The Pilgrim Fathers of New England: The Exodus
BY
W. CARLOS MARTYN
An excerpt from
THE PILGRIM FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND: A HISTORY.
1867
Introduction
The arrival of the Pilgrims in the early 17th century marked a seminal moment in the history of the United States, representing a profound chapter in the story of colonization and the pursuit of religious freedom. The Pilgrims, a group of English Separatists seeking religious autonomy from the Church of England, embarked on a perilous journey aboard the Mayflower in 1620, seeking a new home where they could practice their faith without persecution. These individuals, driven by a fervent desire for religious liberty, landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts, facing harsh conditions and unknown territories.
The Pilgrims were part of a larger religious movement within England known as Puritanism. The Puritans sought to reform the Church of England from within, advocating for simpler religious practices and greater spiritual purity. However, facing resistance and persecution, a faction within the Puritans, known as Separatists or Pilgrims, chose to break away entirely and seek refuge in the New World.
The establishment of Plymouth Colony marked the first significant permanent European settlement in New England. The Pilgrims’ early years in America were rife with challenges, including severe winters, scarce resources, and interactions with the indigenous Wampanoag people. Yet, through resilience, cooperation, and the assistance of Native Americans, the Pilgrims managed to establish a foothold, creating a community based on principles of self-governance and religious freedom.
Their legacy reverberates through American history as a testament to the enduring pursuit of liberty and the foundational principles of self-determination and religious tolerance upon which the United States would later be built. The story of the Pilgrims and the early Puritan settlers forms an integral part of the nation's narrative, embodying the resilience, sacrifice, and quest for freedom that underpin the American ethos.
The Pilgrim Fathers of New England: The Exodus
“Nothing is here for tears; nothing to wail
Or knock the breast; no weakness, no contempt,
Dispraise or blame; nothing but well and fair.”
The influence of that mysterious triad, the gold eagle, the silver dollar, and the copper cent, has been overestimated. Spiritual forces are more potent than the motors of materialism. The Sermon on the Mount outweighs the law of gravity. Ethics make safer builders than stocks. Two hundred years ago, commercial enterprise essayed to subdue the New World in the interest of greedy trade, hungering for an increase; but though officered by the brightest genius and the highest daring of the age, backed by court favor and bottomed on the deepest bank-vaults of London, the effort failed.
Where physical forces balked, a moral sentiment bore off a trophy. The most prosperous of the American colonies were planted by religion. New England is the child of English Puritanism; and yet, paradoxical as it may seem, antedates its birth. Men say that the history of New England dates from 1620. ’Tis a mistake. New England was in the brain of Wickliffe when, in the infancy of Britain, he uttered his first protest against priestcraft and pronounced the Christianity of Rome a juggle. New England, in esse, was born in that chill December on Plymouth Rock; New England, in posse, was cradled in the pages of the first printed copy of the English Bible.
Soil does not make a state; nor does geographical position. That spot of ground which men call Athens does not embrace the immortal city. It bears up its masonry; but the Athens of Socrates and of Plato exists in the mind of every scholar. The intellectual and moral elements which enter into and shape it, these are the real state. In this sense, New England was in the pages of the Puritan publicists, in the psalms of the Lollards, and in the prayers of Bradwardine, centuries before that winter’s voyage into the dreary wilderness.
Society, government, law, the graces of civility, the economic formulas, are growths. “Books, schools, education,” says Humboldt, “are the scaffolding by means of which God builds up the human soul.” There are no isolated facts. Events do not occur at hap-hazard. Each effect has its cause; it may lie buried beneath many blinding strata, so that it must be dug for, but it exists.
Puritanism was not a sudden creation. It did not crop out of the sixteenth century unexpectedly, and begin to impeach formalism without a cause. It was a growth. “It was as old as the truth and manliness of England. Among the thoughtful and earnest islanders, the dramatic religion of the popes had never struck so deep root as in continental soil.” Chafed and weary, the people had long demanded a purer and more spiritual faith. The strong repressive hand of the Vatican was not able to stop the mouth of unwearied complaint. Thinkers were convinced that Rome had paganized Christianity. Christ was banished from all active influence. He could only be reached and “touched with the feeling of our infirmities” through the intercession of saints, who were constantly invoked. The popes professed to possess a fund of supererogation, which they might dispense at will; and this became their stock in trade. Salvation by meritorious works was preached. Brokers in souls hawked their celestial wares in every market-place. Rome, an incarnate Pharisee, made broad its phylactery, and hid beneath it a dead religion and a corrupt church.
From Wickliffe to Tyndale, a few earnest, devout men had impeached this cheat. But the influence of these teachers was at best but local. They were barely able to keep the gospel torch aglow, and to pass it down from hand to hand through the dusky centuries. The masses were affrighted from the pursuit of knowledge by the jingle of the rusty and forged keys of St. Peter, which locked the storehouse of divine revelation, and barred the investigations of the human mind.
The modern era dawned in the sixteenth century. The invention of printing was the avant courier of reform. The reformers gained a fulcrum for their lever. Scholars might shake the dust from their mouldy folios, and by opening the early records, convict Rome of heresy. Their conclusions might then be scattered broadcast on the wings of the press. Well might the perturbed ghost of Latin Orthodoxy exclaim,
“Ah, fatal age, which gave mankind
A Luther and a Faustus.”
Bibles were everywhere opened. Reform swept from the mountains of Bohemia into Germany; crossing the Saxon plains, it entered the Netherlands; thence it passed the channel into England. In the island it was received with enthusiasm. The government, from personal motives, extended to it the hand of fellowship; the people adopted it, because they felt the inadequacy of Romanism to meet their religious wants.
Rome did not strike its flag without a struggle. As Demetrius was shocked when Paul, a wandering preacher from Tarsus, impeached his Diana, so the Vatican professed to be horrified when the reformers inveighed against the popedom. “Socrates”—so runs the old Grecian indictment—“is guilty of crime for not worshipping the gods whom the city worship, but introducing new divinities of his own.” The adherents of the ancient faith tacked a similar indictment upon the front of the reform. Where they dared, they invoked the thumb-screw and kindled an auto da fé. When they could not fight with these congenial weapons, they made faces at their opponents, and hurled epithets. The iconoclasts were called “infidels.” Hooker and Hales, Stillingfleet, and Cudworth, and Taylor were thus stigmatized. And indeed, “this is a cry which the timid, the ignorant, the indolent, and the venal are apt to raise against those who, faithful to themselves, go boldly forward, using the past only to show them what the present is, and what the future should be.”
These men recast the ecclesiasticism of their age. The essence of Romanism was extracted from their creed, but many of its forms were retained. Then, within the new-built temple of the English church, there arose two parties. The Puritans demanded the complete divorce of the reformed church from Rome, in its ceremonies and in its belief. They strove to inaugurate the purity and simplicity of what they conceived to be the primitive worship. They esteemed the retained forms to be pregnant with mischief, in that they were the badges of their former servitude, and because they tended to bridge over the chasm between Rome and the Reformation.
At the outset, the Puritans did not quarrel with the English Establishment; they all claimed to be within its pale, and many of their leaders were men of high ecclesiastical standing, of the truest lives, and of the loftiest genius; but they held to the spirit rather than to the letter; to the substance of the church, not to its forms.
The Conformists considered the ceremonies to be non-essential; but they desired to retain them, partly because they were enamoured of those old associations which they symbolized, but chiefly because they dreaded the effect of too sudden and radical a change upon the peace of the island. Besides, to facilitate the passage from Romanism to the reformed church, they were willing to step to the verge of their consciences in the retention of the old forms, and in the incorporation of those features of the ancient faith into the outward structure of the new theology which were not intrinsically bad.
Unquestionably honest minds might differ in this policy. “But certainly the doctrine of the Puritans concerning the connection and mutual influence between forms and opinions, so far from being fanciful or fastidious, had foundations as deep as any thing in moral truth or in human nature. A sentiment determined their course; but it was more cogent than all the learned argument which they lavished in its defence. A man of honor will not be bribed to display himself in a fool’s cap; yet why not in a fool’s cap as readily as in any apparel associated in his mind, and in the minds of those whom he respects, whether correctly or not is immaterial, with the shame of mummery and falsehood? To these men the cope and surplice seemed the livery of Rome. They would not put on the uniform of that hated power, while they were marshalling an array of battle against its ranks. An officer, French, American, or English, would feel outraged by a proposal to be seen in the garb of a foreign service. The respective wearers of the white and tricolor cockades would be more willing to receive each other’s swords into their bosoms than to exchange their decorations. A national flag is a few square yards of coarse bunting; but associations invest it which touch whatever is strongest and deepest in national character. Its presence commands an homage as reverential as that which salutes an Indian idol. Torrents of blood have been poured out age after age to save it from affront. The rejection of the cope and mitre was as much the fruit and the sign of the great reality of a religious revolution, as a political revolution was betokened and effected when the cross of St. George came down from over the fortresses along fifteen degrees of the North American coast” n ’76.
The contest which ensued between nascent Puritanism and the entrenched Conformists was prolonged and bitter. It deeply scarred the history of the contemporaneous actors; and it has shaped the ethics and the politics of two centuries; nor is its force yet spent. Indeed, it may be fitly called the epic of our Saxon annals.
“On the one side, in the outset, were statesmen desiring first and mainly the order and quiet of the realm. On the other side were religious men desiring that, at all hazards, God might be worshipped in purity and served with simplicity and zeal. It is easy to understand the perplexities and alarms of the former class; but the persistency of their opponents is not therefore to be accounted whimsical and perverse. It is impossible to blame them for saying, ‘If a man believes marriage to be a sacrament in the sense of the popes and the councils, let him symbolize it by the giving of a ring; if he believes in exorcism by the signing of the cross, let him have it impressed on his infant’s brow in baptism; if he believes the bread of the Eucharist to be God, let him go down on his knees before it. But we do not believe these things, and as honest men we will not profess so to believe by act or sign any more than by word.’ Theirs was no struggle against the church, but against the state’s control over it.”
The fatal error of the church-and-state reformers was, that they strove to coerce unwilling consciences into exact conformity with a prescribed formula of worship by penal legislation. No latitude was even winked at. It was a new edition of the old story of Procrustes and his iron bed. Britain, emancipated from the pope, still hugged the popedom. The rulers of the island clutched the weapons and enacted the rôle of the Hildebrandes, the Gregorys, and the Innocents of ecclesiastical history. Dissent was “rank heresy.” Liberty was “license.” The measure of a conscience was the length of a prelate’s foot.
“An act was passed in 1593,” says Hoyt, “for punishing all who refused to attend the Established Church, or frequented conventicles or unauthorized assemblies. The penalty was, imprisonment until the convicted person made declaration of his conformity; and if that was not done within three months after arrest, he was to quit the realm, and go into perpetual banishment. In case he did not depart within the specified time, or returned without license, he was to suffer death.”
In 1603, when James I. came down from Scotland to ascend the English throne, so stood the law. Nor did it rest idle in the statute-book. The parchment fiat was instinct with vicious life. Hecatombs of victims suffered under it. “Toleration,” remarks Goodrich, “was a virtue then unknown on British ground. In exile alone was security found from the pains and penalties of non-conformity to the Church of England.”
During the pendency of the dissension between the Puritans and the Conformists within the bosom of the church, many honest thinkers, feeling hopeless of success in that unequal conflict, broke from their old communion, and set up a separate Ebenezer. Even so early as 1592, Sir Walter Raleigh, speaking in the House of Commons, affirmed that these “Come-outers” numbered upwards of twenty thousand. Since that date, every year had added new recruits to their ranks, until, in 1603, they had expanded into a wealthy, influential, and puissant party in the state.
Though socially tabooed and politically ostracised—though shackled by fierce prohibitory legislation and by governmental ill-will, the Separatists, as they were called, still prayed and hoped, walking through persecution with faith in their right hand and with patience in their left. At one time they thought they could discern a ray of light on the sullen horizon which gloomed upon them. James I. had been educated in Presbyterian Scotland. He had often hymned the praises of the polity of stout John Knox. When he crossed the Tweed, jubilant Puritanism cried, “Amen,” and “All hail.” Ere long, however, the weak and treacherous Stuart deserted his Scottish creed. From that moment he hated his old comrades with the peculiar bitterness of an apostate. No epithet was vile enough by which to paint them. He raked the gutter of the English language for phrases. “These Puritans,” said he, “are pests in the church and commonwealth—greater liars and perjurers than any border thieves.”
At the Hampton Court Conference—an intellectual tournament between the representatives of the opposing religious parties—the royal buffoon affirmed his determination to make the Puritans “conform, or harry them out of the land, or else worse.”
It has been truly said that “the friends of religious reform had never seen so hopeless a time as that which succeeded the period of the most sanguine expectation. In the gloomiest periods of the arbitrary sway of the two daughters of Henry VIII., they could turn their eyes to a probable successor to the throne who would be capable of more reason or more lenity. Now nothing better for them appeared in the future than the long reign of a prince wrong-headed and positive alike from imbecility, prejudice, pique, and self-conceit, to be succeeded by a dynasty born to the inheritance of the same bad blood, and educated in the same pernicious school. It is true that, as history reveals the fact to our age, almost with the reign of the Scottish alien that nobler spirit began to animate the House of Commons which ultimately” checkmated tyranny beneath the scaffold of Charles I. But this astounding blow was then remote. “As yet the steady reaction from old abuses was but dimly apparent, even to the most clear-sighted and hopeful minds; and numbers of devout and brave hearts gave way to the conviction that, for such as they, England had ceased for ever to be a habitable spot.”
Towards the close of Elizabeth’s reign, a number of yeomen in the North of England, some in Nottinghamshire, some in Lincolnshire, some in Yorkshire, and the neighborhood of these counties, “whose hearts the Lord had touched with heavenly zeal for his truth,” separated from the English church, “and as the Lord’s free people joined themselves, by a covenant of the Lord, into a church estate in the fellowship of the gospel, to walk in all his ways made known or to be made known unto them, according to their best endeavors, whatsoever it should cost, the Lord assisting them.”
The Protestant world was at this time divided between two regal phases of reform. “Luther’s rationale,” says Bancroft, “was based upon the sublime but simple truth which lies at the bottom of morals, the paramount value of character and purity of conscience; the superiority of right dispositions over ceremonial exactness; and, as he expressed it, ‘justification by faith alone.’ But he hesitated to deny the real presence, and was indifferent to the observance of external ceremonies. Calvin, with sterner dialectics, sanctioned by his power as the ablest writer of his age, attacked the Roman doctrines respecting the communion, and esteemed as a commemoration the rite which the papists reverenced as a sacrifice. Luther acknowledged princes as his protectors, and in the ceremonies of worship favored magnificence as an aid to devotion; Calvin was the guide of Swiss republics, and avoided in their churches all appeals to the senses as crimes against religion. Luther resisted the Roman church for its immorality; Calvin for its idolatry. Luther exposed the folly of superstition, ridiculed the hair-shirt and the scourge, the purchased indulgence, and the dearly-bought masses for the dead; Calvin shrunk from their criminality with impatient horror. Luther permitted the cross, the taper, pictures, images, as things of indifference; Calvin demanded a spiritual worship in its utmost purity.”
The Separatists were ardent Calvinists. They esteemed the “offices and callings, courts and canons” of the English church “monuments of idolatry.” Those of the North of England, though “presently they were scoffed and scorned by the profane multitude, and their ministers urged with the yoke of subscription,” yet held “that the lordly power of the prelates ought not to be submitted to.”
In this northern church was “Mr. Richard Clifton, a grave and revered preacher, who by his pains and diligence had done much good, and under God had been the means of the conversion of many; also that famous and worthy man, Mr. John Robinson, who afterwards was their pastor for many years, till God called him away by death; and Mr. William Brewster, a reverent man, who afterwards was chosen elder of the church, and lived with them till old age.”
In the year 1607 these reformers seem to have received the vindictive attention of the government, for Bradford makes this record: “After that they could not long continue in any peaceable condition, but were hunted and persecuted on every side. Some were taken and clapped up in prison. Others had their houses beset and watched night and day. The most were fain to fly and leave their houses and goods, and the means of their livelihood. Yet these things, and many more still sharper, which afterwards befell them, were no other than they looked for, and therefore they were better able to bear them by the assistance of God’s grace and spirit. Nevertheless, seeing themselves thus molested, and that there was no hope of peace at home, by joint consent they resolved to go into the Low Countries, where, they heard, was freedom for all men; as also how sundry from London and various parts had been persecuted into exile aforetime, and were gone thither, sojourning at Amsterdam and in other cities. So, after they had continued together about a year, and kept their meetings every sabbath in one place and another, exercising the worship of God despite the diligence and malice of their adversaries, seeing that they could no longer continue in that condition, they prepared to pass over into Holland as they could.”
The Pilgrims were preëminently men of action. They were not dreamy speculators; they were not dilettanti idealists. They never let “I dare not” wait upon “I would.” With them decision was imperative, and meant action. They had dropped two words from their vocabulary—doubt and hesitation. Instantly they prepared for exile; and they accepted it as serenely when conscience beckoned that way with her imperious finger, as their descendants would an invitation to attend a halcyon gala.
Still, in the very outset they met obstacles which would have unnerved less resolute men. But the heart of their purpose was not to be broken. In 1607, the Pilgrims made an effort to quit the shores of this inhospitable country. They had appointed Boston, in Lincolnshire, the rendezvous, and a contract had been made with an English captain to convey their persons and their goods to Amsterdam. The Pilgrims were punctual; the seaman was not. Finally, however, he appeared. The eager fugitives were shipped; but they were taken aboard only to be betrayed. The recreant master had plotted with the authorities to entrap the victims. The unhappy Pilgrims were taken ashore again in open boats, and there the officers “rifled and ransacked them, searching them to their shirts for money.” Even the women were treated with rude immodesty. After this thievish official raid, they were “carried back into the town and made a spectacle and wonder to the multitude, which came flocking on all sides to behold them. Being thus first, by the catchpole officers, rifled and stripped of their money, books, and much other goods, they were presented to the magistrates, and messengers were sent to inform the lords of the council of the matter; meantime they were committed to ward. The magistrates used the Pilgrims courteously, and showed them what kindness and favor they could; but they were not able to deliver the prisoners till order came from the council-table. The issue was, that after a month’s imprisonment, the greater part were dismissed, and sent to the places from which they came; but seven of their chiefs were still left in prison and bound over to the next assizes.”
In the spring of 1608, these same indomitable Pilgrims, together with some others, resolved to make another effort to quit the house of bondage. Dryden says that
“Only idiots may be cozened twice.”
This time they made a compact with a Dutch captain at Hull—they would not trust an Englishman. The plan now was, that the men should assemble on a wild common, between Grimsby and Hull, a place chosen on account of its remoteness from any town; the women, the children, and the property of the exiles were to be conveyed to that part of the coast in a barque. The men made their way thither, in small companies, by land. The barque reached its destination a day sooner than the foot travellers; it was also some hours ahead of the ship. As the short, chop-sea of the channel caused the passengers in the barque to suffer acutely from seasickness, the sailors ran into a small creek for shelter. Here the night was passed. How comfortless! The deep roar of the sullen breakers smote heavily upon their ears; and while the chill winds swept over them, the ceaseless pulsing of the sea and the hollow moaning of the waves at midnight, for the sea continued rough, deepened the melancholy feelings which could not but agitate their breasts. So huddled on the weird, strange shore, they counted the hours till dawn.
In the morning the longed-for ship arrived; but through some negligence of the sailors, the vessel containing the women, their little ones, and the property, had run aground. The men stood in groups on the shore; and that no time might be lost, the captain sent his boat to convey some of them on board, while a squad of sailors were detailed to help get the grounded barque once more afloat. But alack, by this time so considerable a gathering in such a place, and at an hour so unusual, had attracted attention; information was conveyed to the neighboring authorities; and as the boat which had already taken the great part of the men to the ship, was again returning to the shore, the captain espied a large company, some on horseback, some afoot, but all armed, advancing towards the spot where the hapless barque still lay aground with the few remaining men grouped about it. Alarmed, the mariner put back to his vessel, swore by the sacrament that he would not stay, and deaf to the importunities of his sad passengers, he spread his sails, weighed anchor, and was soon out of sight.
We may imagine with what aching hearts the poor exiles in the ship looked towards the receding shore, to their disconsolate companions, and to their precious wives and children, who stood there “crying for fear and quaking with cold.” Those on board the ship had no property, not even a change of raiment; and they had scarcely a penny in their pockets. But the loss of their possessions was as nothing to the cruel stroke which had severed them from those they best loved on earth.
“Robinson—honest and able general as he was in every sense—had resolved to be the last to embark. He was therefore a witness of the scene of distress and agony which ensued on the departure of the ship. The outburst of grief was not to be restrained. Some of the women wept aloud; others felt too deeply, were too much bewildered, to indulge in utterance of any kind; while the children, partly from seeing what had happened, and partly from a vague impression that something dreadful had come, mingled their sobs and cries in the general lamentation. As the sail of the ship faded away upon the distant waters, the wives felt as if one stroke had reduced them all to widowhood, and every child that had reached years of consciousness felt as one who in a moment had become fatherless. But thus dark are the chapters in human affairs in which the good have often to become students, and from which they have commonly had to learn their special lessons.”
On the approach of the officers some of the men escaped, others remained to assist the helpless. These were apprehended and “conveyed from constable to constable, till their persecutors were weary of so large a number of captives and permitted them to go their way.”
As to the voyagers, the very elements seemed to war against them. They soon encountered foul weather, and were driven far along the coast of Norway; “nor sun, nor moon, nor stars, for many days appeared.” Once they gave up all for lost, thinking the ship had foundered. “But when,” says a writer who was himself on board, “man’s hope and help wholly failed, the Lord’s power and mercy appeared for their recovery, for the ship rose again, and gave the mariners courage once more to manage her. While the waters ran into their very ears and mouths, and all cried ‘We sink! we sink!’ they also said, if not with miraculous, yet with a great height of divine faith, ‘Yet, Lord, thou canst save! yet, Lord, thou canst save!’ And He who holds the winds in his fist, and the waters in the hollow of his hand, did hear and save them.”
Eventually the storm-tossed ship dropped anchor in Amsterdam harbor; and “in the end,” says Young, “notwithstanding all these tortures, the Pilgrims all got over, some at one time and some at another, and met together again, according to their desire, with no small rejoicing.”
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