CHAPTER 13
Abrasions, Utopians, and Holy War
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SOCIAL DISAGREEMENTS, personality conflicts, and theological controversies within this carefully managed exodus to the New World emerged quickly as the thousands of settlers, drawn from every region of England and committed to various shades of religious reform, disembarked and began the tortuous process of settling into the land. Winthrop had hoped that the outcome of this wrenching enterprise and its ultimate justification would be a single harmonious community ruled by a unified magistracy and guided in spiritual matters by clerics in agreement on the essentials of reformed Protestantism. He was the first of the Great Migration to know the bitterness of ideals betrayed. It immediately became clear that the Puritans’ world would consist not of a single integrated community devoted to carefully defined Christian goals but a sprawl of small settlements scattered across the countryside and dominated by contentious magistrates and clerics of increasingly divergent views. In the end Winthrop would live to see, not the maturing of an integrated Puritan community, but the development of a society of divergent opinions and discordant modes of behavior—differences and antagonisms that would be resolved, to the extent that they were resolved, at times by persuasion, at other times by intimidation, and at moments of crisis by vengeful brutality.
THE FIRST AND most vital question the settlers faced was how the land—so vast, so apparently boundless, so providentially open for exploitation—would be possessed and used. They had lived in a realm where every acre was preciously possessed and where whole domains were preserved for landlords’ recreation while tenants and subtenants cultivated plots whose yields were shared in rents. In the varieties of their regional origins they had had different experiences in crop selection and land use. Now, in New England, cling as they might to the practices they had known, they had no choice but to reconsider the foundations of land distribution and exploitation.
At first, all was confusion. Displeased with the original landing site at the earlier settlement at Salem—a scene of death and desolation—the Winthrop fleet’s leaders turned south and explored the Boston Bay area, only to disagree on a permanent location for the future city. With Dudley stubbornly insisting on a site inland along one of the two rivers emptying into the bay, the Charles, and Winthrop favoring a site on the other, the Mystic, they compromised on a temporary encampment between the two, at what became Charlestown. There, on the sloping shore, the hundreds of disoriented, exhausted voyagers threw together temporary shelters—tents, huts, and wigwams—and dragged their supplies, livestock, and equipment to safety above the waterline. It was a desperate, crowded, helter-skelter huddle, lacking sanitation, sufficient food, and medical supplies. Dysentery swept through the encampment, and the settlers were forced to disperse. While Dudley continued to demand that the entire colony follow him up the Charles to “Newtown” (Cambridge), Sir Richard Saltonstall led one group farther up the Charles to what would become Watertown, William Pynchon led another a short distance south to Roxbury, and Winthrop, though conceding enough to Dudley to build a house at Newtown, led his personal following to the small, narrow peninsula jutting into the bay that became known as Boston, in recognition of the Lincolnshire town where John Cotton had inspired a generation of Puritans. By the end of 1630, six months after the fleet’s arrival, there were seven settlements scattered on the shores and inlets of Boston Bay, and Winthrop’s dream of a single, organic community, a model of disciplined Christian civility free of the corruptions of the world left behind, had begun to fade.1
None of these initial communities had rules to follow for the distribution of land. But as the settlements multiplied, the General Court devised, not by theory but by pragmatic adjustments to demographic, cultural, financial, and ecological pressures, a procedure that would determine the process of land distribution for generations to come. Well before 1650, by which time forty-four towns had been founded, it had become clear that the complicated process began with the gathering of a group—ecclesiastical or secular—with the will and resources to choose a site, obtain permission from the General Court, purchase the land from the Indians, survey the plot in approved form, and design not only the lots for distribution (home lots, fields for cultivation, and meadowland) but also the roads and bridges that would be needed by the initial settlers. The allocation of land was necessarily a subtle process. There was nothing egalitarian about it. The more a family was believed to be able to contribute to the community’s welfare, the greater its entitlement to grants among the several parcels to be divided. Prestige had to be taken into account, as well as professional skills and wealth. And the entitlements based on these social measures had to be cross-calculated with the quality of land in the several parcels: a mediocre town lot could be balanced by a generous grant of rich meadowland. And decisions had to be made on which sections of land would be held in reserve for later distribution and who would be entitled to share in the later grants.2
The entire process, from the initial gathering of people hoping to found a new town to the allocation of land to the last of the founding group, was laborious and expensive. And it required, besides the farming families who would actually settle and work the land, affluent and influential sponsors, resident or absentee, who could provide the necessary financial and political backing. As the process went forward it became peculiarly confusing because of the diversity of the settlers’ regional backgrounds.
For they brought to the process of land distribution and cultivation a variety of habits and expectations drawn from their earlier lives. Though the settlers sought to join with people they knew personally or who came from the same region, no part of New England and very few towns were populated exclusively by migrants from a single ecological, agricultural district of England. Everywhere people were faced with “strangers very unlike themselves despite their common nationality”; people, Winthrop wrote, who originally had been “absent from eache other many miles, and had [had]…imploymentes as farre distant” were now obliged to live together and collaborate in a common enterprise. If in some areas settlers of a common background were dominant, often their dominance did not last. Neighborhood groups, even those that had arrived together, broke up as families moved in search of permanent locations. Dissident factions split off from parent communities to join with other dissidents and with later immigrants to form new towns; and servants, once freed from their obligations, had no choice but to move on until they found steady employment or their own stake in the land.3
Movement, a constant shuffling, was everywhere. Of the 693 heads of household who arrived on the seven ships whose complete passenger lists are known, only 115 remained in their first locations. Though most of these families moved only once, some seemed peripatetic, moving four, five, even six times before settling down permanently. Similarly, of the 939 migrants from London to New England in 1635, only just over one-third remained in the town of their arrival; an equal number moved once before settling, 154 made two moves, and 106 moved three times or more; two can be traced as residents of no less than seven communities. Three-fifths of all those who arrived before 1634 left their original habitations. Roxbury’s settlers, for example, two-thirds of whom came from Essex and East Hertfordshire and were closely related by kinship, “moved in and out of Roxbury at a dizzying rate.” Half of that town’s original free adult males moved on—seven to Rhode Island, one to New Hampshire, three to Salem and its surroundings, nine to Connecticut or Long Island, and two to the West Indies.4
All of this settlement and resettlement compounded the complexity of the communities’ subcultural blendings. An indication of how intricate the pattern became is shown on the map of the English origins of the settlers in a significant number of New England areas as of 1650. In each of the three main areas around Boston Bay, for example, there are people from all five major regions of England. Though the Bay’s North Shore settlements have a preponderance of West Country people; though the people in the mid-Bay area
(Middlesex and Suffolk counties) are mainly from England’s southeast coast; and though on the South Shore East Anglians were in the majority, there were people from all parts of England in all of these areas. There were jarring juxtapositions and shifts in dominance even in such a limited area as the sparsely settled Cape Cod: West Country men dominated the eastern Cape, though not exclusively, but southeasterners were the majority on the western Cape. Similarly, in the mix of peoples in the isolated settlements along Long Island Sound, the majority were drawn from England’s southeastern coast, but a few miles to the north along the Connecticut River, one cluster around Hartford was predominantly East Anglian in origins, while another, around Springfield, was largely drawn from the West Country.
English origins of New England settlers: distribution by regions
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The differences mattered. In certain places distinctions created by English regional origins were easily reconciled and soon faded, but in others they persisted and led at times to difficult community relations and bitter controversies.
For two generations Salem’s public life was dominated by the struggle between the original, pre-Puritan West Country men led by Roger Conant, who settled on the north side of the town’s harbor (Cape Ann), and the later influx of East Anglians, who established themselves across the harbor and on inland farms. Every aspect of the town’s life—landholding, church organization, social order, and political power—reflected that rivalry. The town’s problems rose and fell, but through all the turmoil of the town’s early years, the West Country men clung to their identity as a group apart. By the 1660s, when commerce began to dominate the largely East Anglian port sector and when as a consequence problems of land use and taxation led to sharp differences, the West Country men simply walked off and formed their own town of Beverly. Nothing, it seemed, could dim the West Country men’s identification with the region of their origins. In 1671, forty-six years after Conant had settled on the part of Salem that had become Beverly, he petitioned the General Court on behalf of himself and thirty-four others to change the name of the town to the “western name of Budleigh, a market towne of Devonsheer … where myself was borne.” His request, he wrote, was a “littell Privelidg,” but at the age of seventy-nine, it was important to him. He reminded the Court that all the first comers who had settled with him had been “from the western part of England,” and that in his long life this was the only request he had ever made of the authorities.5
Nothing in the settling of the towns was more clearly influenced by regional background than the question of whether the granted town lots would be owned and worked in common, as in England’s open or common field system, or whether individual grants would form separate enclosed farms worked independently by individual families. And nothing was more complex, since the two forms had overlapped in certain areas. Further, in many regions the process of enclosure had been in flux, spreading rapidly in modernizing areas in East Anglia, where open-field agriculture had once been dominant, while scarcely penetrating large parts of the Midlands.6
Often at the start of settlement the physical need to collaborate in building new villages and in opening virgin land to cultivation, as well as the desire to keep church communities together, led to some form of communal cooperation. But frequently counterpressures in the end prevailed, and not always peaceably.7
A common experience was that of the village of Andover. Its founders were West Country men who devised an open-field system similar to what they had known in their earlier lives, and they imposed fines on people who moved away from the core settlement. But when some of the most influential of the original leaders died and newcomers arrived from enclosed regions of England, the controls were relaxed and the system was compromised—not fully, to a complete scattering of autonomous family farms, but to the distribution of parcels of land within several large divisions, each held privately by families whose residences remained in the central village while they farmed the outside fields. Then later, in the 1670s, the transition was completed when the villagers began relocating their residences out of the village to their distant farms.8
A more complex picture can be seen in the early years of the South Shore village of Hingham. Founded as Bear Cove by West Country men, it was soon populated overwhelmingly by East Anglians, most of them from Hingham, Norfolk. The town’s agriculture came to resemble the “mixed system” of that East Anglian town: a scattering of private smallholdings in several fields and cooperative efforts in dairy farming and small-scale textile production. But the minority elements from the West Country and Midlands retained their own traditions of open-field agriculture, whose regulation fell naturally into the hands of the town’s selectmen as custodians of the community’s common obligations. For a decade, as new arrivals further complicated the picture, the town lived with the anomalies of its mingled traditions, until gradually the more abrasive differences softened, memories lost some of their grip, children of founding West Country families married East Anglians, and the scattering of autonomous farms began to form a pattern that to many of the rising generation seemed normal.9
It was a typical transition as regional differences melded into a common form. But in some places such a transition was long delayed, and in others it led to conflicts and community ruptures. The contrast between two immediately adjacent North Shore villages, Rowley and Ipswich, and the history of Watertown’s offshoot Sudbury are exemplary of the varieties of ways that regional differences became absorbed into an emerging vernacular culture.
Rowley, Massachusetts, was a Yorkshire village, its “very laborious [industrious] people” drawn largely from the East Riding and led to New England by their imperious, exacting, stubborn, cantankerous, socially conservative preacher Ezekiel Rogers, the son of the charismatic Richard Rogers who had so intensified the Puritans’ zeal. The Yorkshire villagers were conservative in their agricultural practices and quickly devised an open-field system in which most landholders had between seven and ten strips of land in several fields; their total allocations seldom exceeded twenty acres. Further divisions of the town’s property were slow in coming, while Rogers battled with the General Court for the expansion of the town’s boundaries. The system survived almost intact through the founding generation, partly because of the strength of the English inheritance, partly because of Rogers’s fierce domination of the community (“I am the man who rules here,” he was supposed to have said), and partly because of the villagers’ youth. An estimated 90 percent of the original adult males were under forty upon arrival, 40 percent under thirty, hence few were in a position to challenge the system and the imperious Rogers’s ideas until after his death in 1661. Rowley remained through those years a model not only of open-field farming in an ecologically complex situation but of the political and social characteristics commonly associated with it. Its town meeting met frequently and in effect assumed the role of a manorial court; the town’s social order was stable and sharply stratified, with little outmigration; and there was little entrepreneurship despite the townsmen’s English background in textile production.10
All of this was strikingly different from the lifeways of the adjoining village, Ipswich, presided over, briefly, by Rogers’s lawyer-preacher stepbrother Nathaniel Ward, and then by his cousin Nathaniel Rogers.
Ipswich was an East Anglian village, its people drawn largely from the Winthrops’ homeland of the Stour River area, the Suffolk and Essex border region that was involved, directly or indirectly, with overseas trade and the booming London food market. There, as opposed to what Cotton Mather called “those drowsy corners of the north,” land values had soared and parcels were bought, sold, and exchanged in a constant flow of transactions. New England’s Ipswich (originally Agawam) was established by the modernizing, enterprising John Winthrop, Jr., and from the start individual, enclosed farms were carved out of the large town grant (14,505 acres). The individual allotments averaged ninety-seven acres, quadruple the size of the
average Rowley grants, and they became the basis of a lively market in land transactions, as parcels were exchanged, sold, and resold in full or in part. In this volatile real estate market Ipswich men filed 104 land deeds before 1660, over ten times the number filed in Rowley. More than half of the Ipswich deeds related to sales of town houses or house lots in the village, reflecting considerable mobility within the town. When parcels of farm land were sold, the average transaction involved twenty-nine acres; in Rowley the equivalent figure was slightly over six acres. By 1670 at least twenty-eight individuals in Ipswich had bought or sold parcels of over one hundred acres, and almost every one of these men had origin in Suffolk or the adjacent home counties.
In Ipswich, where most householders could claim considerable property, leadership was tied to wealth; crafts and commercial activities were actively promoted; and a wide economic disparity developed quickly. Ten percent of the original settlers came to control almost half of the town’s wealth, the bottom 50 percent only 12 percent. And the same oligarchic tendency shaped the town’s politics. The town was ruled not by a broadly representative, cooperative town meeting but by a small band of selectmen, and a few families dominated that elite group. Some selectmen in effect served for life; sixteen men held 62 percent of the positions on the board between 1636 and 1687; seven held almost 40 percent of the total.
Thus the differences in regional backgrounds between the adjacent towns of Rowley and Ipswich, separated by no more than fences, had dramatic consequences: in one, a cooperative community; in the other, a community of separate, enclosed farms quickly becoming competitive, volatile, and commercial. But however different they were, these patterns developed separately in the two towns, and neither was conflicted within itself. But where these divergent regional traditions came together within a single town, there were clashes, sometimes with splintering effect.11
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Page 52
