The Beginnings of New England

MR. FISKE’S contribution to the interpretation of American history is of a very interesting character. He brings to his task a mind trained in another field of science, but the methods used by him in his scientific studies are precisely those which are most effective in historical pursuits, and, we may add, most needed in the writing of American history. We do not understand that Mr. Fiske’s work in science was that of a special investigator of phenomena, but of a systematizer. His synthetical genius enabled him to avail himself of a wide range of investigation by other men. and to show the interrelation of physical laws. Moreover, his philosophy was always occupied with the development which proceeds from lower forms to higher, and he displayed none of that lofty disregard of man which seems sometimes to have characterized the apostles of the protozoic gospel. On the contrary, those who have watched Mr. Fiske’s career have been pleased to see that he showed a decided disposition to let his thought associate with men, and to treat beginnings with reference to ends.

The recent volumes which this author has put forth intimate that history is the laboratory in which he is now at work, and that the special table before which he stands is the United States. As the first duty of a scientific general her is to he sure of his facts, so Mr. Fiske sends to the museum for all the well-attested facts of American history, and is engaged busily in studying their order and significance. Surely, in the higher regions of scientific research there is no field so inviting or so productive as history, and the inductive method is entirely possible in connection with certain sections of social activity. In the latest of his historical works,¹ Mr. Fiske says, what every student will admit: “The beginnings of New England were made in the full daylight of modern history. It was an age of town records, of registered deeds, of contemporary pamphlets, funeral sermons, political diatribes, specific instructions, official reports, and private letters. It was not a time in which mythical personages or incredible legends could flourish, and such things we do not find in the history of New England.”Add to this that, from the time when Prince began his industrious collection of historical material to the present day, the besom has been sweeping out every dusty corner of every house in the New England States, and a host of patient scholars has sifted the dust-heap for every scrap of value. It is questionable if any community in Christendom was ever the subject of such research, or ever laid itself so completely open to view. Whoever has flung a stone at New England has been indebted for the stone to New England scholars.

This vast historical collection is thus at the service of the philosophic student of human activity, and it is possible, as we have intimated, to apply the inductive method to it, and to discover the laws of growth which it reveals. No one, however, can do this to much purpose who does not bring to the task such a general familiarity with historical periods and such a special acquaintance with the operations of the human mind as shall save him on the one hand from treating this period as exceptional, and on the other from undervaluing the light which it throws on human progress. It is the merit of Mr. Fiske’s book that be makes some attempt to correlate the Puritan experiment with other historical passages, and that, because the external features were lacking in splendor and pomp of circumstance, he does not miss the real contribution which this experiment made to the interpretation of the social organism.

The reader, however, will be disappointed if he looks to this book for a substantial history of New England, with a disclosure, en passant, of the spirit and meaning of that history. It is rather a philosophical essay based on certain well-accepted facts of the history, and with special emphasis on the leading ideas involved in the Puritan theory of the state. Mr. Fiske can write narrative, as the readers of this number of The Atlantic, to go no further, have very good evidence ; but except in the chapter on King Philip’s War, which gave more scope for narrative and less for generalization, his interest in this volume has been distinctly philosophic. The reader is expected to bring to the book a like interest; and it is not unreasonable to ask this, and to expect of him a good deal of general information, when one considers how persistently the history of New England has been served out in one form and another.

The most original and effective chapter in the book is the first, on the Roman Idea and The English Idea. Indeed, the chapter is so striking and so genetic that one is somewhat disappointed by the comparative thinness of the rest of the volume. This is to be accounted for by the greater sweep which the introductory subject permits. A survey of colonizing and state-making up to the date of the Puritan exodus offers a great richness of illustration, and Mr. Fiske’s power of coordinating human forces has not been seen to better advantage than in this splendid comparison of worldmovements. His sense of proportion is admirable, and he does not permit himself to be led away from the great line of his argument, yet he constantly throws out. hints of historic interpretation which one is eager to have him expand ; as when, for example, before proceeding to show how in England ‘‘the dominant, religious sentiment came to he enlisted on the side of political freedom,” he remarks incidentally, almost, the contrasted condition of affairs in Spain, and points out that one explanation of the early and complete establishment of absolute despotism in that country lay in the fact that the Spanish monarchy grew up during centuries of deadly struggle with the Mussulman, whereby the religious sentiment was enlisted on the side of despotic methods in church and state.

The habit of the comparative method which Mr. Fiske’s scientific studies have stimulated keeps him on the alert to discover, if not coincidences, yet illustrative passages, and the reader is repeatedly given a very keen insight into the meaning of events by this light. Thus, a whole chapter in the related history of England and New England is written in the paragraph: “As the work of planting New England took place chiefly in the eleven years 16291640, during which Charles I. contrived to reign without a Parliament, so the prosperous period of the New England Confederacy, 1643-1661, covers the time of the Civil War and the Commonwealth, and just laps on to the reign of Charles II. " So again there is almost a text in the brief sentence : “ It. was in one and the same week that Charles I. thus began his experiment, of governing without a Parliament, and that he granted a charter to the Company of Massachusetts Bay.” The first chapter is especially full of these instructive comparisons.

Next to such passages, those which disclose a shrewd perception of underlying causes are most likely to arrest the reader’s attention. Such is his reading of the Indian’s mind in connection with the English and Indian wars. " It is difficult.’ he says, " for the civilized man and the savage to understand each other. As a rule, the one does not know what the other is thinking about.” And then he contrasts the work of the Apostle Eliot with the interpretation put upon it by the savage : “ His design in founding his villages of Christian Indians was in the highest degree benevolent and noble ; but the heathen Indians could hardly be expected to see anything in it but a cunning scheme for destroying them. Eliot’s converts were for the most part from the Massachusetts tribe, the smallest, and weakest of all. The Plymouth converts came chiefly from the tribe next in weakness, the Pokanokets, or Wampanoags. The more powerful tribes—Narragansetts, Nipmucks, and Mohegans — furnished very few converts. When they saw the white intruders gathering members of the weakest tribes into villages of English type, and teaching them strange gods while clothing them in strange garments, they probably supposed that the pale-faces were simply adopting these Indians into their white tribe as a means of increasing their military strength. At any rate, such a proceeding would he perfectly intelligible to the savage mind, whereas the nature of Eliot’s design lay quite beyond its ken. As the Indians recovered from their supernatural dread of the English, and began to regard them as using human means to accomplish their ends, they must of course interpret their conduct in such light as savage experience could afford. It is one of the commonest things in the world for a savage tribe to absorb weak neighbors by adoption, and thus increase its force preparatory to a deadly assault upon other neighbors.” The entire account of the relations of the whites with the Indians, closing with a brief contrast of the conditions with those of the present frontier life, is interesting, but we think Mr. Fiske missed an excellent opportunity in not setting forth the view which the Englishman took of the Indian as colored by his own apprehension of the supernatural world. Not only did the Englishman in Massachusetts play at being a Jew in Canaan, but he was still under the shadow of the unknown, and these dusky figures emerging from the dark forests, with their silent ways and their uncanny behavior, were to him half beast and half demon. His world was still peopled with goblins, and the native spirits which embarked with him in English ports quickly were reinforced by these bodily shapes of a new species of devil and witch.

We are not sure that Mr. Fiske has taken note of all the important elements which met in the Puritan migration. It is so essential a part of his scheme to elucidate the religious influence, that he has touched too lightly on motives which are inseparably bound up with the religious and political. The seventeenth century in England saw, indeed, the growth of the Puritan idea, but it saw also a marked development of the trading spirit, and no study of early New England should leave out of sight the commercial instinct which was strong at the outset, and played a very important part in the making of the state. The very structure of the Company of Massachusetts Bay was laid on foundations of trade, and it was in the interaction of commerce, politics, and religion that the state grew in solidarity. We should have been glad also had Mr. Fiske paid more attention to that large contingent of New England life which was excluded at first from government, but was a factor in the internal development of the state. His object, however, was chiefly to set forth the relations of Puritan New England, in its origin, to universal history, and this thesis he has exploited with singular acumen and in a most generous spirit. It is not too much to say that to many readers this book will supply an introduction to an entirely new conception of New England history; for heretofore the prevailing treatment has fostered the notion that New England was a corner of the world which was a law unto itself.