Empires Apart (14 page)

The sudden wave of immigration between 1630 and 1642 was radically different to anything seen before or after, and it was the nature of this wave that made the new colonies that were to spring up on the north-east coast fundamentally different to all the others. By the end of the century there were two sets of English colonies in the Americas, which, if it were not for their common language, would have been as different from each other as Afghanistan and Zanzibar.

It is only a slight oversimplification to say that there were three very distinct classes of migrants to most of the colonies outside New England: poor whites, slaves and a minority of the rich. The history of these colonies is the history of the relationship of these classes. While to say that New England had only one class really would be an oversimplification it would not be grossly misleading. And the class that dominated New England was none of the above three. New England was colonised by, and for, what today would be called the middle class. The promoters of the Virginia Company were rich London merchants and lawyers who became even richer by staying at home and sending shiploads of ‘sturdy beggars' and slaves out to make money for them. The promoters of the Massachusetts Bay Company were certainly wealthy but they wanted more than profits;
they wanted the key to heaven, and they believed that the key could be found on the other side of the Atlantic – so they themselves had to be ‘on board', quite literally. Promoters like John Winthrop travelled with the migrants and ran the company from Boston. The promoters and other migrants took the same risks, had the same objectives and shared the same interests. (The Pilgrim Fathers were actually an exception: the
Mayflower
was financed by the London company of Merchant Adventurers to whom its passengers were indentured for their first seven years in the New World. The Plymouth colony was a commercial enterprise more typical of Virginia and the south than the later religious settlements in New England.
Mayflower
colonists socially were also more typical of the other English colonies: Bradford, their leader, was a cloth worker whereas Winthrop, the Governor of Massachusetts, was a lawyer.)

These were not religious liberals seeking freedom of religion. The rigorously enforced laws prohibiting work, play or even travel on the Sabbath were redolent more of today's fundamentalist Islam or Judaism than of mainstream Christianity. The Puritan migrants were Calvinist zealots who made it clear that heretics such as Anglicans or Baptists were not welcome in their colony. Nor were they content to wait until Judgement Day to witness the wrath of God in such cases. Quakers were regarded as a particular threat, being a sect that ‘tends to overthrow the whole gospell & the very vitalls of Christianitie'. On 19 October 1659 Mary Dyer, Marmaduke Stephenson and William Robinson were ‘convicted for Quakers' in Massachusetts and led to the gallows with ropes around their necks. Stephenson and Robinson were duly hanged, but Mary Dyer was spared after pleas from the governors of Connecticut and Nova Scotia. Dyer, however, refused to be banished. On 1 June 1660 she was led to the gallows once again and this time was dispatched to her maker. (Unlike Europe the scaffold rather than the stake was the preferred method of execution even for heretics and witches, although hanging at that time meant being hung from a gibbet and slowly and painfully strangled; the ‘long drop' hanging – in which the victim died quickly as his or her neck was broken – was introduced much later.) Anyone
suspected of communing with the devil faced the hangman's rope. In one case, when a piglet was born with a face that seemed to resemble its owner's, the farmer was hanged, and for good measure so was the sow with which he had so obviously enjoyed carnal relations. The Salem witch trials were only the most famous examples of the Puritans' extreme religious beliefs. Their society was closer to the Iran of the Ayatollahs than to America today.

Like socialist dogmatism in Russia two centuries later, the Puritan dogmatism of the New England settlers was beset by sectarianism. Groups fractured along bitter ideological fault lines comprehensible only to themselves. The abundance of ‘empty' land populated only by heathen natives made it easy for dissenting groups to strike out on their own and found new settlements. Although Massachusetts remained the heartland, more conservative sects founded colonies in Connecticut while others moved north to assert control over the fishing settlements being set up by less religiously fixated settlers in Maine and New Hampshire.

Only Rhode Island demonstrated any real signs of the religious tolerance for which America was later to pride itself. Its founder, the dissident Roger Williams, was expelled from Massachusetts in the middle of a bitter winter in 1636. His heresy was to proclaim that religion was a matter of personal conscience; that, as he put it, ‘forced worship stinks in God's nostrils'. Rhode Island became the one beacon of religious freedom in a sea of competing orthodoxies as the small colony became home for the rejects from its neighbours. Not only did various Protestant sects coexist but the colony's toleration extended to a small Jewish group. (The history of Jews in America is one example, like English Quakers and various continental European sects, where the early immigrants were genuine refugees escaping persecution. The first Jewish migrants to North America came from South America. A small group of Dutch Jews had settled in the Dutch colony in what is now Brazil. When the colony was seized by the Portuguese the Jews felt the full force of Catholic fundamentalism, and to escape burning at the stake they fled north.)

As time went by religious discrimination became less severe but did not disappear. Anglicans tempted to work or travel on the Sabbath were liable to be arrested and fined by their more puritanical neighbours. Religious dissenters might not be burnt at the stake but other ways were found to exclude them from society; one method of suppressing dissent prefigured a tactic much used in Russia. The Rev. James Davenport, a Yale graduate and great-grandson of one of New England's first Puritan clergymen, provoked a furious reaction with his brand of evangelical fundamentalism. He preached against the iniquities of wigs, jewellery and fine clothes, and with his followers organised the burning of books whose contents he deemed offensive. In 1742 he was arrested in Connecticut, tried, declared insane and banished. He promptly moved to Massachusetts only to be rearrested, retried and declared
non compos mentis
again. Two years later Davenport gave up and recanted his ‘errors'; he went on to become Moderator of the Synod in New York. A century later Pyotr Chaadayev, the first great radical Russian philosopher, was declared insane after criticising autocracy, serfdom and the Orthodox Church, and under Stalin the ‘Davenport' method of suppressing dissent was to be employed on a horrific scale.

After the southern and New England colonies were established an eclectic group of four colonies appeared between them: New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware.

Catholics were one religious group who found no welcome in New England. At the same time as thousands of Puritans were escaping from what they regarded as the dangerously papist practices of the Anglican Church of Charles I, others fled for exactly the opposite reason. A year after the
Mayflower
the Catholic George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, set sail for the New World and founded the colony of Avalon in Newfoundland. The settlement was not a success, and after George's death his son Cecilius, the second Lord Baltimore, decided to try again further south, and dispatched his younger brother Leonard. In 1634 the
Ark and the Dove
landed in Maryland. Among the two hundred religious refugees on board were two Jesuit priests, who had been smuggled aboard before leaving England and who on arrival recited on their bended knees the Litanies of the Sacred Cross. The physical climate in Maryland was more hospitable than Newfoundland, but the same could not be said for the religious climate. The two ships contained Catholic and Protestant colonists but the new colony soon developed a Protestant majority, which resented the power wielded by Calvert's Catholic cronies. In 1689, when the Dutch king William seized the English throne in a
coup d'état
(the ‘Glorious Revolution'), Maryland's Protestants seized the opportunity to mount an armed coup of their own, and America's first attempt at religious pluralism outside Rhode Island ended as Catholics lost the right to vote and hold office.

The Dutch settlements on the Hudson welcomed European settlers of almost any persuasion, and when they were captured by the British in 1664 added yet another facet to colonial life. New Netherland became the state of New York. New Amsterdam became the city of New York, and its enterprising burghers were soon making their presence felt in the commercial life of British North America.

The Quaker William Penn founded Pennsylvania. The first settlers there, largely English Quakers and Germans escaping from their wartorn homelands, were distinctive for their relatively civilised treatment of the natives. Even here, however, the exigencies of ethnic cleansing won out when a group arrived in the colony with a very different view of life. In the 1690s Scottish Protestants had been ‘planted' in Ireland, particularly in Ulster, to help the English tame what was effectively the first English colony. Ireland was not the Promised Land, however, and many ‘Scotch-Irish' moved further west, to the frontiers of Pennsylvania. These new settlers had no truck with Penn's pacifism. They had learnt how to deal with unruly natives in Ireland and followed the same tactics in their new home – stealing, intimidating and killing those whose land they were determined to take over. Those who claimed to know better, including Penn's own family, soon joined them. After William Penn's
death his son Thomas led a famously audacious land grab. Having agreed with the local natives to buy a piece of land as big as a man could walk around in a day, Penn had a special trail cleared through the forest and then used trained runners to sprint along it. When the natives refused to hand over the enormous territory Penn had thus gained he employed Iroquois mercenaries to enforce the ‘agreement'.

The strangest colony to emerge on the eastern seaboard was named after an English lord, founded by Dutch entrepreneurs based in Sweden and populated largely by Finns.

The Finns are one of the oldest races in Europe, so perhaps some background would be helpful here. At the height of their power some 8,000 years ago these Ural-Altaic peoples dominated a vast land from Mongolia to the Baltic and, according to some, introduced hieroglyphic writing to Egypt. Some Ural-Altaic tribes, like the Finns, settled down, while others erupted in streams of conquest (the last of these to pillage their way west only stopped when their leader Attila was defeated at Châlons). Over time their territory was taken by other groups, especially the Slavs, and their people and languages absorbed, so that in Europe today only the Finns, Estonians and Hungarians remain. The Finns were pushed westward by Slavs expanding to form Russia. In one version of the legend surrounding the founding of Russia, Finns and Slavs joined together to invite Rurik to rule over and protect them. In this version the term Rus comes from the Finnish ruotsaa, meaning to row, the means of propulsion used by Vikings on the rivers of their new domain.

In 1157 another Viking king invaded Finland, but by then the Vikings were no longer pagan barbarians. A mysterious Scottish bishop named Henry accompanied King Erik Jedwardson and, by judicious use of his patron's sword, converted the Finns to Christianity. At the same time King Erik brought the Finns firmly into Sweden's orbit, so that when, at the end of the sixteenth century, the Finns found themselves once again under attack from the Slavs, this time Poles, it was natural for many Finns to move west themselves. Between 1600 and 1650 numerous Finnish settlements sprang up in Sweden, but not everyone welcomed
the immigrants. While the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus used Finnish troops in his conquests across Europe, at home their families were being massacred. A way of solving this ‘Finnish problem' was suggested by a man named Peter Minuit.

The first American colonies owed their creation to a small number of energetic men, ranging from the godly to the godless. Peter Minuit was not at the godly end of the spectrum, and is perhaps most charitably described as an entrepreneur. He is known today as the man who bought Manhattan from the natives for a handful of shells, a Dutchman who had been appointed Governor of New Netherland but had fallen out with its proprietor, the Dutch West India Company. Minuit persuaded Swedish leaders not only to allow him and a group of Dutch ‘promoters' to set up a colony under the Swedish flag but to put up half of the funds as well. This colony was the ideal place to send surplus Finns, and a trading post was established on the Delaware river in 1638. Minuit himself disappeared in the Caribbean, and neither he nor his ship were ever seen again, but his idea had taken hold on the imagination of his Swedish partners. In 1643 New Sweden was established, populated largely by Finns.

The colony prospered, and soon Finns were petitioning the queen to be allowed to emigrate. In 1655 the Dutch seized the colony but were soon replaced by the English (who, always alive to commercial possibilities, sold the Dutch garrison to Virginia planters as cheap labour for their fields). Eventually the English colony of Delaware came into formal existence.

(The role of Finns in the intertwined histories of Russia and America deserves a book of its own. One of the most curious chapters occurred during the Depression of the 1920s. Stalin decided that Finnish-Americans presented a potentially useful pool of talent and sent recruiters to encourage emigration from the promised land of the past to the promised land of the future. They presented such a rosy picture of life in Russian Karelia that some 25,000 are thought to have sailed east, only to discover that conditions were no better on the other side of the Atlantic. Stalin was unimpressed by their complaints and shipped them off to the gulags.)