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

by Bernard Bailyn

  But though Stuyvesant managed to bring the colony to a degree of order and civility and to defeat his enemies at The Hague, the ultimate disruption of public authority lay just over the horizon, in the outcome of the war with England. When Stuyvesant surrendered to the English troops, the formal structure of Dutch authority collapsed, leaving the Dutch and Anglo-Dutch merchants and officials scrambling to find their footing in the new regime. And no sooner had some of them managed to do so than, eight years later, the Dutch reconquest in the Third Anglo-Dutch War restored the old Dutch authorities, now complicated by the presence of recently arrived English officials and merchants. But that readjusted, patchwork system, such as it was, disappeared too when, fifteen months later, the English reacquired, by the terms of the treaty that ended the war, the province they had once conquered and restored England’s authority. By then new elements had appeared in the population, who would increase the demographic tensions and rivalries to a dangerous pitch.

  In New England, the antinomian upheaval was not the only or the most threatening challenge to the successful Puritan authorities. For all its notoriety and fervor, that episode was confined; it was a domestic struggle over theological and ecclesiastical principles. Child’s Remonstrance of 1646 was different. It mobilized and brought into the open various strains of dissent and discontent that lay just below the surface of the colonies’ public order. The Remonstrants went over the heads of the Puritan authorities to declare to officials at home that the entire Puritan government, under cover of its charter, was depriving England’s loyal subjects of their native rights and imposing on them a sectarian regime that sacrificed the general good to the benefits of a minority faction. And just as Van der Donck’s challenge to the West India Company’s chartered jurisdiction could be adjudicated only by the ultimate authorities in The Hague, so Child’s challenge to the legitimacy of the Puritans’ chartered rights was directed to the highest powers in England, who ultimately decided the issue. But while vindicated in this episode, the Bay Colony’s authorities were never free from the possibility of fundamental challenge to the legitimacy and autonomy of their vulnerable jurisdiction.

  A more subtle but more threatening challenge to the Puritan authorities than Child’s lay in the principles behind John Eliot’s Indian Praying Towns, which, for safety’s sake if not for sheer survival, they were forced utterly to repudiate.

  The origins of Eliot’s mission to the Indians had lain not only in the desire to convert these benighted people to Christianity and civility but to prepare all mankind for the approaching millennium. In a series of lectures in the 1640s John Cotton had discoursed vividly on the twenty-two chapters of the Book of Revelation and left a searing impression on Eliot that the predestined end of history was approaching and that the entire drama of Christ’s deliverance would soon be enacted, beginning with the prophesied destruction of all earthly monarchies and the presage of the rule of Christ. A new, millenarian polity would be required, and it would be extrapolated from the small-scale model that he, Eliot, would create among the Indians in New England. The Algonquians, gathered into settled towns, would be governed by elected rulers of tens, of fifties, of hundreds, and of thousands as prescribed in Exodus 18, and they would be able to lead perfected Christian lives within covenanted churches, in preparation for Christ’s deliverance.

  “I doubt not,” Eliot wrote to Cromwell, “but it will be some comfort to your heart, to see the kingdom of Christ rising up in these western parts of the world, a blessed kingdom that will in time ‘fill all the earth.’ ” In his Christian Commonwealth, written in 1651 at the height of his apocalyptic fervor, Eliot laid out the full vision that gripped his imagination. With the Praying Towns templates of what could prevail in England, and given the likelihood that the Indians, ripe for utopian molding, were descendants of the lost tribes of Israel, their conversion, followed by that of all gentiles, would indicate that the kingdom of Christ was nigh.

  But his ecstatic message and the reports of his Praying Towns reached an England in turmoil over the proper form of republican government. His urgent advice was taken to mean that England should give up ransacking law, history, and constitutional theory to find proper forms of government and draw on scripture alone, for, he wrote, “Christ is your King and Soveraign Lawgiver … set the Crown of England upon the head of Christ … Let him be your Judge, let him be your Law-Giver, Let him be your KING!” England’s constitution should, like the Indians’, consist of elected rulers with suffrage for all self-sufficient males. This, he wrote, is the form of government, infinitely expandable, “by which Christ meaneth to rule all the Nations on earth according to Scriptures.”

  All of this was a deadly embarrassment to the Massachusetts authorities. It would surely bring down on the colony the wrath of the restored royal government. As the Restoration approached, they forced Eliot to recant, officially condemned the book, and confiscated every copy they could lay their hands on.11

  But their authority was never secure. How insecure, how liable their authority was to outright confiscation in the Restoration world, became clear with the arrival in 1664 of a royal commission sent to examine and constrain their corporate existence. Staffed by representatives of disaffected New Englanders, of merchants with designs on New England’s economy, and of ambitious royalists, they were led by the Puritans’ most committed enemy, Samuel Maverick, still smarting from the indignities he had suffered in Massachusetts. The commission’s mandate in effect restated the charges of Child’s Remonstrance, compounded with demands that New England comply with the restrictions of the newly enacted navigation laws. The colony mobilized its legal and constitutional defenses, refused to acknowledge the commission’s existence, and denied them access not only to officials and records but even to suitable housing. (Breedon’s house became their working headquarters.) The commission failed, but New England’s authorities were on notice that the legal basis of their corporate existence in the reign of Charles II was no longer secure, as it had been under Cromwell and the Protectorate, and that other, later commissions might well be more effective.12

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  Contention and insecurity in British North America were not confined to public authorities. The structures of private authority were no less insecure.

  In the 1660s the immigrant flow to the Chesapeake was continuing unabated. No one at the Restoration had any reason to think it would slacken, especially as the 1650s had seen the largest inflow to date. The region’s population rose by 12,000 during that decade—literally doubling the population as of 1650—mainly due to the arrival of new indentured servants. And in the 1660s the population grew by 15,000—more than half again the total population as of 1660. Between 1640 and 1670 the total European population in the Chesapeake area more than quadrupled: from 8,000 to 38,500—an annual growth of 7.5 percent, the product of improved survival rates and greatly increased inflow of indentured servants.

  The difficulties, the confusion, of absorbing in two decades thousands of bound servants of different backgrounds and conditions into the unfamiliar life of tobacco farms, were compounded by the arrival in the same years of steadily increasing numbers of slaves. By 1660 they numbered approximately nine hundred, brought in mainly from the West Indies. Though they formed only 3.6 percent of the total population, their numbers were rising at almost three times the rate of the rest of the population. Further, by 1650 perhaps 150 convicted felons had arrived, and by 1661 they were coming in a steady flow—a small flow, but enough to cause grave concern, especially after a servant uprising in Virginia in 1663. In 1670 the colony legislated a complete ban on the further importation of “jaile birds or such others who for notorious offenses have deserved to dye in England,” a move that Maryland followed six years later. Given the relative respectability of many of the ordinary indentured servants, the convicted felons, drawn from London’s underworld and slums as well as from among the vagabonds and petty thieves who infested the English countryside, constituted a peculiarly co
ntentious element in so small a population. And further compounding this social and ethnic mix were shipments of Irish vagrants who had begun to appear as bond servants in large numbers in the 1650s, the same years that saw the arrival of Cromwell’s war prisoners, a small contingent of the thousands sent out to where they would do the most good and the least harm.13

  This heterogeneous population—indentured servants from a variety of English subcultures, Africans from the West Indies, English convicts, Irish vagabonds, and Scottish war prisoners—formed in the Chesapeake lands a labor force that was restive, quarrelsome, ill disciplined, and latently rebellious.

  With the new servant population beset, as their predecessors had been, by recurrent waves of disease, unaccustomed climate conditions, and exhausting work schedules, master-servant relations remained uncertain, often tumultuous, at times violent. For “the work was unceasing, seldom relieved by amusement or relaxation, and shelter or provisions were frequently lacking. Loneliness broke the spirit, work weakened the body, disease contributed to ill health, and many servants died before they fulfilled their indentures.” Some rebelled, ran off, stole from their masters and from the common stores. Masters swung between bursts of reprisals and concessions necessary to keep servants working. Runaways and the many unmarried servant women who bore children continued to be fined or whipped and forced to serve an extra year or two to make up for the lost labor. Not much notice was taken when a manservant who attempted to escape with stolen guns and a canoe was severely beaten and given five and a half years of extra labor, nor even when another died of a beating with a rake handle. It seemed obvious, when a servant hanged himself, for suspicious neighbors to examine his body for bruises. The records, Warren Billings writes, document “a dreary litany of privation, overwork, beatings, harassment, and other abuses,” and the court dockets were “clogged by cases of runaways, bastard bearings, petty thievery, and other infractions.” It is hardly surprising that there were two servant uprisings in the early 1660s and that Virginia was obliged to pass a statute defining the rights of servants. For, the Assembly stated in 1662, “the barbarous usage of some servants by cruell masters bring soe much scandal and infamy to the country … that people who would willingly adventure themselves hither are through fear thereof diverted.” “Barbarous”—the word appears again and again in contemporaries’ descriptions of the treatment of servants.14

  But solutions to the problems of master-servant relations could not be legislated, any more than upheavals in marital relations or child abuse, both of which are constant reminders, in the records of time, of the breakdown of accepted modes of social relations.

  The Chesapeake colonies, with their constant inflow of new servants, white and black, bound to labor under brutal circumstances, had special problems. But social disorder and contention in the 1650s and 1660s were not confined to the tobacco lands. New Netherland, polyglot, polyethnic, and polysacral in its origins, grew ever more complex as the years passed, its population more fragmented, its clangorous diversity more abrasive and more dangerously volatile.

  It is impossible fully to classify the ethnic complexity of that outpost of the Dutch maritime empire. But an effort has been made to list the places of origin of 904 of the estimated 5,700 immigrants from the Dutch Republic to New Netherland, who, with their families, represent well over half of the population of the colony and the adjacent settlements on the Delaware River at the time of the English conquest. The colony of approximately six thousand people in 1664 was a mosaic of peoples from all over northern Europe. Half of the settlers known to have emigrated from the Netherlands had not originated there. Of the non-Dutch who had come through the Netherlands, the largest group was of German origin, people not only from the German principalities on the borders of the Netherlands—Cleves, East Friesland, Oldenburg, Osnabrück, Emden, Münster, and Hamburg—but from as far southwest as Württemberg, near French Lorraine; from as far southeast as Nuremberg in Bavaria; and from as far east as Pomerania, soon to be absorbed into Prussia. But the non-Dutch from the Netherlands were by no means all Germans. There were French among them too—from Calais, Amiens, Dieppe, Paris, and even Languedoc and the Pays de Vaud in present-day Switzerland. And there were major components from the French-speaking Walloon and Flemish provinces, from the Channel Islands, from Schleswig-Holstein, and in relatively large numbers from Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Three of the immigrants in the sample were from Poland. And there were in addition an increasing number of English throughout Long Island and in the Hudson River settlements, a small and evanescent community of Jews, and an estimated six hundred blacks, 12 percent of the total population, imported largely from Brazil and, after 1654, from Curaçao. There was little sign by the 1660s that New Netherland’s mixed multitude was converging into a coherent and stable civil society, but many signs that it was increasingly fractious, unstable, riven with contending interests.15

  Even New England, though ethnically more homogeneous and dominated by able, well-informed magistrates, its public institutions so carefully devised and so advanced for their time that in modified form they have survived to this day,16 was no oasis of tranquil social relations, its villages peaceable kingdoms. Dissension appeared repeatedly in the eastern Massachusetts towns. The inhabitants of Sudbury were not alone in fighting bitterly over the division of common land, over farming procedures, and over church organization. As in that town, dissenters frequently rose against the initial leadership, formed schisms that ruptured the small communities, and went off to found new, more harmonious villages.

  The courts were sensitive reflectors of social reality. David Konig’s examination of the Essex County, Massachusetts, court records reveals an extraordinary incidence of litigation—“literally thousands of cases,” at least two hundred a year—in a population that never exceeded two thousand adult males. His study concentrates on the integrative function of the court system, the way it channeled, contained, and absorbed many of the myriad conflicts of a contentious society—but not all of the conflicts. The court could not resolve all of the animosities, feuds, claims, and counterclaims, especially when increasingly valuable property rights were in question. Some contestants simply ignored the court and resorted to malicious mischief, violence, and vandalism to gain advantage, even turning, at times, to malefic magic.17

  The more isolated Puritan settlements, deep in the interior, were even less stable than the eastern villages. The standard study of the Connecticut River towns, ninety miles west of Boston, is called Valley of Discord. “Dissension,” we read, “was a bitter fact of life in the seventeenth century, and the more [Connecticut] Valley Puritans sought to control it, the more they fostered ideological conflict and widened the gap between ideals and behavior.” Their struggles to establish consensus and to shape behavior by ideal values “left an institutional order weakened by dispute and torn by a growing argument over the locus of authority in church and society.” The history of Springfield, in western Massachusetts, is replete with accounts of “physical assaults, slander, family feuds, fraud, and witchcraft accusations.” Personal animosities escalated into fistfights and “hair-pulling, rib-kicking” brawls. The Scottish war prisoners allocated to the town compounded the disorder. Accused of chronic drunkenness, card playing, and slander in this remote Puritan village, they were universally despised. New Haven was no less disordered, its social pathology intensified by what has correctly been called the “fierce communion” of these devout villages—villages in which every man was his brother’s keeper, every neighbor a moral guardian. “People,” it has been remarked, “spent a good deal of time saying no to each other in New England towns.”18

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  By the 1660s, when England’s government first took serious notice of what had been achieved in its overseas lands in the west and began to draw the elements together into a western empire, the North American communities had existed for two or three generations, and distinctive, persistent patterns of life were beginning to emerge. The pattern
s were not entirely clear, the trajectories unpredictable, but certain fundamental lines could be perceived that framed the colonies’ place in the world.

  New England had fallen victim to the forces that reshaped English life after the Restoration. The settlement of the great issues of church and state that had inspired the founding of the Puritan colonies had come quickly. The monarchy was restored in 1660, and the conflicts of religion that had torn the realm apart were resolved by the reestablishment of the Church of England as the nation’s official church, but toleration had been conceded to those who could not conform. In the new pattern of establishment and nonconformity, New England found itself a minor cluster of distant nonconformists, no longer generative of challenging new ideas and exciting socio-religious experiments. The fierce religious intensity, the sense that theirs was a daring and risky enterprise of great relevance to the whole informed Protestant world, had passed. They had turned in upon themselves and were deeply engaged in devising their own parochial way of life.

  John Winthrop, Jr., had seen it all, had lived it all, dramatically. A founding Puritan, scientist, and entrepreneur, he had contributed to the vitality of both the Massachusetts Bay project and Hartlib’s circle of advanced intellectuals in London. He had worked at the frontier of experimental knowledge and social reform, and he alone had attempted to bring the Hartlib circle’s theories and speculations into practice in the providential setting of New England—all this in the years of Laudian persecution and Cromwellian revolution. The Restoration changed his world. As governor of Connecticut, he became keenly aware of the royalists’ threat to his colony’s autonomy and left for England to defend Connecticut’s charter. He remained in London for two years—busy, active, productive years which would prove to be his last direct contact with the metropolis.