A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (9 page)

The types of heresies introduced by both Williams and Hutchinson constituted particularly destructive doctrinal variants, including a thoroughgoing selfishness and rejection of doctrinal control by church hierarchies. Nevertheless, the experience of Hutchinson reaffirmed Rhode Island’s reputation as a colony of religious toleration. Confirming the reality of that toleration, a royal charter in 1663 stated, “No person…shall be in any wise molested, punished, disquieted, or called in question, for any differences in opinion in matters of religion [but that all] may from time to time, and at all times hereafter, freely and fully have and enjoy his and their judgments and consciences, in matters of religious concernments.” Rhode Island therefore led the way in establishing toleration as a principle, creating a type of “religious competition.”
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Quakers and Baptists were accepted. This was no small matter. In Massachusetts, religious deviants were expelled; and if they persisted upon returning, they faced flogging, having their tongues bored with hot irons, or even execution, as happened to four Quakers who were repeat violators. Yet the Puritans “made good everything Winthrop demanded.”
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They could have dominated the early state completely, but nevertheless gradually and voluntarily permitted the structures of government to be changed to the extent that they no longer controlled it.

Rhode Island, meanwhile, remained an island of religious refugees in a Puritan sea, as new Puritan settlers moved into the Connecticut River Valley in the 1630s, attracted by the region’s rich soil. Thomas Hooker, a Cambridge minister, headed a group of families who moved to an area some hundred miles southwest of Boston on the Connecticut River, establishing the town of Hartford in 1635; in 1636 a colony called New Haven was established on the coast across from Long Island as a new beacon of religious purity. In the Fundamental Articles of New Haven (1639), the New Haven community forged a closer state-church relationship than existed in Massachusetts, including tax support for ministers. In 1662 the English government issued a royal charter to the colony of Connecticut that incorporated New Haven, Hartford, Windsor, New London, and Middletown.

The Council for New England, meanwhile, had granted charters to still other lands north of Massachusetts: Sir Ferdinando Gorges and John Mason received territory that comprised Maine and New Hampshire in 1629, although settlements had appeared throughout the region during the decade. Gorges acquired the Maine section, enlarged by a grant in 1639, and after battling claims from Massachusetts, Maine was declared a proprietary colony from 1677 to 1691, when it was joined to Massachusetts until admitted to the Union in 1820 as a state. Mason had taken the southern section (New Hampshire), which in 1679 became a royal province, with the governor and council appointed by the king and an assembly elected by the freemen.

Unique Middle Colonies: New York, New Jersey, and Quaker Pennsylvania

Sitting between Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas to the south and New England to the north was an assortment of colonies later known as the middle colonies. Over time, the grants that extended from Rhode Island to Maryland assumed a character that certainly was not Puritan, but did not share the slave-based economic systems of the South.

Part of the explanation for the differences in the region came from the early Dutch influence in the area of New Amsterdam. Following the explorations of Henry Hudson in 1609, the West India Company—already prominent in the West Indies—moved up the Hudson Valley and established Fort Orange in 1624 on the site of present-day Albany. Traveling to the mouth of the Hudson, the Dutch settled at a site called New Amsterdam, where the director of the company, Peter Minuit, consummated his legendary trade with the Indians, giving them blankets and other goods worth less than a hundred dollars in return for Manhattan.

The Dutch faced a problem much like that confronting the French: populating the land. To that end, the company’s charter authorized the grant of large acreages to anyone who would bring fifty settlers with him. Few large estates appeared, however. Governor Minuit lost his post in 1631, then returned to the Delaware River region with a group of Swedish settlers to found New Sweden. Despite the relatively powerful navy, the Dutch colonies lacked the steady flow of immigrants necessary to ensure effective defense against the other Europeans who soon reached their borders. The English offered the first, and last, threat to New Amsterdam.

Located between the northern and southern English colonies, the Dutch territory provided a haven to pirates and smugglers. King Charles II sought to eliminate the problem by granting to his brother, the Duke of York (later James II), all of the land between Maryland and Connecticut. A fleet dispatched in 1664 took New Amsterdam easily when the Dutch governor, Peter Stuyvesant, failed to mobilize the population of only fifteen hundred. The surrender generously permitted the Dutch to remain in the colony, but they were no match for the more numerous English, who renamed the city New York. James empowered a governor and council to administer the colony, and New York prospered. Despite a population mix that included Swedes, Dutch, Indians, English, Germans, French, and African slaves, New York enjoyed relative peace.

The Duke of York dispensed with some of his holdings between the Hudson and Delaware Rivers, called New Jersey, giving the land to Sir George Carteret and John (Lord) Berkeley. New Jersey offered an attractive residence for oppressed, unorthodox Puritans because the colony established religious freedom, and land rights were made available as well. In 1674 the proprietors sold New Jersey to representatives of an even more unorthodox Christian group, the Society of Friends, called Quakers. Known for their social habits of refusing to tip their hats to landed gentlemen and for their nonviolence, the Quakers’ theology evolved from the teachings of George Fox. Their name came from the shaking and contortions they displayed while in the throes of religious inspiration. Highly democratic in their church government, Quakers literally spoke in church as the Spirit moved them.

William Penn, a wealthy landlord and son of an admiral, had joined the faith, putting him at odds with his father and jeopardizing his inheritance. But upon his father’s death, Penn inherited family lands in both England and Ireland, as well as a debt from King Charles II, which the monarch paid in a grant of territory located between New York and Maryland. Penn became proprietor and intended for the colony to make money. He advertised for settlers to migrate to Pennsylvania using multilingual newspaper ads that rival some of the slickest modern Madison Avenue productions. Penn also wanted to create a “holy experiment” in Pennsylvania, and during a visit to America in 1682 designed a spacious city for his colony called Philadelphia (brotherly love). Based on experience with the London fire of 1666, and the subsequent plan to rebuild the city, Penn laid out Philadelphia in squares with generous dimensions. An excellent organizer, Penn negotiated with the Indians, whom he treated with respect. His strategy of inviting all settlers brought talent and skills to the colony, and his treatment of the Indians averted any major conflict with them.

Penn retained complete power through his proprietorship, but in 1701, pressure, especially from the southern parts of the colony, persuaded him to agree to the Charter of Liberties. The charter provided for a representative assembly that limited the authority of the proprietor; permitted the lower areas to establish their own colony (which they did in 1703, when Delaware was formed); and ensured religious freedom.

Penn never profited from his proprietorship, and he served time in a debtors’ prison in England before his death in 1718. Still, his vision and managerial skill in creating Pennsylvania earned him high praise from a prominent historian of American business, J.R.T. Hughes, who observed that Penn rejected expedient considerations in favor of principle at every turn. His ideals, more than his business sense, reflected his “straightforward belief in man’s goodness, and in his abilities to know and understand the good, the true and beautiful.” Over the years, Pennsylvania’s Quakers would lead the charge in freeing slaves, establishing antislavery societies even in the South.

The Glorious Revolution in England and America, 1688–89

The epic story of the seventeenth-century founding and development of colonial America ended on a crucial note, with American reaction to England’s Glorious Revolution. The story of abuses of power by Stuart kings was well known to Americans. Massachusetts Puritans, after all, had fled the regime of Charles I, leaving brethren in England to wage the English Civil War. The return of a chastened Charles II from French exile in 1660 did not settle the conflict between Parliament and the king.

When James II ascended to the throne in 1685, he decided to single-handedly reorganize colonial administration. First, he violated constitutionalism and sanctity of contract by recalling the charters of all of the New England and Middle colonies—Massachusetts Bay, Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey—and the compact colonies Plymouth, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. In 1686 he created the so-called Dominion of New England, a centralized political state that his appointee, Governor Edmund Andros, was to rule from Boston, its capital city. James’s plan for a Dominion of New England was a disaster from the start. Upon arrival, Andros dismissed the colonial legislatures, forbade town meetings, and announced he was taking personal command of the village militias. In reality, he did no such thing, never leaving the city limits of Boston.

In the meantime, the countryside erupted in a series of revolts called the colonial rebellions. In Maryland’s famed Protestant Revolt, discontented Protestants protested what they viewed as a Catholic oligarchy, and in New York, anti-Catholic sentiments figured in a revolt against the dominion of New England led by Jacob Leisler. Leisler’s Rebellion installed its namesake in the governorship for one year, in 1689. Soon, however, English officials arrived to restore their rule and hanged Leisler and his son-in-law, drawing-and-quartering them as the law of treason required. But Andros’s government was on its last leg. Upon hearing of the English Whigs’ victory over James II, colonials arrested him and put him on a ship bound for the mother country.

James II’s plans for restoring an all-powerful monarchy dissolved between 1685 and 1688. A fervent opposition had arisen among those calling themselves Whigs, a derogatory term meaning “outlaw” that James’s foes embraced with pride. There began a second English civil war of the seventeenth century—between Whigs and Tories—but this time there was little bloodshed. James was exiled while Parliament made arrangements with his Protestant daughter, Mary, and her husband, William, of the Dutch house of Orange, to take the crown. William and Mary ascended the throne of England in 1689, but only after agreeing to a contract, the Declaration of Rights. In this historic document, William and Mary confirmed that the monarch was not supreme but shared authority with the English legislature and the courts. Moreover, they acknowledged the House of Commons as the source of all revenue bills (the power of the purse) and agreed to acknowledge the rights to free speech and petition. Included were provisions requiring due process of law and forbidding excessive bail and cruel and unusual punishment. Finally, the Declaration of Rights upheld the right of English Protestants to keep and bear arms, and forbade “standing armies in time of peace” unless by permission of Parliament.

The resemblance of this Declaration and Bill of Rights to the eighteenth-century American Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, Constitution, and Bill of Rights is striking, and one could argue that the Americans were more radicalized by the Glorious Revolution than the English. In England, the Glorious Revolution was seen as an ending; in America, the hatred and distrust sown by the Stuart kings was reaped by subsequent monarchs, no matter how “constitutional” their regimes. Radical Whig ideas contained in the Glorious Revolution—the pronounced hatred of centralized political, religious, economic, and military authority—germinated in America long after they had subsided in England.

By 1700, then, three major themes characterized the history of the early English colonies. First, religion played a crucial role in not only the search for liberty, but also in the institutions designed to ensure its continuation. From the Mayflower Compact to the Charter of Liberties, colonists saw a close connection between religious freedom and personal liberty. This fostered a multiplicity of denominations, which, at a time when people literally killed over small differences in the interpretation of scripture, “made it necessary to seek a basis for political unity” outside the realm of religion.
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A second factor, economic freedom—particularly that associated with land ownership—and the high value placed on labor throughout the American colonies formed the basis of a widespread agreement about the need to preserve private property rights. The early colonists came to the conclusion that the Indians’ view of land never could be harmonized with their own, and they understood that one view or the other had to prevail.
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They saw no inherent contradiction in taking land from people who did not accept European-style contracts while they continued to highly value their own property rights.

Finally, the English colonies developed political institutions similar to those in England, but with an increased awareness of the need for individuals to have protection from their governments. As that understanding of political rights percolated up through the colonial governments, the colonies themselves started to generate their own aura of independent policy-making processes. Distance from England ensured that, barring significant British efforts to keep the colonies under the royal thumb, the colonies would construct their own self-reliant governments. And it was exactly that evolution that led them to independence.