Early Settlers. 207 



Puritan colony, but from an early day they manifested a good deal 

 ■of independence of the Boston magnates ; and Peter Hobart's de- 

 fiant attitude towards Governor Winthrop is one of the picturesque 

 features of that early time. There is sometimes, undoubtedly, an 

 inclination to exaggerate the religious element in the early settle- 

 ments of New England. It was a mixed purpose that animated 

 our forefathers. There was in them the genius of adventure and 

 enterprise which in later days has peopled our own West with 

 their descendants ; there was the search for fortune in new coun- 

 tries over the sea ; there was the spirit of trade and mercantile in- 

 vestment ; there was the hope of new homes, and the ardor of new 

 scenes, all clustering around what was unquestionably the central 

 impulse to find a larger religious freedom than the restrictions, 

 legal or traditional, of the old country afforded. This is evident 

 from the fact that while the population of Massachusetts grew 

 rapidly by accessions from England till the execution of Charles 

 the First, yet, as soon as that event happened, the republic of 

 Cromwell and the supremacy of Puritanism during his Protec- 

 torate were accompanied by a practical suspension of immigration 

 to Xew England. For the next two hundred years it had little 

 other growth than that which sprung from its own loins. 



In these first settlements the ministers were the leaders. Their 

 influence was supreme. They gave tone to the time, and color to 

 history ; and the communities which they largely moulded seem, 

 as we look back upon them, to be toned by the ecclesiastical atmos- 

 phere which the clergy gave to them. But with all this there was 

 still all the time an immense deal of human nature. The picture 

 of the early time, if it could be reproduced, would present a body of 

 men and women engaged in the ordinary activities of life, culti- 

 vating the farms, ploughing the seas, trading with foreign lands 

 and among themselves, engaged in near and remote fisheries, 

 maintaining the school, the train-band, and the church, holding 

 their town-meetings, — a people not without humor, not altogether 

 innocent of a modicum of quarrel and greed and heart-burning, yet 

 warm with the kind and neighborly spirit of a common and inter- 

 dependent fellowship. The Massachusetts settlers indulged in no 

 mere dream of founding a Utopia or a Saints' Rest. They were 

 neither visionary philosophers nor religious fanatics. Their early 

 records deal with every-day details of farm and lot, of domestic 

 affairs, of straying cattle and swine, of runaway apprentices and 

 scolding wives, of barter with the Indians, of whippings and stocks 

 and fines for all sorts of naughtinesses, of boundaries and suits, of 

 debt and legal process and probate, of elections and petty offices 

 civil and military, and now and then the alarum of war and the 

 inevitable assessment of taxes. They smack very much more of 

 the concerns, and the common concerns, of this world than of 

 concern for the next. They are the memoranda of a hard, prac- 

 tical life ; and if the name of Hingham now and then appears in 

 them during the first half-dozen years of its existence, it is in 



