But the major group from the West Country had settled in 1630, not on Conant’s Cape Ann or Salem, but on a spur of land that jutted into Boston harbor that they called, in honor of the Reverend White, Dorchester. The lives of the 140 men, women, and children who disembarked from the Mary and John of Devon were desperate at first, as they sought shelter in hastily erected canvas tents and wigwams and in timber-framed earthen dugouts and unloaded their crates, barrels, and bundles of clothes, food, drink, equipment, and firearms. But their leadership was strong. Chief among them—typical in many ways of the Great Migration’s secular leaders—was Roger Ludlow.
Scion of a prominent family of Wiltshire landowners and lawyers, Ludlow had studied at Balliol College, Oxford, then had had legal training at the Inner Temple and had practiced law in London. Married into the family of prominent West Country merchants, he was drawn by White, and probably Endecott, his brother-in-law, into the settlement project. He personally funded the purchase of the Mary and John and became the official leader of the expedition. Well educated, politically informed, sophisticated in the law, and enormously energetic, Ludlow had all the qualities needed for the task except an even temper and a conciliatory spirit. Contemporaries found him “arrogant, overbearing, and opinionated.” When in 1632 it was proposed that the magistrates and governor be elected by more popular procedures, Ludlow flew “into passion,” declared that all government would then be at an end, and that under those conditions he would return to England. His impatience and restlessness were matched by his ambition. When in 1635, having served as Massachusetts’ deputy governor, he would fail of election to the magistracy, in part because of intemperate remarks to the town representatives, he would break with the community he had helped found and lead many of his people westward, to Connecticut—first to Windsor, then to Fairfield. For a time the challenges of creating a settlement in the wilderness, devising a new, remarkably innovative code of law, serving in a magistracy of his own creation, and leading troops against the Dutch—all this would absorb his energies. But when the political-ecclesiastical world turned in England, his ambition would overcome him and he would return, to serve in Ireland on Cromwell’s commission on forfeited estates.69
There were more peaceable, less restless leaders of the West Country contingent—notably Henry Wolcott and Edward Rossiter. But the latter died within months of his arrival, and Wolcott, who emigrated with his family from Somerset at age fifty-two, would devote his considerable energy and cunning to land development in Windsor, Connecticut, and in connection with his Somerset kin, he established a trading network that would launch the fortunes of an affluent family. Like Conant, Wolcott and his sons and grandsons would never forget their West Country origins, which continued to shape their lives. Less fervently Puritan than the East Anglians who dominated Boston and its satellites, they remained different in style and folkways: “softer in speech,” their historian has written, “slower in tempo, and distinct in … rural habits and allegiances.”70
7
Such was the leadership of the migration that would populate New England—clerics resolute in refusing to concede to the church’s demands for conformity and determined to realize their hopes for a fulfilled, apostolic Protestantism, and pious laymen familiar with land management and the law, and familiar too with commerce and the mobilization of resources. There is abundant record of their frantic efforts to launch the exodus and establish the settlements. The problems they faced, starting in 1629 and in the decade that followed, were enormous. Besides dealing with the details of disposing of their own personal property, they had to decide how much and what kinds of food would be needed for the voyage and for the year thereafter, what clothes, tools, building materials, fishing and hunting equipment, arms, and kitchenware; what cattle could be transported; what craftsmen, tradesmen, artisans, and physicians—indeed what preachers—should be brought along,71 and how many sailors and soldiers. What would be the transportation cost—per person, per family, for the fleet as a whole—and how should it be paid for? Above all, they had to decide how the settlers were to be recruited and how they should be organized for departure.
Many left as members of informal, loosely associated “companies” under clerical leadership, drawn to the migration by the magnetism of major figures like Cotton and Hooker. These were not stable, durable communities whose members were bound together in networks of shared rights and obligations. They came together only as associates in migration, and their group identity therefore was fragile and transitory. Thus Anne Hutchinson, who had been deeply touched by Cotton’s preaching, traveled in his entourage.72 So too did the Boston (Lincolnshire) alderman Thomas Leverett, who had protected Cotton in his need, and the town’s former mayor, Atherton Hough, who was linked by marriage to the extensive Bedfordshire clan of the Rev. Peter Bulkeley. In all, fifty-nine emigrants have been identified as having been in Cotton’s initial “company,” and many more, in subsequent years, would follow in his path. John Davenport led his own large and important contingent from Coleman Street, London, ultimately to New Haven, Connecticut, which became a refuge for spiritists of Cotton’s persuasion. Wheelwright, Anne Hutchinson’s brother-in-law, led twenty-nine of his followers to Boston. Nathaniel Rogers, son of “the mighty thunderer of Dedham,” inspired the migration of twenty people to Ipswich, Massachusetts; his stubborn, domineering cousin Ezekiel brought twenty families from his Yorkshire parish in Rowley and its surroundings to Massachusetts, where they joined thirty others in settling a new Rowley, close by the new Ipswich.
Hooker’s personal influence on the migration was even greater, numerically, than Cotton’s. Fifty-eight of his Essex devotees preceded him to New England; later fifty-three others followed. Among them were people of some wealth and standing. John Haynes, of Copford Hall, Essex, whom Winthrop described as “a gentleman of great estate,” traveled with Hooker and would serve first as governor of Massachusetts and then, when he followed Hooker to Connecticut, as governor or deputy governor of that colony for the rest of his life. Shepard’s “company” of thirty-eight included the young, affluent Roger Harlakenden, son of the manor lord of Earls Colne, Essex, whose family had attempted to shield Shepard from Laud’s attacks. Harlakenden traveled in some style, with his wife, sister, eight servants, and an associated family of five.73
Such ministerial “companies” gathered wherever Puritanism was under heavy attack and where there were forceful preachers determined to lead the way. From parishes in northeastern Suffolk came the John Phillips and John Young groups of forty-nine, along with the John Allen and John Fiske “company” of sixty-two. The largest single ministerial “company” known to have moved to New England came from Hingham, Norfolk, and its surroundings. Between 1633 and 1640, 143 people migrated from that district with the blessings of both “the old fox,” the Rev. Robert Peck, who had been excommunicated as “a very violent schismatical spirit” and emigrated at age fifty-eight, and the Rev. Peter Hobart, twenty-seven years his junior. Together they would organize and dominate the settlement of Hingham, Massachusetts.74
The total population of the ministerial “companies”—some of them loose groupings of scattered parishioners, some actual congregations—that left from the five counties of greater East Anglia has been calculated at 667.
The fabric of the Great Migration was much more, however, than a patchwork of ministerial-led clusters. Equally a part of the complex pattern were other associations independent of clerical leadership—groups related not so much by shared religious experiences and commitments as by kinship, friendship, and geographical proximity. One of the subtlest statistical analyses of the migration from London to New England reveals disproportionate numbers from different inland locations sailing together—statistics that identify them as voyagers who had gone to London not to take the first transport available but to wait, according to plan, for others to join them—family, neighbors, and friends—with whom “to brave the uncertainty of an Atlantic crossing.”75 Not all such
groups survived the migration intact. Some of these conglomerates broke up at the start, their subunits traveling sequentially. Men often preceded their families; adult children sometimes led the way for their parents, siblings, and in-laws. But once settled in New England the scattered elements at times rejoined their association supplemented by strangers.
Thus John Winthrop’s extended kin group of twenty-eight individuals included, through marriage ties, members of the Tyndal, Fones, Sampson, Doggett, Firmin, Downing, and Goad families, who arrived at various times and settled in Boston, Ipswich, Salem, and Watertown and yet retained a sense of commonality; the ties among them survived years of physical separation. The relationship between the large nuclear families of the two Winthrops, father and son, remained especially close, even when the younger Winthrop lived in Connecticut and traveled abroad. Similarly, the Hutchinson clan, which by in-law extension and other relationships has been counted at forty people scattered through Massachusetts and Rhode Island, managed to maintain its ties through many vicissitudes and geographical distances. And so too the prosperous Tuttle family, who traveled from the market town of St. Albans, Hertfordshire, as a cluster of at least twenty-five that included the couple’s children, stepchildren, in-laws, and servants.
In genealogical terms, much of the emigration, especially from greater East Anglia, the West Country, and eastern Yorkshire, can be conceived of as tangles of such extended kinship groups. In the case of greater East Anglia, fifty-five such networks have been identified. Together they appear to account for over a third of all emigrants from that region of southeastern England.76
BUT SUCH CONGLOMERATES ARE only the outer manifestations of the central role of family organization in the history of the Great Migration. For at the core of such galaxies were nuclear families and their immediate households. In number they were unique in the migration history of the era. No other displacement of the English people—to Ireland, the West Indies, or elsewhere in North America—involved so many stable, complete, traditional nuclear families. But their importance cannot be measured by numbers alone. While the family basis of the Puritan migration accounts for much of the cohesion of the New England communities, it also accounts for a deep fault line in New England’s social structure that would prove to be the source of persistent conflict.
FAMILIES—nuclear families—were everywhere in the migration of the 1630s, and everywhere they proved to be the source of both stability and instability in the emerging social order. A meticulous study of the seven emigrant vessels of the 1630s whose passenger rosters are complete reveals that almost nine-tenths (87.8 percent) of the 680 passengers aboard were traveling in family groups, most of them nuclear units of married couples, generally in their thirties, who had been married for approximately a decade and who brought with them three or more children. “These were families-in-progress, with parents who were at most halfway through their reproductive years and whose continued fertility would make possible New England’s remarkable rate of population growth.”
But there were important ambiguities. Twelve percent of the emigrants in this sample were traveling not in full family groups but alone or with siblings, and most of these eighty-three individuals were young males, mainly tradesmen and semiskilled artisans. More than half of the families aboard these seven vessels brought with them servants, predominantly male. Of the seventy-four married couples who came with their children, over half (forty-two) also brought servants as members of their families. The servants totaled 17 percent of the entire group (as opposed to 13.4 percent of the English population) and 37 percent of the male emigrants, and they were present in perhaps twice as many families among the migrants as among the English population generally. In the disorienting circumstances of transatlantic travel and resettlement in unfamiliar and difficult circumstances, young male servants restive within the constraints of disrupted families, and unattached laborers and tradesmen anxious for the future, could be the source of severely destabilizing tensions.
Their origins mattered. These seven vessels left from the outports—Great Yarmouth (Norfolk), Sandwich (Kent), Southampton (Hampshire), and Weymouth (Dorset). The complexities of families in the migration become more apparent when one turns to the metropolitan port of London.77 Of the 4,878 voyagers to the colonies whose names are entered in the London port register of 1635, 1,169 boarded seventeen vessels bound for New England. In some ways the characteristics of that group match those of the previous sample; they too resembled, roughly, the attributes of the society from which the migrants had come. The sex ratio of those who left through London (1.5 males for each female) is almost as well balanced as that of the outport emigrants (1.3), and the age distribution is similar. But the anomalies stand out more clearly. Only 60 percent of these 1,169 migrants, as opposed to almost 90 percent, traveled in family groups, and a third, as opposed to 17 percent, of those whose occupations or statuses are known were servants. Their presence accounts for a notable bulge in the age group 15–24.78
Thus in the London register of 1635, as in the previous compilation of vessels leaving the outports, the incidence of families among the emigrants to New England is far greater than that of groups destined for other colonies, but in both cases the families are accompanied by large numbers of solitary travelers and servants, some attached to families, some not. The same configuration is found in the comprehensive compilation of almost ten thousand people known to have migrated to New England between 1620 and 1650. Here the lines are broader, the details far fewer, but once again there is a higher incidence of families traveling to New England than to any other colonial destination, and yet here too one finds that “one third of the adult males … were single, young, and without family connection in their new land.”79
It is a complex picture—of cohesive families and unaffiliated workers, of patriarchal householders and self-directing isolates, of exalted utopians and pedestrian toilers, of deeply rooted, prosperous gentry and wandering, unemployed laborers. The complexity is compounded—the discrepancies deepened—by the dominant groups’ remarkable cultural level. In this remote, uncultivated, disarrayed frontier world the educational level of New England’s population in the 1630s was utterly distinctive, and discordant with the crudeness and primitiveness of everyday life. It was not simply that some 60 percent of the region’s adult male population was fully literate (as opposed to 30 percent in rural England) and that perhaps “a major part” of the rest could to some extent read—or indeed, that in the mid-seventeenth century New Englanders “were the equals in literacy of the citizens of Amsterdam and of the best-educated sectors of pre-industrial England.”80
More important was the cultural accomplishments of the settlements’ leadership. At least 130 of the migrants to New England before 1646 had matriculated in Oxford or Cambridge university; eight had attended other European universities. And if the range of years is expanded to 1660 and the definition of “university men” is broadened to include Harvard graduates and those “informally tutored” in preparation for clerical careers, the number of highly educated men rises to 266. By 1640 there was probably one university educated man in New England for every thirty-two families, a ratio similar to that of England itself and astonishing in a frontier world.81 And few of these had been simply casual students, attending university only to acquire a literate or social polish. The ministers who emigrated were not average clergymen. They were better educated than the average and more effective as preachers. Many, like Hooker and Cotton, had been scholars of considerable attainments. Charles Chauncy, besides having held the Greek lectureship at Trinity College, Cambridge, was also a student of Hebrew and Arabic. John Wilson, Boston’s future pastor, was gifted in writing Latin poetry; as a young man, he had scoured the abstruse literature on conformity and dissent, then had spent three years at the Inns of Court before returning to Cambridge University and committing himself to a clerical career. John Winthrop, Jr.—the notable scientist, alchemist, industrial entrepreneur, and physician—wou
ld be the first American member of the Royal Society. Everyone, even his opponents, recognized that Roger Williams, for all his restless and rebarbative ways, was a brilliant intellectual, relentless in pursuing to their logical extremes the subtlest and at times the most dangerous implications of his and his opponents’ ideas. “Never,” Edmund Morgan has written, “was a man of action more an intellectual.”82
The discrepancy between this highly educated, articulate clerisy, extraordinary in such a crude marchland world, and the growing mass of ordinary settlers intent on material security, intensified conflicts endemic in Puritan society. It was not so much a matter of who or how many would gain technical membership in the Puritan churches as who and how many would conform to the demands of rarified social ideals brought to a point of refinement by learned, sophisticated, aspiring, contentious minds freed from external constraints and determined to design a new world. The incongruities were glaring—between intellectuals attuned to the advanced ideas of metropolitan Europe and an insecure laboring population, pragmatic, individualistic, vagrant, responding in the most parochial terms to the possibilities of immediate satisfaction.
THIS STRIKING INCONGRUITY compounded other discrepancies and anomalies within a migrant population that only in romantic retrospect could be seen as a congruent whole. The settlers of Massachusetts and its satellite colonies were in fact people from many different English subcultures, and brought with them many different folkways and differing expectations. They would be ruled in public life by hard and abrasive personalities in constant competition for dominance and guided in spiritual matters by clerics who differed increasingly on fundamental principles. They would be drawn between the magnetic poles of sophisticated, cosmopolitan ideals and the mundane realities of an uncultivated world. The resulting conflicts, the clangor and disaffections, would set in early in the settlements’ history and would last for two generations before a consistent and integrated regional culture evolved. That end product of the Great Migration would prove to be far different, in its peculiar provincialism, from anything the founders had imagined.
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Page 51
