in combustion they excited the air to tempests, and thus raised great waves and inundated the earth. The winds driven into caves, and by some means imprisoned in the earth, made the ground quake in their endeavors to get out, said the astrologers. Others believed that they were but a sort of celestial weather signal hung out to give warning of the imminence of calamities ordained by God. Yet others believed that, in the phrase of the time, they were " both effectual and significant." It was noted in New England that when John Cotton, the great ecclesiastical luminary of the first generation, drew near his end, a comet appeared which " went out" soon after the preacher's death. The blight of 1665, that put an end to the hope of prosperity from wheat -raising in Massachusetts, was heralded by "a great and blazing comet," which, like all portents and omens, lacked definiteness, for it was "accompanied with many sad efTects " beside. John Hull, the pine-tree shilling-maker, calls the attention of a correspondent to the comet of 1680 with a pious ejaculation of alarm : " The Lord fit us and you for all his will and pleasure." A protagonist of Puritanism in its decline was Increase Mather. He was a pessimist with a keen relish

Chap. I.

Spencer, Of Natural Prodigies, 14.

Kepler's

De Come-

Kepler, as

above, 107,

John

Edwards,

Cometo-

mania,

Josselyn, Chron.

Obs. sub a?ino.

Compare the horoscope of an eclipse in Chauncey's Cambridge, Mass. , Almanac for 1663.

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Chap. I.

Am. Antiq.

Soc.

Trans., iii, 247. Compare D'Ewe's Autobiography, i, 123, and Royal MSS.

Comm.

Rept., xii, p. vii.

Acct. book of Sir D.

Fleming.

Doc. Hist., N. Y., iii, 882.

Note 8.

The Beginning, Progress, and for the supernatural and sensational. Nothing delighted him more than calamities past, present, or potential. The brilliant comet of 1680 was a call from heaven for a man of his genius ; he re-enforced it by a sermon entitled " Heaven's Alarm to the World." When two years later another blazing star burst upon a world that had not yet had time to recover its equanimity, Mather proceeded to expound this also in " The Latter Sign Discoursed of," and then followed these with a book, for which he borrowed the title " Kometographia." In this the accidents by land and sea, the disasters of pestilence, famine, war, and assassination, that had ever come trailing after any comet, were once more rehearsed, as they had been rehearsed in other times by other sensational moralists. The notable comet of 1680, which set so many watchdogs baying at the sky, alarmed the Dutch dwellers on the upper Hudson, as we may see in a letter dispatched by their usual post, an Indian runner, to New York. In this they mention the " Dreadful comett starr " " with a very fyery Tail or Streemer." " Undoubtedly God threatens us," is their inference, and they crave permission of superior authority in New York to cause "the Domine " to proclaim in the church "a day of fasting and humiliation."

On the eve of Bacon's rebellion in Virginia, in 1676, the people were warned, to no good purpose apparently, by signs in the heavens, in the air, and out of the earth. To a comet " streaming: like a

Mental Outfit of the Eai'ly Colonists.

horse taile westwards" there was added "fflights of pigeons in breadth nigh a quarter of the midhemisphere, and of their length was no visible end." This ought to have been enough to frighten even the easy-going Virginians of that time out of their sins, but comet and pigeons were re-enforced by a third omen — strange swarms of flies " rising out of spigot holes in the earth " ; no doubt what are now known as the seventeen-year locusts. Not only comets, but eclipses, parhelia, or " multiplied suns," and other unusual phenomena were beheld with awe. In auroras the colonists saw swords of flame brandished, and fiery horsemen charging in ghostly battle. There was always the chance that a particularly brilliant display of northern lights might prove an awful forerunner, not of war and famine, but of the combustion of the earth and the crack of doom itself. Rainbows, on the other hand, were recorded with a " Laus Deo." The people of Boston were comforted by a rainbow after the unlucky outcome of an expedition against Port Royal in 1707, but nothing else came of it. The rainbow which raised all hopes at the outset of an expedition, in 171 1, also played Boston false.

VI

From Greek and Roman antiquity down at least to the middle of the seventeenth century no scientific proposition was more universally received than that insects and some birds, fishes, and

Chap. I.

Conclusion of Bacon's Rebellion, by T. M., Force, i.

Note 9.

Compare Evelyn's Diary, i, 264, and Henry King's sermon at Pavl's Crosse, 1621, p. 15.

Lambert's New Haven, 190.

Compare The Rainbow, a sermon at Pavl's Crosse, 161 7, by Bourne.

Sewall's Diary, ii, 1S9, 314, 318.

Spontaneous generation.

lO

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reptiles were generated by putrefaction, or, to turn the proposition round, that all putrefaction produced life. From the bodies of decaying horses came hornets ; but kine in decomposition produced hone3'bees. Ovid says that this was known by experience, and later writers quoted his verses on the subject and saved themselves the necessity of observation. The practical bee-keeper of the seventeenth century did not read the classics, or Gesner or Mouffet, or any of the other innumerable Latin treatises on animal life, but he did look into his hive occasionally, and he knew that a bee came from a " little worm " in the comb. Bees taken from England to Virginia and New England prospered. But the traveler Josselyn entertained the hope that, when the carnivorous animals should have been exterminated, American bees might be produced from dead bullocks, after the approved scientific formula. Some kinds of wasps had their origin in the decay of apples and pears; the most superficial observer might find them to his sorrow issuing from the fruit. Minnows were produced from foam, carp came from putrid slime, the oyster, the nautilus, and other shellfish from different kinds of putrescence mixed sometimes with mud, sometimes combined with the sand of the sea bottom. So far did Nature carry this economy that even the discarded tails of New England tadpoles were not suffered to go to waste: out of them were formed the water newts, as Josselyn takes pains to explain. Lord Bacon, who floun-

Mental Outfit of the Early Colonists.

II ders like a stranded leviathan when he seeks to explore the coasts of physical science, suggests that toads come from the corruption of water mixed with mud; to "old snow" he attributes the generation of those red larvae or " worms " which are yet believed by the unlearned to have " snowed down." A chemist of that day, whose work was reprinted by the Royal Society, says of fermenting bread dough that " unless it were bridled and restrained by . . . Artificial Fire it would proceed to vitality and produce worms." It was held in Elizabeth's time, and long before and after, that parasites Avere bred from the body on which they lived. As late as 1676, when Bacon, the Virginia rebel, in his last illness found himself obliged to cast his discarded garments directly into the fire, the presence of the parasites was thought to be one of the results of his disease and a divine judgment on him for rebellion, though the case is sufficiently explained by the fact that he had been dwelling in Indian wigwams a few weeks before. The persistence of vitality was held then as the persistence of force is now ; "no one living creature corrupts without the production of another," was an accepted maxim. Lord Bacon states it more cautiously : " Briefly, most things putrefied bring forth insects of various names."

VII

If there was much lack of book learning in the generation of English people that sprung up first

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on American soil, there was some gain in a life in which exigent wants compelled a habit of shrewd observation. For centuries strange theories had prevailed among learned and unlearned regarding the origin of those far-wandering waterfowl whose distant resting places were yet undiscovered. Following the analogy of the accepted theory regarding the production of " insects," including frogs, mice, and snakes, there were those who derived many birds from wood rotting in the water, or from decaying fruits. Others said that some birds grew on trees, and proved it by showing the shells of the nuts from which the bird had emerged. The so-called barnacle goose had been held for centuries to develop from the shellfish barnacle which clings to the bottom of a ship or a water-soaked timber. More than one writer of standing testified to the metamorphosis on the evidence of his own senses, at least he had found a barnacle all befeathered and ready to take flight. Eas3^-going casuists treated the barnacle goose as a fish hy virtue of its marine origin, and it was served up to monks and other self-indulgent fasters on Fridays. Such a myth could not be long held in solution by American tradition ; barnacle geese were not found, and the unlearned pioneer seeking his meat by prowling along the reedy shores of rivers, ponds, and estuaries with a great fowling piece six or seven feet long in the barrel came to know the life habits of waterfowl better than any of that procession of philosophers who with pedantic learning copied

Mental Outfit of the Early Colonists.

incredibilities from one Latin book to another down the ages. One bit of ornithology of that time crossed the seas, and perhaps by virtue of its absurdity was able to hold its own in America for two hundred years. The annual disappearance of migratory birds and their return in the spring demanded explanation, and in old British folk-lore it was held that such birds were accustomed to lie hid in caves, rocks, and hollow trees. In Cornwall it was reported that swallows out of season had been " found sitting in old deepe Tynne — workes and holes in the Sea Cliffes." Olaus Magnus, a banished Scandinavian bishop living at Rome, published in the sixteenth century a work learned in form but as full of things unbelievable as the writings of the much-venerated Pliny. He told on the never-to-be-questioned authority of fishermen that they had drawn up torpid swallows in their nets which came to life on warmine. He even gave all the details of their taking refuge for the winter in the clay at the bottom of the river. Once this fond story of the fishermen got itself printed in Latin and authenticated by a bishop, it became a scientific fact. The new notion almost crowded out the old folk-theory of hibernation in caves and holes, and held its own for two centuries, to be reluctantly discarded almost in our time. The revelations of the telescope made the moon seem near, and Bishop Godwin formed a new theory of hibernation in the satellites, which was elaborated by Charles Morton, an Oxford scholar.

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whose old age was passed in Massachusetts. He preached a sermon from a text in Jeremiah, from which he deduced a winter home for all kinds of migratory birds among the newly revealed mountains and valleys of the moon. If that were thought too far away for wing travel, Morton was willing to split the difference by suggesting that the earth might have some smaller satellites — little undiscovered gull islands in the heavens for the birds to roost upon. After Morton's death, omnivorous and marvel-loving Cotton Mather appropriated this hypothesis as a piece of flotsam, and wrote a letter to the Royal Society in which he suggested that the prodigious flights of pigeons in the colonies rendered probable the existence of an unseen, nearat-hand satellite, from which came these myriads of birds, and to which they were wont to retreat again. But the English colonists who touched elbows with Nature, and had larger opportunities for observation than their island ancestors, came to accept the annual migration of the disappearing birds before the middle of the eighteenth century. There were, however, learned pundits in Philadelphia as late as 1800, who followed Olaus in winter inof their swallows in the bottoms of the rivers.

VIII

Classification, which is at once the result of knowledge and an instrument of investigation, was infantile and unstable even among the learned.

Mental Outfit of the Early Colonists.

Fishes, including, of course, sea mammals, had been divided into round and long; to these Harrison adds shelled fishes and legged fishes. Popular classification is always rough, but in that day nobody held firmly to the cardinal division of the vertebrate animals. The beaver and otter were even divided transversely in classification ; their hind quarters were counted with the fishes. In ecclesiastical regulations it was not always thought worth while to make two bites of a beaver ; Lorrainers and Savoyards, as well as Canadian woodsmen, ate freely of his flesh on fish days, making sure that the meat of so aquatic an animal with so flat a tail could not be flesh. The interest in animal life was unscientific, being mainly an interest in the marvelous stories of the basilisk hatched from a cock's tgg brooded by a toad, of the unicorn with a horn eight or ten feet long growing out of his head, of the salamander that endured the fire, of the phoenix that lived five hundred years, of the common hare that changed sex in alternate years, of men that were metamorphosed into wolves in Ireland, of wolves that struck men dumb by seeing them first, of swans that sing before dying, and so on and on. Wonders were not wanting among American animals ; the unicorn was observed on the Hudson, and many half-human creatures, reported by early voyagers, dwelt along the seacoast from Cape Ann eastward. Sometimes these were seen at night dancing in groups about a fire on the shore ; one daring Triton swimming in Casco Bay i6

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made bold to grasp the side of a canoe and got his hand lopped off with a hatchet. Narrating these occurrences, Josseljn meditates that " there are many stranger things in the world than are to be seen between London and Stanes." We are accustomed to see popular credulity controlled by scientific skepticism, but in the seventeenth century the learned looked for scientific knowledge primarily in the writings of the ancients, sacred and profane, and devoured most of the atrocious stories accumulated by Pliny, " the greatest gull of antiquity." When modern light began to dawn and science tried to observe, it was not mainly the ordinary and the regular that were noted ; members of the new Royal Society and others thought to learn from the monstrosities and marvels ; New England ministers acted as soothsayers and expounded the hidden meaning of monstrous births, and even played showmen to exhibit these ghastly messages from the Almighty.

IX

The world invisible as conceived in every age is a reflection of the familiar material world ; the image is often inverted : it may be exaggerated, glorified, distorted, but it is still their own old world mirrored in the clouds of heaven. Even the love of rank and ostentation in the seventeenth century — the snobbery of the age — projected itself into heavenly arrangements. In a day when idle

Mental Outfit of the Early Colonists.

serving men stood about the halls of a country gentleman merely to lend dignity to the master, when one no greater than a high sheriff thought it unfit to perform his functions without a squad of liveried retainers at his heels, when a bishop in Christian humility rode about with sometimes a hundred and fifty horsemen clanking after him, and when kingly state was multitudinous in proportion, the majesty of Almighty God required myriads of attendants. Milton thinks thus of God :

His State Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed And post o'er Land and Ocean without rest.

And the prose of Bishop Hall is almost as lofty as Milton's verse, when it contemplates " those next-to-infinite numbers of mighty and majestical spirits, wherewith the great God of heaven hath furnished his throne and footstool." Human arithmetic had no terms by which to tell the number of those who " are numerable only to God who made them." The uncountable angels were employed in keeping the universe in motion, as many eminent writers knew partly by intuition, but also by metaphysical demonstration. The busy angels turned round the crystalline spheres from the outer priinuni mobile, just this side the immovable abode of God, to the nethermost of all that carried the moon about in her lagging revolutions. Besides this duty of keeping the lights of heaven burning and turning, "these mighty

Chap. I.

Sonnet xix.

The Invisible World, ed. 1659, P- 15-

As above, p. 18.

The good angels.

Digby's Peripateticall Institutions, 362, 398.

Hakewill's Apologie, 85, 86.

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angels" produced those "strange concussations of the earth" which are so alarming and "direfull prodigies in the skie," about which it was not deemed safe to speculate. Hall relates that one philosopher was stricken dead for venturing to reason about thunderstorms. It was angelic agency that caused a corpse, in that believing age, to bleed when touched b}^ the guilty hand of the murderer. Angels gave warnings and revelations by dreams, by mental impressions and by apparitions; and they even fought for men against the spirits of the underworld. Of such stuff as this the great Puritan poet wrought the splendid fabric of his epic. To contemporar}^ readers Paradise Lost had as much of history as of poetry. It was an imaginative rendering of the picturesque mythology of the seventeenth century, a mythology destined to grow dim in the gray morning light of the critical century that followed.