The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675

by Bernard Bailyn

  By then a decisive moment had passed in the social history of the colony. Despite all the obvious discouragements for people “of great qualitye & estate” to join the migration, a few of such distinction had cautiously tested the waters. When Humphrey arrived in 1634 he carried with him “Certain Proposals” from Viscount Saye and Sele, father-in-law of the Earl of Lincoln and an early supporter of the Bay Colony, Baron Brooke, “and other Persons of quality, as conditions of their removing to New-England.” The two lords, Saye and Sele and Brooke, leading Puritans but by no means religious utopians, were already deeply engaged in the Puritan colony on Providence Island in the Caribbean and in Puritan projects elsewhere, especially a new colony planned for establishment at the mouth of the Connecticut River, a site that would be known as Saybrook. For this they had organized a development plan, had begun sending supplies to the site, and had appointed John Winthrop, Jr., who had his own scientific interest in the project, to serve as governor. For that imagined community as well as for their knowledge of the Bay Colony, should they decide to migrate there, the “persons of great quality and estate” wrote to inquire what kind of a society New England actually was and whether it would be suitable for people like themselves.

  So they asked: Did the colony have a bicameral legislature whose upper chamber was reserved for eminences like themselves and their heirs in perpetuity and had veto power over ordinary legislation? Was it true that any man could vote and serve in the lower house simply by virtue of church membership, without regard to wealth and standing? Surely, they wrote, men should be chosen for civil offices, even though “carnal” with respect to the church, if they had “eminent gifts of wisdom, courage, justice, fit for government.”7

  The colony’s magistrates and its leading theologian, John Cotton, scrambled to respond. Eager for the support and if possible the presence in New England of such distinguished figures, they assured their lordships that there was no danger that the colony would ever become a “mere democracy.” God, they hastened to say, never advised such a thing: “if the people be governors, who shall be governed?” Nothing in the colony’s organization would “cast the commonwealth into distractions, and popular confusions.” They were no levellers and no advocates of arbitrary rule of any sort. Nor was there a danger, they wrote, that the rule of the godly would lead to “excommunications.” They simply believed, because they knew it was a “divine ordinance (and moral),” that no one should be trusted with public authority, either as voter or magistrate, who was not godly, and since godly people were “fit materials for church fellowship,” it followed that membership in the church should be, and would continue to be, a qualification for political participation. But though the magistrates would be church members, they would govern by civil laws enacted by civil legislatures and executed by normal courts of law. As for social distinctions, they would be fully respected, as would all the privileges natural to them. Indeed, they wrote, the colony had already established a Standing Council whose members would serve for life, though membership in that body would not be hereditary. There was no biblical sanction for hereditary governance, nor was it reasonable. To exalt to high places heirs lacking “gifts fit for magistracy,” simply because they were heirs, would be to violate God’s clear intention. Hereditary honors and titles would of course be respected, but hereditary authority and power would be taking God’s name in vain, just as would hiding “under a bushel” the abilities of any members of noble families who had in fact been blessed by God “with a spirit and gifts fit for government.”8

  The language was somewhat complicated, but the message was clear. The colony would be ruled by members of the church who qualified for leadership. Hereditary distinctions would be respected but not deemed qualification for office. While there would be no levelling of the social order, rank or wealth would not in themselves be qualifications for political participation.

  Thereafter Lord Saye and Sele, while leading the opposition forces in Parliament, concentrated on the Puritans’ colony on Providence Island, even attempting, to the mortification and deep resentment of Winthrop and his assistants, to lure some of the Bay Colony’s settlers to that remote Caribbean spot. Brooke joined him in this and in the Connecticut venture, which languished for lack of funds and attention. Ultimately Brooke would gain fame as an officer in the military struggles against the royal forces, until he was killed in battle in 1643.9

  But however fruitless the two nobles’ approach to the Puritan leadership in Massachusetts had been, it forced the leaders to consider what kind of community they were creating and what form the peopling of the colony should take. A popular democracy the colony would certainly not be. Nor would it be a theocracy. It would be a society of traditional social ranks below the level of the titled aristocracy and nobility, with a majority of farmers, artisans, and laborers, dominated by affluent, or once-affluent, well-educated, godly, competent gentlemen and merchant-entrepreneurs, together with a powerful cohort of England’s clerical intelligentsia.10

  And so it was. While in Ireland English and Scottish settlements were being imposed on an indigenous population of Christians to form garrisoned enclaves of conquest; while in the scattered plantation world in the American south immigrants were forming an overwhelmingly male population of agricultural laborers violently displacing the native population; and while in the mid-Atlantic coastal region a polyglot mix of north Europeans was struggling with fiercely contesting natives for control of agricultural lands and the fur trade—in the same years greater New England was being transformed. English village communities appeared in increasing numbers, radiating inland from initial settlements on the Atlantic coast, from estuaries on Long Island Sound, and along the Connecticut River. In the process clusters of native Indian villagers were scattered into new, diminished, unstable groupings in more remote locations.

  THE MIGRATION BEGAN, after the establishment of the Massachusetts Bay Company’s preliminary settlement at Salem and the transfer of the company’s government to Massachusetts, with the Winthrop fleet of 1630. That formidable flotilla, the largest single shipment of emigrants ever to have left England, consisted of eleven vessels carrying approximately 700 passengers. Six other vessels followed in the weeks thereafter, bringing the total within the single year to approximately 1,000 migrants, most of whom landed at the ramshackle fishing village of Salem, where 80 of the company’s 180 servants had died during the previous winter. The flow continued, at a diminished rate, for the next three years, bringing annual increments of approximately 500 men, women, and children. Then in 1633, which marks the advent of William Laud to the Archbishopric of Canterbury and the beginning of determined repression of active nonconformists, the numbers soared.

  Annually thereafter, until 1640, dozens of vessels left ports in southern England bearing well over a thousand migrants to Massachusetts; in 1638 no fewer than three thousand arrived. At docks in Boston, Salem, and a few lesser New England harbors and inlets the passengers, hundreds at a time, after long, exhausting, often frightening voyages, unloaded their personal belongings, their supplies, and equipment of all sorts, sought out kin, acquaintances, and church and neighborhood leaders who had gone before, and crowded together in whatever shelters they could find. In 1631 the future Charlestown, at the confluence of the Mystic and Charles rivers, was a “sprawling tent community,” Boston a disorderly scattering of shacks, huts, wigwams, and small, half-built timber-frame houses. Once secured in whatever makeshift shelters they could devise, the new arrivals began the difficult process of organizing quasi-normal communities and of learning to cope with the local environment. At the same time preliminary structures of church and state were improvised, and some elementary regulations of economic life, especially the distribution of land, were agreed upon. It was a frantic, contentious, and remarkably creative time, but also dangerous and threatening. Diseases spread, many died (two hundred, it was said, between April and December 1630), and at least one hundred of the thousand who arrived in 1630—
despairing, disillusioned, and fearful for their lives—returned to England. But the region’s population grew with astonishing speed. Before the decade was out, it had reached more than eleven thousand men, women, and children, in villages scattered from Boston and a ring of neighboring communities in the east to clusters of settlements on the Connecticut River and Long Island, and to a string of fishing villages stretching north along the Atlantic coast to the mouth of the Kennebec River.11

  Peculiarly derived from English antecedents, these villages, as they developed, were social amalgams, hybrids in English terms, variations on known community models, demographically dynamic to an extraordinary degree, and remarkably contentious.

  2

  The demographic complexity of New England’s population derived in part from the geographical diversity of the English sources from which it was drawn and from the resulting variety of the migrants’ socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds.12

  There was no singular sociogeographic source of the Puritan migration. The largest number of settlers came from the east-central area of England, between the Humber River on the north and the Thames on the south—that is, from East Anglia proper (Norfolk and Suffolk) and its surrounding counties (Essex, Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire, and Hertfordshire),13 and in addition from London and Kent. But New England was not simply a greater East Anglian or east-central England transplant. The scope and reach of the recruitment was far broader than that. Though the passengers in the initial Winthrop fleet were locally recruited and as far as possible were personally screened by Winthrop and the Bay Company’s incorporators, among them were people whose origins lay in no fewer than twenty counties of England: from the north (Yorkshire and Lancashire), from the west (Cheshire), and from the south (Hampshire); five of the voyagers, though English, came from Holland. And Winthrop’s fleet had been preceded by the arrival of an independent shipment of 140 emigrants from the West Country (Devon, Dorset, and Somerset).14

  Every relevant record repeats this pattern of regional and subcultural diversity in the origins of New England’s population. Of Boston’s residents in the 1630s, the English origins of 141 are known: though 60 percent came from the East Anglian counties of Suffolk and Essex, the rest were drawn from ten other counties, and from London and the Netherlands. Of the 669 emigrants known to have left the port of London for New England in 1635, 48 percent were residents of London and greater East Anglia, but the rest came from twenty-eight other counties as far distant as Northumberland and Devon, Yorkshire and Lancashire. In the most comprehensive listing of the origins of all known emigrants to New England before 1650, almost the whole of England, plus Holland and Ireland, are represented. Of the 4,282 people whose residential origins are known (approximately one-fifth of those known to have emigrated to New England in those years), the largest number (1,302, or 30 percent) came from Suffolk, Essex, and Norfolk, followed by London and Kent (608, or 14 percent). But 687 (16 percent) came from the West Country (Somerset, Wiltshire, Devonshire, and Dorset), and there were significant numbers from Yorkshire (136), Lincolnshire (113), Lancashire (54), Northumberland (37), and Sussex (33). The only county that was not represented was Westmoreland, though not because of its remoteness: Northumberland, Cumberland, and Durham in the north sent 42. And there were also residents of Ireland (11) and Wales (34) as well as 80 people, no doubt English in origin, who began their journey to New England from the Netherlands.15

  These regional differences, in the still deeply decentralized England of the early seventeenth century, defined distinct variations in local cultures, in economic experiences, and in the expectations of the settlers.

  • • •

  IN THE BROADEST GEOPHYSICAL and climatological terms, England as a whole was divided between pastoral highlands in the north and west and arable lowland areas of mixed husbandry in the east. The former was a cool, wet land of mountains and moors and thin, poor soils good mainly for animal raising—sheep and cattle—and grass growing. The south and east were a drier region of gentle slopes, open pastures, and a richer, deeper soil excellent for grain cultivation and mixed farming as well as pasturage. In the highlands, enclosure of the land into separate farmsteads was widespread, and mining and quarrying were important parts of the economy. But in the south and east, enclosure was still in the process of development, in many places incomplete and a matter of controversy; open-field mixed farming and “large-scale commercial dealings in food” predominated, and everywhere there were nucleated villages whose inhabitants lived within the control of manorial institutions. And the “social framework of community life in upland and lowland England was as distinct as the farming arrangements.” Partible inheritance, for example, was more widely practiced in the highlands than in the south and east where primogeniture was common.16

  But these gross distinctions mask a great variety of specific, local differences that were vital in shaping the experiences, customs, and expectations of the migration’s people. “When an Englishman in the early seventeenth century said ‘my country,’ ” Lawrence Stone has written, “he meant ‘my county,’ ” and there was “an emotional sense of loyalty to the local community, and also … institutional arrangements to give that sentiment force.” But “country” could also mean “immediate neighborhood, one’s farming region or ‘pays.’ ” For not only were there significant differences in the social structure, the political temper, and the economic fortunes of adjacent counties, but even within counties there were “sudden changes of scenery and society.” “Geographically, few counties were homogeneous”; nor were all local areas unitary in character. Individual communities within them were peculiarly shaped by the impact of a particularly charismatic preacher, sudden rent increases, or personal struggles in politics. And throughout these years there was something subtler and more general at work: a deepening introversion, an intensifying insularity and sense of parochial self-consciousness.17

  Thus greater East Anglia, from which the largest number of emigrants came, while it shared certain general characteristics of the southeastern region, had its own economic and cultural diversity. The core counties of Norfolk and Suffolk were given over to grassland and dairying, but its broad western and northern circumference had long been a major supplier of grain to the great London and northern European markets as well as to its own coastal fishing areas. Sheep breeding supplied a cloth industry centered in Norfolk, especially in its shire town, Norwich. In addition there were wood-pasture districts, in which small hamlets and isolated dairy and horse-breeding farms were scattered among extensive woodlands that nourished a long-established timber industry. Neighboring Essex and Kent too were complex worlds, containing as they did in some areas mixed husbandry and enclosed pasture farming, in others dairying and market farming, in still others sheep and pig breeding in enclosed wood-pasture lands. There as elsewhere economic and agrarian differences shaped variant social structures even at the most local level. Society was more hierarchical and oligarchic in mixed farming regions; in pastoral areas there was more clan or family control, and there was less social regulation of any kind in districts of highly developed commercial farming.18

  Farming regions of England, 1500–1640

  Click here to see a larger image.

  The West Country was no less complex, no less a region of diverse communities and multiple relationships rooted in distinctive microlocal economies. The four southwestern counties of Wiltshire, Somersetshire, Dorset, and Devonshire, which together supplied 16 percent of New England’s migrants whose origins are known, formed a patchwork of local variations. The Wiltshire chalklands were almost entirely devoted to sheep and grain production, and in this mixed farming world, manorial institutions remained powerful, society was peculiarly hierarchical, and there was a steady increase in the holdings of the major farmers. Somerset, the region’s most densely populated county, was crowded with dairy farmers and clothiers in the east but elsewhere supported a range of industries based on mineral resources. Much of Dorset was pasturel
and, with small farms scattered across the landscape, but dairying flourished in its vales. Devon, bleak and desolate in fall and winter, was largely pastoral country, though grain and fruit were grown in the south, and cloth making was a major industry. Many of the isolated inland farmsteads had little communication with the outside world, but the coastal lowlands were closely tied to the metropolitan markets.19

  Similarly varied was the northern area of recruitment, Yorkshire primarily, but also Lincolnshire, Lancashire, and Northumberland. Yorkshire’s emigrants came from both the West and East Ridings, but the majority were from the East, which was a countryside “of nucleated villages, common fields, and stinted, shrinking commons” that produced grain of various kinds and raised mixed herds of cattle. Most of the vales in southeastern Yorkshire and northern Lincolnshire were held within tight manorial control; open fields were worked under regulations made by common consent and managed by manorial stewards; population size was steady; most individual holdings were small; society was more static and more highly stratified than it was in East Anglia; and change was slowly paced. In the upland vales of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, there were contrasts in wealth between squires and large farmers on the one hand who knew how to reach metropolitan markets, and ordinary yeomen and husbandmen who did not. While the hills of the two adjacent counties “were a fertile field for the development of large-scale farming by the capitalist farmer,” the forests and fens of both counties were centers of chronic poverty. There landless cottagers struggled to survive, and fenland peasants fought large-scale drainage schemes that threatened their use of the commons.20