The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910 Page 5

  Another man than Smith would have committed some folly or rashness which would have precipitated his fate; but Smith was as much at his ease as was Julius Caesar of old on the pirate's ship. His two companions were killed, but he was treated as a prisoner of rank and importance by the brother of the great chief Powhatan, by whom he had been captured. He interested and impressed his captors by his conversation and his instruments; and at the same time he kept his eyes and ears open, and missed no information that could be of use to himself and his colony. Powhatan gave him an audience and seems to have adopted a considerate attitude; at all events he sent him back to Jamestown after a few days, unharmed, and escorted by four Indians, with a supply of corn. But precisely what occurred during those few days we shall never certainly know; since we must choose between accepting Smith's unsupported story, only made public years afterward, and believing nothing at all. Smith's tale has charmed the imagination of all who have heard it; nothing could be more prettily romantic; the trouble with it is, it seems to most people too pretty and romantic to be true.

  Yet it is simple enough in itself, and not at all improbable; there is no question as to the reality of the dramatis personae of the story, and their relations one to another render such an episode as was alleged hardly more than might reasonably be looked for.

  The story is--as all the world knows, for it has been repeated all over the world for nearly three hundred years, and has formed the subject of innumerable pictures--that Powhatan, for reasons of high policy satisfactory to himself, had determined upon the death of the Englishman, rightly inferring that the final disappearance of the colony would be the immediate sequel thereof. The sentence was that Smith's brains were to be knocked out with a bludgeon; and he was led into the presence of the chief and the warriors, and ordered to lay his head upon the stone. He did so, and the executioners poised their clubs for the fatal blow; but it never fell. For Smith, during his captivity, had won the affection of the little daughter of Powhatan, a girl of ten, whose name was Pocahontas. She was too young to understand or fear his power over the Indians; but she knew that he was a winning and fascinating being, and she could not endure that he should be sacrificed. Accordingly, at this supreme crisis of his career, she slipped into the dreadful circle, and threw herself upon Smith's body, so that the blow which was aimed at his life must kill her first.

  She clung to him and would not be removed, until her father had promised that Smith should be spared.

  So runs the Captain's narrative, published for the first time in 1624, after Pocahontas's appearance in London, and her death in 1617. Why he had not told it before is difficult to explain. Perhaps he had promised Powhatan to keep it secret, lest the record of his sentimental clemency should impair his authority over the tribes. Or it may have been an embellishment of some comparatively trifling incident of Smith's captivity, suggested to his mind as he was compiling his "General History of Virginia." It can never be determined; but certainly his relations with the Indian girl were always cordial, and it seems unlikely that Powhatan would have permitted him to return to Jamestown except for some unusual reason.

  Pocahontas's life had vicissitudes such as seldom befall an Indian maiden. Some time between the Smith episode of 1607, and the year 1612, she married one of her father's tributary chiefs, and went to live with him on his reservation. There she was in some manner kidnapped by one Samuel Argall, and held for ransom. The ransom was paid, but Pocahontas was not sent back; and the following year she was married to John Rolfe, a Jamestown colonist, and baptized as Rebecca. He took her to London, where she was a nine days' wonder; and they had a son, whose blood still flows in not a few American veins to-day. If she was ten years old in 1607, he must have been no more than twenty at the time of her death in Gravesend, near London. But her place in American history is secure, as well as in the hearts of all good Americans. She was the heroine of the first American romance; and she is said to have been as beautiful as all our heroines should rightly be.

  When Smith, with his Indian escort, got back to Jamestown, he was just in season to prevent the colony from running away in the boat. Soon after a new consignment of emigrants and supplies arrived from England; but again there were fewer men than gentlemen, and Smith sent back a demand for "rather thirty carpenters, husbandmen, gardeners, fishermen, blacksmiths, masons, and diggers up of trees' roots, well provided, than a thousand of such as we have." There spoke the genuine pioneer, whose heart is in his work, and who can postpone "gentility" until it grows indigenously out of the soil. The Company at home were indignant that their colony had not ere now reimbursed them for their expenditure, and much more; and they sent word that unless profits were forthcoming forthwith (one-fifth of the gold and silver, and so forth) they would abandon the colony to its fate. One cannot help admiring Smith for refraining from the obvious rejoinder that to be abandoned was the dearest boon that they could crave; but a sense of humor seems to have been one of the few good qualities which the Captain did not possess. He intimated to the Company that money was not to be picked up ready made in Virginia, but must be earned by hard work with hands and heads in the field and forest. It is his distinction to have been the first man of eminence visiting the new world who did not think more of finding gold, or the passage to India, or both, than of anything else. Smith knew that in this world, new or old, men get what they work for, and in the long run no more than that; and he made his gentlemen colonists take off their coats and blister their gentlemanly hands with the use of the spade and the ax. It is said that they excelled as woodcutters, after due instruction; and they were undoubtedly in all respects improved by this first lesson in Americanism. The American ax and its wielders have become famous since that day; and the gentlemen of Jamestown may enjoy the credit of having blazed the way.

  Fresh emigrants kept coming in, of a more or less desirable quality, as is the case with emigrants still. Some of them had been sent out by other organizations than the London Company, and bred confusion; but Smith was always more than equal to the emergency, and kept his growing brood in hand. He had the satisfaction of feeling that he was the right man in the right place; and let the grass grow under neither his feet nor theirs. The abandonment threat of the London Company led him to take measures to make the colony independent so far as food was concerned, and a tract of land was prepared and planted with corn. Traffic for supplies with the Indians was systematized; and by the time Smith's year of office had expired the Jamestown settlement was self-supporting, and forever placed beyond the reach of annihilation--though, the very year after he had left it, it came within measurable distance thereof.

  He now returned to England, and never revisited Jamestown; but he by no means relaxed his interest in American colonization, or his efforts to promote it. In 1614 he once more sailed westward with two ships, on a trading and exploring enterprise, which was successful. He examined and mapped the northern coast, already seen by Gosnold, and bestowed upon the country the name of New England. Traditions of his presence and exploits are still told along the shores of Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

  In the year following he tried to found a small colony somewhere in these regions, but was defeated by violent storms; and at a subsequent attempt he fell in with French pirates, and his ship and fortune were lost, though he himself escaped in an open skiff: the chains were never forged that could hold this man. Nor was his spirit broken; he took his map and his description of New England, and personally canvassed all likely persons with a view to fitting out a new expedition. In 1617, aided perhaps by the interest which Pocahontas had aroused in London, he was promised a fleet of twenty vessels, and the title of Admiral of New England was bestowed upon him. Admiral he remained till his death; but the fleet he was to command never put forth to sea. A ship more famous than any he had captained was to sail for New England in 1620, and land the Pilgrims on Plymouth. Rock. Smith's active career was over, though he was but eight-and-thirty years of age, and had fifteen years of life still
before him. He had drunk too deeply of the intoxicating cup of adventure and achievement ever to be content with a duller draught; and from year to year he continued to use his arguments and representations upon all who would listen. But he no longer had money of his own, and he was forestalled by other men. He was to have no share in the development of the country which he had charted and named. At the time of his death in London in 1632, poor and disappointed, Plymouth, Salem and Boston had been founded, Virginia had entered upon a new career, and Maryland had been settled by the Catholics under Lord Baltimore. The Dutch had created New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island in 1623; and the new nation in the new continent was fairly under way.

  Jamestown, as has been said, narrowly escaped extinction in the winter of 1609. The colonists found none among their number to fill Smith's place, and soon relapsed into the idleness and improvidence which he had so resolutely counteracted. They ate all the food which he had laid up for them, and when it was gone the Indians would sell them no more. Squads of hungry men began to wander about the country, and many of them were murdered by the savages. The mortality within the settlement was terrible, and everything that could be used as food was eaten; at length cannibalism was begun; the body of an Indian, and then the starved corpses of the settlers themselves were devoured. Many crawled away to perish in the woods; others, more energetic, seized a vessel and became pirates. In short, such scenes were enacted as have been lately beheld in India and in Cuba. The severity of the famine may be judged from the fact that out of five hundred persons at the beginning of the six months, only sixty diseased and moribund wretches survived. And this in a land which had been described by its discoverers as a very Garden of Eden, flowing with milk and honey.

  Meanwhile, great things were preparing in England. Smith's warning that America must be regarded and treated as an agricultural and industrial community, and not as a treasure-box, had borne fruit; and a new charter was applied for, which should more adequately satisfy the true conditions.

  It was granted in 1609; Lord Salisbury was at the head of the promoters, and with him were associated many hundreds of the lords, commoners and merchants of England. The land assigned to them was a strip four hundred miles in breadth north and south of Old Point Comfort, and across to the Pacific, together with all islands lying within a hundred miles of shore.

  In respect of administrative matters, the tendency of the new charter was toward a freer arrangement; in especial, the company was to exercise the powers heretofore lodged with the king, and the supreme council was to be chosen by the shareholders. The governor was the appointee of the corporation, and his powers were large and under conditions almost absolute. The liberties of the emigrants themselves were not specifically enlarged, but they were at least emancipated from the paternal solicitude of the stingy and self-complacent pettifogger who graced the English throne.

  Lord Delaware was chosen governor; and Newport, Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers were the commissioners who were to conduct the affairs of the colony until his arrival. A large number of emigrants, many of whom contributed in money and supplies to the expedition, were assembled, and the fleet numbered altogether nine vessels. But Newport and his fellow commissioners suffered shipwreck on the Bermudas, and did not reach Jamestown till nine months later, in May, 1610. The calamitous state of things which there awaited them was an unwelcome surprise; and the despairing colonists would be contented with nothing short of exportation to Newfoundland. But before they could gain the sea, Lord Delaware with his ships and provisions was met coming into port; and the intending fugitives turned back with him. The hungry were fed, order was restored, and industry was re-established. A wave of religious feeling swept over the little community; the rule of Lord Delaware was mild, but just and firm; and all would have been well had not his health failed, and compelled him, in the spring of 1611, to return to England. The colony was disheartened anew, and the arrival of Sir Thomas Dale in Delaware's place did not at first relieve the depression; his training had been military, and he administered affairs by martial law. But he believed in the future of the enterprise, and so impressed his views upon the English council that six more ships, with three hundred emigrants, were immediately sent to their relief. Grates, who brought these recruits to Jamestown, assumed the governorship, and a genuine prosperity began. Among the most important of the improvements introduced was an approximation to the right of private ownership in land, which had hitherto been altogether denied, and which gave the emigrants a personal interest in the welfare of the enterprise. In 1612 a third charter was granted, still further increasing the privileges of the settlers, who now found themselves possessed of almost the same political powers as they had enjoyed at home. It was still possible, as was thereafter shown, for unjust and selfish governors to inflict misery and discontent upon the people; but it was also possible, under the law, to give them substantial freedom and happiness; and that was a new light in political conceptions.

  More than thirty years had now passed since Raleigh first turned his mind to the colonizing of Virginia. He was now approaching the scaffold; but he could feel a lofty satisfaction in the thought that it was mainly through him that an opportunity of incalculable magnitude and possibilities had been given for the enlargement and felicity of his race. He had sowed the seed of England beyond the seas, and the quality of the fruit it should bear was already becoming apparent to his eyes, soon to close forever upon earthly things. The spirit of America was his spirit. He was for freedom, enlightenment, and enterprise; and whenever a son of America has fulfilled our best ideal of what an American should be, we find in him some of the traits and qualities which molded the deeds and colored the thoughts of this mighty Englishman.

  Nor can we find a better example of the restless, practical, resourceful side of the American character than is offered in Captain John Smith; even in his boastfulness we must claim kinship with him. His sterling manhood, his indomitable energy, his fertile invention, his ability as a leader and as a negotiator, all ally him with the traditional Yankee, who carries on in so matter-of-fact a way the solution of the problems of the new democracy. Both these men, each in his degree, were Americans before America.

  And with them we may associate the name of Columbus; to him also we must concede the spiritual citizenship of our country; not because of the bare fact that he was the first to reach its shores, but because he had a soul valiant enough to resist and defy the conservatism that will believe in no new thing, and turns life into death lest life should involve labor and self-sacrifice. Columbus, Smith, and Raleigh stand at the portals of our history, types of the faith, success and honor which are our heritage.

  CHAPTER SECOND

  THE FREIGHT OF THE MAYFLOWER

  The motive force which drove the English Separatists and Puritans to a voluntary exile in New England in 1620 and later, had its origin in the brain of the son of a Saxon slate cutter just a century before. Martin Luther first gave utterance to a mental protest which had long been on the tongue's tip of many thoughtful and conscientious persons in Europe, but which, till then, no one had found the courage, or the energy, or the conviction, or the clear-headedness (as the case might be) to formulate and announce. Once having reached its focus, however, and attained its expression, it spread like a flame in dry stubble, and produced results in men and nations rarely precedented in the history of the world, whose vibrations have not yet died away.

  Henry VIII. of England was born and died a Catholic; though of religion of any kind he never betrayed an inkling. His Act of Supremacy, in 1534, which set his will above that of the Pope of Rome, had no religious bearing, but merely indicated that he wanted to divorce one woman in order to marry another. Nevertheless it made it incumbent upon the Pope to excommunicate him, and thus placed him, and England as represented by him, in a quasi-dissenting attitude toward the orthodox faith. And coming as it did so soon after Luther's outbreak, it may have encouraged Englishmen to think on lines of liberal belief.

/>   Passionate times followed in religious--or rather in theological--matters, all through the Sixteenth Century. The fulminations of Luther and the logic of Calvin set England to discussing and taking sides; and when Edward VI. came to the throne, he was himself a Protestant, or indeed a Puritan, and the stimulus of Puritanism in others. But the mass of the common people were still unmoved, because there was no means of getting at them, and they had no stomach for dialectics, if there had been. The new ideas would probably have made little headway had not Edward died and Mary the Catholic come red-hot with zeal into his place. She lost no time in catching and burning all dissenters, real or suspected; and as many of these were honest persons who lived among the people, and were known and approved by them, and as they uniformly endured their martyrdom with admirable fortitude and good-humor, falling asleep in the crackling flames like babes at the mother's breast, Puritanism received an advertisement such as nothing since Christianity had enjoyed before, and which all the unaided Luthers, Melanchthons and Calvins in the world could not have given it.

  This lasted five years, after which Mary went to her reward, and Elizabeth came to her inheritance. She was no more of a religion-monger than her distinguished father had been; but she was, like him, jealous of her authority, and a martinet for order and obedience at all costs. A certain intellectual voluptuousness of nature and an artistic instinct inclined her to the splendid forms and ceremonies of the Catholic ritual; but she was too good a politician not to understand that a large part of her subjects were unalterably opposed to the papacy. After some consideration, therefore, she adopted the expedient of a compromise, the substance of which was that whatever was handsome and attractive in Catholicism was to be retained, and only those technical points dropped which made the Pope the despot of the Church. In ordinary times this would have answered very well; human nature likes to eat its cake and have it too; but this time was anything but ordinary. The reaction from old to new ways of thinking, and the unforgotten persecutions of Mary, had made men very fond of their opinions, and preternaturally unwilling to enter into bargains with their consciences. At the same time loyalty to the Crown was still a fetich in England, as indeed it always has been, except at and about the time when Oliver Cromwell and others cut off the head of the First Charles. Consequently when Elizabeth and Whitgift, her Archbishop of Canterbury, set about putting their house in order in earnest, they were met with a mixture of humble loyalty and immovable resistance which would have perplexed any potentates less single-minded. But Elizabeth and Whitgift were not of the sort that sets its hand to the plow and then turns back; they went earnestly on with their banishments and executions, paying particular attention to the Separatists, but keeping plenty in hand for the Puritans also.--The Separatists, it may be observed, were so called because their aim was to dispart themselves entirely from the orthodox communion; the Puritans were willing to remain in the fold, but had it in mind to purify it, by degrees, from the defilement which they held it to have contracted. The former would not in the least particular make friends with the mammon of unrighteousness, or condone the sins of the Scarlet Woman, or of anybody else; they would not inhale foul air, with a view to sending it forth again disinfected by the fragrance of their own lungs. They took their stand unequivocally upon the plain letter of Scripture, and did away with all that leaned toward conciliating the lighter sentiments and emotions; they would have no genuflexions, no altars, no forms and ceremonies, no priestly vestments, no Apostolic Succession, no priests, no confessions, no intermediation of any kind between the individual and his Creator. The people themselves should make and unmake their own "ministers," and in all ways live as close to the bone as they could. The Puritans were not opposed to any of these beliefs; only they were not so set upon proclaiming and acting upon them in season and out of season; they contended that the idolatry of ritual, since it had been several centuries growing up, should be allowed an appreciable time to disappear. It will easily be understood that, at the bottom of these religious innovations and inflammations, was a simple movement toward greater human freedom in all directions, including the political.