Penguin History of the United States of America (17 page)

The years since then had at first seen Boston’s continued development on the lines indicated in
Chapter 4
. Its population had risen from 7,000 in 1690 to 17,000 in 1740, and throughout the years between it had been the largest city in the colonies. It and the other towns of New England retained their characteristic instrument of self-government, the town-meeting, which made even the smallest township a city-state, a direct democracy of the purest classical kind. The town-meetings were more and more dominated by the well-off at the expense of the poor and the ‘middling sort’, but they still sharply differentiated the New England from the Old and provided essential training in self-government.

The religious and social tendencies discussed at the end of
Chapter 4
also continued. The New England conscience, the New England mind, had many victories ahead before their submersion in the vast society of twentieth-century America. But ministerial denunciation of the too-evident backsliding went on. A visitor in 1740 might say that the Bostonians’ observation of the Sabbath was ‘the strictest kept that ever I yet saw anywhere’, and indeed the day seems still to have been a properly miserable one, with no public pleasures of any kind allowed, not even walking in the streets. All else declined from godliness. To a Huguenot visitor in 1687 it was clear that ‘the English who inhabit these countries are as elsewhere, good and bad’. This was no consolation to the surviving Puritans. One of them, Judge Samuel Sewall (1652–1730), denounced ‘affectation and use of gaiety, costly buildings, stilled and other strong liquors, palatable, though expensive diet… sensuality, effeminateness, unrighteousness, and confusion’ and tried to restrain his acquaintance from wearing periwigs.
Another, Cotton Mather, deplored the appearance on the streets of Boston of beggars, whom ‘our Lord Jesus Christ himself hath expressly forbidden us to countenance’ (it was God’s law that men work, not beg), and lamented that ‘idleness, alas! idleness increases in the town exceedingly; idleness, of which there never came any goodness!’
¹
Worse was to happen, in spite of all efforts. The General Court of Massachusetts had three times to pass laws forbidding ‘extraordinary expense at funerals’. Women got out of hand: some dared to run away from disagreeable husbands, others set up in the oldest profession on Boston docks. Most unfortunately, a leading business of the town came to be the manufacture and export of rum, which was drunk throughout the Empire as well as by the Royal Navy. Boston, exporting some 600,000 gallons annually,
²
was herself, if anything, less boozy than other places. In 1752 Pennsylvania, an agrarian colony with many thirsty harvesters, distilled 80,000 gallons of rum and imported 526,700 gallons. A Philadelphia poet, J. Dumbleton, wrote a
Rhapsody on Rum
. Right-thinking Bostonians were not comforted. In 1726 they had to denounce in the press ‘the birth of so formidable a monster in this part of the world’ as dancing, and to announce that ‘the abuse of strong drink is becoming epidemical among us, and it is very justly supposed… that the multiplication of taverns has contributed not a little to this excess of riot and debauchery’. Taverns were indeed much more numerous than churches, and probably more influential: it was in their hospitable rooms that news was exchanged and opinions formed. Bostonians, we are told, sat ‘tippling and sotting for whole evenings, or perhaps for whole days’.

Much of the ministers’ outcry seems to us, with our different beliefs and values, irrational and disproportionate, or simply elderly. The bulk of the colonial population, above all in Massachusetts, was as grimly conventional in its morality as could be wished. Real crime, on the other hand, was a concrete problem on which the ministers could offer little guidance, one which the American cities were as unable to solve in the eighteenth century as they are in the twentieth. Already complaints were heard at New York that ‘it seems to be now become dangerous for the good people of this city, to be out late at nights, without being sufficiently strong or well-armed, as several attacks and disturbances have been lately made in our streets’. To deal with the sprinkling of footpads, housebreakers, shoplifters, pickpockets, etc. – many of them no doubt transported from England – the colonists had to rely on the old English system of watches and constables that, in Boston at any rate, had improved very little since the days of Dogberry.
³
Thus in 1742

some malicious and evil-minded persons took off the hinges and carried clear away, the door of the watch-house at the town dock, while our Guardians were at their natural rest, to the great endangering of their health, if not their lives, there being nothing more pernicious to persons asleep, than nocturnal air. There has been a proposal made in the neighbourhood, to raise a guard for the defence of the said house, to prevent the like enormity for the future. But all generous proposals meet with opposition from contracted spirits, some object and say, that the watchmen ought at least to take care of their own lodgings.

To no avail: this was not the first time the watch had slept on duty, nor was it the last, for a month later the door was stolen again. The truth was that all watches tended to be what they were called in New York: parcels of ‘idle, drinking, vigilant snorers, who never quelled any nocturnal tumult in their lives (nor as we can learn, were ever the discoverers of a fire breaking out,) but would, perhaps, be as ready to join in a burglary as any thief in Christendom’. It was usually impossible to find enough strong, responsible men for the watch, and equally impossible to erect prisons strong enough to keep criminals until their trial – and the incident at New Jersey in 1745, when, after a politically motivated jail-break, the jail-breakers mended the hole they had made in the wall before dispersing, was quite as exceptional in colonial America as it would be anywhere else. The crime rate rose everywhere, because increasing wealth increased temptation; because more and more immigrant felons arrived; because the size of the cities increased, offering the protection of urban anonymity; because, even in America, it was possible to be unemployed or underfed; because the size of the continent helped getaways; and because innocent Americans, not yet attuned to the times, were still easy gulls.

The ministers could be excused for dismay when contemplating such a world and for sighing that things did not use to be so in New England. They also had professional grounds for anxiety. There could be no doubt that the Congregational churches were losing their hold on men. Perhaps it all began in the mid-seventeenth century, when it had unfortunately seemed necessary to persecute the Quakers, then intent on disturbing the peace of Zion with their own version of divine truth. Some had been flogged ferociously, some imprisoned or driven from the colony, some hanged. This sort of thing encouraged the home authorities to annul the Winthrop charter, for it was Whitehall’s opinion, expressed by the Board of Trade in 1750, that ‘as toleration and a free exercise of religion is so valuable a branch of true liberty, and so essential to the enriching and improving of a trading nation; it should ever be held sacred in his Majesty’s Colonies’.
⁴
So the
pernicious practice of religious freedom came to Massachusetts, and with it, Anglicanism, which proved shockingly attractive to some of the better-off.
⁵
Then there was the bad business of the Salem witches in 1692, when in a wave of superstitious hysteria twenty people were hanged for crimes of witchcraft that the judges and the jury later became convinced they had not committed (Judge Sewall nobly made public confession, in the meetinghouse, of his fault). This did nothing to strengthen public respect for the ministers. Finally, the age of science was at hand and many men were growing less susceptible to the old Biblical evangelism: more interested in the world about them, less in the world to come. In his old age Cotton Mather devoted himself to the introduction of inoculation against smallpox; while the young Benjamin Franklin sold his set of Bunyan’s works to buy history books.

Not that the age was irreligious. In spite of science, belief in a magical universe was still fairly general. Presbyterianism revived in America as a crusading creed, with the fire that had once been the Congregationalists’ and the Quakers’; and in the thirties the Great Awakening, first and fiercest of religious revivals, swept across the colonies. It was connected with the birth of Methodism in England: George Whitefield himself visited America to preach the new word. He, and American revivalists like him, such as Jonathan Edwards of Northampton, Massachusetts (1703–58), dealt with the degenerate times by reviving the old Puritan concern with the conviction of sin, the necessity of conversion and the certainty of salvation. Spectacular results were achieved. Members of Edwards’s congregations fell to the floor in fits as he announced that God,

though he will know that you cannot bear the weight of omnipotence treading upon you, yet he will not regard that, but he will crush you under his feet without mercy; he will crush out your blood, and make it fly, and it will be sprinkled on his garments so as to stain all his raiment. He will not only hate you, but he will have you in the utmost contempt.

This sort of thing convinced tens of thousands that they must change their wicked ways; but, as in all such cases, a few years later the effect had largely worn off and the good people of Boston and Philadelphia felt free to dance again.
⁶
The Awakening doubtless saved souls, but it split churches; indeed, its emphasis on the importance of individual experience may be said to have democratized American religion. Many men of good sense, good nature or good education disliked its emotionalism and turned to deism,
unitarianism or infidelity. Many congregations split into New Light (ranting) and Old Light (respectable) portions; and a gulf opened, which has not yet closed, between the liberal, rationalizing prosperous religion of the town and the fundamentalism of the economically and intellectually backward countryside; and also between the religion of the urban rich and the urban poor. It was an Old Light Presbyterian minister who sniffed that ‘the vulgar everywhere are inclined to enthusiasm’. In Connecticut the dispute spilled over into politics and became a quarrel of secular parties that was still bitter during the Revolutionary period.

In other respects Boston, and the New England which it dominated and represented, flourished notably. The Boston Latin School, Harvard College and mighty Yale College (founded at New Haven, Connecticut, in 1701, by strict Congregationalists, when Harvard showed alarming signs of liberalism) were merely the most conspicuous of many excellent educational institutions which gave New England the highest literacy rate in the colonies and quite probably in the world. Inoculation for smallpox caught on after some resistance: before long the colonies had outstripped Britain in generally adopting it. Disastrous and repeated fires forced Bostonians to replace their wooden houses by brick as much as they could, and to develop an efficient fire-service. Town sanitation made great advances; so did printing and the book-trade. If Boston built fewer and fewer ships, other towns in Massachusetts and Rhode Island built more and more.

There was the rub. Worldlier men than the ministers could reasonably worry about Boston after 1740. The narrow and agriculturally unpromising hinterland ceased to attract settlers, who found more tempting prospects to the South-West. Newer colonies (above all, Pennsylvania) began to cut into Boston’s early monopoly of the trade to the West Indies. The town’s shipbuilding did indeed decline, and so did that accurate barometer of her prosperity, her population, while the other leading American cities continued to gain. The rum-trade became the only dependable staple, and that in turn depended on importing molasses from the French West Indies, where it was cheaper than in the English, a practice ineffectively forbidden by the Molasses Act of 1733. The merchants of Boston turned smugglers rather than obey the law, but other, heavier blows were in store for them. Britain drifted into war with France in the forties, and Massachusetts bore most of the burden in the colonies. Her sailors were pressed into the Royal Navy; many of her young men were killed; and heavy taxes hampered economic life still more. Worse, it was decided to fall in with the imperial government’s desire to replace the inflationary and unsound paper money then current with a metallic currency; accordingly in 1749 the paper money was called in and coins became the only legal tender. But they were in very short supply, so that there was no money to finance new ventures. As a result, merchants were soon lamenting that ‘trade is quite dead’ and that ‘all trade seems to be stagnated; and little else goes on but drinking’. In 1760 Boston was devastated by the worst of all the many fires she endured during the
colonial period. ‘This once flourishing metropolis must long remain under its present desolation’, sighed the
Boston Post Boy
, a local newspaper. It is not very surprising that, in their attempt to recoup their losses, Bostonians traded freely with the enemy during the Seven Years War. Nor is it surprising that the first events of the Revolution struck sparks out of a city which had been in a bad way for twenty years.

For a picture of thriving urban life we have to turn to Boston’s successful rival, Philadelphia. In her relation to the province surrounding her, the younger town may stand for all that was new, hopeful and vigorous in colonial America.

In the causes which brought it about, in the causes of its subsequent successes and in the nature of its ultimate failure, the foundation of Pennsylvania
⁷
in some respects recalls that of Massachusetts. William Penn (1644–1718) intended ‘a holy experiment’, a state to be run on Quaker lines, as John Winthrop had planned his city on a hill. Like the older dream, the Quaker vision faded. In 1721 a rapidly increasing crime rate induced the Friends to abandon their mild penal code for an extremely stiff one: the crime wave continued to mount. One historian has unkindly remarked that eighteenth-century Quakers preferred the counting-house to the meetinghouse. He might equally well have remarked that they preferred the family farm, for the settlers in Pennsylvania brushed aside, quite as firmly as the New Englanders had done and even more promptly, all attempts to make them live in compact villages, centring their lives on the meeting-house and cultivating their lands co-operatively. They were resolute individualists; and it was to be in large part from their settlements that the tradition of the small farm was eventually to spread into the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys, thereby becoming a sacred, because so universal, detail of the American way of life.