The Seattle post-intelligencer. [volume] (Seattle, Wash. Terr. [Wash.]) 1888-1914, 1892-12-21

cute inhered in them alone. because they
honestly believed that they alone of their
.ifhe were o chosen people" By
'heir dealings alike with the Indians and
with heretics the Puritans showed that
'hey were not. like the Pilgrim Fathers,
IN advance of their time. They were in
Ienseiy practical men and not idealists.
ihey objected to persecution only when
applied to themselves.
There is no doubt that Mr.. Adams is
historically correct. The Puritans of the
Massachusetts, bay colony included some
superior men like Winthrop and Sir
henry Vane. but their prevailing spirit,
Dotn IN England, Scotland and America,
was as lntoierant and as instinct with in
humanity as Laud, whose persecution
reused them to revolt and revenge. Moth
ing shows the superiority OF Cromwell to
ms church and his party than the fact that
MS personal interference was necessary to
stop II wholesale drowning of witches in
scotland, to protect George Fox and the
Vuakers from violence, to annul the Jew
isn act, to reduce the number of
unusual and cruel capital pu~nishments.
Inc only humane figure, after battle,
among the Puritans was Cromwell. and
mad 1t not been for Cromwell the record of
furitanism would have been as brutal in
treat Britain as Endicott and his tribe
made 1t in New England. The Puritan
solo the Indians remorselessly into
slavery, transporting them to the West
India plantations; the great Jonathan
Edwards, the expounder and champion of
Calvinisn in Colonial New England,
owned a negro slave, and. like Whltefield,
argued that slavery was an ordinance of
God. and it is historically true that a
Massachusetts clergyman of colonial
times owned a slave woman and did not
hesitate to sell her and her Legitimate
baby at a good price. There was q far
stronger opposition on moral grounds to
slavery in Virginia before the Revolu-
ton than there was in Massachusetts,.
Jefferson and Richard Henry Lee urged
anti-slavery legislation upon the Virginia
assembly fifteen years before the Revolu-
ton. Jefferson says that he struck out of
the original draft of the Declaration of In
dependence q denunciation of the slave
trade in compliance with the wishes of
South Carolina and Georgia. He adds
that "our Northern brethren also felt a
little tender under these for
though their people had very few slaves
themselves, yet they had been pretty con-
siderable carriers of them to Others" It
is very certain that If negro slavery had
been as profitable to New England as it
was to the tobacco and cotton-growing
states, New England would have chung to
it as tenaciously as South Carolina.
There was nothing in the Puritan char
acter that justifes the ~supposition that he
believed in the largest individual liberty
under law and equality of justice to all
men; he did not; he wanted it for the
Puritan always; and he wanted it so badly
that he always was ready to fight bitterly
to get it and keep it, but he did not care a
button for universal liberty and justice
under law for anybody in general or par
ticular outside of the Puritan pale Of
social and political interests.
Up to and beyond the war of 1912 the
heresy of secession had a most vigorous
life in New England, and the Populist
party of today inherit their Jack Cade
philosophy of society and government
from their Puritan ancestors. who formed
part of the armed rabble of Shays' rebell-
ion, which was nothing but the culmina-
ton of the 'Ieveling" principle and spirit
which as early as 1892 had been character.
istic of the New England fierce Democ-
racy.
1t is true that the evolution of New
England has been a church without q
bishop and a state without a king, but it
was the suspicion that the king might
day force he English church and
its bishops upon the Puritan that chiefly
made the Puritan rebel against the king.
Wendell Phillips nee said of Boston:
''Since 1880 the living fiber running
through history which owns the name of
Boston means jealousy of power, I'M
fettered speech. keen sense of Justice.
readiness to champion any good cause"
This is not true. or at least it is not
especially true of a city that mobbed anti
slavery meetings constantly from 1885 to
1861. Boston mobbed and jailed Abner
hlCCioakds aiiopbGa duO TulltIOS,
and a Catholic convent was burned in
Charleston, Mass. 1t is true that Boston has
got over this and her mobocratic DAYS are
over; in the final evolution of the Puritan
the Pilgrim strain of sweetness and light
seems to predominant, but the record of
Boston and of New England will hardly
bear the extravagant encomium passed
upon it by Mr.. Phillips in 1883.
The Puritan virtues We're courage. enter
prise, energy. executive capacity, ten
acity, ~pertinacity. endurance. physical
and intellectual hardihood, and he has
carried these virtues with him from the
Atlantic to the Pacific, but he has car
ried. too, something of his ancient ~intoler-
ance, bigotry, harshness and persecut-
spirit. The Puritan was not na,ur-
ally a humane, genial or loyable
person: he was a very str~ong-brained, sell
fish trader and a very stern. intolerant
t~heologian; he has become finally a con-
vert to the doctrine of the religion of
humanity; the Fatherhood of God and
the Brotherhood of Man, not through his
heart, which was never very sensitive. hut
through his head; hi. brains and enlarged
outlook have finally convinced him that
intolerance is Ineffective; that persecution
does not pay. aud he has abandoned them
for better. wiser and more humane methods
sense of enlightened selfinteres, which
nersuaded him TO give up slavery. not be-
cause he sympashized with the slave