peninsula, however, as was natural, speedily attracted their attention: it was then in a state of nature, and in the undisturbed possession of the solitary occupant, by name Blackstone. Here Winthrop and his people determined to fix themselves, and begin a settlement, which, after the English town in Lincolnshire, they called Boston. Other parties of emigrants, as they arrived, settled at various points in the vicinity of Boston, and gave names to the various towns and villages which they then and there founded.
"Each settlement," says Mr. Hildreth, "at once assumed that township authority which has ever formed so marked a feature in the political organization of New England. The people assembled in town meeting, voted taxes for local purposes, and chose three, five, or seven of the principal inhabitants, at first under other names, but early known as 'selectmen,' who had the expenditure of this money, and the executive management of town affairs. A treasurer and a town clerk were also chosen, and a constable was soon added for the service of civil and criminal processes. Each town constituted, in fact, a little republic, almost complete in itself."[1]
The warmth of their attachment to home had led to the expression of strong feeling of affection for their "dear mother," the Church of England; but when they set foot on the soil of the New World, they did not hesitate to arrange and organize churches according to their own views of right and propriety; but, as they were inclined to a temporizing policy, at least for the present, they acted prudently, so as not needlessly to provoke collision on such nice points as the value and necessity of Episcopal ordination, the obligation of ceremonies, and the like.
Although the new settlers were not subjected to hardships so severe as those which had fallen upon the New Plymouth colony, yet owing to various circumstances of an unfavorable character, shortness of provision, debility, severity of the winter, etc., more than two hundred died before December, among them the Lady Arbella Johnson and her husband.[2]
- ↑ Hildreth's "History of the United States," vol. i., p. 186.
- ↑ Cotton Mather bestows this somewhat quaint tribute to their character. "Of those who soon dyed after their first arrival, not the least considerable was the Lady Arbella, who left an earthly paradise in the family of an Earldom, to encounter the sorrows of a wilderness, for the entertainments of a pure worship in the house of God; and then immediately left that wilderness for the Heavenly paradise, whereto the compassionate Jesus, of whom she was a follower, called her. We have read concerning a noble woman of Bohemia, who forsook her friends, her plate, her house, and all; and because the gates of the city were guarded, crept through the common sewer, that she might enjoy the institutions of our Lord at another place where they might be had. The spirit which acted that noble woman, we may suppose, carried this blessed lady thus to and through the hardships of an American desert. But as for her virtuous husband, Isaac Johnson, Esq.,
. . . . .He try'd
To live without her, lik'd it not, and dy'd.His mourning for the death of his honorable consort was too bitter to be extended a year; about a month after her death, his ensued, unto the extream loss of the whole plantation. But at the end of this perfect and upright man, there was not only peace, but joy; and his joy particularly expressed itself, that God had kept his eyes open so long as to see one church of the Lord Jesus Christ gathered in these ends of the earth, before his own going away to Heaven"—Mather's "Magnalia," vol. i., p. 77.
