Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 by Various

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Our historians have learned to write their books with full as much
reference to their being read abroad as at home. The problem with which
they first have to deal, therefore, is, how to make the men and the
incidents and the cardinal points of our annals look as large to
foreigners as they do to us. Many of our town-histories are written in
the tone and style of Mr. Poole's "Little Pedlington,"--the epithet
_Little_ being suppressed in the title, but obtruded on every page. The
intensity and emphasis of our historic strain appear to foreigners to be
disproportionate to the subject-matter of the story. Mr. Punch always
represents a Yankee as larger than his garments. His trousers never
cover his ankles; his cuffs stop far short of his wrists; his long neck
extends beyond the reach of even his capacious collar; and the bone in
him lacks amplitude of muscle. But Mr. Punch, with all his wisdom, does
not fully understand the composition of a Yankee, as the greatest common
multiple of a Teuton, Dane, Norman, Frank, Kelt, and Englishman. Dr.
Palfrey's volume will largely conciliate our cousins beyond the water
to our own conceit of our annals, because, more distinctly and cogently
than any previous record in pamphlet or folio, it identifies the springs
and purposes of our heroic age with an era and a type of men which
English historians now exalt on their own noblest pages.

Dr. Palfrey has had precisely that natural endowment, training,
experience, mental discipline, and intercourse with the world in public
and private relations, to furnish him with the best qualifications for
the work to which he has devoted the autumn of an eminently useful and
honored life. The sinewy fibre of his theme is religion. And he is a
religious man of the highest pattern, deeply skilled in its scholarly
lore, erudite in its Scriptural and controversial elements, and
practised in the sagacity which it imparts for understanding and
interpreting human nature. Religion enters into the subject-matter of
his narrative, not so much in its philosophical bearings as in its
civico-ecclesiastical and institutional relations; where it becomes the
spine of the social fabric, traversed and perforated with the nervous
life-chords for all the members of the organism. His education has
been that of the highest ideal of New England,--through books and men,
through professional duties and public services, bringing him into
relations with youth, with men and women, and with the forms and the
routine work of civil and political administrations. He has at his
command the language of devotion, the rhetoric and logic of philosophy,
and the technicalities of jurisprudence. To his personal friends, and
they are very many in every walk of life, it is a matter of grateful
recognition that he escaped from a political arena whose conflicts were
not congenial with his delicacy of taste or of conscience, in season to
give the vigor of his best years to the composition of a work which will
spread his fame to other lands and identify it forever with what is of
most reverent and honored remembrance on his native soil.

The historian's work, when done after the best pattern, involves a duty
to his readers and a privilege for himself. To them he is bound to
present all the essential facts, authenticated, illustrated, and
carefully disposed in their natural relations. For himself, having done
this, he is at liberty to construct his own theory, to follow his own
philosophy, and to pronounce judicial decisions. The highest exaction to
be made of an historian, and the loftiest function which he could claim
to exercise, are expressed in these two conditions. The noble privilege
and opportunity secured in the latter condition are the only adequate
reward for the drudgery of the labor required in the former. It would
be foolish to raise a question whether it be more essential for an
historian to be faithful in his narration or to be wise in his comments.
Only the statement we have made will serve to remind us how essential
the philosophy of human nature is to throw life into a record of old
annals.

The two books in our hands, where their specific themes are identical,
substantially accord in their relation of facts,--allowing for a few
exceptional cases,--but they differ widely in their philosophy. Very
much of the fresh interest which both of them will create in their
respective subjects will be found in the collisions of their philosophy.

Dr. Palfrey had a favorable opportunity for undertaking to write anew
the history of New England. Those who have yet to acquaint themselves
with that history say there was no occasion for this reiterated labor.
If such persons will merely read over his notes, without wasting any of
their precious time upon his text, they will discover their mistake.
There are in those notes matters new even to adepts. All the recent
materials which have been lavishly contributed from public and private
stores by public and private researches amount in sum and in importance
to an actual necessity for their digest and incorporation into a new
history. Dr. Palfrey has used these with a most patient fidelity, and
his references to them and his extracts from them convey to his readers
the results of an amount of labor which the most grateful of them will
not be likely to overestimate. While he speaks to us in his text, he
allows those whom we most wish to hear to speak to us in his rich and
well-chosen excerpts from a mountain-heap of authorities.

The Dedication of the volume to Dr. Sparks has in it a rare felicity,
which is to be referred to two facts: first, that the writer had some
peculiarly touching and grateful things to say; and, second, that
he knew how to say them in language fitted to the sentiment. In his
Preface, he announces his purpose with its plan, refers us to his
authorities and sources, and recognizes his obligations to individual
friends. Some of the choicest matters in his Notes are the results of
his own personal research in England.

The limit which he sets for himself will carry forward his History to
the time of the English Revolution, thus embracing our annals during the
vitality of our first Charter. That Charter, its origin, transfer, and
subsequent service as the basis of government, the reiterated efforts
to wrest it, and the persistent resolution to hold it, give to it a
symbolic significance which warrants the dating of an epoch by it. Dr.
Palfrey regards our local political existence as commencing from the
hour in which that document, with its official representatives, reached
these shores. We have seen criticisms disputing this position, but, as
we think, not even plausible, still less effective to discredit it. We
must have an incident, besides a _punctum temporis_, for our start in
government; and where could we find a better one than that on which the
whole subsequent course and character of the government depended? We
go, then, for the old Charter, and for the setting up of a jurisdiction
under it here. It was an admirable and every way convenient document;
good for securing rights, impotent as impairing liberties. It comforted
the "Magistrates" to have it to fall back upon, when its provisions
harmonized with their purposes; nor did they allow themselves to be
embarrassed by it, when it appeared that some of their purposes were
not fully provided for in it. That Charter got wonderfully aired and
invigorated on its ocean-passage. The salt water agreed with its
constitution. In a single instance, at least, it falsified the old
maxim,--_Coeium, nun animum, mutant, qui trans mare currunt_. That was
a marvellous piece of parchment. So far as Massachusetts was concerned,
the Declaration of Independence was interlined upon it in sympathetic
ink.

We hardly know of fifty octavo pages anywhere in which so much
investigation and labor condense their results so intelligibly into such
useful information as in each of the first two chapters of this volume.
The first is devoted to the Physical Geography of the Peninsula of
New England, its Natural History, and its Aborigines; the second is a
summary sketch of the Early Voyages and Explorations. In this we find
the most discriminating view which we have ever seen of the marvellous
adventures of John Smith,--so happily and suggestively described as the
"fugitive slave" who was "the founder of Virginia." The notes on the
credibility and authenticity of the narrations connected with his name
are admirable. In reading these two chapters, one must muse upon
the wilderness trampings and the ocean perils of the keen-set and
all-enduring men who furnished the material for these high-seasoned
pages.

"Puritanism in England" is, of course, the author's starting-point. Here
he finds his men and their principles. A partial reformation is the most
mischievous influence that can work in society. It unsettles, but is not
willing to rebuild, even when it can learn how to do so. Reaction and
excess are the Scylla and Charybdis of its perils. Compromise is the
very essence of a partial reformation; and compromise in matters of
moral and religious concern, where it is not folly, is crime. Where any
party has been in earnest in a strife, there is no honest end at which
it can rest till it reaches the goal of righteousness. The active
element of Puritanism was the persistency of a religious party in
pursuing a purpose which was yielded up, at a point short of its full
attainment, by another branch of the party, which up to that point had
made common cause with them. To speak plainly, the English Puritans
regarded their former prelatical and conformist associates as traitors
to a holy cause. They had engaged together in good faith in the work of
reformation. They had suffered together. When the time came for triumph,
a schism divided them; and the more zealous smarted from wounds
inflicted by the lukewarm. It appeared that the Prelatists had been
looking to ends of state policy, while the Puritans kept religion in
view. The Conformists thought their ends were reached when Roman prelacy
was set aside, and certain local ecclesiastical changes had been
effected; but the real Puritans wanted to get and to establish the
essential Gospel.

Dr. Palfrey tells this story concisely, but emphatically. He takes two
stages of the Puritan development in England, from which to deduce
respectively the emigration to Plymouth and to Massachusetts Bay.
Stopping at intervals to make intelligible the perplexities connected
with the patents and charters, his narrative is thenceforward
continuous, admitting new threads to be woven into it as the pattern
and the fabric both become richer. For the first time we have the full
connection presented in solid history between the Scrooby Church and
Plymouth Colony. And the tracing is beautifully done. An artist may find
his paintings in these pages. Our poets may here find themes which will
be the more tempting and rewarding, the more closely they are held
to severe historic verity. They will find, that, after all, the most
promising materials for the imagination to deal with are facts. The
residence of the exiles in Holland, their debates and arrangements with
respect to a more distant remove, the ocean passage, the first forlorn
experiences during two winters at Plymouth, are vividly presented. The
paragraph, on page 182, beginning, "A visitor to Plymouth," gives us
a picture better than that which hangs in the Pilgrim Hall. If the
sternest foe of the Pilgrims across the water could have looked upon
the exiles in their winter dreariness, hungry, wasted, dying, cowering
beneath the accumulation of their woes, he might have regarded the scene
as presenting but a reasonable retribution upon a stolid obstinacy in
the most direful and needless self-inflictions. "Why could they not have
been content to cling to the comforts of Old England, and to restrain
their wilfulness of spirit?" The question is answered now differently
from what it would have been then. We have used one wrong word about
those exiles, in speaking of them as _cowering_ under their woes. They
did not _cower_, but _breasted _them.

After another most pregnant and exhaustive episode on Puritan politics
in England, Dr. Palfrey brings in that thread of his story on which is
strung the fortune of Massachusetts. It is here that Englishmen will
find explained some of our vaunting views of the importance of our
annals. Dr. Palfrey, in this and in other chapters, traces with skill
and exactness the course of public measures and events in England,
through kingly tyrannies and popular resistance, which ended by
harmonizing the institutions of the mother country for a little while
with those which had sprung up in this wilderness. He soon comes upon
ticklish matters, but his touch and hold are firm, because he feels sure
that he is dealing with men who understood themselves, and who were
at least resolute and honest, to whatever degree they may have erred.
Probably, like many of us who are aware that we could not possibly have
lived comfortably with our ancestors, he feels all the more bound on
that account to set their memory in the light of their noblest and least
selfish ends. He is stout and unflinching in his championship of those
ancestors: he sees in their experiment a lofty ideal; he vindicates
their policy in the measures for realizing it; nor does he withhold
apologetic or vindicatory words where "unmeet persons" among the whites
or Indians stood in the way of it.

Henceforward Dr. Palfrey has to follow out each thread of his story
by itself, as by-and-by he will have to gather them into one cord. He
traces the developments of months and years in the original settlements,
and pursues them as they lead him to new territory in the Northeast
and the Southwest, into Maine, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. Another
episode on the opening of the Civil War at home, which invited a large
return of the exiles, and a record of the original confederacy of the
New England Colonies, bring us to the present close of his labors. May
they be speedily continued! and may we enjoy the reality, as we now do
the promise of them!

We turn now to Mr. Arnold's book. The field which it traverses is
narrower as regards space, but its spirit is large and generous, and its
subject-matter is of the loftiest significance. If the writer does not
indulge us with many disquisitions, it is not from lack of ability.
Wherever, as in his moralizings upon King Philip's War, and in his
incidental comments upon the peculiarities and temper of his prominent
men, he allows us to meet his own mind, he is uniformly wise and
interesting. He stands by Rhode Island as does Dr. Palfrey by
Massachusetts; and seeing that for a far longer period than the two
books run on together the two Colonies were at strife, we are glad to
have before us both the ways in which the story may be told. There are
various sharp judgments on Massachusetts men and principles in the Rhode
Island book. The argument is in good hands on either side.

Mr. Arnold begins with the first occupation of Rhode Island by white
men, and conducts his narrative to the close of the century. His
research has been faithful. His style is chaste, forcible, and often
picturesque. He has seen the world widely, and he knows human nature.
He understands very well what a place of honor and what a well-proved
assurance of safety distinctive Rhode Island principles have attained.
The issue, having been found so triumphant, has dignified to the
historian the early, humble, and bewildering steps and processes through
which it was reached. The narrative on his pages is the most distracting
one ever written in the annals of civilized men. Every conceivable
element of strife, discord, agitation, alarm, dissension, and bitterness
is to be found in it,--redeemed only by a prevailing integrity,
right-mindedness, and right-heartedness in all the leading spirits. Each
man in each of the towns composing the original elements of the Colony
was a whole "democratie" in himself, and generally a "fierce" one.
Disputed boundaries with both the other Colonies, and an especial and
continuous feud with Massachusetts,--unruly spirits, bent upon working
out all manner of impracticable theories,--the oddest and most original,
as well as the most obstinate and indomitable dreamers and enthusiasts,
furnished some daily nutriment to dissension with their neighbors or
among themselves. Men of mark, like Roger Williams, Samuel Gorton,
Governor Arnold, and William Harris, appear equally competent for
fomenting strife of a sort to threaten every essential element of civil
society, and for averting all permanent harm while putting on trial the
most revolutionary theories. On page 337, Mr. Arnold has a note most
characteristic of a large portion of his whole theme, as covering both
his men and their measures. Many of the documents, of an official
character, written by citizens, towns, or rulers in Rhode Island, were
of such a sort in language and matter, that the town of Warwick did not
think them fit for the public records, and so enjoined that the clerk
should keep them in a file by themselves. This was known as "the
Impertinent File," and, more profanely, but not less appropriately,
as "the Damned File." A certain "perditious letter," written by Roger
Williams himself, serves as the nucleus of this deposit; and we read of
another of the documents as being as "full of uncivil language as if it
had been indited in hell."

Mr. Arnold picks his way through all these dissensions, and finds a full
reward in the nobleness of the men and the principles with which he has
in the main to deal. His only abatement of praise to Roger Williams
is on account of his bitter feud with William Harris. He repels,
as slanderous, the imputations founded on alleged interpolations
restricting religious liberty in the code, and cast at Roger Williams
for undue severity to Quakers and for favoring Indian slavery.
Randolph's visit, Andros's administration, the suspension and resumption
of the Charter, bring him out into broader matters, which he treats with
frankness and skill.

The more histories we have from the pens of competent writers, even
though they go over the same ground, the more lively and interesting
will the pages be. We need not fear that like fidelity and ability in
the use of the same materials by different writers will reduce our
modern histories to a dead level of uniform narration. None but those
well-skilled in our annals are aware what scope they afford, not only
for special pleas, but also for honest diversity of judgment, in viewing
and pronouncing upon many test-points vital to the theme. Indeed, when
the historic vein shall have been exhausted, it will be found that there
is more than a score of special and contested points, in each of our
first two centuries, admirably suited for monographs. We have but to
compare a few pages in each of the two excellent works now in our hands,
to see how men of the highest ability, of rigid candor, and scrupulous
fidelity in the use of the same materials, while spreading the same
facts before their readers, may tell different tales, varying to
the whole extent of the diversity in their respective judgments and
moralizings. We can easily illustrate this assertion from the pages
before us. Though Dr. Palfrey stops more than a half-century short of
the date to which Mr. Arnold carries us, the former indicates exactly
how and where he will be at issue with the latter, even to the end of
the story common to both of them. So strong and clear is Dr. Palfrey's
avowal of fealty to the honorable and unsullied fame of the founders of
Massachusetts, that he will not be likely, on any later page, to qualify
what he has already written. It happens, too, that the points in which
any two of our historians would be most disposed to part in judgment lie
within the space and the years common to both these writers. We can but
indicate, in a very brief way, some of the more salient divergences
between them, and we must preface the specification by acknowledging
again the high integrity of both.

Dr. Palfrey writes, unmistakably, as a man proud of his Massachusetts
lineage. He honors the men whose enterprise, constancy, persistency,
and wise skill in laying foundations have, in his view, approved their
methods and justified them, even where they are most exposed to a severe
judgment. He wishes to tell their story as they would wish to have it
told. They stand by his side as he reads their records, and supply him
with a running comment as to meaning and intention. Thus he is helped to
put their own construction on their own deeds,--to set their acts in the
light of their motives, to give them credit for all the good that was in
their purposes, and to ascribe their mistakes and errors to a limitation
of their views, or to well-founded apprehensions of evil which they had
reason to dread. Under such pilotage, the passengers, at least, would
be safe, when their ship fell upon a place where two seas met. Now
Massachusetts and Rhode Island were in stiff hostility during the period
here chronicled. The founder of Rhode Island and nearly all of its
leading spirits had been "spewed out of the Bay Colony,"--and the
institutions which the Rhode Islanders set up, or rather, their seeming
purpose to do without any _institutions_, constituted a standing
grievance to the rigid disciplinarians of Massachusetts. Indeed, we have
to look to the relations of annoyance, jealousy, and open strife, which
arose between the two Colonies in the ten years following 1636, for
the real explanation of the severity visited upon the Quakers in
Massachusetts in the five years following 1656. These early Quakers,
when not the veritable persons, were the ghosts of the old troublers of
"the Lord's people in the Bay." Gorton, Randall Holden, Mrs. Dyer, and
other "exorbitant persons," who had been found "unmeet to abide in this
jurisdiction," could not be got rid of once for all.

Mr. Arnold glories in the early reproach of Rhode Island. He finds its
title to honor above every other spot on earth in the phenomena which
made it so hateful to Massachusetts. In every issue raised between it
and the Bay Colony from the very first, and in every element of its
strife, he stands stoutly forth as its champion, and casts scornful
reflections, though not in a scornful spirit. Wherever our two
historians have the same point under treatment, we discern this
antagonism between them,--never in a single case manifesting itself in
an offensive or bitter way, but tending greatly to give a brisk and
quickening vigor to their pages. Arnold claims that a perfectly
democratical government and entire religious freedom are "exclusively
Rhode Island doctrines, and to her belongs the credit of them both." He
might afford to give Massachusetts the appreciable honor of having been
the indirect means of opening those large visions to the eyes of men
who certainly were a most uncomfortable set of citizens while under
pupilage. Mr. Bancroft had previously written thus:--"Had the territory
of Rhode Island corresponded to the importance and singularity of the
principles of its early existence, the world would have been filled with
wonder at the phenomena of its history."[B] It was only because the
State was no larger that it was a safe field for the first trial of such
principles. And it has often proved, that, the larger the principle,
the more circumscribed must needs be the field within which it is first
tested. It was well that the first experiments on the capabilities of
steam were tried by the nose of a tea-kettle. Seeing that most of the
early settlers of Rhode Island had very little property, and scarce
anything of what Christendom had previously been in the habit of
regarding as religion, the territory was the most fitting place for the
trial of revolutionary principles. Mr. Arnold says, very curtly, but
very truly,--"No form of civil government then existing could tolerate
her democracy, and even Christian charity denied her faith." (p. 280.)
The wonder of the world, however, would have been more curiously engaged
in watching what legislation for religion could possibly have devised
for a community made up of all sorts of consciences. The little State
deserves the honor claimed for her. But had she any alternative course?

[Footnote B: BANCROFT'S _History of the United States._ I. 380.]

Mr. Arnold, we think, defines with more sharp and guarded accuracy
than does Dr. Palfrey the ruling aim and motive of the founders of
Massachusetts. An historian of Massachusetts, knowing beforehand through
what a course of unflinching and resolute consistency with their first
principles he is to follow her early legislators, has reason to limit
their aim and motive at the start, that he may not assume for them more
than he can make good. Especially if he intend to palliate, and, still
more, to justify, some of the severer and more oppressive elements of
their policy, he will find it wise to qualify their purpose within the
same limitations which they themselves set for it. Dr. Palfrey parts
with an advantage of which he afterwards has need to avail himself, when
he states the motive of the exiles too broadly, as a search for a place
in which to exercise liberty of conscience. He speaks of these exiles
as recognizing in "religious freedom a good of such vast worth as to be
protected by the possessor, not only for himself, but for the myriads
living and to be born, of whom he assumes to be the pioneer and the
champion." (p. 301.) This large and unqualified claim might be advanced
for the founders of Rhode Island, but it cannot be set up for the
founders of Massachusetts. Whoever asserts it for the latter commits
himself most unnecessarily to an awkward and ineffective defence of them
in a long series of restrictive and severe measures against "religious
freedom," beginning with the case of the Brownes at Salem, and including
acts of general legislation as well as of continuous ecclesiastical and
judicial proceeding. Winthrop tells us that the aim of his brotherhood
was "to enjoy the ordinances of Christ in their purity here." The
General Court repeatedly signified its desire to have a draft of laws
prepared which might be "agreeable to the word of God." Now either
of these statements of the ruling purpose of the colonists, as then
universally understood and interpreted, was inconsistent with what we
now understand by "freedom in religion," or "liberty of conscience."
What were regarded as "the pure ordinances of Christ" could not have
been set up here, nor could such laws as were then considered as
"agreeable to the word of God" have been enacted here, without impairing
individual freedom in matters of religion. Indeed, it was the very
attempt to realize these objects which occasioned every interference
with perfect liberty of conscience. The fathers of Massachusetts avowed
their purpose to be, not the opening of an asylum for all kinds of
consciences, but the establishment of a Christian commonwealth. Their
consistency can be vindicated by following out their own idea, but not
by assigning to them a larger one.

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