Initial Studies in American Letters | Page 6

in England, and made their presence there
seem in some cases a duty. The celebrated Hugh Peters, for example,
who was afterward Oliver Cromwell's chaplain, and was beheaded after
the Restoration, went back in 1641, and in 1647 Nathaniel Ward, the
minister of Ipswich, Massachusetts, and author of a quaint book against
toleration, entitled _The Simple Cobbler of Agawam_; written in
America and published shortly after its author's arrival in England. The
civil war, too, put a stop to further emigration from England until after
the Restoration in 1660.
The mass of the Puritan immigration consisted of men of the middle
class, artisans and husbandmen, the most useful members of a new
colony. But their leaders were clergymen educated at the universities,

and especially at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, the great Puritan
college; their civil magistrates were also in great part gentlemen of
education and substance, like the elder Winthrop, who was learned in
law, and Theophilus Eaton, first governor of New Haven, who was a
London merchant of good estate. It is computed that there were in New
England during the first generation as many university graduates as in
any community of equal population in the old country. Almost the first
care of the settlers was to establish schools. Every town of fifty
families was required by law to maintain a common school, and every
town of a hundred families a grammar or Latin school. In 1636, only
sixteen years after the landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock,
Harvard College was founded at Newtown, whose name was thereupon
changed to Cambridge, the General Court held at Boston on September
8, 1630, having already advanced 400 pounds "by way of essay
towards the building of something to begin a college." "An university,"
says Mather, "which hath been to these plantations, for the good
literature there cultivated, sal Gentium, . . . and a river without the
streams whereof these regions would have been mere unwatered places
for the devil." By 1701 Harvard had put forth a vigorous offshoot, Yale
College at New Haven, the settlers of New Haven and Connecticut
plantations having increased sufficiently to need a college at their own
doors. A printing-press was set up at Cambridge in 1639, which was
under the oversight of the university authorities, and afterward of
licensers appointed by the civil power. The press was no more free in
Massachusetts than in Virginia, and that "liberty of unlicensed printing"
for which the Puritan Milton had pleaded in his Areopagitica, in 1644,
was unknown in Puritan New England until some twenty years before
the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. "The Freeman's Oath" and an
almanac were issued from the Cambridge press in 1639, and in 1640
the first English book printed in America, a collection of the psalms in
meter, made by various ministers, and known as the Bay Psalm Book.
The poetry of this version was worse, if possible, than that of Sternhold
and Hopkins's famous rendering; but it is noteworthy that one of the
principal translators was that devoted "Apostle to the Indians," the Rev.
John Eliot, who, in 1661-63, translated the Bible into the Algonquin
tongue. Eliot hoped and toiled a life-time for the conversion of those
"salvages," "tawnies," "devil-worshipers," for whom our early writers

have usually nothing but bad words. They have been destroyed instead
of converted; but his (so entitled) _Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe
Up-Biblum God naneeswe Nukkone Testament kah wonk Wusku
Testament_--the first Bible printed in America--remains a monument of
missionary zeal and a work of great value to students of the Indian
languages.
A modern writer has said that, to one looking back on the history of old
New England, it seems as though the sun shone but dimly there, and
the landscape was always dark and wintry. Such is the impression
which one carries away from the perusal of books like Bradford's and
Winthrop's Journals, or Mather's _Wonders of the Invisible World_--an
impression of gloom, of flight and cold, of mysterious fears besieging
the infant settlements scattered in a narrow fringe "between the
groaning forest and the shore." The Indian terror hung over New
England for more than half a century, or until the issue of King Philip's
War, in 1670, relieved the colonists of any danger of a general
massacre. Added to this were the perplexities caused by the earnest
resolve of the settlers to keep their New-England Eden free from the
intrusion of the serpent in the shape of heretical sects in religion. The
Puritanism of Massachusetts was an orthodox and conservative
Puritanism. The later and more grotesque out-crops of the movement in
the old England found no toleration in the new. But these refugees for
conscience' sake were compelled in turn to persecute Antinomians,
Separatists, Familists, Libertines, Anti-pedobaptists, and later, Quakers,
and still later, Enthusiasts, who swarmed