The Portable Edmund Burke (Portable Library) (45 page)

It is said, that the law of England is favorable to liberty; and so far this observation is just, that, when we had men in a servile condition amongst us, the law took advantage even of neglects of the masters to enfranchise the villain: and seemed for that purpose even to subtilize a little; because our ancestors judged, that freemen were the real support of the kingdom. What if in our colonies we should go so far as to find out some medium between liberty and absolute slavery, in which we might place all mulattoes after a certain limited servitude to the owner of the mother; and such blacks, who being born in the islands, their masters for their good services should think proper in some degree to enfranchise? These might have land allotted them, or, where that could not be spared, some sort of fixed employment, from either of which they should be obliged to pay a certain moderate rent to the public. Whatever they should acquire above this, to be the reward of their industry. The necessity of paying the rent would keep them from idleness; and when men are once set to work through necessity, they will not stop there; but they will gradually strive for conveniences, and some even for superfluities. All this will add to the demand for our goods, and the colony will be strengthened by the addition of so many men, who will have an interest of their own to fight for.

There is, amongst others, a very bad custom in our colonies of multiplying their household slaves far beyond reason and necessity. It is not uncommon for families of no very great fortunes, to have twenty-five or thirty in the capacity of menial servants only. These are so many hands taken from planting, to be of no manner of use to the public; but they are infinitely the most dangerous of the slaves; for being at all times about our people, they come to abate of that great reverence which the field negroes have for the whites, without losing any thing of the resentment of their condition, which is common to both. And besides, in any insurrection, they have it more in their power to strike a sudden and fatal blow. Surely a sumptuary law might be contrived to restrain the number of the menial slaves, as there might and ought to be one strictly enjoining all who keep five servants, to have one white man and one white woman amongst them, without any power of being indulged in a contrary practice; as it ought to be a rule never to be broken through, to have not only the overseers, but even all the drivers, white men.

The alarms we are under at the news of any petty armament in the West Indies is a demonstrative proof of the weakness of our condition there; which is, however, so far from rousing us to seek any proper remedy, that there are not wanting of the people of that country, many who would use a thousand pretences to prevent our taking the only possible means of securing their own possessions from danger; as the majority of men will always be found ready to prefer some present gain to their future and more permanent interests. But the apparent and dangerous progress of the French ought, methinks, to arouse us from our long inaction, and to animate us to enterprise some regulations, in a strain of policy far superior to any thing I have ventured to hint for the interest of the commerce and the honor of the councils of the British nation.

 

We derive our rights in America from the discovery of Sebastian Cabot, who first made the northern continent in 1497. The fact is sufficiently certain to establish a right to our settlements in North America: but the particulars are not known distinctly enough to encourage me to enter into a detail of his voyage. The country was in general called Newfoundland, a name which is now appropriated solely to an island upon its coast. It was a long time before we made any attempt to settle this country ; though in this point we were no more backward than our neighbors, who probably did not abstain so long out of respect to our prior discovery. Sir Walter Raleigh showed the way, by planting a colony in the southern part, which he called Virginia. However, the spirit of colonization was not yet fully raised. Men lived at ease in their own country, and the new settlement of Virginia, though dressed up in all the showy colors which eloquence could bestow upon it, gave adventurers but little encouragement. The affairs of North America were in the hands of an exclusive company, and they prospered accordingly.

Things remained in this condition until the latter end of the reign of James the First. From the commencement of the Reformation in England, two parties of Protestants subsisted amongst us; the first had chosen gradually and almost imperceptibly to recede from the church of Rome; softening the lines rather than erasing the figure, they made but very little alteration in the appearances of things. And the people, seeing the exterior so little altered, hardly perceived the great changes they had made in the doctrines of their religion. The other party, of a warmer temper, had more zeal and less policy. Several of them had fled from the persecution in Queen Mary’s days; and they returned in those of Queen Elizabeth with minds sufficiently heated by resentment of their sufferings, and by the perpetual disputations which had exercised them all the while they were abroad. Abroad they learned an aversion to the episcopal order, and to religious ceremonies of every sort; they were impregnated with a high spirit of liberty, and had a strong tendency to the republican form of government. Queen Elizabeth had enough of the blood of Harry the Eighth to make her impatient of an opposition to her will, especially in matters of religion, in which she had a high opinion of her own knowledge. She advised with the party but very little in the alterations which she thought proper to make; and, disliking the notions which they seemed to entertain in politics, she kept them down during the whole course of her reign with a uniform and inflexible severity.

However, the party was far enough from being destroyed. The merit of their sufferings, the affected plainness of their dress, the gravity of their deportment, the use of scripture phrases upon the most ordinary occasions, and even their names, which had something striking and venerable, as being borrowed from the Old Testament, or having a sort of affected relation to religious matters, gained them a general esteem amongst sober people of ordinary understandings. This party was very numerous; and their zeal made them yet more considerable than their numbers. They were commonly called Puritans.

When King James came to the throne, he had a very fair opportunity of pacifying matters; or at worst he might have left them in the condition he found them; but it happened quite otherwise. The unkingly disputation at Hampton Court did more to encourage the Puritans to persevere in their opinions, by the notice which was taken of them, than all King James’s logic as a scholar, backed with all his power as a king, could do to suppress that party. They were persecuted, but not destroyed; they were exasperated, and yet left powerful; and a severity was exercised towards them which at once exposed the weakness and the ill intentions of the government.

In this state things continued until the accession of Charles, when they were far from mending. This prince, endowed with many great virtues, had very few amiable qualities. As grave as the Puritans themselves, he could never engage the licentious part of the world in his favor ; and that gravity being turned against the Puritans, made him but the more odious to them. He gave himself up entirely to the church and churchmen; and he finished his ill conduct in this respect, by conferring the first ecclesiastical dignity of the kingdom, and a great sway in temporal affairs, upon Dr. Laud. Hardly fit to direct a college, he was called to govern a kingdom. He was one of those indiscreet men of good intentions, who are the people in the world that make the worst figure in politics. This man thought he did good service to religion by a scrupulous inquiry into the manner in which the ministers everywhere conformed to the regulations of the former reigns. He deprived great numbers for nonconformity. Not satisfied with this, in which perhaps he was justifiable enough if he had managed prudently, he made new regulations, and introduced on a people already abhorrent of the most necessary ceremonies, ceremonies of a new kind, of a most useless nature, and such as were even ridiculous, if the serious consequences which attended them may not entitle them to be considered as matters of importance.

Several great men, disgusted at the proceedings of the court, and entertaining very reasonable apprehensions for the public liberty, to make themselves popular, attached themselves to the popular notions of religion, and affected to maintain them with great zeal. Others became Puritans through principle. And now their affairs put on a respectable appearance; in proportion as they became of consequence, their sufferings seemed to be more and more grievous; the severities of Laud raised not terror as formerly, but a sort of indignant hatred; and they became every day further and further from listening to the least terms of agreement with surplices, organs, commonprayer, or table at the east end of the church. As they who are serious about trifles are serious indeed, their lives began to grow miserable to several on account of these ceremonies; and, rather than be obliged to submit to them, there was no part of the world to which they would not have fled with cheerfulness.

Early in the reign of King James a number of persons of this persuasion had sought refuge in Holland; in which, though a country of the greatest religious freedom in the world, they did not find themselves better satisfied than they had been in England. There they were tolerated indeed, but watched; their zeal began to have dangerous languors for want of opposition; and, being without power or consequence, they grew tired of the indolent security of their sanctuary; they chose to remove to a place where they should see no superior; and therefore they sent an agent to England, who agreed with the council of Plymouth, for a tract of land in America, within their jurisdiction, to settle in, after they had obtained from the king a privilege to do so. The Plymouth council was a company, who, by their charter, had not only all the coast of North America from Nova Scotia to the southern parts of Carolina (the whole country being then distinguished by the names of South and North Virginia) as a scene for their exclusive trade; but they had the entire property of the soil besides.

This colony established itself at a place which they called New Plymouth. They were but few in number; they landed in a bad season; and they were not at all supported but from their private funds. The winter was premature and terribly cold. The country was all covered with wood, and afforded very little for the refreshment of persons sickly with such a voyage, or for sustenance of an infant people. Near half of them perished by the scurvy, by want, and the severity of the climate; but they who survived, not dispirited with their losses nor with the hardships they were still to endure, supported by the vigor which was then the character of Englishmen, and by the satisfaction of finding themselves out of the reach of the spiritual arm, reduced this savage country to yield them a tolerable livelihood, and by degrees a comfortable subsistence.

This little establishment was made in the year 1621. Several of their brethren in England, laboring under the same difficulties, took the same methods of escaping from them. The colony of Puritans insensibly increased ; but as yet they had not extended themselves much beyond New Plymouth. It was in the year 1629, that the colony began to flourish in such a manner, that they soon became a considerable people. By the close of the ensuing year they had built four towns, Salem, Dorchester, Charlestown, and Boston, which has since become the capital of New England. That enthusiasm which was reversing every thing at home, and which is so dangerous in every settled community, proved of admirable service here. It became a principle of life and vigor, that enabled them to conquer all the difficulties of a savage country. Their exact and sober manners proved a substitute for a proper subordination and regular form of government, which they had for some time wanted, and the want of which in such a country had otherwise been felt very severely.

And now, not only they who found themselves uneasy at home upon a religious account, but several by reason of the then profitable trade of furs and skins, and for the sake of the fishery, were invited to settle in New England. But this colony received its principal assistance from the discontent of several great men of the puritan party, who were its protectors, and who entertained a design of settling amongst them in New England, if they should fail in the measures they were pursuing for establishing the liberty, and reforming the religion of their mother country. They solicited grants in New England, and were at a great expense in settling them. Amongst these patentees, we see the Lords Brook, Say and Seal, the Pelhams, the Hampdens, and the Pyms; the names which afterwards appeared with so much eclat upon a greater stage. It was said that Sir Matthew Boynton, Sir William Constable, Sir Arthur Haslerig, and Oliver Cromwell were actually upon the point of embarking for New England, when Archbishop Laud, unwilling that so many objects of his hatred should be removed out of the reach of his power, applied for, and obtained, an order from the court to put a stop to these transportations; and thus he kept forcibly from venting itself that virulent humor which he lived to see the destruction of himself, his order, his religion, his master, and the constitution of his country. However, he was not able to prevail so far as to hinder New England from receiving vast reinforcements, as well of the clergy who were deprived of their livings, or not admitted to them for noncomformity, as of such of the laity who adhered to their opinions....

The part of New England called Massachusetts Bay had now settlements very thick all along the sea-shore. Some slips from these were planted in the province of Maine and New Hampshire, being torn from the original stock by the religious violence, which was the chief characteristic of the first settlers in New England. The patentees we last mentioned principally settled upon the river Connecticut, and established a separate and independent government there: some persons having before that fixed themselves upon the borders of this river, who fled from the tyranny arising from the religious differences which were moulded into the first principles of the Plymouth and Massachusetts colonies.