A Brief History of the United States. John Bach McMaster
was very unlike that in Virginia. People dwelt in villages, cultivated small farms, and were largely engaged in trade and commerce. They bartered corn and peas, woolen cloth, and wampum with the Indians for beaver skins, which they sent to England to pay for articles bought from the mother country. They salted cod, dried alewives and bass, made boards and staves for hogsheads, and sent all these to the West Indies to be exchanged for sugar, molasses, and other products of the tropics. They built ships in the seaports where lumber was cheap, and sold them abroad. They traded with Spain and Portugal, England, the Netherlands, and Virginia.
[Illustration: STONE HAND MILL. Brought from England in 1630 and used for grinding flour. Now in Essex Hall, Salem, Mass.]
SCARCITY OF MONEY.—The colonists brought little money with them, and much of what they brought went back to England to pay for supplies. Buying and trading in New England, therefore, had to be done largely without gold or silver. Beaver skins and wampum, bushels of corn, produce, cattle, and even bullets were used as money and passed at rates fixed by law. [13] In the hope of remedying the scarcity of money, the government of Massachusetts ordered that a mint should be set up, and in 1652 Spanish silver brought from the West Indies was melted and coined into Pine Tree currency. [14]
[Illustration: SPINNING WOOL.]
MANUFACTURES.—That less gold and silver might go abroad for supplies, home manufactures were encouraged by gifts of money, by exemptions of property from taxation, and by excusing workmen from military duty. The cultivation of flax was encouraged, children were taught to spin and weave, and glass works, salt works, and iron furnaces were started.
[Illustration: YARN REEL. [15] In Essex Hall, Salem, Mass.]
On the farms utensils and furniture were generally made in the household. Almost everything was made of wood, as spoons, tankards, pails, firkins, hinges for cupboard and closet doors, latches, plows, and harrows. Every boy learned to use his jack-knife, and could make brooms from birch trees, bowls and dippers and bottles from gourds, and butter paddles from red cherry. The women made soap and candles, carded wool, spun, wove, bleached or dyed the linen and woolen cloth, and made the garments for the family. They knit mittens and stockings, made straw hats and baskets, and plucked the feathers from live geese for beds and pillows.
THE HOUSES.—On the farms the houses of the early settlers were of logs, or were framed structures covered with shingles or clapboards. The tables, chairs, stools, and bedsteads were of the plainest sort, and were often made of puncheons, that is, of small tree trunks split in half. Sometimes the table would be a long board laid across two X supports. This was "the board," around which the family sat at meals. [16] In the better houses in the towns the furniture was of course very much finer.
THE VILLAGES.—The center of village life was the meetinghouse, or church. Near by was the house of the minister, the inn or tavern, and the dwellings of the inhabitants. In early times, if the village was on the frontier or exposed to Indian attack it was guarded by blockhouses surrounded by a high stockade. These "garrison houses," as they were called, were of stone or logs, with the second story projecting over the first, and had loopholes in place of windows. Most of them have long since disappeared, but a few still remain, turned into dwellings. Sometimes there were three or more blockhouses in a village, and to these when the Indians were troublesome the farmers and their families came each night to sleep.
SCHOOLS.-Among the acts passed by the General Court of Massachusetts in early days were several in regard to education. In 1636 four hundred pounds [17] was voted for a public school. Two years later, John Harvard, a former minister, left his library and half his fortune to this school, and in grateful remembrance it was called Harvard College. Thus started, the good work went on. Parents and masters were by law compelled to teach their children and apprentices to read English, know the important laws, and repeat the orthodox catechism. Another law required every town of fifty families to maintain a school for at least six months a year, and every town of two hundred householders a primary and a grammar school, wherein Latin should be taught.
[Illustration: FAIRBANKS HOUSE, NEAR BOSTON. As it looks to-day. Built partly in 1650.]
PERSECUTION OF THE QUAKERS.—Though the Puritans suffered persecution in the Old World, they had not learned to be tolerant. As we have seen, no man could vote in Massachusetts who was not a member of their church. They drove out Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, and again and again, in later times, banished, or fined, imprisoned, and flogged men and women who wished to worship God in their own way. When two Quaker women arrived (1656), they were sent away and a sharp law was made against their sect. [18] But in spite of all persecution, the Quakers kept coming. At last (in 1659–61) three men and a woman were hanged on Boston Common because they returned after having once been banished. Plymouth and Connecticut also enacted laws against the Quakers. [19]
CONNECTICUT CHARTERED (1662).—By this time the days of Puritan rule in old England were over. In 1660 King Charles II was placed upon the throne of his father. Connecticut promptly acknowledged him as king, and sent her governor, the younger John Winthrop, to London to obtain a charter. He easily secured one (in 1662) which spread the authority of Connecticut over the New Haven Colony, [20] gave her a domain stretching across the continent to the Pacific, and established a government so liberal that the charter was kept in force till 1818. New Haven Colony for a time resisted; but one by one the towns which formed the colony acknowledged the authority of Connecticut.
THE SECOND CHARTER OF RHODE ISLAND.—Rhode Island, likewise, proclaimed the king and sought a new charter. When obtained (in 1663), it defined her boundaries, and provided for a form of government quite as liberal as that of Connecticut. It remained in force one hundred and seventy-nine years.
THE NEW COLONIAL ERA.—From 1640 to 1660 the English colonies in America had been left much to themselves. No new colonies had been founded, and the old ones had managed their own affairs in their own way. But with Charles II a new era opens. Several new colonies were soon established; and though Rhode Island and Connecticut received liberal charters, all the colonies were soon to feel the king's control. As we shall see later, Massachusetts was deprived of her charter; but after a few years she received a new one (1691), which united the Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts, and Maine in the one colony of Massachusetts Bay. New Hampshire, however, was made a separate royal province.
SUMMARY
1. In 1620 a body of Separatists reached Cape Cod and founded Plymouth, the first English settlement north of Virginia.
2. Two years later the Council for New England granted land to Gorges and Mason, from which grew Maine and New Hampshire.
3. Between 1628 and 1630 a great Puritan migration established the colony of Massachusetts Bay, which later absorbed Maine and New Hampshire.
4. Religious disputes led to the expulsion of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson from Massachusetts. They founded towns later united (1643) as Providence Plantations (Rhode Island).
5. Other religious disputes led to the migration of people who settled (1635–36) in the Connecticut valley and founded (1639) Connecticut.
6. Between 1638 and 1640 other towns were planted on Long Island Sound, and four of them united (1643) and formed the New Haven Colony.
7. Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven joined in a league—the United Colonies of New England (1643–84).
8. New Haven was united with Connecticut (1662), and Plymouth with Massachusetts (1691), while New Hampshire was made a separate province; so that after 1691 the New England colonies were New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.
9. The New England colonists lived largely in villages. They were engaged in farming, manufacturing, and commerce.
10. For twenty years, during the Civil War and the Puritan rule in England, the colonies were left to themselves; but in 1660 Charles II became king of England, and a new era began in colonial affairs.
[Illustration: THE CHARTER OAK, HARTFORD, CONN. From an old print.]
FOOTNOTES